Microsoft Outlook to become a lot more social, integrate Facebook and MySpace. Cubicle dwellers rejoice, IT managers cringe..

While those stuck reading this in some dimly lit, cold, and rank smelling cubicle may have nothing but malice and dissent for Microsoft Outlook as it takes up countless hours of their lives each day, people who actually choose to use it on the outside seem to think pretty favorably of it. Outside of the enterprise world, Outlook itself is a pretty decent desktop email client that can at least hold it’s own against many other desktop email clients from various software companies. But even in the consumer space, Microsoft Office still feels like it’s at work. That stodgy corporate image is hard to shake.

Last year, Microsoft announced that they would be rolling out a “Social Networking Connector” plugin for Office 2010 that would allow social networking sites to be more deeply integrated with the defacto corporate standard desktop email client. No surprise here, LinkedIn was the first to jump on the bandwagon seeing as how it is a Facebook of sorts for the corporate world. But LinkedIn integration is hardly going to pick up any worthwhile amount of consumer based users as most of those said users don’t use LinkedIn.

Consider that problem solved. Microsoft has officially announced that within the next few months, two new, big partners are joining the Office social frenzy — MySpace and Facebook. I’d say that by integrating two of the most consumer focused social networks into the corporate workhorse email client can only go up. That is, if the integration is deep (we don’t know yet), well laid out, and easy to use. If not, it will be an epic failure.

I hold out hope however, as I myself am one of those very people I outlined above — stuck in a cold, dark, dimly lit cubicle that reeks of old cheese and 1974. Now, the only question is if those who run the network I use will allow such social shenanigans to take place. At least in my case, I think not. But for the rest of the Office/Outlook using world, this new social madness is looking might nice.

Question: Will MySpace and Facebook integration keep you from leaving Outlook or even draw you in if you’ve never used it before?

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Samsung Wave’s Snapdragon 3D performance 4x better than “other” Snapdragon CPU’s?

The processor everyone wants right now is Snapdragon. With meager power requirements considering it’s 1+GHz speeds, it’s not hard to see why. So far, the more prominent phones to have received the speedy chip have been the WinMo powered Touch HD 2 and the N1. Both equally fast phones for sure. But Samsung’s recently announced “Wave” smartphone could put them all to shame, not necessarily raw CPU speeds considered, but buy graphics performance.

In the image above, you can see the CPU and GPU specs of the Samsung Wave. What’s odd is that they put a pretty fair amount of focus on the Snapdragon CPU, yet left out the little tidbit concerning the phone’s 89 million Triangle/s GPU performance. If you’re keep track, that’s considerably more than pretty much every other Snapdragon powered device today, with “the rest” averaging around 22 million triangles per second. The only other mobile chip that comes close is Nvidia’s Tegra 2 (85-90 million Triangles/s) which was also still fresh, announced at CES last month.

Why keep such an important spec on the down low when mobile phones are already taking after their desktop counterparts and realizing the CPU isn’t everything? It’s a combination of factors, though a big, beefy GPU does wonders for a gadget’s performance.

The only question is now, after seeing Bada in numerous videos and spec sheets galore, can it actually handle all of that hardware power?

GearLog

Looking to earn a cool $100k? Pwn2Own is your place.

Pwn2Own in years past has been staged to completely rip apart the security of modern computer operating systems and their browsers. Seeing as how that is now old news and taking into account more and more people are using smartphones, which are just as capable as desktop computers to browse the web, sets up a new recipe for security disasters. So it’s no surprise that the main highlight of Pwn2Own this year is focused on mobile browsers from the “big guys”, aka, iPhone 3GS, BlackBerry 9700 Bold, a new Nokia device running the latest version of Symbian, and an Android device.

If you think you’ve got the chops to hack your way to victory, perhaps you’ll want to enter into this event. Doing so will net you $60k just for exploiting one of the aforementioned systems above with each subsequent tool that can be “executed without any user interaction” bringing in an additional $15k. It adds up folks. It’s one of those times where being an extremely good hacker and breaking systems is actually a good thing. Think you can do it?

The Register

The AT&T Coverage Helmet [Humor + Bonus Video]

Without a doubt, the “Funniest joke to poke fun at AT&T’s rural coverage award” goes to none other than “Ryan” and his friend “parawing742″ of YouTube. Parawing742 created a massive plexiglass map showing AT&T’s rather meager 3G coverage and affixed it to a helmet. Then they went to an AT&T store followed by a Verizon store. Capturing all the candid goodness was rather easy thanks to a wireless mike on Ryan and tailgating camera guy, Parawing742.

The whole point was for Ryan here to find a phone (and carrier) that gave him decent rural coverage so he could yak the night away. When all is said and done however, Ryan goes home empty handed. He did accomplish one thing though — making us laugh.

Check out the vid below as hilarity ensues.

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PhoneArena

Moto DROID shows off Flash 10.1 in video

Flash Flash Flash. No, that’s not an invitation to do something scandalous. It’s all about Adobe Flash. Whether you like it or not, Adobe Flash is coming the the DROID and a whole host of other smartphones in the near future. The pros of Flash integration are mainly centered around a much richer web experience. The naysayers however site even mobile versions of Flash for having poor performance — stuttery playback and battery depleting powers like no other. Looks like we’l see soon enough. If you’re curious to see how the DROID holds up when churning through all of those pixels, give the video below a look over.

MobileBurn

Norway to be the home of new, giant slaying wind turbine.

When it comes to wind power, bigger is always better. A few design tweaks here and there can be made to the individual blades to increase the efficiency of said blade, however, at the end of the day, the blade with the most square footage wins. It looks as if Norway is taking that thinking and multiplying it — exponentially — with their new, currently in construction, wind turbine gigantor.

When this modern behemoth is finished, the rotors will span over 473ft, it’s will tower over 533 ft into the air (that’s taller than 50-stories of man made building by the way), and 10MW of electricity will flow forth from this engineering marvel. For those ultra curious tree huggers and nerds of the bunch, that’s enough power to keep 4,000 homes running at any given moment.

Such a massive piece of metal, steel, and ingenuity has to be anchored securely right? Wrong. “Giganturbine” (oh yeah, the creative juices are flowing now) will live life as an *almost* freely wondering spirit, floating on top of the sweet blue sea and connected to mother earth with nothing more than a suction anchor. I’d hate to see this child run away from home and have to drag it back — tens of miles back.

Norwegians can expect to start seeing electrons harnessed by Giganturbine sometime next year.

Dvice

The RC Millennium Falcon: Pure. Awesomeness.

Much to the delight of Stars Geeks and dismay of parents and significant others, Star Wars toys just got a little cooler today. The RC Millennium Falcon is an honest to goodness hovering piece of plastic.The RC Falcon, built by popular toy manufacturer, Hasbro, will feature a rather authentic look similar to the real Millennium Falcon, save for the massive hole cut out of the center of the device in order to fit the two large rotating plastic blades of fury.

I can already see myself spending days flying this thing around my house and trying to land on the cat before it run’s away. For the more imaginative: The scenario that keeps getting played over and over in my head is the one where ‘ol Mr Solo is landing the Falcon near an Ewok colony and McDroid drive flythru when a wondering Ewok get’s sucked up into the dual blades of death. Oh wait…

Become your very own George Lucas this fall for $50.

Geekologie > StarWars Blog