iPhone gets Bluetooth keyboard driver

Apple’s refusal to add a netbook to its range has left many attempting to use the iPhone or iPod touch as a rough equivalent, but ease of text entry continues to frustrate. Happily, where Apple fall short the developer community delivers, with the simply-named iPhone Bluetooth Keyboard Driver. Soon to appear in the Cydia Store, v.1 of the driver allows you to wirelessly connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS or iPod touch.


It’s not a perfect solution: it requires that the device be jailbroken first, and iPhone 2G support is unclear at present. You’ll also need an iPod touch with Bluetooth, too, so that counts out the first-gen model. The software implementation isn’t quite perfect either; v.10 lacks support for cut/copy/paste, you can’t highlight text by holding down shift and using the cursor keys, the CapsLock button won’t work and Apple’s own wireless keyboard won’t quick auto-connect.

Nonetheless, this is a huge step forward for turning the iPhone or iPod touch into a mobile workstation, and those who enter large amounts of text may find the combination of the App Store and this new driver irresistible. No word on when exactly it will enter the Cydia Store.

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Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS

Google has made a change to Chrome OS to move the user login from the machine to the browser. Our guess is Google is, or will eventually use, Google Friend Connect to facilitate login.

The feature was first mentioned on October 13: “Using Chrome as our login manager has a number of potential benefits.
Explore these tradeoffs and decide what to do about the login manager.” The code was checked in on December 14: “An early version of this change is finally in. It’s not ready for daily use yet, and we haven’t gotten the network picker on there or anything yet, but at least we’ve got a baseline in there. I’m filing issues for the follow-on work.”

There are lots of potential benefits to having users log into machines via the browser. In particular it makes syncing easier and furthers the notion that you can log into any Chrome OS machine and have exactly the same experience as you would on any other machine. The fact that users can’t download any software to Chrome OS computers furthers this experience.

But it’s also clearly interesting from an identity standpoint. Facebook and Twitter are both making strong plays as the defacto online identity for hundreds of millions of Internet users. Facebook Connect in particular is becoming a very popular way for third party sites to easily add identity and login features to apps.

But people using Chrome OS devices will be logging into the Internet first and foremost with a Google account, or via Friend Connect (which currently allows signin via Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, Netlog, OpenID, etc.). By centralizing authentication once, Google can then use the same Friend Connect credentials to automatically login to sites that support it.

If Chrome OS becomes popular, it will be a very powerful weapon for Google to compete with Facebook Connect.

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Google To Launch 'Nexus One' Phone Next Year

Google plans to begin selling a cellphone directly to consumers as soon as next year. Called Nexus One, the phone was designed inside Google and will be sold, at least initially, without being subsidised by a wireless partner. According to reports, the phone will run on the search giant's Android operating system and will be sold online. It is being manufactured by HTC, which also built the first Android phone to hit the market, T-Mobile's G1 phone. The phone's pricing, along which countries Google initially will target for the device, couldn't be learned.

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Mozilla Thunderbird More Secure Than Microsoft Outlook

The French military is now using the Thunderbird client on over 80,000 computers as it finds Mozilla's latest email client more secure than Microsoft Outlook. The department found Mozilla's open source design permitted France to build extensions for security, while Microsoft's proprietary software allowed no extensions to be made.
According to Reuters, "France's military chose open source software after an internal government debate that began in 2003 and culminated in a 6 November 2007, directive requiring state agencies Seek maximum technological and commercial independence."
The military has released some of its work to the public under the name 'TrustedBird' and co-branded it with Mozilla.
The French government is also shifting to other open source software such as Linux instead of Windows and OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
Reuters quoted Lieutenant-Colonel Frederic Suel, ministry of defence as saying, "They may move beyond government, because TrustedBird's security extensions make it transposable to large international companies."

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