Hasta La Gadget!

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Casting aside such permutations as the DSi and the DSi XL, it makes ordinal sense for the Nintendo 3DS to have followed the Nintendo DS. This is true even if the “3” was for the number of dimensions and not necessarily generations (in which case it might have been named the DS 3). But it seems a bit puzzling on the face of it to come out with a product called the 2DS after the 3DS. Changing the sub-brand immediately calls the notion of compatibility into question even if one can see why Nintendo wouldn’t want to include “3D” in a product that doesn’t display it. (At least it’s not being called “the new 3DS.”)

And that’s but one of the confusing things about the 2DS, in which the strongest champion of hand-held gaming hardware has eliminated the signature feature of its latest portable console generation as well as the clamshell design with which the DS series has been identified since its debut a decade ago. The result is a makeover of the portable 3D handheld that is a bit less portable and a lot less 3D.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Nintendo

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The announcement of Steve Ballmer’s impending retirement from Microsoft cast a spotlight on the company’s transition to becoming a devices and services company. While it’s unclear how progress toward this goal will be measured, the success model for the “devices” part of its quest is Apple. (Indeed, Apple, leading with iCloud, is seeking to diversify into more of a “devices and services” company itself.)

Apple’s current revenue champions — the iPhone and iPad — are in categories that Microsoft recognized the potential of long before Apple’s market entry. When the US smartphone market consisted of Microsoft, Palm and RIM, Windows Mobile had been powering smartphones — and doing respectably in terms of US market share — for years before Apple changed the game. Now, Windows Phone scrapes by with a few percentage points of the market. And the Tablet PCs that ran Windows a decade ago were introduced as the future of the notebook. While today’s Windows tablets and convertibles are much thinner and lighter than they were back then, it’s amazing to see how recalcitrant PC vendors have been in their design, with few pursuing pure slates and some using twist-hinges similar to those used in Tablet PCs.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Wearables, Internet, Apple, Microsoft

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Last week’s Switched On discussed the initial confusion and rough ride for Windows RT, which became a dealbreaker for inventive PC designs that used the operating system. Despite ASUS dropping out of making Windows RT devices and joining such abstainers as HP, Acer and Toshiba, the operating system is due to be updated to include improvements in Windows 8.1, creating what will apparently be Windows RT 8.1.

While Windows RT may have survived the chopping block, Microsoft faces some tough decisions regarding its future. Here are a few scenarios on how its future may play out.

Filed under: Software, Microsoft

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Today’s hottest and best-selling tablets and smartphones have one thing in common: they are powered by ARM processors. Offered in such variations as NVIDIA’s Tegra, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Samsung’s Exynos and Apple’s A6, ARM processors dominate the leading edge of mobile products. At LG’s recent announcement of its clever and well-appointed G2 smartphone, much was made of it being the first globally launched phone to include Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800; Android, in contrast, wasn’t mentioned once. And the long reach of ARM extends far beyond the bleeding edge. The Hisense Sero 7 Pro — recently cut to $129 just a few weeks after its launch — has a Tegra 3 processor while ARM chips from Rockchip and MediaTek power Android tablets at even humbler price points.

For years, Intel has promised it would be competitive with ARM in terms of performance per watt (if not in price). It has made great strides both in its smartphone-focused Atom chips and its performance-oriented Core chips (including Haswell, the CPU behind the MacBook Air’s huge gains in battery life), but those in the ARM camp have kept their processors’ competitive heat up while keeping their generated heat down.

Filed under: Software, Intel

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Sold out for weeks after its launch, everyone seems to be in love with the Chromecast — the ultra-cheap, ultra-small, interface-free, HDMI-toting TV appendage that stole the show from the new Nexus 7. Building beyond the DIAL device-discovery protocol that Netflix and YouTube have supported, Chromecast is a client of Google Cast, which enables the kind of second-screen control for volume and other features implemented by the device.

Google has gotten the jump on similar products such as the Plair TV dongle by natively supporting three of the most popular services to use on televisions — Netflix, YouTube and Pandora. Furthermore, it has also enabled a backdoor to many other services by building in support for displaying Chrome tabs on a Chromecast-connected TV. In doing so, it treats the TV as an extension of the browser just as Apple’s forthcoming OS X Mavericks can treat an Apple TV-connected set as another Macintosh screen.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Google

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