Siu Lun

While they’re trying to compete in the areas of processor speed, cameras, location-awareness etc…

One thing Android based phones have already won over the iPhone equivalent is background notifications.

Apps on Android can run in the background. This feature is so crucial and often understated or under-valued…

Imagine:
You’re on your phone, you don’t have the time or patience to check your twitter updates. Or your constantly evolving calendar schedule that is not compatible with the in-built one from Apple that is being maintained by your PA.

On Android, all you have to do is leave your phone on. Your app will notify you of any new changes. Great.

On iPhone, you have to open your tweetdeck, your ical app/lotus notes app in order to check. Not a big problem… just that today is like any other day. You just came out of a client meeting that has overruned and you’re in a hurry going to your next one. You’re revising your notes, repeating the lines in your head. You arrive at your destination. The meeting changed. Bugger.

If Apple don’t put their gear up soon. Android will be slicing away at their market.

A repeat of the ancient Macintosh vs PC era?

Lately, there seems to be a lot of browser choices to make. I find myself struggling to go away from Firefox (due to the development plugins across platforms) to trying to decide between Chrome/Opera as my browser of choice for general browsing.

Firefox for me is over, I’ll only be using it for development purposes as once I install development plugins, the speed reduction is noticeable.

Here I present two choices for you common folks and present to you an easy to understand breakdown:

1) Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome

In use by Google as the ‘future’ of web browsing experience. It consist of many technical enhancements and UI enhancement. I won’t bore you with the technical details, however I’ll make a mention of the UI enhancement Google has brought to the world. The most important UI enhancement for Google Chrome is the maximised area in which websites can flaunt their eye candies.

2) Opera http://www.opera.com/

This little known browser has been around for a long time. It dates back to the days of Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer. Over the years this little guy has actually been the revolutionary party to implement a lot of new ideas first, after which are copied by the bigger players.

As of writing, Opera 10.10 is out and it is a browser that is FAST at loading websites.

When compared to Chrome, on a Windows 7 Ultimate setup, Opera loads sites faster than Chrome.

That’s it for my review. Can’t decide which one to use for your normal day browsing? Nor can I.

Take it as it comes, Opera does usually gets left behind in the browser testing arena on a lot of websites and so it tends to be a little less compatible than Chrome and other major browsers on the market today. Right now, I’m using Opera.

Aftermath:
Interestingly, I decided to go dig for some test results on the net. I’ve found this article that seems to have done some test on Opera 10 and Chrome and Chrome’s javascript performance seems to be much higher. But on my Windows 7 PC, Opera 10’s website rendering speed is much quicker than Chrome’s.

I guess for your ‘everyday’ non-’web 2.0′ heavy sites, Opera is still better. Interestingly though, I found Google Finance’s site loads better on Opera.

Multitouch.

A word that has been echoing in our ears for the past two years. Made ever popular by the real world application Apple has shown in it’s iPhone and iPod touch product line ups. Manufacturers are scrambling to get multi-touch devices into mainstream market.

Finally, Windows 7, which will become the world’s most used operating system in the next 5-10 years. Fully supports multi-touch technology.

Today’s consumer hardware development is driven by the gaming industry, faster processors, bigger rams, faster GPUs. They’re all there to create entertainment.

What’s inevitably on the horizon now is that the gaming industry is getting into 3D vision and multi-touch technologies. Mobile phone applications and games are the experiments on UI and ‘introduction’ to the full-blown PC games.

The first of these new generations of games is already coming: Take a look at R.U.S.E

However, possibly due to the financial downturn that we’re still trying to clear. These technologies maybe delay, products that supports full multi-touch screens are far and few between. So are products that supports 3D vision. There is no doubt these two technology is the future, but currently no products on the market supports both. Just how far are we till we see such products on the market? And more importantly, how much would they cost?

Only time will tell.