The first news Will and Norm get into is of the death of Microsoft’s Kin. They sold anything between 500 and 8000 of the feature-phones. Will liked the smaller form factor of the Kin One, but ultimately a lack of smart-phone features and a high price killed it.
The Nexus One gets an OS update to Android 2.2 this week. It’s a good iteration over 2.1, but Will doesn’t expect any big changes until Gingerbread — Android 3.0.
John Lewis (they weren’t sure but yes, it is the UK’s Macy’s) has said the next iPod Touch will incorporate iPhone 4 features, such as video chat and a five mega-pixel camera. It’ll probably need to be bigger though, to house a larger battery.
They’ve tried the FireFox 4 open beta. It looks a lot like Chrome, and introduces features such as HTML5 and Google’s WebM video codec. It’s not fully optimized yet, so it’s not as fast as current browsers.
Meanwhile, Google have launched Leanback. It auto-plays YouTube videos in full-screen and is optimized for watching from the sofa.
They wrap up with some emails which include questions about mixing RAM sizes, splicing PS3-360 controller hybrids, and why they don’t like the Blackberry.
Covered topics: Microsoft Kin, Android 2.2 and 3.0, next iPod Touch, Firefox 4, YouTube Leanback.
We’ve moved! We’ve sunny Sausalito for the fog-shrouded shores of San Francisco. Yes, our new offices are in a basement, but it’s a really, really awesome basement, with a bar. We talked about the new office, all the stuff we’ve gotten into in the last two weeks, and all the tech news that’s happened since then–Froyo is out and in people’s hands, Firefox 4 went beta, YouTube launched a living room-friendly feature, and the Kin met an untimely end. All that, and a whole mess of reader questions on this week’s episode of This is Only a Test.
Runtime – 41:41
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Man, I'm loving this podcast more and more as time goes on, but I'm fairly convinced that it'd be great if there was a third person on the show. I don't know who'd be well adjusted to the role over at Whiskey, but I truly enjoyed when Gary Whitta was on if only to have a bit more back and forth among the guys.