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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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…

“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.

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…