Samsung Google Nexus S review: Royal droid

Another year, another heir to the Droid throne – and Google are trying to be democratic about it. Which is a roundabout way of saying they’re not monogamous. For the Nexus One, Google teamed up with HTC. This time around, they trusted Samsung to do the job, using the Galaxy S as a base. It’s only their second try and users are given a second chance to like the Royal Droid. A tall task it is – the very concept is fundamentally incompatible with the free and open source Android system. Royal blood is not a benefit in a free democracy. Google did learn it the hard way with the Nexus One.

Google’s second smartphone child has more than just an image problem to tackle. The Nexus S has to keep pace with the evolution of the platform. The 'S' in the name may stand for many things - from second to superior. But with Android 2.3 Gingerbread inside, speed is not far from the truth either. Here’s what else the Nexus S has to offer in a nutshell.

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A new look for Google Translate for Android - Official Google Mobile Blog

When we launched the first version of Google Translate for Android in January 2010, we were excited about the year ahead. For the first time, we were bringing the capabilities supported on Google Translate—like machine translation, romanization of non-Roman scripts and spoken translations—to the Android platform. We also offered voice input to let you speak the word or phrase you wanted to translate instead of typing it in, and SMS translation so you could translate SMS messages sent to you in foreign languages.

Today, we’re refreshing Translate for Android with several updates to make the app easier to interact with. Among other improvements, we’ve created better dropdown boxes to help select the languages you want to translate from and into, an improved input box, and cleaner icons and layout.

We also want to let you in on an experimental feature that’s still in its earliest stages - Conversation Mode. This is a new interface within Google Translate that’s optimized to allow you to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. You may have seen an early demo a few months ago, and today you can try it yourself on your Android device.

Currently, you can only use Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish. In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. Even with these caveats, we’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages.

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Google Chrome OS Cr-48 Notebook Hacked to Run Ubuntu Linux - Softpedia

Without a doubt, Google's Chrome OS notebook, dubbed Cr-48, has been one of the hottest arrivals of late 2010, as it offered the world a glimpse at what Google's brand-new operating system for notebooks/netbooks would be able to offer, as well as the level of performance we are to expect from these machines.

However, it seems that the portable computing system has also drawn the attention of hackers, since, as GizInChina reports, the Cr-48 has already been hacked in order to run another free, open-source operating system (and perhaps the best-known of them all), namely Ubuntu Linux.

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