Telia is planning to build the next generation mobile network called 4G, and they think they will be the first company in the world to offer its services. A service which is said to be ten times faster than 3g! In Sweden, Ericsson will be developing the technology, where as in Oslo, Norway, chinese Huawei got the deal. Though Ericsson already started building the LTE network there.

Erik Hallberg at TeliaSonera says there will be a commercial launch in 2010 and that they hope to launchvery early that year.

The 4G network technology is also called LTE, but it seems I won’t be having the pleasure of ever using it, unless I go to Stockholm or whatever city they might choose to include in their launch. They say they will be delivering it to high population density areas only, which exclude me. Like I covered in an earlier article about Telia, I can’t even get 3G reception in my house, nor my summer house. Seems I’m pretty much off the map. The Tech Map. Yeah, I get 3G reception a few yards outside my house…

This video shows a short guided tour of the new, improved Taskbar for Windows 7, and I must say, it really looks good. Some of the features could really help improve productivity, if you’re the mouse-browsing type. Personally, when using Windows (XP), I tend to navigate through the system using the keyboard only, so the “Aero Peek” (a.k.a. “Peek” for short) would render rather useless for me. However, I tend to change my way of working with things every now and then. No matter what, it looks and works nicely indeed and I’m certain many will appreciate it. Check it out:

Update: I found this article on Gizmodo where they show us a “hidden feature” called “Aero Shake”. Not sure why it’s referred to as “hidden”, it could as far as I know always have been there and nobody noticed it. Or if you have to activate the feature as it might have been turned off for beta testers (hence “hidden”), who knows. I just think it’s truly awesome, a really really good idea. It’s one of those things that stands out, and might even think “Ha, not even Mac OS X does that”. Judge for yourselves:

Google announced yesterday that they are rolling out some Google Labs features for Gmail, which is very exciting! The gadgets include Calendar, Docs, Mouse gestures (like the famous All In One Gestures for Firefox), Signature tweaks (to place your signature above the quoted text when replying, very much wanted by many Gmail users) and many more.

A few gadgets that truly offers more usability are “Navbar drag and drop“, which simply allows you to rearrange the gadgets on your left hand side. This gadget, or more of a plugin if you ask me, is a true miracle worker. At least in my opinion. Being able to choose what gadgets to sit where makes all this so much better. Another gadget that offers more customization for your Gmail inbox is “Custom Label Colors”, which allows the users to personalize Labels, making it slightly better from a usability standpoint.

Lastly, “Mark as Read Button”, here to save the day! Or at least 1.8 seconds of your life. Per click. This gadget places a Mark as Read button right in your inbox. So instead of hiding under the More drop down, you can access it directly, saving you one click. This may sound dorky to some, but it actually make sense from a productivity standpoint, and I can honestly say I’ve wished for this a number of times.

In their announcement they mention a possible performance loss using these, as they are still working on optimizing the gadgets, but that they are keeping a close eye on the performance as they move forward. Well, the last thing we want is a slow email application. They also say that some of them does not work with https, which could introduce some issues for some. You’ll see some error messages if you run in to this.

They also say they are aware of the lack of scalability of gadget real estate: “We’re not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail — in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn’t offer scalable real estate.” which is nice, that they approach this publicly. Adding in the ability to stretch columns, or maximize them, or possibly pop out a gadget could be cool. But let’s just be happy they finally allows us to implement Calendar huh?

At long last, YouTube offers the feature of deep linking, to link to a certain point in a YouTube video. This is done by adding a short tag to the end of the URL, a tag that looks like this “#t=4m45s”. 4m meaning four minutes and 45s meaning 45 seconds, and this would take you 4 minutes and 45 seconds into the video. Duuh. Anyway, just add in the time you want to link to in the video. Very useful feature!

Click the link and see for yourself, this is what the URL would look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZjMgbRUsZM#t=4m45s

There’s no easy copy’n'paste type way of using this yet though, you’d have to mark the time using that thing we call memory, the human memory, you know? Not a To-Do list, Stickies or Notepad… Or you could try a piece of paper and a pen. I don’t think I own a pen anymore… Whenever I actually DO use a pen, I cramp up in five seconds, can barely write my darn signature. Damn computers making me lazy.

OK, sure, you can write the time down however you like, but my point is, you have to copy the URL for the video and paste it wherever you’d like to paste it, and then add in the specific time for the specific point in the video you want to link to, at the end of the URL at the above noted fashion.

Via TechCrunch