App Engine 1 5 0 Release

The App Engine team has been working furiously in preparation for Google I/O time and today, we are excited to announce the release of App Engine 1.5.0, complete with a bunch of new features. This release brings a whole new dimension to App Engine Applications with the introduction of Backends, some big improvements to Task Queues, a completely new, experimental runtime for the Go language, High Replication Datastore as the new default configuration (and a lower price!), and even more tweaks and bug fixes.

Serving Changes

• Backends: Until now all App Engine applications have been running on short-lived dynamic instances that we spin up and down in response to application requests. This is great for building scalable web applications, but has a number of limitations if you are looking to build larger, long-lived, and/or memory intensive infrastructure. With 1.5.0, we are introducing Backends which will allow developers to do precisely this! Backends are developer-controlled, long-running, addressable sets of instances which are as large as the developer specifies. There are no request deadlines, they can be started and stopped (or dynamically start when called), they can use between 128M and 1G of memory and proportional CPU. If you’d like to find out more, have a read through our Backend docs for Java and Python.


• Pull Queues: Most of our users are heavily using Task Queues in their applications today, but there is lots of room for more flexibility. With 1.5.0 we are introducing Pull Queues to allow developers to “pull” tasks from a queue as applications are ready to process them, rather than relying on Task Queues to push tasks at a pre-configured rate. This means you can write a Backend to do some background processing and pull 1, 10, or 100s of tasks off the Pull Queue when the Backend is ready for more. In addition, we’ve introduced a REST API which will allow external services to do the same thing. For example, if you have an external server running to do image conversion or OCR, you can now use the REST API to pull tasks off, run them, and return the results. In conjunction with these 2 improvements, we’ve also increased the payload limits and processing rate. We are excited both about expanding the use of Task Queues as well as improving the ease of integration between App Engine and the rest of the cloud.

Datastore

• High Replication Datastore as default: After months of usage and feedback on the High Replication datastore (as well as a record of 99.999% uptime so far) we are now confident that it is the right path forward for the majority of our users. So, today we are doing two things: setting HRD as the default for all new apps created, lowering the price of HRD storage from $0.45 down to $0.24, and encouraging everybody to begin plans to migrate. We really appreciate all the time that early users of HRD put into trying it out and finding issues and have fixed a number of those issues with this release.

Changed APIs

• In response to popular demand, the HTTP request and response sizes have been increased to 32 MB.


• Mail API: We have added a few restrictions to the Mail API to improve the reliability and reputation of the service for all applications. First, emails must be sent from email accounts managed by Google (either Gmail, or a domain signed up for Google Apps). Second, we’ve reduced the number of free recipients per day from 2000 to 100 for newly created applications. Both of these will help ensure mail from your application arrives at the destination reliably.

Administration

• Code downloads: As of 1.5.0, we have expanded the ability to download an Application’s source code to include both the user who uploaded the code to download it as well as the Owner(s) of the project as listed in the Admin Console. Owners were introduced in 1.4.2 as an admin role.

Go

• New runtime: With 1.5.0 we are launching an experimental runtime for the Go Programming Language. Go is an open source, statically typed, compiled language with a dynamic and lightweight feel. It’s also an interesting new option for App Engine because Go apps will be compiled to native code, making Go a good choice for more CPU-intensive tasks. As of today, the App Engine SDK for Go is available for download, and we will soon enable deployment of Go apps into the App Engine infrastructure. If you’re interested in starting early, sign up to be first through the door when we open it up to early testers. See the announcement on the Go Blog for more details.

There are plenty of additional changes and bug fixes in this release so please check out the full release notes, including all issues fixed for Java and Python. Finally if you are interested in where App Engine is heading later this year, check out our other announcement at I/O 2011!

The App Engine Team

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More Nexus 5 rumors circulate as document from FCC leaks out

It all started with that picture taken at the time that the Kit Kat Android statue was unveiled at the Googleplex. The picture, frozen for all time, shows a mystery man snapping a picture using the camera on an unknown smartphone that was sporting the new NEXUS style logo on the back. Right away, the buzz started getting loud that the phone in the picture was the Google Nexus 5.

And when the FCC received a visit from the LG D820, the buzz got even louder. Equipped with a 4.96 inch screen, the phone had connectivity for AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. Kit Kat was believed to be under the hood. But a new theory seemed to debunk this. A database leaked by evleaks showed a CDMA LG G2 with the model number of LG D821. Since the database mentioned the D821 and not the D820, the thought was that the latter was another CDMA LG G2 variant based on the similarity of the model numbers.

But on Thursday morning, FCC documentation for the LG D821 revealed it to be a GSM version of the LG G2 with LTE support for Band 5.And more importantly, the dimensions turned out to be real close to the LG G2 but not close at all to the LG D820. And that means that the LG D820 is NOT an LG G2 and very well could be the Google Nexus 5. Sweet dreams for Android fans.(PhoneArena)

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Lenovo IdeaCentre K900 with 5 5 inch display and Intel CPU

The Lenovo IdeaCentre K900 phone is a 5.5 inch full HD smartphone with a 2GHz dual-core Intel x86 processor. In our first test Smartlet makes a pretty good impression.

Lenovo has unveiled at CES a pretty interesting smartphone. The Lenovo IdeaCentre K900 phone comes with the new Intel 2GHz Dual Core Atom processor, which is optimized for smartphones. But the Lenovo is not only because of the x86 CPU so interesting, but also because of the 5.5 inch display. This has filled a Full HD resolution that is 5.5 inches so of 1920 × 1080 pixels.

Unfortunately, would not or could not reveal all the details for Lenovo Idea Phone K900. But it is interesting in any case the camera, because this dissolves with 13 megapixels and has two flashing lights. In fact, these are the same camera, which can also be found in the Sony Xperia Z.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre K900 Phone will be released within the next few months in China. A launch in Europe or the U.S., unfortunately, is not initially provided. Thats pretty bad, because the Lenovo IdeaCentre K900 phone has made a pretty good impression. Especially the aluminum housing is very high quality and leaves little to be desired. This was however told that we try not pre-installed on the Idea Phone K900 Android 4.2 Jelly Bean could.

At the latest at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we will see more smartphones equipped with an Intel processor. Previously dominated by ARM chipsets the smartphone and tablet market. Lets see if Intel x86 processors to catch up somehow.

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Top 5 Alternatives to Apple iPad Mini

1.Google Nexus 7

The Google Nexus 7 is without a doubt the leader among the best alternatives to the iPad Mini. With 1280 x 800 pixels is the resolution of the 7-inch display much higher than Apple, and thanks to the quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is the performance really good. Yet there is the tablet with both 8GB and 16GB memory. These versions are expected to be replaced by 16GB and 32GB memory, which then cost 199 and 249 euros. Furthermore, it may soon be a version of the Nexus 7 with 3G.

2.Amazon Kindle Fire HD

In second place is the Amazon Kindle Fire HD . For people who are not familiar with technology as good and easy to consume only movies, books or music, and some want to surf the Internet, probably the Kindle Fire HD occupy perhaps the first place. On the 7-inch tablet runs Android 4.0 but Ice Cream Sandwich, however, the surface Amazon simplified. The Kindle Fire HD should therefore one of the simplest gadgets out there, thats still pretty good. In the tablet lies a 1.2 GHz dual core processor and 16GB or 32GB depending on the version store. Here, too, solves the display with 1280 × 800 pixels.

3.Acer Iconia Tab A110

The Acer Iconia Tab A110 is very similar to the Google Nexus 7th In the 7 inch tablet from Acer puts the same NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip and here is Android 4.1 Jelly Bean preinstalled. Unlike the Nexus 7 There is also a microSD card slot and an HDMI output. Therefore the resolution of 1024 × 600 pixels is much lower - the price is the same for 199 euros.

4.Amazon Kindle Fire

Who wants a very simple tablet may be the slightly revised version of the first Kindle Fires access Amazon. Here, the same operating system as the Kindle Fire HD is installed, only the hardware is not quite as good. Instead of a dual-core chip is only a 1.2 GHz single-core processor fitted with 8GB memory and the display has only to 1024 × 600 pixels. For this, the Kindle Fire with 159 euros is also much cheaper.

5.Toshiba AT270

The Toshiba AT270 combines the positive aspects of the Google Nexus 7 and the Acer Iconia Tab A110. Here we have the quad core NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip, 1GB RAM, 32GB memory and a 7.7 inch display with 1280 × 800 pixels. In addition, a microSD card reader is integrated, there is a 5 megapixel rear camera and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich pre-installed - sorry, no jelly bean. The housing is made ​​of aluminum and the processing is impressive very well. One of the few negative points is the price. With just over 500 euros, the Toshiba AT270 is way too expensive, at least you can get for less than half have a Nexus 7th.

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