Tag Archives: mobile

Tetris turns 25: Is it the next Olympic sport?

It’s amazing how a huge global phenomenon can begin. In 1984, Russian mathematician Alexey Pajitnov was playing with one of his favorite puzzles when he had an inspiration: How about creating a computer version Pajitnov wrote the program in his spare time, simplifying the idea to make it easier for those of us who aren’t math geniuses. He used shapes made of four squares — hence “Tetris,” which comes from the Greek word for four, “Tetra.” In the game, players must position and stack blocky shapes to fill a grid without leaving spaces in between.

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Can a Palm Pre multitask better than an iPhone?

Palm’s comeback attempt rests squarely on the notion that it has found a better way to manage your complicated digital life. Ever since its January coming-out party at the Consumer Electronics Show, Palm has generated buzz for the Pre unlike any other phone released since Apple’s iPhone arrived in June 2007 (that includes impressive phones such as Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Bold and HTC’s G1 Android phone.) The two phones will be forever compared — not just because of their consumer-oriented styles and emphasis on gesture-based user interfaces, but because of the very real enmity between the proud team that worked on Apple’s historic iPhone breakthrough and the ex-Apple executives and engineers attempting to rebuild Palm. While the iPhone has set the standard for future smartphones, Palm’s WebOS delivers two important improvements that the iPhone can’t yet match: true multitasking between applications, and a subtle notifications system that doesn’t interrupt your train of thought.

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Can green cellphones ring the changes in mobile industry?

The next time you go to throw away your old mobile phone, Gert-Jan van Breugel hopes you bury it in a garden instead tossing it in a garbage can. That is of course if the cellphone you’re using is the biodegradable bamboo handset he’s designed with bamboo seeds implanted in its case that should start to sprout when the mobile disintegrates in the ground.

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Nokia rings up 96 percent slump in profits

Nokia, the world’s biggest cellphone manufacturer, recorded its worst quarterly results in more than a decade Thursday on the back of plunging handset sales and a 96 percent drop in operating profits. Nokia posted first quarter operating profits of just €55 million ($73 million), down from euros 1.5 billion a year ago.

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Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow Porn Star, Dead at 56

People in the ’70s knew two things about Marilyn Chambers: that she had appeared as a model on an Ivory Snow box, fondly holding an infant under the corporate slogan “99 and 44/100% Pure”; and that she starred in Behind the Green Door, one of the first, weirdest and most popular hard-core movies in that brief period of the ’70s known as Porno Chic. These two factettes, with their colliding irony, made the blond, willowy Chambers the pin-up princess of XXX cinema, a notoriety she parlayed into a career in soft- and hard-core sex films that lasted from 1972 until..

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Quake survivor: I feel a deep sadness

Survivors of Monday’s deadly earthquake in Italy’s Abruzzo region face the prospect of rebuilding their shattered lives after thousands of homes were demolished. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Tuesday pledged to build a new town to house the thousands of people left homeless in the medieval city of L’Aquila, about 120 km (75 miles) northeast of Rome but for many the problems lie in the more immediate future

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