Hasta La Gadget!

Motorola is cranking out Android handsets and its latest phone, the Devour, is here.

The Devour has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, an aluminum body and a custom user interface called MotoBlur that aggregates contacts and feeds from different social networking sites, such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, into a single stream. Priced at $150 with a two-year contract, the Devour will become the third Android phone to run on the Verizon Wireless network next month.

“The Devour is about streaming your social life into the phone,” says Dan Rudolph, director of product marketing for Motorola. “The more social networking accounts you have, the more value you will get from the phone.”

Still, our first look at the Devour was disappointing. Under the hood, the phone isn’t state-of-the-art in terms of its technical specification — it lacks multitouch, it doesn’t feature the 1-GHz Qualcomm processor seen on the Nexus One and runs an older version of the Android operating system. Nor does it impress with its looks. The much-touted aluminum body aside, the phone is bulky, big and very retro in its styling.

Here’s a closer look at it.

The Devour is a slider phone with a physical keyboard that’s much more pleasant to use than the Motorola Droid. The keyboard, which seems carved directly into the aluminum body, has buttons that are soft, yet respond firmly.

But at 5.9 ounces, the phone is a bulky beast. It weighs almost the same as the Droid but it is positively plus-sized when compared to its lightweight peers: The iPhone 3G S is only 4.8 ounces and the Nexus One is just 4.5 ounces.

What makes the Devour seem hefty is its harsh, boxy look. Unlike the softer, rounded corners that are popular among most smartphones today, the Devour is a rectangular slab with sharp square edges in a hardware design that is reminiscent of the Palm VII. Motorola and Verizon say that they want to evoke a masculine look with the phone but hey, don’t boys want pretty devices too?

The Devour screen is bright but not as vivid as the OLED display on the Nexus One and it seems to smudge very easily. Just a few minutes of using it left fingerprint marks all over the display.

In an interesting twist, the Devour has a tiny touch-sensitive thumbpad on the right that can be used to scroll through the icons on the screen and select one. The slider, itself, though feels flimsy because it is also a toggle button on one of its sides.

The phone has a 600-MHz Qualcomm processor that is a tad faster than the Droid’s but is significantly slower than the 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip used in the Nexus One.

Instead of a removable back plane, the Devour has the cover for the battery and the microSD card at the side of the device — similar to what we see in a compact digital camera.

It’s an attempt  to make the phone more stable, says Motorola’s Rudolph, since smartphone users have complained about the battery cover at the back slipping off in some phones.

Beyond that, the Devour has its basics covered. It includes a camera capable of both video and still photos, a 8-GB microSD card, accelerometer, Wi-Fi and GPS.

Though it’s the latest phone from Motorola’s stable, the Devour runs Android 1.6, which is a surprise considering that most of the latest Android phones use version 2.0 or 2.1 of the OS. The older Android flavor also means that Devour users have to manually download an update to get turn-by-turn navigation on their phone.

But what Motorola says will give the Devour its edge is the use of the MotoBlur skin, which is missing on the Android. After a quick initial setup, the MotoBlur brings in your Twitter feed, Facebook updates and e-mail and text messages into little widgets on the home screen.

Integrated contacts and data is the name of the game, so the interface aggregates corporate and personal e-mail accounts and display them on a single screen — though you can keep them separate if you want. You can also arrange to view new messages in a cardlike view (similar to the Palm Pre) or in an easily scrollable list.

There are some sweet extras. User can back up their phone for free on the MotoBlur website through their MotoBlur account. They can also track their phone for free and remote-wipe it if it is lost, a service that Apple charges $100 a year for with its MobileMe service.

Clearly, Motorola wants to get as many Android handsets out as it can, ostensibly in an attempt to give consumers the choice they want. But at this point, it feels like the process has lost its soul. There’s not much innovation in hardware design or in the user interface. The Devour is yet another cookie-cutter phone churned out to keep the corporate coffers full.

But in an extremely competitive smartphone market,  it’s an approach that may not be enough cut it with choosy consumers.

See Also:

• Motorola Introduces New Android Phone, the Backflip
• Motorola Backflip Will Be the First Android Phone on AT&T
• Hands-On With the Motorola Quench
• Motorola’s First Android Phone Takes Aim at Social Networks
  

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Apple has banned sexy apps. But apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated remain. Why does Apple care what turns me on?

If you need another example of why the iTunes App Store‘s walled garden is flawed, Apple has been only too happy to oblige, capriciously and arbitrarily removing an unknown number of “sexy” apps without warning. All that’s missing to complete the metaphor is a flaming sword.

Some of those apps were certainly garbage, but it seems most were simply slideshows of women in various states of undress.

Jenna Wortham, writing for The Times, quotes Apple’s Phil Schiller: “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”

By Apple’s own count, there are over 130,000 apps in the App Store. With a selection that varied, I’m sure there’s something to offend everyone.

How about an app that discusses abortion and birth control law? Maybe an app that helps you hook up with gay guys? How about an app that teaches you how to evangelize the fundamentalist Christian religion?

Think about that last one for second and the furor that would erupt if Apple made a sweeping ban of religious apps from the App Store. I am not a Christian. I would be concerned if my child were discovering religion before I’d gotten a chance to talk to them about it. (Especially since that would mean I had given birth to a baby without a mother, completing—if adventitiously—my dream to be the Male Madonna.)

Yet I wouldn’t blame Apple for letting the app be sold, just like I wouldn’t complain that I found it morally offensive, its existence alone threatening and insulting. And to be clear, I’ve got absolutely no problem with the “Grindr” app pictured here being on the app store. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. It’s simply a great example to highlight how subjective Apple’s ban has been. That image is right there on its App Store page.

Look, we know censorship is wrong. We’ve been having this conversation as a society for a couple hundred years, and if you haven’t learned by now that freedom of speech negates freedom from offense, there’s nothing I can do to convince you except renew your subscription to Hustler.

The issue at hand is that Apple doesn’t have to abide by the laws we’ve put in place in our society because the App Store is part of its business. Often I feel like that’s a good thing—or at least fair dinkum. They built it; they get to run it.

With a closed ecosystem comes a lot of responsibility. Apple has taken on the heavy mantle of arbiter, ostensibly to manage quality. I can forgive them for that, even if I don’t like it. But the only reason to ban blue apps is taste. And if these apps were a matter of taste, why were they approved in the first place? What will the next set of apps be that Apple decides are inappropriate long after people have spent hundreds of hours creating and marketing them? Ban apps because they’re poorly designed—not because they’re simply sexual.

Apple is making a moral judgement, declaring that nudity and titillation is something that should made hidden and shameful. It’s disappointing that a company so publicly supportive of progressive sexual rights would react so orthodoxly.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Apple is trying to take the easy way out, talking about degradation of women and the innocence of children, but allowing content from established brands—brands that exhibit sexual material meant to arouse—simply because they’re well known and thus “safe”. Apple is aping the sexual posturing of conservative American society, defining what expressions of sexuality are acceptable to even acknowledge.

Sure, there’s still plenty of smut out there on the internet, readily accessible through the iPhone’s Safari web browser. That’s not the point.

Apple has made a declaration: that sex and sexuality are shameful, even for adults. But only sometimes. And only when people complain.

Unfortunately, they’ve accomplished the opposite. The only thing I’m ashamed of is Apple.

Good news: if you thought the current CompactFlash 4.0 storage limit of 137 Gbytes was too restrictive, the new CF 5.0 standard should shatter that barrier for a good long time.

The CompactFlash 5.0 standard creates an upper boundary of 144 petabytes, an almost unfathomably high capacity of storage: almost 147,500 terabytes. One and two-terabyte hard drives are common, but 147,000? On a flash card? That will only be achieved in the far, far future.

The CompactFlash Association competes with the Secure Digital (SD) card, which has announced its own SDXC standard, taking capacity points up to 2 terabytes. Panasonic announced its first SDXC cards in January.

ChatRoulette, for the unaware, is the insane new site that randomly connects two videochatters together. It’s mostly used by gross dudes masturbating and stoned college kids. But here are some examples of how it could be so much more.

First Place—Neal Rosenblat
Second Place—Thrillcox
Third Place—Balazs Denes Kovacs

MagiTact hands-free phone control makes multitouch seem absolutely passe originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink New Scientist  |  International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces  | Email this | Comments