Hasta La Gadget!

Last week, we reported that Facebook is planning on revealing its own customized version of the Google Android operating system . They will be debuting their “special” version of the Android OS onto one of HTC’s devices. It’s speculated that it will launch on a new HTC device, however, there’s also reports that the OS will be able to run on HTC’s older handsets, and even on its upcoming flagship handset, the HTC One.

Now reports are saying that Facebook’s version of Android OS will be called “Facebook Home”. Sources revealed to 9to5Google that the tagline on Facebook’s invitations, “Come See Our New Home On Android”, is actually a teaser to the new product name. Facebook’s version of the OS will feature deep integration into Android. Facebook Messenger, Photos, and Contacts will be set as the default programs, with Facebook Messenger being used for both messaging your Facebook friends, as well as sending out SMS text messages.

The HTC smartphone that will feature the new, modified Android OS, and will most likely be announced at the event as well. Many sources say that the phone highly resembles the iPhone 5. It will have a home button at the bottom-center of the phone, with capacitive buttons on its right and left side. The device will have a screen larger than 4-inches, with speculations that it will be 4.3-inches. The phone is also said to be similar in size to the iPhone 5.

On top of both of these reveals, we’re also expecting Facebook to announce an upgrade to its Facebook for Android app. Android users have been waiting for a long time to have a decent Facebook for Android app. The current app, while much better than the versions before it, could still use a lot of work. We’re hoping that the app is just as smooth as the iOS app, if not better. Facebook had its employees work extra-hard on the Android app, so it’d be nice to see the results that have come from that. Tune in with us on April 4th, 10:00 A.M. PST, for the official updates from Facebook’s event.

[via 9to5Google]

Facebook’s Android OS will be called “Facebook Home” is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I started off liking the HTC One. Now, having used it as my only camera while on holiday in Japan this past week, I’m in love with it. HTC has a whole lot riding on the One this year, and one of the more contentious features is the Zoe photography system, blending stills and short videos that are simultaneously captured in what the company says will “bring to life” your photo gallery. Attempts to differentiate from the gush of other Android devices with software customization is something we’ve seen so often now, it’s hard not to be cynical (and simply demand “pure” Android instead), but Zoe has turned out to be a different story.

I’m bad at taking photos, especially when I’m away. All too often I’ll come back from a trip and realize I have nothing – bar the memories in my own head – to show for it. Stills seldom capture the emotion of a moment, while video gets long and unwieldy, and thus goes unwatched.

Zoe, though, combines a burst of twenty stills with about three and a half seconds of Full HD video. You can shoot just stills, or just HD video, but HTC expects most One users to give up on regular images and instead use Zoe mode: once you’ve captured a cluster of shots, you can then scroll through and pick out the one with the best framing or facial expressions, or indeed combine features from two stills into one. The One also automatically combines a selection of Zoes into a highlight reel, 30s of curated content complete with music, effects, and transitions.

What Zoe is particularly great at, though, is putting photography into a framework. You’re not just snapping hundreds of stills and recording dozens of videos – which, if you’re anything like me, you have a strong suspicion that you’ll never actually look through or share after you’re home. Instead, you start to think about photography in terms of easily snackable chunks of content: a simple 30 second highlight reel that you can imagine actually showing someone without having to worry that you’re boring them.

Find out all the details on the UltraPixel camera and Zoe system here

It also makes you think of your life in terms of events. On every other phone I’ve used, I’ve never bothered with albums: all of my images and videos have been left in one long stream of content (and one I seldom bother scrolling back through). On the One, though, you start to consider how an event might look when seen as a highlight reel: I started purposefully shooting panning shots that I knew would be particularly good at setting the scene, for instance, and tried to take more photos of people and their reactions, rather than just impressive landscapes.

The result is a gallery I actually want to flick back through, and photos I actually want to show to people. Highlight videos that require less than a minute’s investment in time are perfect for attention-short social networks like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and of course since it’s Android there’s fully baked-in sharing with whatever service you have installed.

“The result is a gallery I actually want to look through”

It’s not all perfect, however. As we noted in our review, right now the One gives you no control over what resolution the Zoe highlight reel is encoded at – it’s Full HD or nothing – and that makes for a big video. When you’re roaming abroad, it means finding a (fast) WiFi connection is essential unless you want to bankrupt yourself with foreign data fees.

That’s not the only upload-related headache. Zoe doesn’t work at all well with automatic-upload systems; I love how Google+ pushes new photos and videos to the cloud in the background, ready for me to share them later, but on the One every single shot is queued up for the same online treatment. Given each Zoe consists of twenty stills as well as the brief video, that means a whole lot of unnecessary duplication when you browse through online. “You have 3825 new photos ready to share” Google+ eagerly informed me, after suggesting that I might want to pay to upgrade my Google Drive storage.

In fact, there’s a sense that HTC only really thought about the photography experience on the One itself, not that people might want to explore their shots outside of the handset. Having spent a couple of hours sifting through all of the multiple Zoe shots after dumping them over to my computer, picking out the best/least blurry/most interesting to share with family, the comparative value of the highlight reels began to wane. For every scene there were twenty shots to key through, and the HTC Sync Manager app does nothing but push everything into iPhoto.

HTC really needs to offer more granular – and straightforward to use – control over which photos are treated as the default by other apps and services, particularly given the shortcomings of the current highlight reel selection process. Eventually, you should be able to pick out which images are used to build the automagically-edited video; right now, though, the only way to manually control what’s included and what isn’t is to sort them manually into different Event albums (the One splits up events that are at different times and locations automatically, but I found it still mixed together activities while I was away).

Those Events can then be used to create more specific highlight reels, but then you miss out on auto-uploading, since most such services only look at content in the root Photos folder. Events on the One are organized into subfolders, unless you copy rather than move them, in which case you run into storage limitations (which, since there’s no memory card slot, could quickly become an issue given the size of each single Zoe cluster).

I’d love to see HDR support in Zoe mode (at the moment, you can only use it in standard camera mode); that generally works well, though it sometimes left the sky oddly colored in brighter scenes. The ability to opt for longer highlight reels would be great too: a minute or 90 seconds, perhaps, to fit in more media from longer Events.

The fumbles and glitches don’t undermine the overall experience, however. HTC’s decision to opt for a 4-megapixel-equivalent sensor might mean we get stuck with awkward “UltraPixel” branding, but it doesn’t stop the One from taking solid shots and delivering great low-light images (useful for when you’re taking food photos in restaurants; yes, I know it’s a cliché, but I still did it).

Zoe seemed like a gimmick at first, but it’s enough to make me reach for the HTC One in preference to the iPhone 5 or any other Android handset when I know I’m likely to be taking photos. Now HTC just needs to bring its sync app up to speed too, as well as do a better job of explaining to potential consumers why they might end up thinking the same, if they’d only give the One a try.

I fell for the HTC One in a Tokyo cat cafe is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I want a black and white computer, and I don’t want it out of sheer, wanton weirdness. I actually think it’s a good idea. Here’s why.

A huge, huge proportion of the content we consume every day is text. And, for many, an equal proportion of what they work with is text — be it code, email, or published content like this. For the consumption and creation of text, a monochrome display is all that is necessary, and in some ways even superior to a color one.

Pixels on an LCD like the one on which you’re probably reading this are made up of dots or sub-pixels — usually one red, one green, and one blue. The transistor matrix changes the opacity of a sub-pixel of a given color, and by working together they can create millions of hues and shades. But they work (with a few exceptions such as sub-pixel font smoothing and pentile layouts) only as triads, meaning a display with a resolution of 1920×1080 addressable pixels has three times that many addressable dots. (This is the reason why simply desaturating the image does not improve the resolution.)

Consequently, if you were to remove the color filters, each sub-pixel would become a pixel — all only able to show shades of grey, of course, but pixels nonetheless, and far more of them than there were before. Result: extremely high spatial resolution, far beyond the so-called “retina” point, even at close range — beyond even glossy magazine levels of sharpness, a dream for rendering type. (The two previous paragraphs previously contained miscalculations as to the pixel density, which have since been amended)

It would also be brighter, or put another way, would require less backlight, since the removal of the filters allows far more light to pass through. That saves battery. Also saving battery is the reduced amount of graphics processing power and RAM necessary to store and alter the screen state, and so on. Small things, but not insignificant.

It would, of course, retain all of the other benefits of a modern, connected device, remaining as responsive and powerful as any other laptop or tablet, just minus the color. Logistically speaking, adapting existing content would not be that problematic (“time-shifting” apps and other extractors already do this). And it’s more than a glorified e-reader: the limitations of that type of hardware are lethal to many of the methods in which we are now accustomed to finding, consuming, and creating content (to say nothing of the screen quality).

Why black and white? Well, why color?

But what the hell is the point, you ask, if it’s not in color? The web is in color. The world is in color!

Your Instagram feed won’t be quite as striking in greyscale, it’s true. Rich media wasn’t designed for monochrome, and shouldn’t be forced into it. It demands color, and deserves it. Obviously you wouldn’t want to browse Reddit or edit video on a monochrome display. But if something does not require color, it seems pointless to provide it, especially when doing so has real drawbacks.

You’ve seen the apps that prevent procrastination, or make the user focus on a task, by blocking out distractions and the like. At some times, we want a tool that does one thing, and at other times, we want a tool that does others. That’s why computers are so great: They can switch between, say, text-focused work mode and image-focused movie mode in an instant.

They’re like Swiss Army knives: a corkscrew one minute and a can opener the next. But, as I tried to suggest in my previous column, if you tend to open a lot of wine bottles and very few cans, wouldn’t you prefer that you had a dedicated wine opener, without a bunch of other tools attached? That it can’t open a can is tragic, but more than made up for by its facility in its chosen task.

There will always be a place for the essential alone

I believe some people would not only be unperturbed by an inability to watch videos or what have you — in fact, they may prefer it. We already have different computing tools for different purposes, and we don’t demand that they all do everything — I have a laptop so I can write, as I am at the present, while enjoying some fresh air and coffee. I have a desktop for games and heavy productivity. I have an iPad for this, and an e-reader for that, and a phone for this, and a camera for that. What’s one more, especially when it would be, I believe, quite good at what it does, even if that’s “only” working with text?

There’s also a less practical, more aesthetic reason I would enjoy a black and white device. The content we consume and the ways we navigate it have become loud and colorful, and to me it does not appear that this profusion of saturation has been accompanied by a corresponding subtlety of design. The eruption of capabilities has made many lose touch with the beauty of austerity, and what’s billed as “minimalism” rarely is. There is a set of qualities that sets that starkness apart, and while we have always enjoyed ornamentation, there has always been (and will be for the foreseeable future) a place and purpose for the essential alone.

On that note, I think it would be an interesting experiment, and highly beneficial one, to attempt to rebuild, say, Facebook or an OS, without any color at all. When you subtract color cues like green for yes and red for no, or implicit boundaries based not on contrast and flow but on different coloration, the problem of presenting and consuming the information concerned is totally changed. Perhaps one would learn better the fundamentals of layout, flow, proportion, and so on, and that would inform the color world as well.

I read a lot, and I write for a living. I want a specialized tool for doing those things, just as a logger would want an axe instead of a big knife, or a runner a good pair of shoes instead of slippers. In the end, I like the idea of a black-and-white device and interface for many of the reasons I like black-and-white photography. It’s different, and has different strengths, and both requires and provides a different perspective. For me, that’s enough to at least want it on the table.

If you’re a fan of military-themed real-time strateg games, you’re probably familiar with the game Company of Heroes. Sega has announced that the second game in the franchise is set to start its closed beta early next month. Company of Heroes 2 will kick off it closed beta April 2. That is next Tuesday if you don’t have a calendar in front of you.

The initial phase of the closed beta is open to eligible pre-order customers only. Sega says that in the coming weeks it will have a second phase of the beta allowing a wider audience to take part. The closed beta will use Steam and players will need the free Steam client to redeem their closed beta access key.

During the closed beta, players will have access to multiple player and skirmish game play with six maps. The beta will support 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 competitive game play and single player game play. Players will have access to the first 40 levels of progression and will be able to customize load-outs. The full game is set to launch for PC gamers in June 2013.

In a club far, far away, Marco of Picotek Design must be wowing the crowd not just with his beats but with his one-of-a-kind gear as well. His highly modified turntable is based on another highly modified piece of equipment: the freighter-turned-smuggler’s ship Millenium Falcon.

Marco said he stumbled upon the toy replica of Han Solo’s ship and got it for a mere $2 (USD), albeit with some of its parts missing. He stowed it away for a couple of years, then one day decided to combine it with another relic from the 70s, a Technics 1200 turntable. Marco says he’ll upload more pictures of the turntable soon.

[via Obvious Winner]