Hasta La Gadget!

We heard a rumor last week that Sony was working on new handhelds to compete with devices like the iPad. It sounds like a great idea: a PSP with integrated telephony and e-book functionality could perhaps give everyone in the market a run for their money. But I’m a little skeptical — Sony’s Clié line once defined state-of-the-art PDA, but the company ceded the market to Palm long before the PDA was eventually reborn as the smartphone. If Sony’s seriously thinking about getting back to the handheld space, here’s some lessons it might learn from its efforts back in the PDA day.

1. Innovation is great but only when you really innovate. Sony led the market in innovation when it entered the PDA space. It offered the first Palm OS devices with removable storage, the first devices that could play back audio and video, and the first high-resolution color devices. All of these clearly drove the market forward. Then the innovations became less innovative and more “gadgetry.” There were 3D interfaces for the launcher that were confusing and awkward. Some devices had Bluetooth support but not others. Devices like the NZ-90 (pictured above) added so many features into the mix that it was big, bloated, and nearly useless.* In short, the innovations became less compelling and eventually stood in the way of. I’m worried that Sony’s meshing the type of functionality rumored to be its new device without any thought how it all has to work together.

Continue reading Entelligence: Aiming high or another Mylo?

Entelligence: Aiming high or another Mylo? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Chuck Thacker, a technical fellow at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, on Tuesday night will accept the A.M. Turing Award and a $250,000 check from the Association
for Computing Machinery.

Thacker is but the second recipient to win the prize for a hardware achievement; the award, named after British inventor Albert Turing, usually is awarded for work in the software field, especially in theory.

“I was extremely surprised,” Thacker said, as quoted in a Microsoft statement accompanying the announcement. “I never expected to win this
one. There are several other nice awards that I’ve won that I thought
were within the realm of possibility, but this one I never even thought
was possible.”

Thacker was the chief designer for the Alto computer at Xerox PARC, and a co-inventor of Ethernet, along with Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, and Butler Lampson, also at Microsoft.

Unusually, Thacker does not hold a Ph.D.

We just sat down with Palm here at GDC and fished out a few more details on the PDK beta front. Firstly, and most interestingly, Palm has confirmed that the PDK now works on all of its handsets (instead of just the Pre and Pre Plus), which means Pixi buyers can stop hating themselves pretty soon. Apparently the level of performance degradation should be comparable iPhone 3G vs. 3GS, which doesn’t sound too horrible. This is functionality that wasn’t available even to Palm’s early PDK partners like EA and Gameloft, so we should be seeing versions of existing games make the jump to the Pixi when the time for PDK beta-developed apps to hit the Palm App Catalog. When will that time come, you ask? The “middle of the year,” or “a few months,” whichever sounds more promising to you. Palm’s not saying whether this new era for the App Catalog (anyone being able to release PDK apps, and those apps working on the Pre and the Pixi) will accompany a full-on webOS update, but it seems logical to us.

On a more technical front, we’re told the PDK supports the Linux standard SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to ease in porting and development (Unreal for Linux runs using SDL, for instance), and that developers could even build apps like an audio processor that rely on PDK components but don’t show up in the UI at all, or OpenGL-empowered things that aren’t necessarily games or in 3D. Also, existing developers have only been able to do “full screen” games that rely on PDK components alone, but the PDK beta lets you mix and match webOS UI with PDK elements. Currently there aren’t many PDK games that use the extra Palm hardware like the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but we’re told that’s all exposed to the developer, along with any other element of webOS that Mojo SDK users have access to. One notable plugin hangup is the fact that Flash only works in the browser, and can’t be embedded into a regular webOS app, PDK or no — though we have to assume this is something that’s in the works.

Palm’s webOS PDK beta adds Pixi native development, PDK’d apps will hit the Catalog mid year originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Continue reading Samsung NaviBot SR8845 / SR8855 vacuum cleaner hands-on

Samsung NaviBot SR8845 / SR8855 vacuum cleaner hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Sony’s PlayStation 3 has suffered from poor sales over the past few years. But the console is making a resurgence and at least one analyst firm believes it will triumph. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10466112-17.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Digital Home/a/p