Google I/O 2013 is happening now!

If you weren’t aware Google I/O is in full swing.

Updates to Google Play, cross platform leaderboards, multi-player, developer enhancements, are just a few things.

OK, boys and girls. This is it. We’re live from the Google I/O developer conference this week in San Francisco, for all the developer/services/apps/hardware/whatever Google can throw at us.

Kicking things off today is the week’s only keynote, and it’s a 3-hour whopper. We’re all charged up and ready to go. The keynote starts at 9 a.m. PDT — that’s noon on the east coast and 5 p.m. in the UK.

So join us for the live stream, our photos and commentary, and basically the best Android coverage on the planet. source AndroidCentral.com

Looks like there is a huge update to Google Music (streaming audio! ; they call it Radio without rules, sounds awesome), also Google Play on the web will look just like your phone’s Google Play…

Go here to follow the live blog!

BBM jumps to iOS and Android!

This has been long overdue, but BBM will finally be available to iOS and Android users this summer, not sure of the actual release date but it should  be in the next couple months.

Initial released will only support chats and group chats, with added features on each release after that. BBM Voice and Video chat is said to be introduced later this year.

It has been a while since I have been on BBM and I cannot wait to get back to it!

It’s clear BlackBerry is finally waking up. They are no longer the big dog in the mobile war. If they are to survive, the company needs to forge new relationships and learn to work well with the two reigning platforms. This move to put BBM on Android and iOS is a big step forward. BlackBerry might actually have a chance. via TechCrunch.com

Stay tuned for more information as it’s released! What are your thoughts? Is this the right move for Blackberry? I think so.

Seagate joins the SSD Race

I was just browsing an article where Seagate is finally releasing SSD disks. Among the reasonable specifications for 120/240/480GB selections, they mention drives with dual-port 12G SAS Connectors! These guys are twice as fast as previous generation drives and will be available in capacities up to 800GB, in both 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch form factors, which will be ready for the enterprise.

Seagate 600 SSD: Faster Performance with 6Gb/s SATA

The ultimate laptop upgrade, the Seagate 600 SSD delivers faster boot up speeds, shorter application load times, and improved system responsiveness for the ultimate performance. Laptop users can boot up nearly four times faster and load applications more than two times faster than with a standard hard drive, greatly reducing the amount of wait time to access content.

Here are the official specifications from the 600 series of drives.

• 120GB: 500+GB/s read, 300+GB/s write, up to 80,000 IOPS read, up to 60,000 IOPS write
• 240GB: 500+GB/s read, 400+GB/s write, up to 80,000 IOPS read, up to 70,000 IOPS write
• 480GB: 500+GB/s read, 400+GB/s write, up to 80,000 IOPS read, up to 70,000 IOPS write

Also mentioned in the article is the Seagate x8 Accelerator

Seagate X8 Accelerator— Application Performance Turbocharged

The Seagate X8 Accelerator, powered by Virident, delivers memory-class performance and storage-class capacity with enterprise reliability and data integrity in a single, low profile PCIe card. Providing industry-leading performance, with up to 1.1 million IOPS, the X8 Accelerator boosts server performance with ultra-fast speed that is up to 2X faster than the closest competitor and closer to DRAM performance than storage.

No pricing for any of these drives was mentioned. Read more about the Seagate 600/1200 SSD drives here.

Android Apps on your PC and Mac

Are you looking to run Android applications on your PC? If you don’t know how, then you haven’t heard of BlueStacks.

BlueStacks, which makes software that lets users run Android apps on their desktops, laptops and Windows tablets,  has reached the 10 million user mark in just over a year. Possibly even  more impressive is that 4.2 million of those users started using the software in just Q1 of this year. CEO of BlueStacks Rosen Sharma also notes that active usage has increased exponentially, which in many ways is a more important metric to determining success of a product. BlueStacks is now being used in over 100 countries, due in part to the fact that it is now pre-installed on many manufacturer’s devices. source Android Central

Now don’t get too excited, it isn’t the full Android experience ported to PC. From the time I spent with the application, there is no home screen, syncing didn’t work the way I had expected it to, no “direct” access to Google Play, and I was unable to login to Facebook, I gather that is because BlueStacks isn’t supported with the Facebook API as of this time. If they fix these issues, and make it more akin to what we are used to seeing, including full syncing capabilities, a lot more people may be inclined to use it. I know I would.

All in all, it’s a great step forward, and the creators say that the biggest apps to be downloaded are the games, so maybe it’s not so much for the user experience, but for Android gaming, which has exploded onto the scene in the last while.

So how do you like your BlackBerry Q10?

Over in the UK the Blackberry Q10 outsold the Z10 by a large amount. The Q10 is supposed to be the phone to save Blackberry, although the Z10 has exceeded everyone’s expectations, people really love the physical keyboard, and pair that with a pretty hefty battery (2300 mAh) and you have yourself a pretty sweet phone.

The department store began selling the Q10 last Friday, but buyers were also able to pre-order the device from the store’s Web site since April 24.

Selfridges’ initial stock of 2,000 Q10 units sold out in a matter of two hours from the time store opened its doors last Friday. Additional stock was being delivered “Continually on the hour, every hour” to keep up with demand, according to a statement from Selfridges.

Read more at the source links below.

• Hands on review: BlackBerry Q10
  Canadian Tire to buy thousands of new BlackBerry
• Do huge Q10 sales save BlackBerry longer term?

You can also order the phone online from various retailers via Blackberry’s website.

VMware Mobile Knowledge Android/iOS Application

I posted earlier about a vSphere 5.1 Hardening guide available in HTML or PDF, I read that they recently made a mobile version. Curiosity peaked, and I went looking for it. While looking for it, the first thing to pop up was the VMware Mobile Knowledge app. Only problem with this is that you cannot download it to iPhone or Android Phones, I guess it has something to do with formatting… I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for me as I have a 1080p screen on my phone… better than most tablets out there! But I do hear that it seems to be formatted specifically for the 10″ Android screens… I wonder if it can be side-loaded? Anyways, onto the details.

AT&T Samsung Galaxy S4 is Bootloader Locked

Guys, when will you get it in your head that only the people that WANT to mess around with their phone will install a proper recovery platform like TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project 2.5, or twrp2 for short, is a custom recovery built with ease of use and customization in mind.) People who don’t know what I am talking about (90% of all phone users) really don’t care. But 10% is a lot of people, I am one of those 10%. I have an HTC One, and I already unlocked the bootloader and installed a custom ROM onto it, called CleanRom 1.5. What CleanRom does it remove the bloatware that companies like AT&T put onto their phones. So when my phone’s OS crashed and I cannot use my phone, I can use TWRP to restore my OS to a point in time when it worked properly, that easy, if its a hardware issue, as long as it boots and works as designed, they still replace the hardware, easy as pie… So as I mentioned, the 10% that know enough to unlock the bootloader and load their own OS, should know enough to take the proper precautions to protect themselves…

egzthunder1 over at XDA Developers states,

I can draw two conclusions:

1. You have some of the worst contract reviewers and negotiators on the planet when it comes to dealing with US carriers.
2. You are indeed turning a page in history and have started going down a path where developers and hobbyists are not really welcome anymore.

The path you are taking right now is likely #2, as you obviously can spend a pretty penny on half decent lawyers (based on recent wins against Cupertino’s finest). In fact, it seems to me that you are turning into what you claimed to despise the most. You have absolutely, positively, nothing at all to gain from locking the bootloader (and neither does AT&T for that matter), and in fact, you are simply losing a good stream of bug reviewers and people who can discover pretty serious flaws in your code.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Android is an open and flexible OS, stop locking people out of their right to modify and tweak as they please…

Frank Denneman leaves VMware for PernixData

Well this is some interesting news, Fran Denneman, one of the best know VMware employees is leaving VMware for PernixData.

Eric Sloof, “PermixData is a start-up founded by another ex-VMware employee Satyam Vaghani. Satyam, who’s one of the co-founders and CTO of PernixData, has spoken at TechfieldDay earlier this week, where he presented their new storage technology. A recorded video can be found here. I’ve conducted an interview with Frank this weekend about his jump to PernixData.” source NTPro.nl

Frank was quoted in an interview with Eric Sloof (another very well know VMware Expert,

When I attended a technical preview of the Flash Virtualization Platform at Pernixdata I got excited. I think just as excited as when I saw my first vMotion. Not only am I thrilled about the current benefits the platform offers, but also the strategic value the platform provides. It decouples the performance element from the capacity element of the storage architecture, allowing them to be separately managed. By turning the storage stack into a modular model it essentially changes the way virtualization infrastructures will be designed.  And think about the potential of such a platform inside the hypervisor layer. I think addressing latency of storage I/O to accelerate the application is only a fraction of the possibilities of FVP. As you notice I really get excited when discussing the solution, and this by itself made me realize that I wanted to become a part of this success story.

If you want to keep up with Frank, you can do so with the information below.

Via Twitter @FrankDenneman, or his blog site is: FrankDenneman.nl

You can also read about his journey away from VMware and into PernixData in this article – Embarking on a new adventure – Joining PernixData as Tech Evangelist

vSphere ESXi 5.1 Update 1 and vCenter 5.1 Update 1 Released

Well I knew all this was coming down the pipe a couple weeks ago, unfortunately I was under NDA. But here it is officially released!

“vSphere 5.1 Update 1 is now available. For those of you running 5.1, there are a lot of critical fixes and enhancements, so I’d urge you to review the release notes and consider scheduling a slot to upgrade your infrastructure to this new release. There are updates for both vCenter and ESXi in this release.”

Storage Enhancements and fixes specifically, the author urges everyone to update to ESXi 5.1 U1

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/04/new-storage-enhancements-in-vsphere-5-1u1.html

If you are not convinced make sure you go over the release notes, as there are a lot of resolved issues.

vSphere 5.1 Update 1 Release Notes.

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esxi-51u1-release-notes.html

Resolved issues in this release in the following subject areas:

• CIM      and API Issues
• Guest      Operating System Issues
• Miscellaneous      Issues
• Networking      Issues
• Security      Issues
• Server      Configuration Issues
• Storage      Issues
• Supported      Hardware Issues
• Upgrade      and Installation Issues
• vCenter      Server and vSphere Client Issues
• Virtual      Machine Management Issues
• vMotion      and Storage vMotion Issues
• VMware      Tools Issues

Mind you 5.1 in itself is a pretty solid build… better to do the upgrades sooner than later.

Windows 8.1 “Blue” News and Rumors

The first major update to make its way to Windows 8 is supposed bring along new software. The start button will make its come back, although not really a start button, it will take you to the tiles screen, how will that affect Start8 and Classic Shell? I am sure they will just overlay it.

We know Windows 8.1 will utilize smaller tiles, and also allow a more optimized way to multitask, along with Internet Explorer 11. Skydrive will be updated, allowing for more backup options, tablet syncing (so you can see all your tabs mirrored across devices), I wouldn’t doubt they will start some kind of profile save feature at some point, and an easier way for us fans of customization to do so.

Windows Blue is a minor update, yet will yield a lot of neat new features, and is maybe one of the fastest released updates to date.

As long as I have my start button I am happy, if you guys out there do not know of Start8, you should get your hands on it, well worth the 4.99. Microsoft doesn’t want to bring the start button back anytime soon. I am really not sure why…