Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

It looks like one lucky user “accidentally” got the Zune 2 software update a little early thanks to a supposed mishap in Windows Update. JJRules, a member of the Zunerama forum, posted some screenshots late last week of the Zune 2 interface (version 2.1.0522.00) that is scheduled to be released in November.

The first question that popped into everyone’s mind was “are the screenshots real?” JJRules did everything he could to assure us that they were indeed real, and he even went as far as to take a screenshot of his entire desktop with the Zune 2 software running. One of the things that really clinched it for me was the comparison of his screenshots (which are below) and the screenshot above which Microsoft provided in one of their own documents. There are a lot of similarities between the two.

(Click to Enlarge)

So how did he download the Zune 2 software? It was delivered to him via Windows Update on Vista, and one reason he could have been “chosen” was because he is also testing Vista SP1 Beta. In the end, however, JJRules ditched the Zune 2 software because he couldn’t get the Zune MarketPlace to work. As it stands right now he is running Zune 1.3 just like the rest of us, and he says that he hasn’t been prompted to download the software since.

I’m sure all of the Zune users are getting excited about the big update particularly because the 30GB Zune owners will also get a piece of the action. If you happened to hop on board during the Woot $100 Zune blowout sale then you got one heck of a deal, and there is a nice update coming your way!

Source: Zunerama Forum [via Crunchgear]

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Skullcandy is hitting CES with a characteristically bold claim: its new Fix in-ear headphones are touted as the first to never fall out of your ears, irrespective of the intensity of your physical activity. We’ve matched them up against the Yurbuds Ironman Series, a rather larger pair of in-ear speakers, which makes the exact same assertion. Both companies have patented their particular technology and both claim to be the one and only true solution. Obviously targeting runners, vigorous exercisers and discreet headbangers, they’re priced at $70 for Skullcandy’s Fix and $50 for the Yurbuds Ironmans. We’ve had a pair of each to play around with for a few hours here and sound quality is generally satisfactory on both. The Ironmans are much punchier in the bass range and offer significantly better sound isolation — a lot of external noise leaks in through the Fix’s seal, but the oversized Ironman buds netralize the vast majority of it. Both sets feel comfortable in the ear and shouldn’t cause any grief if you opt to wear them for prolonged jogs outdoors … or impromptu indoor moshing sessions.

Skullcandy Fix versus Yurbuds Ironman … battle of the in-ear headphones! (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 24, 2009 by CyberNet.

It was a tough decision, but I decided to upgrade my iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3GS. I wasn’t sure if the new features would be enough to justify the purchase, but I figured I should be able to sell my iPhone 3G on eBay and recoup a good chunk of the cost. So I pre-ordered the phone, and got it delivered to me last Friday morning.

I’m not going to do a full-fledged review because I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of those already. Gizmodo has a really good in-depth review, and so does Engadget if that’s what you’re looking for. Instead I really wanted to focus on the camera, and then briefly throw in my thoughts on some of the other features.

–The Camera–

They bumped up the resolution of the camera to 3.2MP, but the thing I love the most would have to be the auto/manual focus capabilities. I’ve never seen a camera that would let you choose which spot you want to focus on simply by touching it on the screen, but I’m sure that will be the next big thing on point-and-shoot cameras. Combining this with some camera-specific apps I found (more details in a later post) will make this a valuable device to be carrying in my pocket.

I have quite a few friends who ended up grabbing the iPhone 3GS, and one of the first things there’s always comments on is the quality of the images. Some are surprised at how good they turn out, while others say it could be a lot better. I think for a phone the camera is pretty darn good… except in low-light situations where a flash is a must-have.

I took some time to walk around Millennium Park in Chicago since it’s right down the street from where I work, and along the way I took some pictures. I didn’t just take them with the iPhone 3GS though, I also took the exact same photos with my Canon XSi Digital SLR for comparison sake. The iPhone doesn’t really let you adjust any settings when taking photos, and so I decided to set my DSLR to fully automatic mode in the spirit of keeping things fair. I did my best to split each of the photos so that you can really see the differences when they are side-by-side.

The “Bean”

Click the image to view a larger version

Garden/City View

Click the image to view a larger version

Concert Hall

Click the image to view a larger version

Flowers

Click the image to view a larger version

As you can tell from the example photos the iPhone 3GS isn’t the best camera, but it’s pretty good for those times you don’t have a dedicated camera on you. One thing I did when taking the photos above is I let the iPhone focus on the center without manually adjusting it. I noticed, however, that if you’d tap the screen to focus on a different part of the photo that the brightness would also adjust accordingly. So after you get used to working with the iPhone’s camera you might be able to take some pretty nice photos.

–The Other Features–

Here’s my quick thoughts on the other new features:

• Speed – I didn’t think the speed increase would make that much of a difference, but it does. Hearing a stat like “2 times faster” doesn’t really put things into perspective until you sit down to use it. Everything is snappier… switching between apps, loading websites, playing games, and so on. Plus there’s double the amount of memory, and because of that I noticed Safari has never unloaded from memory. That means the websites I was viewing when I closed the browser will be there (without refreshing) the next time I open Safari.
• Video – There is no doubt in my mind that this will become my primary method for capturing videos. Previously I had used a point-and-shoot camera for taking videos since I don’t like hassling with a bulky camcorder, and I love having a video stored as a single downloadable file. Given the amount of free space I have on my iPhone I’ll be able to save hours of video.
• Voice Control – I think I’ll be surprised at how much I’ll use this. I tested it out on a few contacts, and also for controlling my music, and overall it worked pretty well. What makes this useful for me is that I can activate this even when my phone is locked by holding down the Home button, or by holding the button on my headphones. So I really don’t have to take the phone out of my pocket to call someone if I’m already listening to music. Now if only it would read the name/number to you when receiving a call with your headphones on.
• Maps – Having the map rotate in the direction you’re facing was also a big selling point for me. Working in downtown Chicago it can be tough to figure out which way the GPS wants you to go when you’re walking since the little dot doesn’t move very fast. This makes finding your way when walking a lot easier, but I noticed that a lot of things seem to cause interference with the compass causing it to be inaccurate at times.
• Support for Apple In-Ear Headphones – I bought Apple’s in-ear headphones a few months ago because they had some really good reviews, and I have to say they are the most comfortable pair of headphones I’ve ever owned. The main reason I got these headphones was because they supported hands-free calling with the iPhone, but the volume up/down buttons never worked since this was a hardware limitation. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that all of the buttons on the headphones are now fully supported on the iPhone 3GS.

I was running the iPhone 3.0 software on my iPhone 3G about a week before I got my new phone. Apple definitely tuned the overall performance of the software with this release, and combining that with the new hardware makes it that much faster.

There are also a lot of little things around the operating system that I’ve noticed, and I really like. Such as being able to display the remaining battery level as a percentage (on the iPhone 3GS only, apparently because previous iPhones didn’t have an accurate enough battery meter). Or the fact that when an SMS/MMS fails to send it just places an exclamation point next to the message, but it will still let you keep entering more if you want. Before if a message failed to send you’d have to wait to send that one before you could try sending another.

Overall I’m really happy that I upgraded because I use my iPhone for hours everyday when commuting on the train. For some people the upgrade may not be worthwhile, but I spend more time on this than I do my personal computer. So it’s a device that I like to keep up-to-date.

Feel free to jump into the comments and shoot us your thoughts/questions on the iPhone 3GS.

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This article was written on September 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Google Trends has proved to be a great way to see what’s hot and what’s not in Google searches. There’s a lot you can learn, particularly with their “Hot Trends” which is compiled daily. It’s also proved to be a great way to analyze search trends as I’ve done today with some of the more popular technology competitors. There’s nothing earth shattering about what I’ve found, but it’s interesting to see who comes out on top as far as searches go.

You’ll notice “markers” on the graphs which correlated with a news article. Often times if there are big spikes where these letter markers are located, it tells us that whatever was in the news that day caused the spike in searches. For example, on the graph showing Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs, the spike that occurred at marker “F” was when the “Fake Steve” jobs was revealed.

Finally, keep in mind that these are search trends based upon Google searches.

–Apple vs. Microsoft–

–iPhone vs. BlackBerry–

–Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs–

–HP vs. Dell–

–MySpace vs. Facebook–

As expected, we see Facebook steadily climbing North!

–Flickr vs. Picasa–

I wasn’t expecting Flickr and Picasa to align as closely as they do. Both have seen a pretty decent climb in searches over the last month or two as well.

–iPod vs. Zune–

Is it just me, or is the Zune flat-lining?

–Xbox 360 vs. PS3 vs. Wii–

We know that the Wii is currently the best selling console, so it makes sense that there are more searches for the term “Wii” than there are for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

–Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Pownce–

–Google vs. MSN vs. Yahoo–

Yahoo still leads the way here, although Google is getting close…

–IE vs.Safari vs. Firefox–

Wow, Firefox seems to be popular amongst searches, doesn’t it? I was going to include Opera here, but Google pulled in trends for opera singers, not exclusively the browser.

–Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux–

–Hotmail vs. Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail–

–Gizmodo vs. Engadget vs. Lifehacker–

While Lifehacker certainly wouldn’t be considered a competitor of Gizmodo or Engadget, it’s still a high-traffic blog that I thought would be interesting to compare against other high-traffic blogs.

–Spiderman vs. Batman–

Just for fun Can you tell when Spiderman 3 came out?

–Wrapping it up–

While none of these graphs provide any information we didn’t already know, it’s interesting to see how some of the most popular technology topics compare against others. If you’d like to do your own comparisons, just go to www.google.com/trends and enter in the topics you’d like to compare separated by a comma.  You can enter in up to five different topics. There’s a lot you can learn about what people are searching for, especially with the “hot trends.”

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This article was written on February 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

There are certain features in Google Docs that everybody seems to know about, yet there are others which are hardly known. One such hardly known feature will be helpful for times when you need to revise a document. It’s built right into Google Docs and allows a user to look at two versions of the same document side by side and compare them. Google Docs highlights all of the differences so that it’s super simple to see. To give you an example of how this works, I went to Wikipedia and pulled up the entry for “Steve Jobs.” Wikipedia keeps an archive of changes that have been made, so I pulled up two different versions of the article and copied a paragraph that had been changed. Here’s how it worked for me using Wikipedia:

• First I opened up a new document and pasted one version of the Steve Jobs article. Then I saved it.
• Next I went back to Wikipedia and pulled up an earlier version of the same article and then went back to the original document I had created and pasted the new content over the previous content. Then I saved it.
• Finally, I went to the Revision tab in Google Docs and selected the two different file versions (they list them based upon the time it was changed) and clicked “compare checked.” The results I received are displayed below:

At first glance, it looks like a bunch of gibberish, but it’s actually not. I’ll point out that there were only two minor variations between the two different revisions.  The first was in the first paragraph where it says “Jobs was born in New York…” Notice that starting with New York, a whole paragraph is crossed out? Now look to where it says “San Francisco” highlighted in green. This was the first variation. It reads, “Jobs was born in San Francisco” (not New York). Most of the third paragraph is crossed out because it reads exactly the same as the 2nd paragraph.

Of course the example I gave using Wikipedia isn’t exactly realistic, but it helped demonstrate the feature. Using this comparison tool would be useful if you had two versions of a single document that you wanted to compare and revise.

Source: Digital Inspiration

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