There is nothing wrong with offering a feature-packed product, but it is possible to take things a little too far. The following gadgets definitely illustrate convergence at its worst.
Microsoft’s Surface has been shipping out to corporate customers for a year now, but we haven’t heard much about the backend setup of the $17,000 table — sure, we know it’s fun when it’s up and running all those custom apps, but what’s it like after the unboxing? Incredibly frustrating, says FD kinesis’s Gordon Miller. Hired to implement a Surface solution for a client, Miller and his team first spent 30 minutes on the phone with MS phone support trying to locate the power socket, and another lengthy period of time poking at an unresponsive touchscreen before realizing that the Surface doesn’t respond to touch out of the box. Yep, you read that right — Microsoft’s $17,000 big-ass touchscreen table requires a keyboard and mouse to set up, something which isn’t noted in any of the marketing or manuals. Ouch. Hopefully that’ll get fixed before this thing ships to consumers in 2011, but in the meantime, hit the read link for the entire harrowing tale — it’s a pretty fun read for a Friday afternoon.
P.S.- We actually talked to Gordon on the phone for a quick minute and he said that Microsoft’s been in touch about the experience — he’s working on an new post about that which we’ll link when it goes up.
[Via Daring Fireball]
Filed under: Desktops
Microsoft Surface setup impressions: “filled with mind-bogglingly frustrating usability issues” originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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(Credit: Toshiba)JJ Abrams’ retooling of the classic-era “Star Trek” is beaming into movie theaters very soon–sorry, we’re contractually obliged to make that pun–and Toshiba is celebrating with all manner of branded bits and bobs.
Tosh launched the mini NB200 Thursday. It’s a perfect candidate for an inexplicably …
During this week of everything green and Earth-friendly, we choose to shine a light (preferably compact fluorescent) on the ridiculous side of green gadgetry.
Listen now:
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 | EPISODE 133 |
Solar bra brings conservation closer to the heart
Squirrel light an eco-friendly form of rodent worship
Laser-etched laptop tray made from recyclable materials
Hitachi’s ‘green’ refrigerator turns out blue
Trivia: We spill a lot of gas on our lawnmowers
Pleo (robotic dinosaur) now extinct
…
Originally posted at Gadgettes, the blog
Steve Guttenberg, the Audiophiliac, joins the show today to talk about the coming “singularity.”
(Credit: CNET)For those of you not from the future, the “singularity” is a concept from Raymond Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.” According to him, human beings will eventually live forever because of nano-machines that will repair our bodies and miracle drugs. That’s about as deep as the show gets today. Again, you don’t really want us to be discussing the ever-increasing amounts of entropy in the universe.
Steve is generally disappointed with the quality of the sound systems at the New York auto show. You’d expect that a $200,000 Bentley would have pretty great speakers, but you’d be wrong.
Also on today’s show, we’ve got more Twitter stories: 1) Justin is attempting to bring back the $5-dollar Italian BMT from Subway with the world’s first Twitition (that’s Twitter + petition); 2) Post Secret meets Twitter with SecretTweet.com. Honestly, it’s one of the most depressing Web sites ever. Kind of like a not-funny fmylife.com.
Finally, it’s the weekend, so we know you have the time. Be sure to send in your call backs! We need them!
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Originally posted at the 404
Who says netbooks are no good for business. Not Lenovo, apparently. The company is reportedly looking to enter the space with a business-minded netbook. “It’s an area we’re exploring,” Lenovo analyst Matthew Kohut told APC Magazine, “but I can’t comment one way or the other. Watch this space, that’s all I can say.”
He added that the concept of netbooks in the office is one that has been gaining more prominence amongst companies,
Businesses are definitely asking about netbooks, they’re wanting them more and more. Business problems, whether the economy is good or not, remain the same: do more with less, be more efficient and all that. This ties in very nicely with netbooks.
It seems that the fellas over at The Boy Genius Report got their hands on leaked screenshots of an alpha version of Skyfire’s mobile browser for BlackBerry. Their source has proclaimed it “already being the best BlackBerry browser ever.”
The BlackBerry version of Skyfire looks a lot like the …
Originally posted at The Download Blog
Technically, OCZ outed this here PCI-Express SSD way back at CeBIT in March, but it’s just now making things super official. Now available with a fresh face and hard specifications, the Z-Drive is aiming to take on wares by firms like Fusion-io and provide blistering transfer rates to anyone who buys in. Essentially, this device removes the SATA bottleneck by employing the PCIe architecture and four Vertex controllers configured in four-way RAID 0 array. Curious about performance? Read speeds can hit upwards of 510MB/sec, while write speeds top out at 480MB/sec — plenty respectable in our eyes. OCZ’s planning to push these out in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, and while final pricing is still being kept under wraps, we’re told that it’ll be kept “competitive.”
Filed under: Storage
OCZ gets official with Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Star Trek will disappoint no one.
As the lights dimmed and the familiar Star Trek Federation logo slid on screen, the emotion of all those hours of watching Next Generation reruns as a kid came sloshing back into my brain, dripping out of my eyes as tears of pure happiness. I expect that it was essentially the same emotion Star Wars fans felt during the opening credits of Episode 1, but without the massive letdown afterwards. (Ha ha, suckers.)
But yes, to answer your question, there’s Kirk, there’s Spock, and there’s everyone you expect (even Pike!). Not all of the same mannerisms are there, but if you wanted to see the old actors you’d go watch the first six movies again. This implies that Kirk doesn’t do a two-hour Shatner impression, which is, of course, good news. Instead, he plays Kirk as a intelligent, brash, but friendly youngster that has confidence oozing out of every torpedo tube. And the new Spock is more Sylar than Spock, to be honest; though the rest of the casting is essentially spot on.
So long as you go into the movie expecting a “Star Trek” movie, in that there’s space and aliens and action and shooting and torpedoes and pew pew pew, you’ll come out happy. The movie is targeted enough toward the mainstream in that someone with zero Trek experience would enjoy it. Director J.J. Abrams also gives enough shout outs to old time staples that trekkers will be giddy at the slight nods and fanservice that say, in essence, “thank you for supporting us all these years, now here’s something you asked for.”
Think of it like Casino Royale was to the James Bond franchise: fewer gadgets, more action and an incredibly pugilistic lead. And lens flares. Lots, and lots, and lots of lens flares.
Kirk’s Enterprise has never looked better. These guys took the original ship, combined it with some designs of the Enterprise-B, then mashed it up with Picard’s Enterprise-E and then added a dash of ’60s non-Trek Sci Fi. The set design, however, is almost all touchscreen (like TNG), but with a tremendously updated UI. I’d hate to call it Apple-y, but there’s lots of glass and slick white finishes. Retro this is not—you’ll barely be able to equate the bridge to the original’s, other than the fact that the players are all sitting in the right places. Why Bones canoodles in the bridge so much instead of where he’s supposed to be is still beyond me.
And the plot? The plot makes as much sense as any other Star Trek movie. There’s even a very good explanation of why this movie is the way it is, which is the most I can say about that.
This is what Star Trek needs right now. After writing on Next Generation, Ron Moore went on (about a decade later) to reimagine Battlestar Galactica, a relatively realistic show (topic-wise) that just happened to be set in space. Sci Fi fans have moved on from the utopian, and what many accused as sterile, confines of TNG to a grittier, less kempt future.
That’s not to say Star Trek is now gritty—it’s just more…modern. And more sexy. Like when you upgrade from a six piece KFC meal to a 12 piece bucket: you’re going to get more breast and thigh.
It also doesn’t have any crap about the Prime Directive or any undertones about race that TOS and TNG dealt with, but it is a very good “restart” of the franchise. With this film as the base, I cannot wait to see where the franchise goes from here.
Bonus: there’s a four-issue Star Trek: Countdown comic series that prequels the movie. Though, you might want to wait until after you watch to read, since it gives away a few plot points. To tell you more would be to spoil too much. It’s too much even to tell you what KIND of fans would like the comic. You can download the first one here for your iPhone.
Two years after we thought it was all over, it sounds like the saga of Sony, Immersion, and the rumblin’ DualShock has yet another chapter: a New Jersey electrical engineer named Craig Thorner is now suing Sony and its attorneys, claiming that he was more or less duped out of one of his patents in a shady deal designed to help Sony and PDP/Electrosource beat Immersion’s cases against them. Oh yeah, it’s a tangled mess — Thorner first signed over his patent to Immersion, hoping to score a little slice of royalty pie when the lawsuit settled, but then took it back when he decided Immersion wasn’t pursuing it hard enough and signed it over to PDP/Electrosource, who promised him $150,000. So where does Sony come in? Thorner says PDP and Sony were teamed up to beat Immersion, and that Sony was secretly the one licensing the patent but trying to remain out of the picture to keep the price down — and he’s got proof, in the form of a $150,000 wire transfer between the two companies. Not only that, but Sony’s attorneys apparently promised Thorner that they could “wear two hats” during negotiations and represent both him and Sony, which is ten kinds of shady. You can guess what happened next: Sony lost, PDP settled, and Immersion sued Thorner for breaking his agreement — and Sony’s attorneys didn’t help him defend the lawsuit. Did we say ten kinds of shady? Eleven kinds. Of course, it’s doubtful that Thorner is totally innocent here, so it’ll be interesting to see how Sony responds, but at this point we’re treating the DualShock 3 as a miracle of nature and leaving it at that.
[Via Joystiq]
Read – GamePolitics article (with PDF of the complaint)
Read – Law.com article
Filed under: Gaming
Sony sued for cheating man out of rumble patents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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