We love it when tech companies stop playing nice. Remember the Samsung ad that last November? Now Microsoft’s got in the spirit, having released a video that directly attacks Google Docs.

The video is a promo for the virtues of Microsoft SkyDrive , which lets you work on Microsoft Office documents collaboratively from multiple devices over the web. Google Docs lets you do the same thing, but Microsoft claims it’s a poor man’s version of its own software.

Samsung ad ridicules the iPhone

While you could argue that the difference is in the price – Google Docs is free – it’s certainly a heavy-handed way of persuading Google users to get on board with MS’ cloud services.

Watch the video below to see the Microsoft smackdown for yourself. The ball’s in your court, Google…

SkyDive and Office

The NY Times just published an absolutely fascinating piece on Apple and why it builds almost all of its stuff in China. Go read it. Clearly some of our politicians could learn a lot from it.

The short of it is that companies like Apple simply cannot manufacture products in the United States. The cost (though it is cheaper in China) is not the reason, however. Years ago, the Chinese government subsidized building cities of factories that can hire 3,000 workers to live in a dorm per day —or 8,700 Industrial Engineers in two weeks (it would take 9 months to do this in the U.S.). Today’s gadgets require thousands of little parts that are all made in the same areas. This whole global supply chain cannot be moved to the U.S.

The most interesting tale might have been the last minute decision to make the iPhone’s display glass:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

Other notable tidbits:

1. Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average ofthree tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

2. Various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense.

3. “Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

4. At the Silicon Valley Summit: “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

Interestingly, the biggest piece of the iPhone made in the U.S. is the processor, which is manufactured in Texas.

By Samsung.

Touch Mouse, a free iOS app, lets you control your computer (and in turn, your TV) from a distance, giving you the freedom to surf the Web from your couch.

The application can also be used as a PowerPoint remote when giving a presentation.

· Connect your computer to Wi-Fi and download the Touch Mouse Server on your computer (PC or Mac ) from Logitech.com/touchmouse .

· Connect your iPhone to the same Wi-Fi hot spot and download the Touch Mouse app (iTunes link). When the app launches, your computer will be listed. Tap to select it.

· Now you’re ready to control your computer with your iPhone. Watch the video to learn some basic gestures, and get the full list of functions on Logitech’s Web site .

Turn your iPhone into a keyboard and mouse

Penultimate – one of the first handwriting apps for the iPad – got a major update yesterday, to Version 3.3.

The headline additions in this update are Dropbox integration and Evernote support:

• Serious Dropbox integration: Send notebooks and pages directly to your Dropbox, or enable automatic backup to be sure you always have a copy of your notes in the cloud. Open Penultimate files from your Dropbox.
• Evernote support. Evernote’s handwriting recognition is a great fit for Penultimate users. You can send notebooks and notes to your account for searching there later. Very simple signup in the app if you want to give it a spin.

This is very good news for Penultimate users, as Dropbox and Evernote are both just superb services. Dropbox provides effortless, flawless online file sync and Evernote is the ultimate notes and store-everything app that’s available everywhere (Mac, Windows, browsers, iPhone, iPad etc).

Here’s an App Store link for Penultimate; it’s currently priced at $0.99.

A simple option in Windows Explorer’s preferences fixes one of its biggest annoyances, automatically expanding the left sidebar as you navigate through your computer’s folders.

Perhaps this is an obvious tip, but once I discovered it, I realized how useful it can be. In Windows 7, by default, Explorer’s sidebar stays the same unless you click around in it. That is, if you use the right pane to navigate through folders, as most of us do, the left sidebar doesn’t change. With a simple checkbox, though, you can have the left sidebar focus on your current folder in the tree as you click around the right pane. To enable this feature:

§ Open up Explorer and go to Organize > Folder and Search Options.

§ On the General tab, look under "Navigation Pane" and check "Automatically expand to current folder".

This is especially useful considering Windows 7′s Explorer doesn’t have a "one folder up" button. You could always click on the folder’s name in Explorer’s address bar, too, but this can save you a few clicks if you’re constantly jumping around nearby folders. Again, it certainly isn’t a new tip, but we’ve never featured it before, and having just discovered it, I thought it was a pretty cool feature.

Penultimate – one of the first handwriting apps for the iPad – got a major update yesterday, to Version 3.3.

The headline additions in this update are Dropbox integration and Evernote support:

• Serious Dropbox integration: Send notebooks and pages directly to your Dropbox, or enable automatic backup to be sure you always have a copy of your notes in the cloud. Open Penultimate files from your Dropbox.
• Evernote support. Evernote’s handwriting recognition is a great fit for Penultimate users. You can send notebooks and notes to your account for searching there later. Very simple signup in the app if you want to give it a spin.

This is very good news for Penultimate users, as Dropbox and Evernote are both just superb services. Dropbox provides effortless, flawless online file sync and Evernote is the ultimate notes and store-everything app that’s available everywhere (Mac, Windows, browsers, iPhone, iPad etc).

Here’s an App Store link for Penultimate; it’s currently priced at $0.99.

Pradip Sukhija
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Vodio is a new social video discovery app for the iPad. I saw Robert Scoble give it an excited mention on Google+ and decided to give it a quick try this morning – and have to say so far, so good.

Here’s a slice of its App Store description:

Vodio for iPad delivers personalized video content unlike any you’ve ever experienced before.
Take video consumption on the go to the next level, by creating your very own personalized video streams from dozens of content services. Free up your time by watching the most talked about videos, instead of searching through hours of videos you might like.
With the wealth of video content available, knowing what to watch isn’t always as easy as it seems. Vodio lets you discover and enjoy the best videos, based on what’s being shared around you as well as your personal preferences and interests.
Additionally, Vodio lets you share videos through your social networks, so your friends can enjoy it too.

And some of its key features:

* Personalized video streams
* Slick and Intuitive UI
* Quick Share of cool video content via Facebook, Twitter and Email
* Constantly adapting to your personal taste in video content
* Vertical channels (News, Entertainment, Music, Sports, Comedy, Science, Sports, Music, Comedy and more…)

I’ve only spent a short while with Vodio so far, but it looks quite promising so far. It’s got a very simple and slick UI that’s fun to use – and everything about the app feels quick and easy. Just a few minutes into using it I discovered a video for a brand new (not even released yet) track from Train and shared it to Facebook and Twitter.

I’ll share more thoughts on Vodio when I’ve spent more time with it, but for now I’d say it’s well worth a look if you enjoy video content on your iPad.

Here’s an App Store link for Vodio; it’s a free app.

A hack called Whited00r allows iOS 5

features to be installed on the original iPhone and iPhone 3G devices, as well as the early iPod touch models.

Whited00r will automatically jailbreak your device, and the latest version of Cydia, 1.1.3, will be installed on it. The biggest advantage of the tool, is that you will get true multitasking, and apps will keep in running state in the background.

It’s as simple as running a manual IPSW install via iTunes before Whited00r takes over and installs a custom iOS firmware package. Apparently you’ll be running a heavily modified iOS 3.1.3 IPSW, which is required on older iOS devices. As such, this version of iOS comes with a custom iCloud setup, and also doesn’t include the new Notification Center included in iOS 5.

Hungry for a shiny new file system? Windows 8′s got your back, or at least, Windows server 8 will. In his latest Building Windows 8 post, Steven Sinofsky introduces the Resilient File System, or ReFS, as a "next generation file system" built on the foundations of the NTFS. By reusing NTFS’ API / semantics engine, ReFS hopes to retain a high level of compatibility with NTFS features. Underneath the existing semantics engine, the new file system introduces a new storage engine that hopes to protect against latent disk errors, resist data corruption, uphold metadata integrity, grant large volume, file and directory size — and well, just build a better storage system in general.

First, an apology: Microsoft released details of Windows 8′s tablet hardware requirements back in December, but we were too preoccupied with Christmas and CES to notice. Now that the only thing we’re suffering from is jet-lag, let’s take a quick tour of some notable extracts from the documentation and what it’ll mean for users when the operating system arrives towards the back end of the year.

• Controversially, ARM-based tablet users won’t be able to deactivate secure booting and (therefore) install another operating system. Clearly that’s not gone down well with people — and a straw poll of our editors agreed
• Ctrl + Alt + Del for tablets without physical keyboards will be supplanted by Windows Key + Power.
• There’s a mandatory five points of touch — which we already knew thanks to our hands on with Synaptics at CES.
• If your gear has NFC, physical "touch marks" will be visible on the hardware so people know where to plonk their devices.
• All tablets must have Power, Rotation Lock, Windows Key, Volume Up and Volume Down buttons.
• After all operating system updates, there must be 10GB free space, all machines must run UFEI Firmware.
• All hardware must include one USB 2.0 port, a magnetometer, speakers, Bluetooth 4.0, WLAN, gyroscope and accelerometer.
• Any camera must have a minimum resolution of 720p.
• The minimum display for any tablet is 1366 x 768.
• You’ll be able to update your graphics drivers without rebooting.

There you have it, many of the new changes are welcome and demonstrate Redmond’s commitment to avoid fragmentation between PCs, Laptops and Slates. However, ensuring ease for the general consumer might come at too high a price if it alienates those who value the freedom of a PC. Still, we won’t be betting against the hacking community: which has probably already started taking a run up at the limitation — just as soon as it’s made sure Doom runs smoothly on it.