That’s right, folks. Google just announced that Chrome for Mac and Linux is out of beta. They feel they’ve squashed enough bugs to get it up to snuff with the Windows version and have released it as of today.

Google is also touting its speed increases with the latest version for all three platforms. Since the first beta, they’ve increased Javascript performance by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks.

As outlined on the Google Chrome blog, there are also new features added to this release. You can now synchronize bookmarks and preferences across computers, plus some HTML 5 goodies like drag and drop and geolocation APIs. For the full list, check out their blog entry.

That’s right, folks. My favorite Linux distribution ever is nearing the release of its next LTS (Long Term Service) release by the name of Lucid Lynx (10.04). The most notable changes in this release are:

• Removal of HAL from the boot process. This makes booting much, much faster, even on semi-old hardware. I’m running the RC on a P4 3 GHz machine with 1 GB of RAM, and it boots in seconds.
• Social features. Support for Twitter, Facebook, identi.ca, and other social networks are built in so you can use them right away with ease.
• New themes. These are called Ambiance and Radiance. Both are smooth and easy on the eyes. Both also use the Mac-style buttons in the upper left of the window rather than the right side.

There are other features as well, but these are the ones that stood out the most to me. You can get the full release notes here. The final release is due out on April 29th. Here’s a nifty little countdown:

According to recent reports, Apple will no longer be providing updates to the first-gen iPhone. It wasn’t mentioned at all in the iPhone OS 4 preview, so many had been speculating as to the future of the original iPhone.

iPhone OS 4 was previewed today. It is available to iPhone developers today – to the rest of us sometime this summer. Here’s a breakdown of the 7 ‘Tentpole’ features that Apple considered the most important.

Multitasking:

• While in an app, double-click the home button and it brings up a ‘dock’ of your currently running apps while pushing up the rest of the UI toward the top of the screen.
• 3rd party apps can run audio in the background (Pandora)
• VOIP apps can listen for calls in the background (Skype)
• GPS apps can continue giving turn-by-turn directions in the background
• Task completion – if a photo upload is taking a while, it can be pushed to the background while you move on to something else.
• Fast app switching – Allows you to continue using an app where you left off rather than re-launching it from scratch.

Folders

• Store apps of the same category (Or however you choose) in a folder. Reduces the number of pages you have to flick through to get to an app.
• Folders can exist in the dock as well
• With folders, over 2,000 apps can live on your iPhone

Enhanced Mail

• Unified inbox – all accounts go directly to the same inbox, much like the Mail app in Mac OS X.
• Fast inbox switching – to switch to different, specific accounts.
• More than one Exchange account (This is great for me, personally since I use Exchange for work and Gmail for personal – I can have push for both!)
• Organize by thread – again, like the Mail app in Mac OS X
• Open attachments with a 3rd party app.

iBooks

• iBooks will be available on the iPhone as well – not only the iPad
• Buy books once, read them anywhere
• Wirelessly sync books between platforms
• Free “Winnie The Pooh” book

Enterprise Features

• Better data protection
• Mobile device management
• Wireless app distribution (for corporate ‘home’-built apps)
• Multiple Exchange servers, plus support for Exchange 2010
• New VPN options

Game Center

• Achievements
• Leaderboards
• Match Making
• Invite friends to play

iAd

• Apple says that current advertising in apps ‘stinks’
• Apple is aiming for emotion + interactivity
• Keeps you in your app
• HTML5 (Still no Flash. Ever.)

Again, the update will be available sometime this summer. The iPhone 3G will not be able to handle ‘some tasks’. Multitasking was specifically pointed out.

There was no indication that there would be any new hardware this summer, neither was anything spoken about availability on the Verizon network. It seems that now would’ve been the time to make an announcement, but they may still be keeping those a surprise…who knows?

I ran across an interesting post today on LifeHacker that referenced a blog post on mint.com. It talked about why you should never spend more than $10 for an HDMI cable for your TV.

Why? The real reason is that the signal being carried is a digital one. 1′s and 0′s. It is not an analog signal that can be improved by adding shielding to the cable, or gold plated connectors. It either works or it doesn’t.

Monoprice.com is a great place to find HDMI cables and tons of other stuff on the cheap.

That’s right. Apple has lifted the restrictions for developers so that they can write VOIP apps that work over AT&T’s 3G network. Back in October, AT&T lifted the restriction on their network and informed Apple and the FCC about it.

Yesterday, Apple released a new SDK for the iPhone and the new iPad. In this SDK, the restriction has been lifted. iCall has already updated their iPhone app, and many others will soon follow no doubt.

I’ll be curious to watch and see how much (or even if) AT&T complains about this extra data usage on their network.

Much has been rumored about the existence of this device, and today it came to fruition. The iPad has a 9.7 inch diagonal touch screen. The interface is much like that of the iPhone.

In fact, ‘most’ of the apps currently in the App Store will run on the iPad. They can run either in their native resolution, meaning they’ll use a small area of the center of the screen. Or, they can run at full screen, essentially doubling the size of the app resolution. Those apps will surely feel clunky to use, so it would benefit most of the developers to write a native version for the iPad. That will be a lot of work…

Will it catch on? Steve Jobs seems to think so. The price point for the device is pretty attractive – $499 for the lowest end. It has 16 GB of storage and no 3G.

For more detailed info on this new device, take a look over at Gizmodo’s ‘everything you need to know‘ article.

Most of you know by now that I’m a Google fan. I like their products. They’re innovative, geeky and cool all at the same time.

At last, there is a full-fledged Google Voice App for the iPhone. There is no push notification for this app, however. The reason? It is a web app. But it’s actually a nice web app written by Google themselves.

The difference between this app and their previous (ugly) mobile web app is that this one is done in HTML5 and functions just like a native iPhone app. It is very fast, and feels like a regular app sitting right on my device.

For anyone who hasn’t kept up with the whole ‘Google Voice on iPhone’ issue, Apple has pretty much all but rejected the native app that Google submitted to the app store. There were other apps out there, which were all pulled from the store at the same time. One of the developers made his app available on the black market for jailbroken iPhones so that his development time wasn’t a total waste.

Another clever developer began working on an HTML5 app, much like the one Google has written. I signed up for the app’s beta, VoiceCentral Black Swan Edition, but never received an invite. It doesn’t matter any more, because we have another one available now, straight from the source.

In true Google fashion, here is a video explaining how everything works.

Skype has announced a new beta for their Linux client. Linux doesn’t see many updates from them, but when they come out, they’re usually pretty significant. Of note in this release:

• Screen Sharing
• Quote a message in chat
• UI Styling

There are apparently still some audio bugs in this otherwise nice Linux client. Let me know what you think.

As if to immediately follow suit, Vimeo announced yesterday that they were making an HTML5 player available. It is beta, possibly a step up from YouTube’s ‘experimental’ player. (Knowing Google, experimental is RC material though.)

There are some limitations with Vimeo’s player as well. You must be using Safari, Chrome or IE with ChromeFrame installed, just like with YouTube. No full screen, like YouTube. Sensing a trend here?

For full screen, I’m not certain if it’s a limitation of current browsers, or if the HTML5 standard isn’t quite there (I lean toward the browsers). But either way, this is a nice step forward in moving away from flash.

Vimeo says that 90% of the videos uploaded in the past year are available to watch using the HTML5 player. 35% overall are available.