Here we are plunged headlong into Q4 and we know what you’re thinking: “What’s up with ZillionTV?” You know, the company that whetted our appetites with its promise of a “free” (unless you count the one-time $99 setup fee as free, which we don’t), ad-based streaming content and whose finely rendered set-top boxes were due out before the end of the year? According to a hot tip sent to Zatz Not Funny!, the company’s pilot program is not only in full swing, but expanding — that’s the good news. Unfortunately, it looks like there is quite a bit of turmoil within the company itself that might serve to delay the device beyond even its new estimated 2010 target date, including: a 30 staff reduction, a new CEO, and the fact that the sexy product renders have been superseded by a box that looks, well, about as un-sexy as you can get. We’ll keep our ears to the ground on this story — in the meantime, there are a couple more pics after the break to tide you over.
On Monday, Sprint and Palm announced that the Palm Pixi will be available starting November 15 for $99.99 with a two-year contract and after a $100 mail-in rebate. The Pixi will be sold online and in Sprint stores as well as Best …
2010 may well be the year of the Android–it may also be the year that Verizon starts getting some good, non-BlackBerry smartphones. Word is that the forthcoming Motorola Droid is only the beginning of a deluge of Android handsets for Verizon. Two handsets are expected to come from the carrier via HTC. The first is the Desire, essentially a re-branded Verizon version of the Hero.
Also rumored to be in the slate is the similarly-named HTC Passion–the Verizon version of the Dragon, which is said to feature the a snapdragon processor, an 4.3″ WVGA 480 x 800 display, and Android 2.0. The device is said to be shipping in Q4–heck, maybe 2009 will be the year of the Android, after all.
Palm’s little Pixi will be available to buy on November 15th, and only from Sprint, the carrier of Palm’s other WebOS device, the Pre, at a price of “$100”. The little phone, which comes with a smaller screen, slower processor and much less slidey-out keyboard, looks to be a sweet little pocket-phone for those who don’t need the power of the Pre, and as such it goes squarely against Apple’s $100 iPhone 3G, itself a cheaper, slower and less full-featured alternative to the 3GS.
But while the iPhone 3G will actually cost you $100 in the store, Sprint and Palm force you to endure not one, but two rebates to get to the magic price. The first is a $50 instant rebate, applied at the time of purchase. The second is a $100 mail-in rebate, the kind that sneaky companies hope you’ll never redeem. So the actual price at the register is $200, or twice the price of the 3G.
It’s such a shame. The Pre is loved by the press, but remains just another cellphone to the buying public. It could have been the spunky little underdog that forced Apple to up its game, but instead it looks destined to play the role that the Creative Zen played to the iPod: the loser.
Sprint announced today that the Palm Pixi, the second Palm WebOS phone, will cost $99.99 with $150 worth of rebates and a two-year contract when it arrives from Sprint on Nov. 15.
The Pixi is a smaller, less expensive cousin to the Palm Pre, and when we did our hands-on preview we found it preferable to the Pre in some ways. Because the Pixi isn’t a slider, its keyboard is easier to type on. On the other hand, the Pixi’s 2.63″ capacitive mutlitouch screen is smaller and has less real estate than the Pre’s, at 320×400 compared to the Pre’s 320×480.
It’s fat. It’s $500. It takes fantastic photographs.
The G11 is Canon’s top-of-the-line point-and-shoot. It occupies a sorta strange spot, towering over the average point-and-shoot in basically every metric—image quality, size, weight and price—but sits just below entry-level DSLRs and more recently, micro four thirds cameras.
So, there are two ways to look at the G11: It’s an amazing street camera. More discreet than a DSLR, but more powerful than a run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot. You can’t stuff it in your jeans pocket, but that’s fine, because you want to sling it over your shoulder anyways. The other way is that you can buy a more versatile entry-level DSLR that’s not much larger for around the same price, especially if you step back a generation or so.
It’s all about your priorities.
H-h-h-h-hardware
Everything about this camera is just—solid. The full-metal jacket makes it feel indestructible, while the shape evokes the classic cameras you feel like you’re supposed to be taking photos with. It’s thick, remarkably so, in part because of the flip-out swivel LCD screen. And it’s definitely more along the lines of a rangefinder-style camera than a typical point-and-shoot.
The real magic of this camera lies in the dedicated control dials. You’ll fine three on top—exposure compensation, ISO speed, and shooting mode. They feel cramped and tiny, at first, but the snap they make as as you rotate them is surprisingly deep and satisfying. Having these settings at your fingers at all times is so much of why the G11 feels like a camera that’s a step above point-and-shoots, a tool for creating photographs.
The back dial is the most frustrating part of controlling the camera—a ring surrounds a four-way d-pad with a button in the center. Ultimately, you wind up pressing buttons on the d-pad when you’re trying to rotate the dial to adjust shutter speed or aperture, or simply pressing the wrong button because it’s so small. The menu system, otherwise, is a pretty standard Canon setup, which looks a lot like the G10’s—it’s not dead simple, but it’s not overly complicated either, and a couple minutes of fiddling will reveal all of its secrets.
The viewfinder is utterly depressing. I want to use it, badly. It just feels intrinsically wrong to hold a camera of this caliber out in front of me to shoot, not up to my eyeball. Meanwhile, the G11’s viewfinder is so small, and the coverage is so bad (you can see the lens through it!), that it’s nigh useless, like trying to compose through a pinhole.
One of the shooting modes, quickshot, sounds like a good idea on paper, but is ruined by this viewfinder. The camera constantly adjusts parameters while waiting for you to take the photo, so you can fire off instantly without worrying about missing the shot. Unfortunately, you have to use the minuscule viewfinder in quickshot, and I wound up botching far more photos than I did nailing them.
So, you’re pretty trapped to using the decent flip-out swivel LCD display. Honestly, I probably would’ve preferred the static-but-larger 3-inch version on the G10, to the 2.8-inch, 461,000-dot display on the G11.
The LCD is really bright, though, and perfectly usable in direct sunlight, with a wide viewing angle to boot. But the video feed is not quite crisp enough on it to use it for manual focusing—in this mode, a zoomed in box appears in the center of the display as you spin the back dial to bring it into focus. The experience of focusing becomes a bad iPhone game.
Can we talk about the photos please?
With the G11, Canon pulled the bold maneuver of cutting megapixels—to 10, from 14 on the G10—in order to get better quality and low-light performance. It was the right move. Low-light images are definitely improved, and more detail is preserved up through ISO 800. Shots at ISO 1600 are definitely usable at web resolutions, which is pretty impressive for a compact camera. You should stay away from the special “low light” shooting mode, though, which cuts the size of pictures in half to try to extract every ounce of light possible—it produced uniformly bad pictures.
The G11 has a wide-angle zoom lens with the same basic specs as the G10, starting at 28mm and going up to 140mm, which is versatile enough to shoot just about anything you’d want. I’m not sure, however, if it corrects some of the problems at the wide-end with the macro mode, though, since I didn’t have a G10 to compare it with.
The runthrough of the ISO range goes a couple ways—on programmed auto, letting the camera figure out what to make of the ISO setting I picked, and then another set where I dictated shutter speed, so you can see how much you gain (or lose, depending on your point of view) as you ratchet up the ISO setting.
Like past G series cameras, you can shoot in RAW, but if you do, you’re stuck with using Canon’s software to process it for the time being. In the full sample gallery above, I’ve marked the handful shot in RAW.
In a world where phones and gadgets the size of a jumbo pack of Juicy Fruit shoot 720p, the fact that video’s limited to 640×480 resolution on such a stacked camera gets a big frowny face. But, the video the G11 produces at that resolution is generally excellent (just compare to the video-shootin’ iPod nano). That’s because it’s packed with data—the bitrate averages around 10Mbps, which is more than the Flip Mino HD, at 9Mbps for 720p video. That’s why it looks so vibrant compared to a lot of the 720p video out there. Sure, 720p out of this would be nice, but I’d take VGA video that looks great over HD video that looks like crap.
Okay, but do I buy it?
I like this camera a lot. It’s what I’d reach for whenever I wouldn’t feel like tugging along a honkin’ DSLR, and I’d feel like I wasn’t sacrificing too much. The real question, I think, it how it stacks up against Panasonic’s Lumix LX3, which is in the same demographic—a lauded $500 point-and-shoot—and outgunned the G10 in many respects (though the G10 tried to cram 14 megapixels onto the same-sized sensor the G11 only squeezes 10 megapixels onto). The slightly cheaper S90 offers the same sensor as the G11 as well, and inside of a pocketable body—though you lose perks like the dedicated control dials and a viewfinder, as far as that’s a perk on the G11.
If you do buy the G11, you won’t regret it—you’ll be too busy taking pictures.
Photographs are top-notch for a compact camera
Solid low-light performance
Built to smash into people’s spaces and live to smash again
Anyone who witnessed the opening of Microsoft’s first retail store in Scottsdale must have been feeling a bit of deja vu at the whole experience. It started with the camping and the long meandering lines leading to a raucous countdown. When the doors finally opened, customers were greeted with sturdy high-fives from overly-enthusiastic employees dressed in their casual, every-man uniforms. Inside were products placed on tables within easy reach of a curious public as well as an “Answer Bar” where presumed geniuses will tenderly solve customer issues. Failing that, you can always sign-up for the in-store events and training sessions scheduled throughout the day. Sound familiar… maybe a bit too familiar? But the icing on this plagiaristic cake is Lisa Seigneur, a former Apple retail store manager who famously (in our circles, anyway) introduced Oprah to Bono’s Product RED iPod nano in Chicago — the very same Microsoft Store employee who handed out free Zune HDs to those early campers in Scottsdale. Video evidence after the break.
Sprint’s just gone public with its plans for the Pixi: a single c-note, payable November 15th. It’s not the aggressive, bottom-scraping pricing I was hoping to see for Palm’s second, daintier webOS device, and just $50 less than the Pre.
The Pixi is generally thought of as a hardware downgrade from it’s older brother, because that’s basically what it is: With a smaller screen, no Wi-Fi and a gimpier two-megapixel camera, it’s more or less a neo-Centro. Sure, the keyboard’s a bit easier to type on, and the device is slimmer, but Sprint (and Palm) really should’ve shaved another $50 of off this thing: It’s a drop in the bucket next to what Sprint will make from each Pixi’s two-year service contract, and would go a long way toward making the Pixi, which has to compete with not just the Pre, but a decent spread of $50-$100 entry-level smartphones, a decent buy.
And seriously, still with this rebate stuff? The Pixi’s technical price is $250 dollars, yanked down to earth by a $50 instant rebate and a $100 mail-in card. But Best Buy, Radio Shack and Walmart credit the MIRs instantly, so what’s the point?
In any case, the Pre didn’t sell for full price for more than a few months—in fact, as John Paczkowski notes, Amazon has it on sale for $100right now—so with any luck we could see a Pixi deal in time for the holidays. And even without any luck, within a few months after that. [Sprint via BusinessInsider]
Kohjinsha had a slew of portables on display at CEATEC earlier this month, including the classification-bending PA. Its design fits in somewhere between a MID and a tablet netbook, with its 4.8-inch, 1024 x 600 touchscreen and 1.33GHz Atom processor, but now we’re learning that it’s price roughly equates to a netbook and a MID. The device hits Japan early next month for ¥69,800, about $770. That’s certainly not cheap, but if you need one elsewhere you’re probably going to need to go through an importer, and their prices are ¥79,800 and up. That’s about $870. Yikes.
I don’t suppose this would be news were it not part of a much larger pile of evidence that Apple is, in fact, prepping a tablet for early next year. During an in-house speech to his staff, New York Times executive editor, Bill Keller, said this,
We need to figure out the right journalistic product to deliver to mobile platforms and devices. I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate, or whatever comes after that.
See, toward the end there he made mention of that much anticipated device. The reason why people are jumping on what might otherwise be regarded as pure speculation is the fact that The Times is rumored to be a content partner for the device, so Keller and company may, in fact, have some inside information, something compounded by the fact that the editor never really expected the speech to get leaked to the Internet.
How could something like that happen in a room full of reporters, anyway?
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Photographs are top-notch for a compact camera
It’s huge
The viewfinder is basically useless
