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Google Glass spurs battle for eyeballs

Friday's news roundup will have you eyeing Google's competition:

We've sung this tune before: Amazon is tinkering with creating its own smartphone. A recent Bloomberg report has the media buzzing again about the possibility, but we first heard this last year from an analyst. If true, would Amazon knock Windows from the No. 3 spot? I think we're just hungry for more choice.

Google wasn't the first company to tinker with a computerized headset for augmented-reality vision. With all the buzz on Google Glass, Olympus felt confident about sharing news on its Glass-like prototype. And … Read more

First 4K movie available for sale

At the risk of sounding reductive, New Zealand is most famous for three things: "Lord of the Rings," those guys on HBO, and sauvignon blanc.

Now you can add a fourth item to the list: New Zealand is the home of what claims to be the world's first film to be sold to the public as a 4K resolution file you can actually own at home. Called "TimeScapes," the movie is the brainchild of Orange County photographer and former serviceman Tom Lowe and New Zealand composer Nigel Stanford. It's a 50-minute film featuring some … Read more

A tour of Sony Ericsson's User Experience Platform

For its Xperia X10 smartphones, Sony Ericsson designed a new user interface from scratch. Called the User Experience Platform (or UXP), it sits on top of the Android OS for the Xperia X10, X10 Mini, and X10 Mini Pro.

Last week, Nicole Lee and I took an in-depth tour of UXP with George Arriola, Sony Ericsson's head of human interface design, at the company's lab in San Francisco. On the whole, we liked what we saw. UXP is clean, easy to use, and attractive, and we like that it lets the basic Android framework shine through.

For the … Read more