Sony's PlayStation 3 got a small update early Thursday morning that added a new channel called Life with PlayStation. It merges news feeds, weather forecasts, and live Web cams on a giant world map.
It's an evolution on the Folding@Home application, the protein-folding scientific project that's gotten a hefty processing boost from worldwide PlayStation 3 owners who run the small application when not using their systems to play games or watch movies.
What makes the service neat is that it figures out where you are and automatically jumps to that point when you start it up. The news feeds are pulled in from Google News, while the weather reports are served up in real time via the Weather Channel. As you move around the globe, both the news and weather changes by city, and both are continuously updated throughout the day.
A similar offering was provided by Nintendo for its Wii system back in January of 2007 with both its News and Forecast channels, however in the U.S. the stories were limited to those from the Associated Press, unlike Sony's offering which pulls them in from all over the Web.
Noam Rimon, Sony Entertainment of America's senior development manager of R&D, provides a walk through the updated service in the video below.
As the iPhone continues to march across the globe, Google's special (and slick) interface that was introduced in mid-December has been limited to English speakers. However, yesterday the company rolled it out to 33 countries in 16 languages, including Chinese--despite the fact the handset is not available through any Chinese carriers.
More importantly, Google continues to create special mobile variations of its other pages, which now includes Google News and support for users of Google Apps. Google Apps users can now check their mail using the same interface regular Gmail users have been enjoying, with the added benefit of being signed in to use the other mobile Google services.
The updated news viewer allows users to browse by the front page or by section, and features a built-in search tool. It's still essentially a link repository to other third-party sites, but it's now far easier to parse through on smaller screens than its original format.
What really makes the updated News page shine is that it integrates YouTube videos in the related stories. If there are videos for a selected subject, you can view them as thumbnails, which when clicked will jump you to the handset's built-in YouTube viewer. Short of actually having Flash, this is the closest you'll get to being able to casually watch Web videos while browsing other news networks. You could also use a conversion tool like vTap or Avot mV, but this new system requires one less step.
I still think most iPhone users will be inclined to use Safari's built in-search tool, which can be set to use either Google or Yahoo without having to venture to a search page first. With the speed of EDGE, I often find myself skipping any unnecessary page load when it comes time to search on the go, something that won't be fixed until the purported 3G version of the handset comes out later this year.
iPhone users can now view Google's various device-specific apps in 16 languages.
(Credit: Google)
No matter how this story ends, it will have a big impact on all Web users. If Microsoft takes control of Yahoo, for example, many of Redmond's Web properties will likely get scuttled while Yahoo's become even bigger. If Google and Yahoo do a deal, the price of Internet advertising will go up (since the combined network would control the majority of keyword advertising), and so on. For the full rundown of what could change, what's likely to happen, and all the latest news, check out News.com's complete coverage of Yahoo and its suitors.
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