Services and applications

Pat Gelsinger, EMC's COO for Information Infrastructure Products, recently imparted a new vision for the future of IT to a group of analysts gathered in Hopkinton, Mass.

Gelsinger, who now manages some of the company's crown jewels like the storage products division and is EMC's executive sponsor for VMware, said EMC is out to change the structure, technology, and possibly the behavior of the IT community.

That's a tall order to fill even for someone as obviously energetic and experienced as Gelsinger, and so if you react to that statement with a measure of skepticism, you'… Read more

For its Xperia X10 smartphones, Sony Ericsson designed a new user interface from scratch. Called the User Experience Platform (or UXP), it sits on top of the Android OS for the Xperia X10, X10 Mini, and X10 Mini Pro.

Last week, Nicole Lee and I took an in-depth tour of UXP with George Arriola, Sony Ericsson's head of human interface design, at the company's lab in San Francisco. On the whole, we liked what we saw. UXP is clean, easy to use, and attractive, and we like that it lets the basic Android framework shine through.

For the … Read more

CNET readers often ask us just how the Google Android operating system compares with the iPhone's OS. And with good reason, for Android has grown into a formidable player in the smartphone world. Of course, Android is different than the iPhone, but variety is nothing to fear. Android may lack some of the Apple handset's glamour, but the OS and its gallery of handsets offer a lot to like. And if anyone ever tells you that the iPhone is always superior to Android, you really should listen no further. The little green guy beats the iPhone in quite … Read more

Google is moving forward in the booming health care technology market.

The search giant this week announced several new partnerships designed to expand its free Google Health service.

Google Health is the company's attempt to offer an online medical portal where you can research medical conditions and issues, find doctors and health care professionals, and track down other health-related Web sites. You can also compile and store a health profile by adding test results, names of medications, insurance information, and electronic medical records from your computer or from third-party partners.

One of Google's new partners is Surescripts, a … Read more

Editors' note: Sprint also advertises on CNET.

We've always followed Sprint's television ads with interest, primarily because they've been a roller coaster ride. We were never fans of the black-and-white spots with CEO Dan Hesse, but we liked the most recent campaign that tried to demonstrate what users could do on the carrier's network at that given moment.

Now Hesse is back, and frankly his claws are out. On Monday, Sprint announced a new commercial that will focus on its "Any Mobile, Anytime" calling plan. In the TV spot, Hesse informs viewers that unlike … Read more

Symantec on Monday announced the launch of a hosting service designed to let health care providers store, archive, and share their medical records.

The company's new Symantec Health service is designed to help hospitals and health care companies offload the costs and internal resources used to house medical records. As health care firms are forced to keep more image-based files, such as lab tests, for longer retention times, their storage costs have soared, said Symantec. The Symantec Health service will offer an alternative cloud-based storage environment where companies can budget and pay only for what they need.

The service … Read more

Here's one for the important-but-obvious files.

New research at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York finds that medical professionals writing prescriptions by hand are seven times more likely to make errors than those using electronic systems.

Researchers looked at prescriptions written by health care providers at 12 community practices in the Hudson Valley region of New York. They compared the number and severity of the found errors between 15 providers who wrote prescriptions by hand and 15 who used a commercial system that provides dosing recommendations and checks for drug allergies, duplicates, and combination effects.

The researchers inspected … Read more

Last week we told you that Sprint was being cagey about the future of its WiMax devices. The carrier isn't saying when it will offer 4G phones, but we're betting that the summer timeframe isn't so far-fetched.

Indeed, the carrier is doing its best to keep WiMax in the news. On Wednesday, Sprint announced that it would expanded 4G to additional markets in 2010 and it sent us an invitation for a media event featuring CEO Dan Hesse at CTIA next month.

The invitation doesn't say much, but it promises that the event will be all … Read more

Back in January when the Nexus One was unveiled, we got our first glimpse at Google Earth for Android. When the Nexus One officially shipped, I was surprised to learn that the application wasn't loaded on the phone. In fact, there wasn't even a mention of it after the unveiling. I assumed it would arrive at some point on either Android 1.6 or later.

Now it's more than a month later and Google finally snuck Google Earth into the Android Marketplace yesterday.

On paper, the Google Earth app sounds fantastic. Not only does it feature the … Read more