Facebook Smartphones To Take Over The World
We’ve mentioned this before but it looks like Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to have Facebook virtually integrated into smartphones will be far more wide-reaching than previously expected.
HTC has been the smartphone’s driving force behind this development and, speaking at an HTC press event to announce the HTC Salsa and HTC ChaCha, Zuckerberg said that “…..you can expect dozens of phones with deeper integration than ever before.” The type of integration being talked about is, for example, the instant messenger service being Facebook’s by default and news feed items appearing on the home screen.
HTC feels this may be the future of some of its product lines – phones are powered by Android and feature their Sense UI. HTC has said it welcomes developers integrating their own third party applications into Sense and this could herald a wave of smartphones integrated with the application of your choice.
If You Hadn’t Noticed, Linux Has Taken Over The World
That is, according to Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin anyway, Microsoft may
Jim Zemlin
argue the toss but Zemlin has a point. It’s twenty years now since Linus Torvalds wrote the basic Linux operating system, based on UNIX, that has been tweaked, upgraded and improved into the various flavours we use today. You can read about it here.
So why does Zemlin think he’s won the battle with Microsoft? Because Linux dominates virtually every environment except desktop computing and Zemlin says that market is becoming less important anyway with the increasing popularity of tablets and smartphones, many using Android, based on Linux. The others, of course, are iPhones and iPads. The Amazon Kindle uses Linux, as does much software for televisions and camcorders. 90% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers use Linux and it is dominant in server technology.
The problem, if it is a problem, is that not many outside the world of technology know any of this. Mostly you switch on your laptop or your desktop and Windows pops up. If its not Windows it’s most likely an Apple OS. Still, those of us who like safer, hassle free computing can take heart from Zemlin’s words and perhaps we’ll all be using Meego soon.
(written on a laptop running Fedora 14)

