Netflix has always been something of a fickle beast, lavishingtreats upon just one platform at a time, but now that iOS, Windows Phone 7 and every game console under the sun are streaming its video, the firm’s finally turned its gaze on Android. Come early 2011, Netflix will appear on “select Android devices,” according to the company’s official blog, which also promises a “standard, platform-wide solution” for Android in the unspecified future. What took so long, and why will Netflix be limited to particular handsets when it first rolls out? “The hurdle has been the lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism available for Android,” says the blog, stating piracy concerns. Apparently content holders aren’t too keen on making movies available unless devices have DRM baked right in, so the solution is equip new phones with padlocks one at a time. Expect next year’s high-end Android devices to have “Netflix” as a nice big bullet point.
Continuing with our cookery theme this morning, we now have a full tray of scrumptious-looking gingerbread Android men, courtesy of Google Mobile’s Twitter account. The whole world and his poodle already know that Gingerbread, Android’s next iterative update that’s presently expected to be given the numerical identifier of 2.3, is coming some time soon, but now Google’s taken to fanning the flames of anticipation with some home cooking. What could it mean? Well, if you’re an optimist, it means Android’s about to receive its update imminently, but if you’re a pessimist, you’ll look at that Christmas-themed red and green attire and foretell of another month of waiting and thumb-twiddling. Either way, though, this seems to confirm Gingerbread is on track to land at some point before we welcome in 2011. Which can only be a good thing.
Let’s face it, it’s a question the world’s been dying to know the answer to: which of the T-Mobile G2, HTC Surround and iPhone 4 will withstand a (literal) grilling the longest? Well, just in time for a mildly singed breakfast today, we have the answer. As you might have surmised from the title, HTC’s WP7-equipped Surround showed the most endurance, though in the end it too cashed out its Earthly credits and moved on to that great scrapyard in the sky. Video of its final moments awaits after the break.
Look out, here come more tablets: Archos is debuting the Archos 101 and the Archos 70. The Archos 101 has a 10.1-inch screen and is less than half an inch thick. If that’s too big, the Archos 70 has a 7.0-inch screen. Both tablets allow Web surfing similar to that on a desktop or notebook computer. Also, both tablets play all the music, video, and photo formats as you’d get on your regular computer.
The Archos 70 comes with 8GB or 250GB of storage, while the Archos 101 comes with 8GB or 16GB. Archos isn’t saying why the larger screen model doesn’t have a large hard drive option. Both tablets can be used for mobile phone tethering by using a Bluetooth connection or a USB cable. You can get the Archos 101 starting at $299.99, or the Archos 70 starting at $275.99. The Archos 70 (8GB) is available now through the Archos online store; the Archos 101 will be available the week of November 18.
We’re still waiting on official Froyo builds for the American Galaxy S variants, but they seem to be getting close. How close? Well, close enough so that you can taste a leak for the Epic 4G if you like to live dangerously. The binary comes conveniently pre-rooted by the source and has a handful of known issues — most notably some sluggish / buggy web browsing — but we guess that’s the price you pay for stepping out on the bleeding edge. Let’s hope an official release isn’t too far behind.
The Nexus S — a Samsung-made, Gingerbread-powered, Google-branded smartphone — could be appearing at Best Buy as early as next week.
Here the clues so far, all of them leaked by Best Buy:
A small text ad with a missing photo was posted and pulled from BestBuy.com. The text: “The Nexus S. Available only at Best Buy this holiday season.” Alt text for the image: “Nexus S for T Mobile.”
Rumors about a new Samsung-made Google smartphone (called the “Nexus Two“) began circulating two weeks ago. Google stopped selling its HTC-made Nexus One in July.
Apparently the search giant is back in the smartphone game again, with a new OS, a new partner and a new retail strategy.
When will books benefit from the addition of multimedia magic? Narnia may hold the answer.
HarperCollins has released an enhanced e-book for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in advance of the film adaptation of the same. The book is a perfect test case for the promises and flaws of the enhanced e-book market.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn’t an app, but a multimedia EPUB book. EPUB is as close as we have to a universal e-book standard. This immediately makes it multi-platform and multi-device — no need for separate iOS or Android code, or store approval. All you need is an application on those platforms that can read EPUB, and a touchscreen. EPUB books can’t be read on the Kindle, but the Kindle isn’t a multimedia touchscreen device either, so that’s no loss anyways.
Sometimes, enhancing e-books with multimedia seems like a solution in search of a problem. Generally, readers aren’t clamoring for enhanced books. Writers and publishers don’t always understand them, and there isn’t always good content to put in them.
Lewis’s Narnia books are different. They have a well-established readership and are broadly popular with both adults and children. They’ve already gone transmedia, spinning off games and movies; the writer’s estate is willing to develop and authorize new media, and companies like HarperCollins and Disney have the tools and incentives to develop them. The serial nature of the books, in turn, gives the books continuity and room to evolve.
What’s more, the visually rich and conceptually encyclopedic nature of the books means that adding maps, illustrations, animations, reference guides, and timelines actually become very useful reading aids. Add in audio readings and commentaries, critical essays, and you have something that could become the equivalent of a deluxe DVD edition of a beloved book.
Really, the deluxe DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings were enhanced e-books without us fully realizing it — at least those portions devoted to author JRR Tolkien, the writing of the books and the world of Middle Earth. That’s the standard against which we should judge enhanced e-books.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t quite get there. I reviewed the iBooks version, which costs $10, $2 more than the $8 “non-enhanced” version. It gets the Pauline Baynes maps and illustrations, animation and reference encyclopedia right. This material alone is worth the extra $2.
But a promising “read along” feature, using audio from Shakespearean actor/audiobook standout Derek Jacobi’s reading of the book, is hopelessly crippled, providing just the first few paragraphs of each chapter. If you want to hear the whole thing, you’ll need to buy the separate audiobook, which costs another $17 from iTunes. Putting snippets of audio in the e-book feels like a terrible tease.
Again and again, enhanced e-books bump up against rights that have already been sold and assigned. The video content, including an animated timeline/summary of the story, is solid, but considering the e-book is intended as a cross-promotion with the film, it’s sad that it doesn’t even include previews from the film.
It’s a worthwhile object for what it is. But it’s ultimately frustrating, because the potential for an integrated object on video-capable e-readers like the iPad and Nook Color is so clear, at least to me.
The publishing industry, though, is so knotted — the media streams so legally and functionally fragmented — that the opportunities for a clear case study, an example that everyone can point to as a standard, get squandered again and again.
What’s that, the greatest Android tablet of the moment caught without its pants on again? Oh, no, it’s just another iFixit special, tearing down a Samsung Galaxy Tab into its requisite bits, bobs, and a slab of Gorilla Glass. The removal of that pane turned out to be the trickiest part, requiring a lot of heat and a little “nervous prying” before it yielded. But, yield it did, and you can see the piece-by-piece teardown on the other end of the source link below.
We’ve literally been waiting for Tegra 2 tablets since CES in January, but that isn’t stopping NVIDIA boss Jen-Hsun Huang from extolling their virtues yet again, this time on a roadmap that points to just after next year‘s CES. In his company’s most recent quarterly results call, Huang was bullish about the disruptive potential of tablets, but insisted that they can’t simply be built like the Galaxy Tab (or the Folio 100, for that matter), which uses a smartphone OS stretched out to a larger screen. “A tablet is not a large phone,” says Huang, and he’s of course not alone in expressing frustration with Android’s current immaturity for the tablet realm, but once Google’s slate-friendly OS update drops, he promises NVIDIA will be ready to capitalize: “Our tablet and phone business is going to ramp. And it’s going to ramp hard.” We’re looking forward to all this ramping, oh yes we are.
We know it’s a little tough to get excited about a chip, even if that chip is the hotly anticipated Samsung Orion. Still, bear with us, because this isn’t your average slab of cellphone silicon — the Orion’s got a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU and a quad-core Mali 400 GPU on board. We spotted it at the ARM Technology Conference this week where it was pimping “Linaro” Linux middleware, as well as some stock Android 2.2. Unfortunately, the development boards still have a few kinks, so representatives couldn’t show it pumping all those pixels to nearby HDTVs — though we did get a butter-smooth demo of Futuremark’s old Cyber Samurai benchmark running on the smaller screen. There are still rumors of this chip hitting some products late this year, but next year is much more likely. Either way, we’re expecting some pretty impressive benchmarks from this thing when it inevitably winds up in the next Galaxy Tab or a flagship phone of some sort.
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