After testing the latest versions of ten Mac OS X web browsers, Macworld’s Joe Kissell concludes that “Apple’s Safari emerged as a clear favorite, with its excellent standards support, its friendly user interface, and all the capabilities most people will need.” As a result of its performance in the tests performed, Safari earned a 4.5 (out of five) mouse rating.

We’re thinking the Vu is the first real post-iPhone cellphone, using a haptic-feedback touchscreen, a fluid UI, and multimedia features in a phone that should cost less than the iPhone but still be cool enough to induce lust.

Laptop caught up with the phone on the floor of the CTIA Emerging Tech Awards pavilion, snapped a few shots, and did a pretty good hands-on. John Biggs here and I got to play with an early version of the phone at CES and it’s good to see Laptop has about the same impressions we did then.

We’re looking carefully at this phone as it supports AT&T’s MediaFLOW live TV service launching next month, and because it might siphon sales away from AT&T’s own iPhone. Is AT&T spoiling its own game? We’ll have to see how popular the TV application really is before we’ll know, but likely not.

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

More here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a few months now but life has always gotten in the way. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their beta code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live.

Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter.
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Filed under: Cellphones

Palm's miniscule and wallet-friendly Centro has managed to reach one million units sold since its launch last September. It got its legs working as Sprint and AT&T's gateway smartphone at that fantastic $99 pricepoint, and now it's making a bid for world domination in major markets in Europe and Asia. The one million sales have it nipping at the heels of recent superstar smartphones, the two million plus HTC Touch and the four million plus iPhone, not bad company in the least.

 

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I’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a while but they just launched some nice beta software so it seems like the right time. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their alpha code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live.

Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter. They’re offering white-box services to providers who can rebrand a Whisher hotspot or simple pay-as-you-go accounts for cybercafes, etc.

You can also share your Wi-Fi for free and then pick up other hotspots anywhere in the world, similar to FON. This, combined with micropayments model, makes for an interesting product. The product is available now for OS X and Windows. You can download it here. Coverage is fairly sparse in the U.S. but it’s considerably more robust overseas.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

According to a survey conducted by brandchannel.com, “the Apple brand has the biggest impact on the world’s consumers,” reports Rachel Sanderson (reuters.com). Asked “to identify the brands with the greatest impact on their lives,” respondents named Apple [the] overwhelming winner. The creator of the iPod and Mac computer triumphed in six categories including most inspiring brand and the one readers cannot live without.”

This morning I checked out Ping.fm, a fairly new service in the social network aggregation space that lets you update your status on several sites at once. So I can submit “Mark is brushing his teeth” to it and both my Facebook friends and Twitter followers will see the message.

The site, which is currently in private beta, launches a new iPhone version and WAP site today (1,000 of our readers can sign up here by entering code “techcrunch”). It works with Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, LiveJournal and Tumblr, with MySpace, Bebo and Friendster support coming soon.

Ping.fm works pretty much as you would expect. After signing into your various accounts, you can syndicate (or “spam”, as one other person in the office called it) your status to these services. My only beef is that there’s a 60 second lag between the time you submit your status and the time it shows up on these networks. Oh, and there’s no way to check your current status. But you can update your status in alternative ways, such as via email or IM message to a Gtalk or AIM bot.

As I was thinking about Ping.fm, however, I felt as though I had seen this done before. So I scrounged around a bit and found HelloTxt, which does essentially the same thing. And then I remembered that Socialthing, an activity aggregator we reviewed a few weeks ago, also lets you propagate your status from a centralized site - in addition to doing a lot more.

So Ping.fm is essentially a feature of Socialthing, although admittedly it does provide some extra goodies. The funny thing is, despite my preference for Socialthing over Friendfeed, these activity aggregators will also become features of social networks (we know Facebook has plans to make this happen). Where does that leave Ping.fm a year from now? Basically a feature of a feature.

To be fair, Ping.fm is a project being run by two guys in their part time. One of them, Ryan Merket, is also a loyal TechCrunch reader who created an RSS reader that displays our headlines within Facebook.

But I do think Ping.fm can be used as an example of a problem many Web 2.0 services face. They can fulfill a substantial need, work properly, and even possess a real business model - but if they can be easily replicated by a larger, more established player then they probably won’t survive in the long run. That’s my view at least, and it’s corroborated by the advice I heard once from another entrepreneur: “don’t build your business around a feature”.

Then again, people once thought Google was just a feature - nothing more than a search box. And it turned out they were so good at that feature that it became a sustainable product.

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We've certainly seen some dumb trademark lawsuit threats lately, but T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom's supposed threats to Engadget may take the cake. It's not that extraordinary for a company to trademark a distinct color that it uses in its logo, and that's exactly what T-Mobile did last year with a trademark (in Germany only) on the color magenta. Now, it's important to realize that this doesn't mean T-Mobile "owns" that color or can forbid anyone else from using it. It really just means that competing providers offering similar goods and services might run into trouble for using the same color, potentially leading to consumer confusion. When this news broke, plenty of people got up in arms, suggesting that T-Mobile "owned" magenta, which just isn't true. However, it does look like its lawyers think it gives them rights far beyond what it actually does.

According to Engadget, Deutsche Telekom lawyers have sent a nastygram to Engadget, because the blog uses magenta in the logo for its sister site, Engadget Mobile. Of course, it's hard to believe that anyone would go to Engadget Mobile and believe it was somehow affiliated with T-Mobile. The logos are quite different, and the services they offer (obviously) are totally unrelated. In fact, this whole thing seemed so ridiculous that I assumed it was an April Fool's joke -- though the folks at Engadget insist it's not. And, if you want icing on the cake, last year Engadget was one of a few sites that defended T-Mobile for its magenta trademark when it became news last year.

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Mashable and Kluster.com are sponsoring NextWeb’s NY Web 2.0 Meetup, going on live right now in New York City. Our own Adam Hirsch is in the crowd, broadcasting live video from one of NYC’s most popular networking events / parties focusing upon all elements of business and technology. Check it out below:

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