When getting directions with Bing, there will now be a “Navigate” button which starts the turn-by-turn voice navigation. The voice navigation feature was developed by the Microsoft Tellme team.

Phones initially compatible with the new free navigation service include: HTC Fuze, HTC Pure, HTC HD2, HTC Tilt 2, HTC Touch Diamond 2, HTC Touch HD, HTC Touch Pro, HTC Touch Pro 2, Motorola Q9c, Samsung Jack, Samsung Omnia II, Samsung Propel, and T-Mobile Dash 3G.

Today, Kansas Broadband Internet (KBI) announced it is moving ahead with the construction of its own WiMAX network with PureWave as the exclusive hardware provider. The finished network will cover 18 counties, and more than 12,000 square miles. With only 33 residents per square mile, Kansas is one of the United States’ ten least densely populated states.

In such sparsely populated areas, WiMAX is an economical solution for reaching the most residents with the least amount of infrastructure. KBI today said that a single base station with six antennas can deliver a 15-mile range of service.

“As we migrate our wireless network from proprietary equipment to more advanced and capable mobile WiMAX technology, we need a solution that is powerful, simple to deploy, easy to maintain and cost effective all at the same time,” said Lee Miller, President and CEO of KBI. “We…are now able to deliver such advanced services as streaming video to customers located 7.5 miles away from the base station in a non-line of site environment. We are reaching customers we were never able to serve before.”

Instead of deploying in rural areas, Sprint and Clearwire thus far have concentrated on deploying WiMAX in urban areas and major air travel hubs. Sprint Nextel’s very own hometown is Kansas City, and the telecommunications company is the number one employer of Kansas residents (according to the Kansas City Business Journal Book of Lists, 2007.) The company has still not officially provided a launch date for Kansas City’s WiMAX network. In all likelihood, the Sprint 4G network will launch well before KBI’s WiMAX network, possibly as early as this summer.

With competition in the Web browser field having transitioned from cold to boiling in less than a year’s time, Mozilla suddenly finds itself playing catch-up against not only Apple and Google, but Microsoft as well. In March, the organization realized it needed to completely make over Firefox 4 if it wanted to remain feature competitive against a fast-rising Google Chrome.

In a live presentation yesterday, Mozilla Firefox director Mike Beltzner admitted that his group’s March roadmap, which involved an interim release of Firefox 3.7, had too many steps. Now the group has decided to straighten out its path by grafting version 3.7’s main additions onto a point release Firefox 3.6.4, and shifting gears to focus on version 4.0.

“We were talking about shipping a Firefox 3.7 in the middle of the year, and shipping a Firefox 4 at the end of this year. Well, it turns out, the primary motivator for Firefox 3.7 was helping our users with frequent crashes caused by plug-ins,” Beltzner told a global audience yesterday. “We’ve managed to do that, and we plan on shipping it to our Firefox 3.6 users in Firefox 3.6.4…What was going to be Firefox 3.7 is now going to be Firefox 3.6.4.”

In Betanews’ research, a well-used installation of Firefox 3.6.3 has crashed an average of six times per day. Analysis of these crashes using Microsoft SysInternals tools indicates that, in at least three out of six of these cases per day, Adobe Flash appears to be the “catalyst,” to borrow a phrase, for Firefox’s downfall; in two cases per day, Adobe’s PDF Reader is the likely cause. The plug-in architecture originally planned for version 3.7, and now being implemented in the version 3.6.4 public beta, is designed to compartmentalize plug-ins on a per-tab basis. Our tests thus far have turned up initial evidence that Flash-related crashes have been contained by the 3.6.4 beta, although we’re skeptical about its ability to contain Reader crashes as well. However, we do not yet have complete statistics.

Beltzner’s plan does not actually accelerate the organization’s roadmap, but rather cuts out a handful of the steps required for it to reach its goal. It still wants Firefox 4 shipped by the end of this year, and to that end, Beltzner has set mid-October as a target zone for Release Candidate 1. The first betas of Firefox 4 could be ready by the end of June, which actually means — if history is any guide — that the first alpha releases of the product (usually intended for developer feedback only, though publicly available) would need to launch within weeks, at the latest.

“In the past, I think we haven’t gotten as focused around our beta rollout as I think we should have,” Beltzner conceded yesterday. “We’ve always aimed it at early adopters; early adopters for our betas have never been a problem. We actually have a very rich beta audience; we normally get to around three quarters of a million to a million users for our betas, which is fantastic…But they are primary early adopters. So we see ourselves getting surprised when we release a product, and mainstream users start using it in a different way.”

Mainstream user feedback was critical for Microsoft Office 2010, and an extended period for that feedback was necessary in order to enable bugs that early adopters would not have found to be discovered, and also for new feature suggestions to be culminated. Perhaps Mozilla discovered this as well, which is why it’s annexing more time for the Firefox 4 beta out of what used to be the 3.7 project.

“We need to make sure that our beta this time is focused both on early adopters and mainstream users, so we’re getting a good spread of data,” said Beltzner. From here, according to Beltzner’s roadmap as of yesterday, the final Firefox 3.6.4 should be released “about the middle of next month,” which translates on the calendar into next week. Mozilla has planned a 2010 Summit for the first week of July, and Beltzner wants the first Firefox 4 beta at least one week before then. The beta phase will be expanded to last over three months, with frequent public updates every two to three weeks. An API freeze is slated for mid-August, which is necessary for developers of plug-ins and other tools that interoperate with Firefox, to enable them to make their own plans. Then the UI freeze will take place in early September, so that documentation teams can take screen shots and expect them to be valid come October.

Beltzner needs differentiators that will help the new Firefox stand out solidly against Google Chrome, as well as a potentially resurgent Internet Explorer 9. He may have found some with respect to Firefox as a platform: With plug-ins already strong and with Web apps maturing into a self-sustaining industry, the browser can evolve to become more like a desktop. Chrome’s architecture now enables plug-ins of a sort, but Google’s penchant for minimalism at all costs makes each plug-in occupy a single icon in an address bar that quickly becomes crowded for space.

Firefox 4 will attempt to exploit that Chrome weakness by giving Web apps (ironically including Google Docs and Gmail) their own identity by way of its forthcoming “app-tabs” feature. There, online tasks can be elevated to permanent tabs in the tab bar, slimmed down to just icon size but still representing a common tool. This way CNET can be a bookmark, but Pandora can be a tool.

With Facebook becoming a “sharing center” on a scale few had predicted, and with Adobe and soon Microsoft deploying Web apps from the browser, it no longer makes sense for privacy and security policies to be relegated to “Internet zones” and “non-Internet zones” like in IE. Sensing that opportunity for differentiation, Firefox 4 will offer what Beltzner currently calls a Permissions Manager, where users set the sharing permissions that pertain to specific Web sites. As of now, it’s merely a concept, which means Mozilla developers will have to work fast, now, to get a working model for Firefox 4’s first alphas.

Determining that earliest part of the new roadmap will likely be the focus of the next developers’ planning meeting set for later today.

Responding to questions about how he foresees Firefox 4’s competitive stance against Chrome 5 and IE9, Mike Beltzner said, “We’ve built the Web ecosystem into the space that we’ve wanted it to be. [Compare] that to five or six years ago, with one player and no competition, nobody pushing each other forward. We’re now in a space that’s intensely competitive, and all of [us] pushing each other forward. We watch our competitors and our competitors watch us, and we are in it to win it…People who are working on Mozilla and believe in our mission should really feel that. It’s no longer the case where it’s all easy-win. There’s hard work to be done here. We have to dig our heels in, and we have to make sure that we are the ones who are leading the charge here and keeping the Web open for users.”

You may have noticed a change in Google online, the addition of a column on the left side that lets you narrow your results to just images, videos, blogs, shopping and other categories. That change has come to Google mobile as well, although it is concealed.

When you use Google on the iPhone or on an Android phone, you may notice two small arrows on a button to the left of the field where you type in your search terms. Touch that box and a column will appear.

The box lets you sort by type (videos, blogs and so forth), time period (24 hours to a year or custom dates), or just images. If you don’t want the menu on the left, touch the arrows again to remove it.

As simple as it is, it is a useful tool, once you know where to find it.

Google has added another tool as well, specifically for Android phones running systems 1.6 and higher. Google Goggles, the image recognition software, can recognize English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, and can translate those languages into several others as well.

To use it, point Google Goggles at the text you want to translate, draw a box around the words you want to translate and press the shutter button. If it recognizes the text, it will offer to translate it for you. Google said its eventual goal was to also translate non-Latin languages like Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

Tracking the Outage

The OpenGraph Search API is a part of Facebook’s newly launched developer API, an interface to the social network which allows developers to access (with permission) users’ profiles, friends, status updates, etc. for use within Facebook applications and external services built on top of Facebook’s platform.

The search API in particular allows developers the ability to search all public objects available in the social graph, including posts, people, pages, events, groups and even an individual user’s New Feed as documented here on the Facebook developer site.

In Facebook’s provided example query, the search term used is “watermelon,” which may or may not be a very popular topic, so we used keywords that we were sure had been posted publicly somewhere, at some point, by at least one of Facebook’s 400 million users.

For instance, in a query for the word “graduation,” the most recent result result was a status update from 23:20 GMT (19:20 EST military time or 7:20 PM EST). The “updated_time” of that post was this morning, but that only refers to when a user comments on a post according to Facebook’s developer documentation.

In other words, around 7:20 PM EST last night, the OpenGraph API stopped pulling in new public status updates.

According to the developer who reported the issue, both his forum posting and bug report have, so far, been unanswered. We have also reached out to Facebook’s PR team and have yet to receive a response. (We will update this post if we do).

Facebook Outage Raises Questions

The larger issue here isn’t just that a portion of Facebook’s platform has gone down – numerous web services have issues from time to time, including everything from Gmail to Twitter. An outage of this length, however, with no official communication from the company itself is disturbing.

With Facebook’s new “Open Graph” initiative, the network has launched an incredibly ambitious plan to socialize the entire web by way of publisher plugins, APIs, “like” buttons, instantly personalized websites like Pandora and Yelp, “login with Facebook” boxes, live streams (like those found on CNN during live events) and more.

The social network is weaving itself into the very fabric of the web which means publishers, developers and users now depend on it to stay up-and-running at all times. If it’s not able to do so, then it essentially becomes a single point of failure for a number of web sites and services.

Today, only Facebook applications and services requiring access to public streams have been affected by the outage. Tomorrow, who knows? You can no longer “like” something or login to your favorite website? How will Facebook communicate its outages going forward? What will this mean for developers whose apps rely on Facebook’s platform?These questions remain unanswered. We hope that Facebook is thinking about these things too as it struggles to fix its broken API this morning. We hope it will have an answer soon.

But it also has one big downside–one that many CIOs are still struggling with–a the loss of control.

“They do lose control, when they move to a cloud-based service, of some things,” Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said during a lunch meeting on Wednesday. “They lose control of when things get updates. They lose control of saying ‘no’ to some new thing.”

Capossela

(Credit: Microsoft)

Capossela acknowledged that many technology executives, even those who are shifting work to the cloud, see it as a mixed bag.

“On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they hate it, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays they are really excited by it,” Capossela said. “What I mean by that is they see the excitement and the benefits of it and they are also scared of it.”

To the end user, it doesn’t make a huge difference; Microsoft’s software looks basically the same whether it is running in a customer’s data center or as a service from Microsoft. If anything, the service customers are happier because they get new versions more quickly.

However, to the IT department, those two scenarios look very different. When they run the software on their own, customers have to budget for upgrades, manage installations, and monitor servers. In the latter scenario, the company doesn’t do any of that but at a different cost: they have little say which versions of the software are running.

For the smaller companies that use Microsoft’s online versions of SharePoint, Exchange, and other software, Microsoft decides when to move to a new version–typically quite soon after its release.

“Some people are fine with that and some people are totally freaked out about it,” Capossela said. “They definitely do that gut check.”

For example, today’s corporate customers are running Exchange 2007, but the company plans to shift to the new Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 later this year.

Larger companies that have their own dedicated servers within Microsoft’s data center have slightly more say. But even they have only a relatively narrow 12-month window to deploy new releases.

“They don’t have a choice of saying ‘No, I don’t want to go,’” Capossela said. “They have a choice of saying when, within the next 12 months, do I go.”

Capossela said that there are some good reasons why that sense of control can be hard to let go of, particularly given the way some technology companies have upgraded their services, such as Google’s addition of Buzz to Gmail or Facebook’s many unpopular revamps.

“It definitely is seeping into their psyche now that the cloud savings and the currency–always being current–comes at a loss of control,” he said.

Microsoft doesn’t say how many businesses are using its online services, but Capossela said that some 40 million end users that are running some paid hosted service from Microsoft–either SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, or LiveMeeting, or the Exchange Hosted Servcies in which a customer runs their own e-mail servers but uses Microsoft to provide things such as spam filtering and virus detection.

Laptop batteries are like people–eventually and inevitably, they die. And like people, they don’t obey Moore’s Law–You can’t expect next year’s batteries to last twice as long as this year’s. Battery technology may improve a bit over time (after all, there’s plenty of financial incentive for better batteries), but, while interesting possibilities may pop up, don’t expect major battery breakthroughs in the near future.

Although your battery will eventually die, proper care can put off the inevitable. Here’s how to keep your laptop battery working for as long as possible. With luck, it could last until you need to replace that aging notebook (perhaps with a laptop having a longer battery life).

I’ve also included a few tips on keeping the battery going longer between charges, so you can work longer without AC power.

Don’t Run It Down to Empty

Squeezing every drop of juice out of a lithium ion battery (the type used in today’s laptops) strains and weakens it. Doing this once or twice won’t kill the battery, but the cumulative effect of frequently emptying your battery will shorten its lifespan.

(There’s actually an exception to this rule–a circumstance where you should run down the battery all the way. I’ll get to that later.)

The good news: You probably can’t run down the battery, anyway–at least not without going to a lot of trouble to do so. Most modern laptops are designed to shut down before the battery is empty.

In fact, Vista and Windows 7 come with a setting for just this purpose. To see it, click Start, type power, and select Power Options. Click any one of the Change plan settings links, then the Change advanced power settings link. In the resulting dialog box, scroll down to and expand the Battery option. Then expand Critical battery level. The setting will probably be about 5 percent, which is a good place to leave it.

XP has no such native setting, although your laptop may have a vendor-supplied tool that does the same job.

Myth: You should never recharge your battery all the way.

There’s considerable controversy on this point, and in researching this article I interviewed experts both for and against. But I’ve come down on the side of recharging all the way. The advantages of leaving home with a fully-charged battery–you can use your PC longer without AC power–are worth the slight risk of doing damage.

Keep It Cool

Heat breaks down the battery, and reduces its overall life.

When you use your laptop, make sure the vents are unblocked. Never work with the laptop on pillows or cushions. If possible, put it on a raised stand that allows for plenty of airflow.

Also, clean the vents every so often with a can of compressed air. You can buy this for a few dollars at any computer store. Be sure to follow the directions on the can, and do this only when the notebook is off.

Give It a Rest

If you’re going to be working exclusively on AC power for a week or more, remove the battery first.

Otherwise, you’ll be wearing out the battery–constantly charging and discharging it–at a time when you don’t need to use it at all. You’re also heating it up (see “Keep It Cool,” above).

You don’t want it too empty when you take it out. An unused battery loses power over time, and you don’t want all the power to drain away, so remove it when it’s at least half-charged.

Never remove the battery while the computer is on, or even in standby or sleep mode; doing so will crash your system and possibly damage your hardware. Even inserting a battery into a running laptop can damage the system. So only remove or reinsert the battery when the laptop is completely off or hibernating.

If you’ve never removed your laptop’s battery and don’t know how, check your documentation. (If you don’t have it, you can probably find it online.) The instructions generally involve turning the laptop upside-down and holding down a button while you slide out the battery.

Myth: Refrigerate your battery.

Some people recommend you store it in the refrigerator, inside a plastic bag. While you should keep a battery cool, the last thing you want is a wet battery, and condensation is a real danger in the fridge. Instead, store it in a dry place at room temperature. A filing cabinet works fine.

You don’t want the battery to go too long without exercise or let it empty out entirely. If you go without the battery for more than two months, put it in the PC and use it for a few hours, then remove it again.

Also, before you take the laptop on the road, reinsert the battery and let it charge for a few hours before unplugging the machine. Allow the battery time to get a full charge before you remove the AC power.

The T-Mobile HSPA+ network–which delivers wireless broadband speeds up to a theoretical max of 21mbps–is currently in place in test markets. T-Mobile plans to expand the high speed data network to 185 million Americans (only 34 million of which are actually T-Mobile customers) by the end of 2010.

T-Mobile is playing from deep in the hole, though. It is the smallest of the four major wireless providers in the United States, and it hasn’t offered any compelling edge to attract defectors from competing wireless networks. Sprint claims the “most reliable” 3G network. Verizon claims “biggest.” AT&T claims “fastest.” T-Mobile has Charles Barkley and Eric Clapton. Until now.

Businesses–particularly businesses interested in Windows Mobile smartphones and Windows 7-based netbooks–have good reason to look twice at T-Mobile. Aside from the HSPA+ network rollout announcement, T-Mobile has also unveiled a Dell Mini 10 netbook running Windows 7 Starter Edition, and revealed the highly-anticipated HTC HD2 smartphone.

Doing business with the smallest of the big boys has its advantages too. Being at the bottom of the wireless provider totem pole means that T-Mobile is more flexible, and tries harder. T-Mobile has some of the most generous and favorable pricing plans, and it ranks highest among the four major wireless providers for customer service.

Sprint and Verizon get to keep their titles for now. But, while its technically 3.5G, once T-Mobile gets the HSPA+ network implemented, it will capture the “fastest” 3G network crown from AT&T. Granted, it’s more a marketing bragging right than anything else, but it’s AT&T’s primary claim to fame aside from being sole provider of the Apple iPhone.

For now, the only device capable of utilizing the HSPA+ network is T-Mobile’s webConnect Rocket USB broadband modem. T-Mobile will continue to introduce devices capable of taking full advantage of the HSPA+ capabilities. However, even existing T-Mobile customers will notice improvements in 3G performance as a result of the network upgrades.

T-Mobile is not resting on its laurels or quietly accepting its fourth-place status. It was the first provider to partner with Google for the Nexus One, it is the first provider to deliver the HTC HD2, and now it will have a super-fast broadband network to back them up.

Businesses looking for a wireless provider–or considering a move from an existing wireless provider–should look seriously at what T-Mobile has to offer and examine some of the advantages that T-Mobile brings to the table.

AT&T gave Apple engineers masterclasses in wireless networking in order to address iPhone connectivity woes on the carrier’s network, says a report from the Wall Street Journal. But that’s only half of the story, as AT&T also says it’s putting a lot of effort (and money) into improving its network as well.

U.S. iPhone users have been complaining about AT&T’s network pretty much since Apple’s smartphone was first launched in 2007. And AT&T was their only option if they wanted an iPhone, , as Apple has forged an exclusive deal with the carrier in the U.S.

However, with (long-standing) rumors that Apple may soon end exclusivity with AT&T and launch a Verzion version of its popular smartphone, AT&T is ramping to beef up its network in an effort to satisfy users. As part of improving iPhone users’ experience, AT&T worked with Apple to reduce strain on its network, according to the WSJ.

AT&T reportedly flew its people to Apple’s California offices to give Apple designers a crash course in wireless networking, which ended up in regular meetings between the two parties. As a result, the WSJ report says iPhones put less load on AT&T’s network when they need to find the closest cell tower or check for text messages.

In addition to working with Apple, AT&T reportedly made improvements to its network as well. Part of a so-called 100-day network improvement plan, AT&T added new network spectrum to help with traffic handling and repositioned antennas in many locations to aid reception in office towers.

However, news of AT&T making massive improvements to its network is not a surprise. Traditionally, every June since 2007, Apple has introduced a new iPhone model, and this year is likely to be no exception. It’s unclear when Apple’s exclusive iPhone contract with AT&T will end, but some say this summer’s model might be the last one exclusive to the carrier.

Add that to continuous speculation of a Verizon-bound iPhone, and it becomes clear why AT&T is striving to improve its network. One more thing though AT&T: where is the iPhone Internet tethering you promised last year?