Google to Become an ISP

Google to Become an ISP Google may soon be your ISP; Opera seems to be sneaking past Apple into the iTunes Store and how to get out of jury duty using Twitter. It’s Thursday, February 11, I'm Natali Del Conte and it’s time to get loaded. Google is becoming an ISP. The company launched a plan to bring fiber optic broadband to a select number of cities sometime this year, this is not your grandfather’s internet, this is one gigabit per second internet. What? Google will start this as a trial with fiber to the home service at what they're calling competitive pricing and ISPs around the country are shaking in their boots. Okay this sounds fantastic because it could challenge our ISP’s and make them stop charging whenever they want to subpart service but we have to ask the question do we want Google as ISP? That is a lot of power in the hands of one company, think about it. You can now instant message over aim using Facebook Connect. These connect your Facebook account and your contacts to you AOL chats accounts so you can chat with both groups of people at once. This was announced this week perhaps as a way to counter the Google buzz-buzz. Opera and they are the mobile browser for the iPhone this week, I don’t know how this one got past Apple. They normally don’t allow competition to their core iPhone applications. Opera Mini5 will be launched at the Mobile World Congress in Spain next week. It’s supposed to be faster and have features such as tabbed browsing, password managers, speed dial and a splash page that features your favorite sites. If it makes this way all the way through I’ll jump and shift from Safari to Opera in a heartbeat, let’s hope it makes it to the App Store though I'm slightly skeptical. Microsoft looked into battery issues with Windows 7 and found that there are really are ano battery issues. The reported problem was that Window 7 was giving users notice of a bad battery when in fact the battery was not bad. Microsoft looked into this and found that the operating system is not issue but rather it’s just a legitimate bad battery. Users were worried about this because XP and Vista didn’t have battery warning so people thought that this was erroneous, it was not, you just have a bad battery. Google is upset over a social networking site in China that looks and sounds a little too much like Google, Goo-J.com has a logo that is very Google-esque as and it also uses Google Search engine along with Vidu which the other major search site in China. Google is threatening legal action against Goo-J and has sent several cease and desist notices even though Google isn’t so in with the Chinese legal system these days they only got a case here. AT&T thinks that it will have its 4G Network rolled out by 2011. The company announced Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as the hardware manufacturers that will get this LTE Network up and running. They expect to have trials ready to test later this year and some measure of actual deployment next year. Sorry if I'm skeptical but AT&T in my experience has not been so successful at 3G so 4G? Right. The Winter Olympics are among us and in preparation Google has put a snow mobile to work to capture some terrain for Google Street view maps. They're of course not doing all snowy mountains in these regions but just starting in Vancouver, so that we could see what its like on the ski jump, kind of fun. Garmin revealed two new newbie phones one that runs Android and another that runs Windows Mobile. The N10 runs Windows Mobile and the A50 runs Android. They both have 3.5-inch HVGA capacitive touch screens, 3 megapixel camera’s, auto focus, geo tagging, four gigs of on-board storage with the micro SD card and of course what Garmin does best, GPS. They are rumored to cost around $400.00 and we should see them in the first half of this year, assuming Garmin can meet their release states with this. This may seem fairly obvious but Federal Courts are proposing that jurors not Tweet while they are assigned to cases. Jurors are not supposed to communicate about their cases any way but in the Federal Court Policy address Twitter specifically. A model jury instruction from the Judicial Conference said, “You may not communicate with anyone about the case on your cellphone, through email, Blackberry, iPhone, text messaging or on Twitter through any blog or website, through any internet chat room or by way of any other social networking website including Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn YouTube, unless you want to get out of jury duty in which case, tweet away. Those are all your headlines for today and that wraps up your week of getting loaded. I’ll see you on Tuesday. We’re closed on Monday for the holidays so have a great weekend. Thank you for watching, I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you’ve just been loaded.