Sony Reveals More Details of PlayStation Xperia Phone

Sony Ericsson unveiled its PlayStation phone, the Xperia Play, on Sunday at the World Mobile Congress. The company hopes it will attract gamers to the well-known Sony brand.
The Android-based smartphone will be available to U.S. consumers first starting in March from operator Verizon, with other operators worldwide expected to shortly follow, said Steve Walker, head of Sony Ericsson marketing.
Walker said that the Xperia Play finally realizes "the dream of high-quality mobile gaming."
As seen on Sony Ericsson's recent Super Bowl advertisement, the Xperia Play has a slide-out game pad, with two analog touch pads, two shoulder buttons, a digital D pad and an area with the four PlayStation icons, which are buttons with a circle, cross, square and triangle.
"You keep your hands on controls rather than all over the screen," said Aaron Duke, product manager.
More than 50 gaming titles will be available when the Xperia Play launches, including Guitar Hero, Assassin's Creed, Dungeon Defenders: Second Wave second wave and Dead Space. The device will ship with games from the PlayStation one.
Sony Ericsson's publishing partners include Electronic Arts, Gameloft, Digital Chocolate, Fishlabs and GLU Mobile/Activision. Electronic Arts will eventually bring its FIFA game to the Xperia Play, which Sony Ericsson said will be the first multiplayer version of that game for mobile devices.
Sony Ericsson plans to launch an online game store later this year called the PlayStation Network. It will be a marketplace for games certified by Sony for phones running the Android operating system, said Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony's networked products and services group.
In January, Sony Ericsson announced the PlayStation Suite, a framework for moving older games to the Android platform.
The Xperia Play has a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm with an embedded Adreno GPU graphics processor that will play 60 frames per second during gameplay. It has a 4-inch multitouch screen and a 5-megapixel camera.
The Xperia Play was perhaps the biggest announcement of Sony Ericsson's lineup at the conference in Barcelona, but the companies also detailed three other phones in the Xperia product line.
The three phones – the Arc, Neo and Pro – all run the 2.3 version of Android, called Gingerbread. Sony Ericsson president Bert Nordberg said the companies want to be the leader in Android devices.
The Xperia Arc, which features a 4.2-inch screen and the Mobile Bravia display and graphics engine, will go on sale in March, said Cathy Davies, director of global marketing communications.
The company's Xperia Neo has an 8-megapixel camera, can record HD video and has an HDMI port. Users can browse through the device's interface using a TV remote control, said Tony McNulty, product director. Other features include the ability to create folders for sorting applications and a pinch function that allows a user to see all of their widgets in one view.
Sony Ericsson is pushing the Xperia Pro as a phone for business users. Its e-mail interface allows users to see a preview of the message in the left-hand side. The Pro also has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
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Submit Blog to Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.

While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.

Website Indexing

Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.

Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-

1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.

2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.

3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.

4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.

6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.

7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.

List of Search Engines

You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.
Google
Bing
Yahoo! Search
Microsoft Live Search
Alexa Web search
Baidu (Chinese search engine)
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The heaviest known antimatter

The diagram above is known as the 3-D chart of the nuclides. The familiar Periodic Table arranges the elements according to their atomic number, Z, which determines the chemical properties of each element. Physicists are also concerned with the N axis, which gives the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The third axis represents strangeness, S, which is zero for all naturally occurring matter, but could be non-zero in the core of collapsed stars. Antinuclei lie at negative Z and N in the above chart, and the newly discovered antinucleus (magenta) now extends the 3-D chart into the new region of strange antimatter.
When an international team of scientists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) announced the discovery of the most massive antinucleus to date — and the first containing an anti-strange quark — it marked the first entry below the plane of the classic Periodic Table of Elements, and sparked enormous interest worldwide. Dr. Zhangbu Xu, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the 2.4-mile circular “atom smasher” is located, will share this discovery with a wider audience at this year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on Friday, February 18, 2011.
All ordinary nuclei are made of protons and neutrons (which in turn contain only up and down quarks). The standard Periodic Table of Elements is arranged according to the number of protons, which determine each element’s chemical properties. There is also a more complex, three-dimensional chart that conveys information about the number of neutrons, which may change in different isotopes of the same element, and a quantum number known as “strangeness,” which depends on the presence of strange quarks. Nuclei containing one or more strange quarks are called hypernuclei. For all ordinary matter, with no strange quarks, the strangeness value is zero and the chart is flat. Hypernuclei appear above the plane of the chart.
Last year, members of the STAR detector collaboration at RHIC published evidence of a form of strange antimatter with an anti-strange quark — an antihypernucleus — making it the first entry below the plane of the 3D chart of nuclides, laying the first stake in a new frontier of physics.
Collisions at RHIC fleetingly produce conditions that existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang, which scientists believe gave birth to the universe as we know it some 13.7 billion years ago. In both nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and in the Big Bang, quarks and antiquarks emerge with equal abundance. Nuclear collisions are unique and distinct from elementary particle collisions because they deposit large amounts of energy into a more extended volume. In contrast to the Big Bang, the small amount of energy in nuclear collisions produces negligible gravitational attraction, which allows the resulting quark-gluon plasma to expand rapidly and to cool down and transition into a hadron gas, producing nucleons and their antiparticles.
At RHIC, among the collision fragments that survive to the final state, matter and antimatter are still close to equally abundant, even in the case of the relatively complex antinucleus and its normal-matter partner featured in the present study. In contrast, antimatter appears to be largely absent from the present-day universe.
The STAR team has found that the rate at which their heaviest antinucleus is produced is consistent with expectations based on a statistical collection of antiquarks from the soup of quarks and antiquarks generated in RHIC collisions. Extrapolating from this result, the experimenters believe they should be able to discover even heavier antinuclei in upcoming collider running periods. The most abundantly produced antimatter next in line for discovery is the antimatter Helium-4 nucleus, also known as the antimatter α (alpha) particle.
Dr. Xu, a member of the STAR collaboration, will describe the discovery of the first antimatter hypernucleus, the models which can describe the production mechanism and the abundance of these antimatter nuclei, and the remaining heaviest antimatter nucleus to be discovered in the foreseeable future at RHIC.
The STAR collaboration is composed of 54 institutions from 13 countries. Research at RHIC is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, and by various national and international collaborating institutions.
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W3C: HTML5 will be finished in 2014

Those curious about the final release date for the hotly debated HTML5 need wonder no more: The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) plans to finalize the standard by July 2014, the organization announced Monday.
"This is the first time we've been able to answer people's questions of when it will be done," said Ian Jacobs, head of W3C marketing and communications. "More and more people from more and more industries are asking when it will be done. They require stability in the standard and very high levels of interoperability."
HTML5 is the next version of the HyperText Markup Language, a platform-neutral standard used worldwide for rendering Web pages. Concerns over when the standard would be finalized have escalated in recent years, as Apple, Google and Microsoft touted the still-unfinished standard as the basis for building Web applications.
Despite the enthusiasm of those companies and others, many have cautioned against using the standard before it is finalized. Because of its complexity, estimates as to when HTML5 would be finished have varied wildly, from a year or two to not until 2022.
The last call for feedback has already been announced, for May 22 this year.
From then until 2014, the HTML Working Group will have several tasks to complete before the standard is finalized, Jacobs said. The group has to review and address the comments submitted up to the May deadline. The feedback from this "Last Call" is expected to be quite considerable and could result in another revision of the document.
The group also has to design a test suite, one that can encompass the wide range of different browsers and platforms that will render pages and Web applications written in HTML5.
Such interoperability is crucial, given the expanding range of devices accessing the Web, including televisions, tablets and phones. "The target is broad interoperability," Jacobs said.
The W3C expects no new features to be added after the Last Call. From that point on the group will take feedback only from implementers and through trials of the test suite, said Philippe Le Hégaret, lead for the W3C Interaction Domain, which oversees the development of HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and other Web standards.
As the working group finalizes HTML5 it will start considering new features and improvements for subsequent versions. While members of the working group have decreed they will do away with version numbering of the standard, neither Jacobs nor Le Hégaret would definitively state that there won't be future numbered versions, such as an HTML6 or HTML5.1.
For now, the organization will classify the work being done under the working title of "HTML.next," Jacobs said.
The W3C also announced on Monday that it has extended the charter of the HTML Working Group to 2014. The HTML Working Group is comprised of more than 400 members from browser vendors, software developers and other organizations reliant on the Web standard.
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Nokia CEO quashes talk of sale to Microsoft

Despite a sweeping deal with Microsoft on Windows Phone, Elop dispels rumors that a Nokia buyout is imminent
Microsoft won't be buying Nokia anytime soon despite a sweeping Windows Phone agreement announced by the vendors last week, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told reporters Sunday.
"There was no discussion of acquisition" during negotiations of a pact that will have Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7, Elop said at a crowded press conference on the eve of the Mobile World Congress here.
"The best approach for Nokia was to enter into a deep partnership, but to respect that there's a huge chunk of Nokia that's not in [Microsoft's interest]," he added.
Several analysts have suggested that the Nokia-Windows Phone partnership could lead to Microsoft buying the Finnish company. Analysts said that despite the high cost of such an acquisition, the fact that mobile devices such as smartphones and laptops will play a central role in the emerging computing and communications landscape could make it successful.
Also, analysts noted Microsoft would capture Nokia's distribution and manufacturing capabilities, providing a huge boost to its efforts to increase its small share of the smartphone market.
Elop acknowledged he had heard the speculation that the cell phone maker might be an acquisition target.
Gartner said Microsoft had 3.4% share of the smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2010, putting it in fifth place.
Symbian-based devices made by Nokia and others led the smartphone market with a share of 32.6%, Gartner said. Nokia's own devices had a 28.5% share of the smartphone market in the quarter, Elop said on Sunday.
While Elop didn't rule out a future purchase of Nokia by Microsoft, he said the focus of the partnership now is the "next billion" Windows Phone-based devices that will be produced by Nokia. "The opportunity for shared value was first priority," he said.
Elop also defended the plan to use Windows Phone on Nokia hardware at a time when few others, such as Samsung, HTC and LG, have committed to Microsoft. He suggested other device manufacturers will move in that direction and say, "We'll compete in the Windows Phone ecosystem."
He added that the first priority is to compete with Android devices. "We have shifted from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems," he said.
Elop also introduced Jo Harlow, who was promoted last week to executive vice president of smart devices at Nokia. She previously held a chief marketing post.
Harlow said a Nokia device running Windows Phone will be available sometime this year, and she presented two slides of concept Nokia devices, including one slide that has already been widely seen on blogs.
"It's an exciting contemporary and modern platform," Harlow told reporters. "We are the partner that will bring innovative design and hardware to make great mobile products with Windows Phone."
She said teams from Microsoft and Nokia are already working together in Iceland on the first Windows Phone product.
Elop also sought to lessen fears of developers writing applications for Nokia's Symbian and Meego operating systems.
"You'll see volumes of Symbian devices in coming months and years ... which gives us the ability to carefully manage the transition of Symbian and Windows phones," Elop said. Nokia's plans for Symbian devices will provide "a huge opportunity for developers," he added.
Elop said that Meego devices will ship this year to take advantage of Qt, a cross-platform developer framework. But he added that Nokia has no plans to put Qt on Windows Phone. "It would confuse developers and consumers," he said.
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iPad to lead 400% surge in NAND flash use this year

12.3 exabytes of NAND flash expected to ship by 2014
Apple's iPad is leading an almost five-fold surge in NAND flash memory use this year as consumers gobble up tablets in increasing numbers, according to a report released today by HIS iSuppli.
The consumption of NAND flash memory chips, which are used to build solid-state drives (SSDs) used in mobile devices, is expected to soar to 2.3 billion gigabytes (2.3 exabytes) this year, up a 382.4% from 476.8 million gigabytes (or 476.8 petabytes) in 2010.
According to iSuppli, shipments of NAND for tablets shows no sign of slowing down, eventually hitting 12.3 exabytes of capacity shipped by 2014.
When measured against the total supply of NAND flash, memory in tablets will represent 11.8% of the supply this year, up from a 4.3% in 2010. By 2014, tablet memory will represent 16% of all NAND flash.
Ultimately, the NAND landscape appears to favor entertainment-focused tablets, like the iPad, over computing-oriented models that will soon be released using a Windows/Intel platform, iSuppli indicated. The high-density requirements for the latter category of tablets will mean higher prices for the devices, which could deter buyers.
Conversely, tablet makers will be pressured to keep prices down, which could serve to limit the amount of flash memory in each unit.
"The bump in NAND consumption among tablets is likely to come from devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPad as well as a raft of tablet devices powered by the rival Android operating system expected to hit the market this year," said Dee Nguyen, analyst for memory and storage at HIS iSuppli. "Together, the iPad and Android-based tablets form one strand of the tablet experience offered by manufacturers -- one centering on Internet-based media consumption. For such tablets, internal storage capacity is less an issue because the devices are intended to provide entertainment, not a full PC computing experience."
According to iSuppli, average flash memory densities will range from 27.1GB for non-iPad slates to 41.5GB in the iPad. Currently, NAND flash costs about $1.20 per gigabyte.
While still an order of magnitude more expensive than hard disk drives, solid-state storage is taking over the market in mobile devices, from smart phones to ultra-portable laptops, because of its greater performance and durability.
Soon there will be a second surge in tablet sales led by new products based on Windows/Intel platform. Those tablets will be sold by the likes of Lenovo, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard and will have solid-state storage with capacities ranging from 32GB to 64GB, Nguyen said.
The expected high volume of iPad and Android tablet sales will end up contributing significantly to NAND consumption by 2012, HIS iSuppli said.
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