TechWay

Early adopters, get ready – Walmart has begun to sell the HTC HD2 on T-Mobile a couple days early. The phone is scheduled to officially launch in the United States on Wednesday for $199 with a two year contract. People not dismayed about Microsoft confirming that there will not be an Windows Phone 7 Series upgrade have already posted unboxing videos on YouTube detailing the phone in all its goodness.

Update: More videos! Check them out after break. Read the rest of this entry →

At the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, said that the company was ready to completely pull out of China if tensions between the country and the company remained tight. Things have not changed between the two, and word comes from a Chinese Google employee that Google is preparing to leave China on April 10 and potentially announce its exit strategy in four days. Google has not confirmed the validity of the report and declines to comment on anything related to pulling out of China. The Mountain View company has had conflicts with the Chinese government after it decided to unfilter its search results, against the dictation of the government.

With Google preparing to pulling out of the Chinese search engine market, the surface of the market has changed completely. Since the January 12 announcement, Badiu’s shares have climbed 46% while Google’s fell 4%. Baidu is Google’s major competition in Asian countries such as China.

Via Bloomberg

For Microsoft, Internet Explorer was a flop in recent days compared to its rivals – Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (among others). However, its dreaded slow speeds and no support for modern web standards made it frustrating for web developers and users alike. Microsoft is now taking the same approach to browsing as they did to mobile OSes in Windows Phone 7 – starting over. With support for HTML5, h.264 video, embedded audio, and CSS3, and scalable vector graphics, Microsoft is throwing themselves back into the game with IE9.

For Internet Explorer users, many have noticed that the browser’s CSS compatibility was scare, and now with Internet Explorer 9, they’re at least trying to improve that.

Internet Explorer 9 also comes up ridiculously faster than Opera 10.10 and Internet Explorer in the SunSpider benchmark test, a tool which determines the performance of JavaScript on the browser. Many web-apps today, including Gmail and Facebook will run (and load) quicker with a lower score in terms of milliseconds. In the benchmark graph above, IE9 comes within reach of Safari and Chrome’s 350-ish range in SunSpider. Internet Explorer 9 also didn’t get anywhere near perfecting the Acid3 test – scoring a mere 55/100 compared to other browsers getting 100/100 on the test. Microsoft also added DirectX video acceleration to Internet Explorer 9, which applies not only to CSS3 rendering and SVG graphics, but text rendering as well.

It was also noted that Microsoft’s Hachamovitch said that Internet Explorer 9 will not support Windows XP. Sure it’s a completely clean break, but Microsoft just made the remaining Windows XP loyalist furious. Those users can still install a later version of Windows or use a virtual machine.

Image source: Gizmodo