Geekly Update Jun 15

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

Zynga, the company behind Farmville and Mafia Wars, has just released Frontierville, a Facebook app that sends you out West to raise both crops and a family. Sigh... yet another app to add to my block list.

As expected, at the WWDC 2010 Steve Jobs announced the 9.3mm iPhone 4. Included is an easier to read "retina display," a 5mp camera with video chat and the addition of a gyroscope.

Activision is already taking pre-orders for Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. Due out in September, the latest sequel has more than 90 new tracks, a controller redesign and additional game modes.

Toshiba has released probably the first 15.6" laptop with 3D Blu-ray capability. The TX/98MBL Dynabook, aka Satellite A665 in Europe, features an Intel Core i7 processor, up to 4GB DDR3 RAM and up to 500GB HDD.

Perhaps in an effort to compete with Bing's artistic backgrounds, Google will now let you upload your own image to make it a background on its home page. Go to Google.com and click on "Change Background Image" that is located on the bottom left hand corner.

RIAA has asked a New York court to issue a permanent injunction against the file sharing network Limewire. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood has already granted a summary judgment in favor of the group that represents the top 4 record labels.

Sprint has announced that sales of its Android-based HTC EVO 4G on launch day were 6 times greater than those of the Samsung Instinct and twice as many as the launch of the Palm Pre. Android-based phones are outselling iPhones in 2010, in spite of the media's incessant adulation for the latter.

OnStar and Google have teamed to provide both Maps and Turn-by-Turn Navigation for General Motors vehicles. Both will become standard on all OnStar equipped GM cars in 2011 models.

Twitter plans to launch their own URL-smashing service that they say will be safer than the currently used one. They claim that it will better inform users where the link may take them.

News, Flash! Adobe has noticed a vulnerability in its Flash Player, Reader and Acrobat products. The company is finalizing a fix and says that, in the meantime, users can delete, rename or remove access to the authplay.dll file.