Google Chrome team working at break neck 6-week pace.

Talk about an uptick in “production”. Google announced via the Chromium Blog yesterday that their browser love child — Chrome — is going to be getting a serious kick in the development department. Instead of waiting many weeks to several months between big updates, six weeks will now be the maximum standard wait time. With that type of speed, we’ll be talking about Chrome 9.0 before the year’s out!

Google Chrome program manager Anthony Laforge goes on to say that while these major 6-week updates will feature a new release number (ex: 6.0, 7.0, 8,0), consumers shouldn’t get too hung up on the actual number itself, for the real motivation is to get updates (large or small) into the hands of end users as fast as possible. It’ll certainly be interesting to see Google’s increased workload play out, especially next to someone such as Microsoft — someone whom you can measure major browser revisions in years.

Bring it on Google!

Would you sell your e-reader if “exclusive” walled gardens hamper ebook uptake?

Yesterday Amazon announced that they scored an exclusive deal with publisher Andrew Wylie (clients: Oliver Sacks, Salman Rushdie, and Philip Roth plus more) that will give them the sole rights to distribute books by mentioned (and unmentioned) authors for a full 2 years. At first, it seems like a great way to push ebooks further and yeah, is a nice little nest egg for Amazon. But when you sit back and look at the bigger picture, it’s a very bad decision. First and foremost, no other outlets have access to these exclusive titles — no other ereader devices and not even traditional paperback versions.

Essentially, Amazon is setting a precedent for other publishers and ebook storefronts to create their own exclusive “talent clubs”, thereby fragmenting the market in an extreme sense. Just think, in a years time the sole decision when purchasing an ereader is: “What books can I or can’t I download?” That’s the wrong question to be asking. Features of the hardware itself and provided 3rd party services should be number one — not worrying about how many different ereaders you’ll need to read books from all of your favorite authors….

Hey! Chrome now features side tabs.

My favorite browser just got cooler. In my drunken rampage through the interwebs tonight, I stumbled on a little ditty on Lifehacker that shows off a particular feature that just popped up in the Google Chrome Dev Channel — side tabs.

It’s straight forward. Side tabs simply indicate tabs that aren’t located above the page, but instead reside on the side of the page. For widescreen users, this is a god send. Widescreens already have a scarcity of vertical realstate. Offloading the duty of displaying open tabs to the much larger horizontal axis is a very welcome addition.

As Lifehacker points out, Firefox users have had this ability for some time with several different plugins. But el Goog going ahead building it right into the browser is A-OK by me. While this is a dev-channel only feature for now, it’s not too hard to imagine Chrome 7 slipping said feature in for good.

**In order to enable side tabs, add “–enable-vertical-tabs” to the desktop shortcut for Chrome, and then access the setting via a right-click on the menu bar.

Droid X haz root! Still no custom roms.

Yes folks, the Droid X haz root. But before you get all excited, proceed to stripping off your clothes, and make a mad grab for the baby oil, let us remind you that root simply means access to the file system. Custom roms and all that tom foolery are a completely different story — a story that is still sealed due to the locked bootloader. Yes, there are likely a team of Android die hards across the world working on cracking Moto’s little nanny. So far, such efforts have proven futile on the European Motorola Milestone. But given the even larger presence Android has garnered, I’m hoping a few more devs have jumped on board, with cracking the Droid X’s locked bootloader first in a line of many “fixes”.

Please devs, for the sake of Android users’ sanity everywhere: Give us custom roms!

What do you want to see in webOS 2.0?

Fresh off the heels of an announcement by HP’s Jon Rubenstein, we now can expect webOS 2.0 by the end of this year. No details were given unfortunately, so we’ll have to resort to good ‘ol fashioned guestimating and hypothesizing for now. Though after having a brief stint with a Palm Pre Plus a few months back as well as listening to tons of consumer feedback, I’d hope speed and stability are high up on the list. Speed, especially speed. Coming from iOS and Android, webOS was a dog. A few extra features wouldn’t hurt either. Hey, Palm HP has to earn that 2.0 badge, right?

Speaking of HP, at the same conference today, HP made it pretty clear that Palm is probably going to be more of a sub-brand of HP than a standalone brand. After seeing the HP acquisition monster consume several other companies over the last few years, turning them into respective sub-brands, HP’s move with Palm isn’t really all that surprising. How do the Palm die-hards feel about this?

Leave a few comments inside. I like to talk…

Update: Special Edition Halo: Reach Xbox 360 coming soon.

Anyone can stroll into an electronics store or online website and slap down a few benjamins, netting themselves a fresh Xbox 360 off the shelf. But some people strive for individuality. Some just want to stand out. Others simply love a particular game, product, or service so much that they want to advertise that brand. Such is the reason we have special edition consoles like the upcoming Xbox 360 Halo: Reach. It hasn’t been officially announced yet, though word has it we’ll see it break cover later today. For now, all we know is that it’ll be silver with some Halo Reach graphics and carry the same 250GB hard drive as the normal high-end 360. $399 seem a bit much for some fancy stickers? I’m leaning towards yes.

Update

The Halo: Reach Xbox 360 bundle is a go

Update: New Microsoft logos leaked?

Some new logos of Microsoft’s have leaked out this afternoon. Well, “claimed” new logos. They’re a tad blurry. Though, any self respecting leaked image/object wouldn’t be caught dead in the clear, now would it? Nope. So we’ll make do with these fuzzy renderings for now. I have to say, they’re certainly better than past logos and icons of Microsoft products. Anyone excited to possibly be seeing these plastered all over upcoming Microsoft products?

I’ll throw in my two cents and note that the Xbox logo is a little chaotic. You? Hop inside for larger shots…

Update

No new logos. A bit late on this one — According to Microsoft, these were just used for keynote purposes to “showcase flexibility”. However, their tagline has changed to “Be What’s Next”. Shame, really. New logos are always fun to look at. Oh well, continue along…