The Wii may help recovering stroke patients improve their motor function, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2010. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-10460039-247.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Health Tech/a/p
A new survey by AdMob shows that Android attracts more male users than other mobile platforms. What gives? pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10460097-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p
Publishers should think twice before worshipping the iPad as the future platform for magazines and newspapers. That is, if they value their independence from an often-capricious corporate gatekeeper.
The past week’s controversy swirling around Apple’s retroactive ban of sexy apps in the App Store seems trivial, but the implications of Apple’s arbitrariness should be disconcerting to members of the press and those who rely on the media for unbiased information.
Apple last week began removing thousands of apps containing “overtly sexual content” from its App Store — apps it had previously approved — in response to complaints from customers and parents. However, still remaining are apps from major publishers such as Playboy and Sports Illustrated, which contain images of partially nude women, just like the removed apps did.
While it may initially appear publishers are more shielded from Apple’s ban hammer, the severity of the retroactive ban should be concerning for freedom-of-speech advocates.
From a legal perspective, Apple can do whatever it wants with the content in its App Store. Apple is not government, and thus it is not governed by the First Amendment. In light of the recent ban, many have correctly compared Apple’s App Store to Wal-Mart, which also doesn’t allow porn.
But the lack of bikini-clad ladies in the App Store isn’t the issue here. It’s the fact that Apple has so much market power, combined with the fact that magazine and newspaper publishers are getting pumped to produce apps for Apple’s iPad, which will be served through Apple’s tightly regulated App Store. The iPad could very well play a major role in the future of publishing, with several of the biggest book publishers already on board to sell e-books through the iPad’s iBooks store, and major publications, including Wired, already working on iPad apps to launch in the App Store.
What will happen when a journalist writes a controversial story about abortion or vaccines? Will displeased readers skip writing angry letters to the publisher and go straight to Apple to get the article pulled? And would Apple then comply?
Take another scenario posed by Frederic Filloux of The Washington Post:
An iPad newsmagazine publishes an investigative piece that triggers a legal injunction: Remove that from the publication or face a $10,000 penalty per day. No, says the publisher, who has guts and money (proof that this is a fiction): We want to fight in court. The plaintiff then turns to Apple (AAPL). Same threat: Face a huge fine or remove the offending content. Furthermore, says the plaintiff’s attorney, thanks to the permanent and unique electronic link to your proprietary devices and the fact that the electronic kiosk now resides on the device, you must extend the deletion to each user’s tablet. Just as you keep pushing updates and various content bits to these gizmos, you can push a delete instruction code.
Filloux admits his scenario is imaginary, and it might not pass legal muster since Apple indemnifies itself against developer liability, but it demonstrates the dangers of a single point of control.
These are both extreme hypothetical scenarios that seem unlikely to occur, but the fact that magazines or newspapers are putting themselves in such a capriciously censored environment is a disturbing thought.
It seems inconsistent to me that Apple has inked deals with book publishers, musicians and movie studios to sell their content through iTunes — partnerships that are based on contracts, and that allow adult-oriented content to be sold with “explicit” warning tags — while magazines and newspapers are left at the mercy of the App Store and Apple’s prudish internal reviewers.
I’m optimistic that Apple will eventually create a separate section in iTunes for digital newspapers and magazines, giving publishers a platform to distribute their digital content based on a strict, contractual agreement that prevents their content from being arbitrarily removed at Apple’s discretion. Publishers should be waiting until Apple delivers that platform, rather than whipping up iPad apps and subjecting them to the gauntlet of Apple’s approval process.
There are other possible solutions as well. Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said he understands Apple’s intention to keep its App Store immaculate, but its censorship — and the rise of more open alternatives such as Google Android — will drive loyal customers away.
“What you’re limited to right now is Apple wants you to see in its little neighborhood, and it doesn’t want you to go into other neighborhoods,” Scheer said. “Eventually you embitter a lot of people who don’t understand why they’re being denied access to something they’d like to have on a device they have and they own.”
Scheer’s suggestion was to give iPhone and iPad customers the choice to leave the “neighborhood” to download apps that are not available through the App Store, either through an alternative store that’s not regulated by Apple or through websites serving individual apps.
“If they let people stray out of their neighborhood, they could have only the G-rated stuff in their store and let people go into ‘bad neighborhoods’ with their phone if that’s the choice they want to make,” Scheer said. “Apple’s neighborhood will still be safe for kids. Parents, if they want to control it, I’m sure there could be some way they can lock their phone so it doesn’t have access to these bad neighborhoods.”
My colleague Nilay Patel, a blogger of Engadget and former attorney, made the same suggestion with a solution he calls “sideloading.” (Patel wrote up his opinion on this topic when Apple faced an FCC audit after rejecting the Google Voice app from the App Store.)
“Apple is the single point of control for the iPhone ecosystem, and it’s simply not fast or flexible enough to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation we’re seeing on the platform,” Patel wrote. “Like it or not, what’s happening on the iPhone is leading the entire tech industry, and Apple should be doing everything in its power to enhance that…. If that means releasing some control over the platform, then so be it — especially since allowing sideloading would make almost all of these problems simply disappear.”
Of course, giving consumers the freedom to transcend the App Store would raise some questions, such as whether developers could charge for non-App Store apps, or how to deal with apps that violate AT&T’s terms of service — but they’re all solvable problems, says Patel.
One thing’s for sure: With the iPad looming and the iPhone continuing to grow in popularity, Apple has to make some dramatic changes to the way it handles apps and runs the App Store. For now, the iPad and the App Store are hardly an ideal environment for newspapers and magazines to be reborn.
Updated 6 p.m. to add that Apple indemnifies itself against App Store developer liability.
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
PlanetSolar unveils world’s largest solar catamaran that is slated to be ready for testing in late March, on time for its round-the-world tour in early 2011.
SAN DIEGO – The completely redesigned 2011 Hyundai Sonata is the best midsize sedan you can buy. Every Sonata comes standard with Bluetooth, USB jack, and satellite radio. There’s a full set of safety features. The styling dazzles. It’s big inside. Handling is improved, it’s quicker, and it gets 35 mpg on the highway. It’s cheaper than the competition. The only drawbacks are the costlier package price of the navigation system for 2011, no parking sonar option, and the lack of a driver assistance system offered by one competitor. Even with that, the 2011 Hyundai Sonata is the car to beat in its segment.
Netbooks for all! We’re convinced that’s the motivational saying plastered to the wall in the HP lab where the company births Minis for everyone but your pet fish. But of all the company’s Pine Trail offerings, we’re most excited about the $425 Mini 210, which has a 10.1-inch HD screen and a Broadcom Crystal Accelerator chip that promises decent HD video playback, even with Flash. With an attractive new thin design, improved chiclet keyboard and that promise to handle high-def content, the Mini 210 has the potential to kick the others to the curb. Given the issues we had with the Broadcom-powered Dell Mini 10 and HP’s newer touchpads, though, we had to put on the glasses and take a closer look. Join us past the break for the full review, will you?
Gallery: HP Mini 210 review
Continue reading HP Mini 210 HD edition review
HP Mini 210 HD edition review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
We did our taxes a whopping 6 times when researching the pros and cons of tax prep apps like TurboTax and TaxAct. Here’s what we found. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10458286-12.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Download Blog/a/p
The Palm Pre unveiling stands in my memory as one of the most refreshing moments in modern history. Palm had done it—they had created a great phone Nokia would’ve killed for. But today, that’s just not enough.
As Palm teeters on the brink of either ruin or acquisition, let’s take stock of what they did right:
• They abandoned an entrenched but aging platform for something new an innovative, and they didn’t half-ass it: Palm OS was dead, WebOS was here.
• WebOS was actually good. If you discounted the lack of apps at launch, it was arguably more capable than anything else on the market.
• The Pre was totally buyable. It’s one of the few smartphones I’d consider buying, and would also recommend to the rest of my family. And the hardware didn’t suck.
• They got huge buzz, and they earned it.
Sure, their app ecosystem was slow to develop, and their TV ads were underwhelming at their best, and creepy at their worst. But that’s not what really matters, right? Palm accomplished something with the Pre, and we could all see that.
This was the line from Jason’s Pre review that he caught the most flak for, but seriously, fuck that, it was spot on:
I’m bored of the iPhone. The core functionality and design have remained the same for the last two years, and since 3.0 is just more of the same, and-barring some kind of June surprise-that’s another year of the same old icons and swiping and pinching. It’s time for something different.
The Pre’s spell was such that it made everything else feel old. Palm made something different—and it was something we would have paid obscene amounts of money for just a year prior. More than anything, Palm succeeded wildly at reinventing its products, its company and its image, by its own standards and by ours.
The problem is, it’s not 2006 anymore. Those standards don’t apply.
There was a time when it was enough for a company like Palm to release a fantastic phone, and for years, that’s exactly what they focused on. But today, to fight in the smartphone wars is to fight against multi-platform giants. And the rules of engagement have changed: It’s no longer phone vs. phone, or mobile OS vs mobile OS. Today there are apps, and even if a phone maker nails that ecosystem, they have to integrate it into the company’s other stuff: desktops, tablets, the living room, the workplace, the bathroom, the car—not to mention all the music, movies, TV and other media consumption any given human expects to be able to tap into on a new device.
The era of the standalone smartphone company is over. To say it plainly: If you want to make the best smartphone these days, it’s just not enough to make the best handset, or even the best OS. So pour one out for the indie phone makers! I, for one, am sorry to see them go.
UPDATE: Jon Rubinstein has issued a company-wide memo to soothe worried employees. It’s suitably last-stand-y:
To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations-all getting the word out about Palm.
As I said before, the root of Palm’s problems are essentially unaddressable, so it’s no shock that he doesn’t lay out a clear, detailed vision for a second (third?) Palm turnaround. But the sight of their CEO so obviously aiming a garden hose at a forest fire can’t be much comfort to Palmers, or investors.
Tom and Rafe report on how gear works in the real world, including Windows Home Server, the iPhone, and the Canon S90.
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The puzzle pieces are all fitting together now, aren’t they? Just a few days after regulatory passage of the PB10ZU from Sharp — a device that could very well be the pebble-shaped Turtle — we’re now seeing a separate filing for the PB20ZU. The label document isn’t terribly detailed here, but if you squint your eyes, you can definitely see how this lines up perfectly with the concept of a landscape QWERTY slider which is exactly what Project Pink’s rumored second phone, the Pure, is expected to be. Despite Microsoft’s blowout announcement at MWC earlier this month, there was nary a mention of Pink or the Danger-influenced hardware and software said to surround it, so we’re expecting to see this stuff soon — especially now that we’ve got FCC certification under our belts. CTIA, perhaps? Notably, this phone rocks CDMA with Bluetooth and WiFi, so if it sees duty on an American carrier — which it almost certainly will — it’s gotta be either Verizon or Sprint. Stay tuned.
Sharp PB20ZU gets FCC approval — is this ‘Pure’ from Microsoft’s Project Pink? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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