The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘sidekick’

With the huge announcement of Windows Phone 7 out of the way, we’re anticipating what was rumored about another Microsoft phone last week: news about a project Pink revival.

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Microsoft Turtle and Pure deets are revealed

It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade.

Here is the original post: 
TenYears: Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade

One thing that that struck me when I first slid open the Motorola Droid is that the software must have been a non-shipping copy.

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The Bearable Lightness of Droid: How the iPhone aesthetic has finally hit the majors

The future, ladies and gentlemen. ThinkGeek has invented a tee shirt with a built-in playable guitar that uses a magnetic pick and included miniature amp to belt out any and all major cords. There’s a drum shirt , too, in case you’re more into rhythm.

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Shirt features playable guitar, flames

Last year I made a habit of calling out manufacturers that released Blu-ray players that didn’t have the latest Profile 2.0 spec. That was last year . But for some odd reason, JVC has introduced a brand new Blu-ray player that confirms to the old Profile 1.1 spec and therefore doesn’t have an Ethernet port or can playback any of the BD-Live features

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JVC drops the ball, releases a $200 BD Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player

Turns out our source had it right: Microsoft engineers who worked on the Danger/Sidekick meltdown have been able to recover “most if not all” of the data that was lost during last weekend’s catastrophic server failure.

In a statement, Roz Ho, Corporate VP of Premium Mobile Experiences addresses the unfortunate T-Mobile Sidekick customers and apologizes for the massive fail:

On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

She adds that there’s now a belief that only a minority of Sidekick users were affected by the outage, but did not share exact numbers. She refers customers who believe they’ve been affected to the T-Mobile Sidekick forum for more updates about when data restoration will commence, and any steps they may need to take on their side. Microsoft says it will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.

And about the actual failure, which turns out not to be sabotage after all as we assumed:

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.

Microsoft states it has made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of their DB is maintained.

It’s still a giant fuck-up, but at least the users (well, most) will get their data back. But the whole debacle has reflected very poorly on all companies involved, and it will linger for long.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We’ve been reporting a lot about Chrome OS the past few days. Possible features, screenshots, early builds — lots of good stuff. And tomorrow was promising to bring even more as yes, there’s an event partially dealing with Chrome OS scheduled to take place on Google’s Mountain View campus. But sadly, we’ve been banned from the event.

Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yesterday we were confirmed as attendees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.

However, before they banned us and closed down registrations, we did manage to get the confirmation email about the event.

The event, dubbed Front End Engineering Open House will feature “presentations on Google Maps and Chrome OS, YouTube will be unveiling their new look and showcasing YouTube 3-D.”

While the presentation on Chrome OS is obviously the thing that first caught our eye, the “new look” for YouTube certainly sounds interesting. As does the showcase of YouTube 3D, something we covered a bit of this summer.

Here are the other key details:

When: Thursday, October 15th, 2009

6:00pm-9:00pm

Where: Google Headquarters

Program

6-7pm | Registration & Networking
7-8 pm | Presentations

Welcome by Adam Sah
Maps – Dan Barcay
Chrome OS – Ben Goodger
YouTube – Chris Zacharias & Igor Kofman
Panel Q&A

8:05-9pm | Networking & Demos

Should be interesting, too bad we can’t go. Anyone who does, feel free to film it and send us the video. tips [at] techcrunch.com.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

So imagine a service that downloads files from Rapidshare for you, then saves them on your 50GB account.

Or forget about Rapidshare, maybe it collects files from Bittorrent automatically.

Or lets you watch a DivX video online, without downloading it to your computer, in high quality, and listen to your music files inside your browser. Put.io will be launched as a paid service.

The service is in private beta right now, but they soon plan to accept beta users.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yo, Sidekick LX ‘09 owners. Check out the Download Catalog. You should find the Sidekick Sync app somewhere in there and guess what?

Originally posted here:
Sidekick Sync app brings push email, Exchange support, and more to the Sidekick LX ‘09

More power to Apple and its legion of accessory makers. Asking people to pay $20 to use your own headphones with an $80 MP3 player is ballsy — brass ballsy. Such is the story of the new iPod shuffle, though, and I’m willing to bet that people will indeed pay for an inline headphone adapter.

More here:
You may now purchase Belkin’s $20 iPod shuffle adapter