Sprint and Palm could be reach to launch the Pre as early as May.

(Credit: Palm)

There are two things the tech world is waiting to hear about the Palm Pre: when it will arrive, and what it will cost. The first answer might be falling into place.

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Originally posted at News – Wireless

Gamers have avoided wireless mice like girls with cooties, fearing the grim fate of death and teabagging induced by milliseconds of lag. Razer’s Mamba and Microsoft SideWinder X8 promise total wireless freedom, sans teabagging.

Razer Mamba

Mamba is clearly Razer’s most carefully designed product yet. Even the packaging was clearly agonized over: The mouse is held aloft on a pedestal inside an acrylic cube, which has a shelf system built into it holding parts like the battery, power cable and charging stand.

But the design is only part of why you’re paying $130—it’s to make you feel good about dropping that kind of cash. You’re paying that much because Razer says it’s the first wireless mouse that’s actually gaming grade, with a latency of just 1ms—twice as fast as other wireless mice, and the same 1000Hz polling rate as their own wired mice. In other words, they’re promising zero lag while taking the gaming mouse DPI wars to the unwanted and ridiculous new level of 5,600 DPI.

It uses 2.4GHz for wireless, just like Microsoft’s SideWinder X8 and Logitech’s now old-school G7 (and every other wireless device) but supposedly Mamba detects and avoids noisy channels to skirt by interference. In this respect, does live up to the hype—at least when you’ve got sufficient juice. After using it in a couple weekends of Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, I really didn’t notice any response difference between it and my wired mouse. It’s perfectly lag-free and twitchily responsive. Wakeup is also surprisingly quick, or at least it was with the 1.02 firmware—it seems a bit slower with the 1.03 update, which is designed to improve battery life. I also never noticed any interference, despite running in close proximity to my dual-band router and the X8, actually.

Where the polish rubs off and shows some rough patches are on the battery and software front. Razer claims 72 hours of “normal gaming usage” and 14 hours of continuous gaming. I didn’t quite have the balls to game for 14 hours straight, but with Razer’s 1.02 firmware, I never got more than 48 hours of what I’d call normal usage battery life, and when it drops to that last bar of battery, it does not play well at all. They’ve since released firmware 1.03, which is supposed to improve battery life. Installing the update on Vista 64-bit is something of an arcane science (Update: Razer wanted me to note that the process is a just a simple installer with XP and Vista 32, and that new mice will have 1.03 already on it). You have to boot into a mode where it accepts drivers that aren’t digitally signed, and then the update process itself requires a second mouse. The configurator software, while it provides a full-featured set of options, is not as responsive as I’d like—it takes a bit to read the mouse’s settings (which are stored onboard) and longer still to change them.

When your battery does get low, you can plug the USB cable into the mouse to play and charge, turning it into a standard wired mouse with the same 1ms latency. It pops easily out of the charging cube/wireless receiver, but for some reason it tends to fight you to avoid plugging into the mouse, which is my biggest problem with the otherwise smart modular design.

Ergonomically, it’s one of the best mice around. It’s essentially a lighter version of Razer’s DeathAdder, though with the addition of a new groove for your pinkie, which took me a little bit to get used to. My only problem with the button placement is that the DPI selection buttons are not distinct enough, so if you’re trying to quickly drop the DPI down to precisely snipe someone’s head off, you might crank it up instead and shoot the guy in the foot. The texture is a nice use of rubber—it’s not super sticky and rubbery, so your hand doesn’t feel weird and gross if it gets sweaty, but it does give you a solid grip.

Shape and texture feel fantastic

Smart design touches throughout

Response time is perfect

Battery life not so great

Firmware updating process is a pain on Vista 64. for now anyway

$130 is pricey!

SideWinder X8

The design apparently still outsourced to the Empire’s mice and keyboard division, Microsoft’s third SideWinder mouse cuts the cable and improves on the series in a lot of little ways that add up to making it the best SideWinder yet.

As I suspected when I eyeballed it, ergonomically it’s finally designed for humans. The sharp spine has been softened into a far more pleasant hump, though it retains the same overall shame as the past two. (It’s huge.) So, it’s not as sleek as the Mamba, but they have finally nailed the way it should feel in your hand. The unorthodox vertical thumb buttons have been reshaped into ergonomic slopes that form a groove for your thumb, so after the initial adjustment period, this touch finally works. The metal scroll wheel isn’t super fantastico to use a lot, but the on-the-fly DPI buttons have a good placement in the middle, but need to be larger—it’s too easy to hit the wrong one. The textured plastic feels a little cheap, too.

It uses 2.4GHz wireless at a 500Hz polling rate (half of Mamba’s) and can crank the DPI up to 4000. Playing the same games as I did with Mamba—TF2 and L4D—again, I never noticed any real difference in response versus my usual wired mouse. In other words, it seemed lag-free to me. On the DPI front, you can only pick between three steps at a time—not five, like on the Mamba or on-the-fly. One superior touch over the Mamba is the built-in LCD that displays your DPI setting—on Mamba you have to decode what the combination of green and red bars on the side mean. On the other hand, try to find where it displays battery life. (I couldn’t.) Speaking of, the battery life is vastly superior to Mamba—I got over five solid days with four intense three-hour gaming sessions on a single charge.

If you had to pick a headlining technical feature (since Mamba also eclipsed its 4000DPI crown), it’d probably be that it uses Microsoft’s BlueTrack technology which can track on anything. Indeed, it worked perfectly on multiple surfaces, including a a glossy plastic SteelSeries SP pad that Mamba wouldn’t touch at all. (My standard surface is the cloth SteelSeries QcK+, in case you’re wondering.) So if you game on crazy surfaces, BlueTrack is a definite check in the X8’s column.

The charging dock/receiver is more functional and less “ooooh” than Razer’s—it’s a hockey puck with a groove for wrapping the cable. But what’s neato is that the play-and-charge cable attaches to the mouse magnetically so there’s no trying to cram it into a stubborn hole like on the Mamba.

Improved ergonomics over last-gen

Long battery life

Good response time

Shape and vertical buttons an acquired taste

Positioning of the hump for your hand makes it feel ginormous

There Can Be Only One?

Can you cut the cord and achieve sweet, wireless freedom while feeling safe that your fragging powers are undiminished? Yep. Response time felt the same for every mouse I used: X8, Mamba and my wired mice. Which means two things: Gaming-grade wireless is here (just in case you doubted it), and performance isn’t the reason you should pick the Mamba over the X8.

Mamba has better design, feels better (especially if you have smaller hands) and more functional software. The SideWinder X8 has longer battery life, less finicky software and it’s much cheaper. You can get the X8 for about $75, while Mamba is very much $130. As always, whether or not the frills of gaming gear is worth the extra scratch is up to you, and this is more true here than usual, given the price gap. [Razer, Microsoft]

Amazon’s Kindle 2 is slimmer, faster and has longer battery life than its predecessor. But the newly launched e-book reader falls short when it comes to how well it displays text, say some users.

"When you read a lot of text on the screen, the contrast on the text drops as the font size gets smaller, which is the exact opposite of what the reader wants," says Ted Inoue, a Kindle 2 owner from Pennsylvania who has extensively analyzed the issue.

It’s a problem that didn’t exist for the first generation of Kindle owners. Kindle 2 has font smoothing algorithms and its screen offers more levels of gray in order to better render text and pictures. But the changes have backfired by making text more difficult to read at smaller sizes. The problem seems especially acute for older users.

Kindle 2 owners are discussing the issue on Amazon’s forums (about 480 messages have been posted in the thread) and have called for Amazon to offer a quick fix to the problem. It’s vexing enough for some to have returned their Kindle 2 devices to Amazon. Others have downgraded, by exchanging their Kindle 2 units for the earlier model.

Amazon released the first generation of the Kindle e-book reader in 2007 and offered a refreshed version in February this year. One of the major improvements has been that Kindle 2 has 16 shades of gray "for clear text and even crisper images," compared to the four shades that the earlier version had.

The changes are proving to be particularly problematic to Kindle 2’s users who don’t have 20/20 vision. While the font size threshold
varies, most complaints have been around the smallest three font sizes
available on the device. Kindle 2 offers a single default typeface and
users cannot change it.

"The new basic font on the Kindle 2 is thinner and not as dark as the K1," says Andrys Basten, a Berkeley, California-based web programmer who also has a Kindle-focused blog. "Its like writing with a fine point pen versus a darker point pen." Basten owns both generations of the Kindle.

Kindle 2’s improved gray scale renders photographs and illustrations better than the old version, but it
is a problem when translating text
that was originally designed to be in color. (See here for a quick explanation on how the gray scale works.)

"With the Kindle 1, all people would get is black shading for text
that was originally in color," says Basten. "Now there is increased gradation, which makes text lighter, and some people have trouble seeing it." 

Kindle 2’s display is supplied by E Ink, which also produces the "electronic ink" displays used in most other e-book readers. E Ink did not respond to a request for a comment.

Then there are the font smoothing algorithms. Without those algorithms, pixels along the edge of a letter would have typically been rendered as black. Instead, they are now available in several shades of gray, as shown in the photographs above. "In conventional backlit displays that works well," Inoue says. "But on a reflective screen like Kindle’s, you are just losing contrast rather than enhancing the image."

The algorithms do produce smoother lines but they do not take into account the human psychology of perception, says Inoue. "Most people don’t have perfect vision," he says. "What I find is that anything that degrades the contrast is going to make it blurrier."

Amazon says the disgruntled customers’ gripes are not reflective of how most users feel. "A few customers have said they prefer Kindle 1 with less shades of gray, but for the overwhelming majority it’s the opposite — they enjoy the smoother text and crisper images on Kindle 2," says Andrew Herdener, director of communications for Amazon in a statement, without offering any other details.

Still, Inoue and other Kindle 2 users say there are a few easy fixes that Amazon can make to keep everyone happy. One is to
render text below a certain font size without applying any
anti-aliasing to it, says Inoue. "This is not a perfect solution, as people with extremely sharp
vision will notice the blockiness and may find it objectionable," he
says. "However, for the majority of the population, the pixelation that
occurs will be blurred out by the eye, making the fonts appear bold and
smooth."

Another solution could be to offer a way to make the fonts at lowest three sizes bold. And if nothing else works, suggest Inoue, add a darker skin to the Kindle to offset its all-white body. The darker skin helps create an illusion of increased contrast.

Some users have gone a step ahead. Andrei Pushkin, a Kindle 2 owner has created a fonts hack that replaces the default Kindle 2 fonts with ones that support a wider range of Unicode characters, including, for example, Cyrillic.

That’s a step too far for Basten, who says she would rather wait for an official update.

"I see the relative lightness of the new font but it doesn’t bother me," she says. "I am not complaining much because I really like my Kindle."

Do you see a difference between your Kindle 1 and Kindle 2 screens? E-mail us side-by-side photographs of the screen or post them to the Gadget Lab Flickr group.

See also:

Wired Review of Amazon Kindle 2

Kindle Readers Ignite Protest Over E-Book Prices

Photos: Ted Inoue’s photos of Kindle 2 display before and after the font is made bold

Do you like apples? Well I’ve got amazing bargains on tech deals. How do you like them apples?

1. Jet-setters, here’s a deal for you. Get the power and ease-of-use of a Garmin GPS for only $137.68 (with free shipping!) and use it in both the U.S. and Europe. The Garmin Nuvi 270 offers maps for both locations, as well as software that a frequent flyer will appreciate, including a world clock and currency converter. It also includes JPEG photo-viewing software, so you can show off your pictures on its 3.5-inch screen. Get it from Amazon.

2. Let’s do the math: Pentax Optio Z10; 8 megapixels, 7X zoom, $342.20 original price, your price: $90.99. It all adds up to savings. Ugh, corny. Anyway, it’s a steal, and the camera also includes face recognition and shake reduction. Amazon’s got a great price on this one.

3. Sing, sing a song. Sing out loud; sing out strong. Not around me, please, but sing to your heart’s content with the iLive CD-G Karaoke System with iPod Dock. Best Buy has it for only $49.99. It’s sure to enliven any party. Please don’t invite me to that party.

Bonus Deal: Amazon would like to give you over 700 MP3s for free. Say thank you.

Episode 27 of the Digital City, where we discuss the move towards capped Internet access, the delicate industrial design of Apple products, a proposed CrunchPad Web-surfing device from TechCrunch, and Dell’s svelte new Adamo luxury laptop.

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Originally posted at Digital City Podcast