AT&T’s network is basically a huge failure. And if you want to fix their incompetence in your area, you’ll need to pay an additional $150 for a 3G MicroCell. I call bullshit.
Danny touched on this earlier, but the logic here is blowing my mind. How little regard for your customers do you have to have to offer a product that fixes your own product for an additional fee every month? Seriously, somebody explain to me how this is going to fly.
AT&T is currently testing the MicroCell in North Carolina, charging up to $20 a month to people who want to fix the dead spot in their apartment by running their phone through the internet. And they’re charging subscribers $150 for the box itself. It’s all a trial, so any of these prices could change, but as it stands it’s pretty ridiculous.
And AT&T is the last carrier to the femtocell party. Sprint charges $20 a month for its AiRave femtocell and Verizon charges $250 for its Network Extender box. T-Mobile charges $10 a month for its @Home service, which uses Wi-Fi instead of a cellular connection, but does the same thing. All of the carriers are ripping off their customers with these things, since all of the work is being put on your home internet connection, which you pay your broadband carrier for.
AT&T’s new test of their MicroCell seems as egregious as any of the carriers, so let’s use them as an example. Basically, AT&T didn’t have a strong enough network to handle the iPhone. It still doesn’t. Yet they still charge about $100 per month on average to iPhone customers, who have to deal with dropped calls, delayed voicemails and unreliable 3G speeds. If you are in a particularly bad spot, the 3G MicroCell will let you run your calls through your internet connection rather than over their shit network.
Where do they get off charging for this? Femtocells will actually reduce the load on their networks. It shifts the traffic over to the internet provider you’re already paying for (which I’m sure ISPs will just love). How does this earn AT&T $20 per month, no matter how much you talk?
The way the iPhone performs on AT&T’s network—or really, any dead spot for any carrier—they should be giving these out to people for free. In NYC and San Francisco, the service is near-unusable a good percentage of the time. AT&T is always talking about how they’re increasing coverage, but it never seems to get better. In fact, the week after they claimed to have completed upgrades in New York, my experiences with their coverage got noticeably worse.
Imagine this was the case with any of your other monthly bills. Oh, sorry about the brownouts! The power company has had some troubles at the plant. I know it was inconvenient, but they’ll fix it for you with a solar panel for an additional fee per month. As for your gym membership, sorry that it was closed four days a week last month! For an extra fee every month you can get a Bowflex so you can still work out whenever that happens.
It’s ludicrous. If their network was solid, these MicroCells wouldn’t even need to exist. AT&T is cutting off your arm and then trying to sell you some bandages. Hey, AT&T: people are already paying you for cell service. You can’t charge them again for the same service. Fix your fucking network.
You’re busy—believe me, I understand. You want to make the most of your time off, and that means speeding up mundane activities. These gadgets can help.
Lighting a charcoal grill is a pain in the ass—pure and simple. A chimney works well, but this hot air starter works faster (60 seconds to be exact). The device doesn’t use lighter fluid, instead it heats up air to 1,290 degrees Fahrenheit. If 60 seconds isn’t fast enough for you, there are other, considerably more dangerous alternatives. [Hammacher via Link] Nobody wants to wait for a bottle of wine or beer to chill properly, which is why gadgets exist to expedite the process. The Cooper Cooler claims to chill beverages 90 times faster than a refrigerator. That means a bottle of room temperature white wine will chill to 43 degrees in less than six minutes. A bottle of beer or soda will be ice cold inside a minute. [Wine Enthusiast] If you don’t like waiting for programs to load enough to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a SSD, look no further than Fusion-io’s ioDrive Duo. It’s the fastest storage drive on the planet with insane 1.5GB per second sustained read speeds and 1.4GB per second sustained write speeds. [Fusion-io via Link] Dead batteries aren’t something you want to mess around with when you really need a flashlight. The 5.11 Tactical series UC3.400 LED can shine at a super-bright 90 lumens for 90 minutes on a charge that only takes 90 seconds. [5.11 Tactical via Link] Manually loading pictures and video to your desktop and/or various social networking sites is a waste of time. Eye-Fi’s line of wireless SD cards cut out the middleman by automatically delivering media to the computers and websites you specify over a Wi-Fi connection. [Eye-Fi] The Taipei 101 skyscraper has 101 floors above ground and 5 floors below. Needless to say, you are going to need a pretty fast elevator in order to avoid standing in a cramped space for an extended period of time. It just so happens that the Taipei 101 has the world’s fastest elevator—capable of traveling between floors at 37.7 mph. Hit the following link to see just how fast that really is. [Link] Even if you could satisfy a woman, chances are it would take considerably more time and physical effort than you are able to spend. Fortunately, Suart Meloy has himself a real-life orgasmitron. The implant is attached to the nerves in your spine responsible for sexual pleasure. Simply clicking on a remote control should result in near instant orgasms for both men and women. [io9 via Link]
The other week, we explained how Apple influences a ton of what goes on in tech by shaping industry-wide standards. This week, we’re gonna look at Microsoft, and what’s it’s done with standards.
Microsoft obviously has a more complicated relationship with “industry” standards, because anything it decides is its standard—even proprietary ones—becomes a kind of de facto standard for everybody else, simply because of Microsoft’s overwhelming marketshare. This was more true in the past than today, with Microsoft playing ball with everybody else more often.
Microsoft’s AV Club Let’s start with Windows Media Audio—most commonly, it’s known as Microsoft’s proprietary audio codec that at one point fought the good fight against MP3, but is now much more, having grown into a sprawling family of various codecs with multiple versions. To name a few of the current ones, there’s WMA 9, WMA 9 Lossless and WMA 10 Pro. Microsoft says it offers superior quality/compression over MP3, with “CD quality at data rates from 64 to 192 kilobits per second.” Needless to say, while it’s baked into Windows Media Player for ripping CDs and is supported by a fairly wide range of PMPs and phones, it obviously never displaced MP3, nor is it ascendant as the “new” standard like AAC (the official successor of MP3), basically since it isn’t supported by the iPod, which owns over 70 percent of the MP3 player market. WMA Pro, despite being an even better codec than WMA, has more limited support still, mostly with Microsoft’s own hardware, like the Xbox 360 and Zune.
WMA’s more ignoble legacy, undoubtedly, is PlaysForSure, Microsoft’s grand attempt to standardize the entire digital music industry (except Apple, or rather, against Apple) by getting everybody on the same page. PlaysForSure was technically a certification for players and services with a variety of requirements, but support for WMA, WMV and Windows Media DRM is what it amounted to in practice. Microsoft succeeded, for a time: Pretty much every PMP maker and services from Walmart, Rhapsody, MSN Music, Yahoo, Napster and others were all aboard PlaysForSure. Then it imploded. As every real music service went to DRM-free MP3, Microsoft re-branded it to Certified for Windows Vista. Which, incidentally, was a badge they slapped on the Zune, Microsoft’s own audio player that didn’t actually support PlaysForSure. When Microsoft ditched its own standard for its premiere player, everybody knew PlaysForSure was dead.
Windows Media has been more successful on the video front, with WMV. Like WMA, it’s gone through multiple versions: At one point (WMV 7) merely Microsoft’s take on the MPEG-2 standard, Microsoft actually succeeded in making it a genuine industry standard, with WMV 9 becoming the basis for the VC-1 codec that’s backed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. VC-1 is part of the spec for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, though at this point it’s really just an alternative to H.264, which is becoming the dominant modern video codec. WMV saw some success as the codec of choice for some services during the heyday or PlaysForSure (since WMV support was part of the certification), but now it sees a lot of action as the video codec for Silverlight, Microsoft’s Adobe Flash competitor.
Internet Exploder Silverlight itself actually isn’t doing so bad, considering it’s fighting Flash, which is installed on the vast majority of internet-connected computers, powering Netflix’s streaming service and last summer, NBC’s streaming Olympics coverage. But like Flash, it’s proprietary, which is obviously a bit disconcerting for people who want an open web. Which brings us to Internet Explorer. The early history of IE and Netscape is grossly complicated, but suffice it to say, being included with Windows eventually gave IE over 90 percent of browser marketshare. In other words, Microsoft defined how an overwhelming majority of people looked at the internet for years—meaning it essentially defined what the internet look like. Microsoft essentially stopped moving forward with IE6, sitting on its ass for years, which is a problem since it’s totally non-compliant with what most people would call modern web standards. (Short version: Web developers hate IE6.) With IE8, which entered a new world with Firefox having devoured a huge chunk of its marketshare, Microsoft supports actual real web standards (mostly—it still fails the Acid3 test miserably). And, they’re actually serious about HTML5, even though they’re not planning to implement the controversial video aspect at all.
Do You Trust Me? Obviously, Microsoft’s in an odd spot in part because the constant specter of antitrust allegations hang over its head—it’s had to de-couple Internet Explorer from Windows in Europe, and it’s moved to separate other stuff from the core OS, like even its mail, video and photo applications, making it harder to achieve the kind of de facto standards through sheer force of market like before.
Which might be part of the reason it’s moving to make tech legit industry standards—besides VC-1 above, for instance, its HD Photo has become the basis for the successor to JPEG, now dubbed JPEG XR. Also, it’s simply that standards matter more now than ever as people do more and more of their computing on the web, on multiple platforms from Windows desktops to Android phones, so industry-wide standards are way preferable to proprietary formats, even if most people still are on Windows.
Increasingly, if Microsoft wants people to use their tech, they’re going to have to open it up in the same quasi-way Apple has (it’ll also go a long way with the whole trust/control issues people have with Microsoft). So don’t surprised if you see Microsoft continue to “open up” and “standardize.” Just don’t be surprised if the standards they embrace have Microsoft tech at the core.
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom’s legs or Steve Ballmer’s deodorant to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
The big question: Can the Zune HD compete with the iPod Touch? I get the sense that Microsoft isn’t trying to, exactly.
While the Touch and its apps are a multi use pocket computer, the Zune HD is an evolution of the PMP—not a devolution of some smartphone model. Every new feature it has is used to expand the way you absorb media, from the HD video output to the HD radio to the redesigned UI.
Hardware
The Zune HD is not a simple curved rectangle with a screen, like the iPod Touch, but a resolutely industrial, luxurious, angular and slim design. From the angled back to the visible screws to the long and thin home button, the Zune HD is a look all its own.
Constructed of aluminum, rubberized black plastic and glass, the Zune HD feels tough and solid in the hand. The widescreen display offers less space for non-media applications like web browsing, but for media (which, after all, is the Zune HD’s raison d’etre), it’s a really nice size. It won’t quite fit in the change pocket of your jeans, but it’ll slip into even the tightest of regular pockets. The iPod Touch may be a hair thinner, but the Zune HD’s narrower body makes it feel much smaller.
The gorgeous 3.3-inch capacitive OLED touchscreen takes up the majority of the device’s face. More on that below. It’s surrounded by three hardware buttons: Underneath the screen on the face is the home button, on the top edge is the power/hold button, and in lieu of a volume rocker the Zune HD has a button on the left side that brings up Quickplay options. These options drift onto the screen and offer volume, track forward/back and play/pause. Quickplay can be enabled to work even while the player is locked.
On the bottom of the device is the proprietary Zune port (the Zune HD will work with all of the surprisingly easy-to-find existing Zune accessories) and the headphone jack. It’s rated for 33 hours of audio and 8.5 of video, which is very strong if it’s true (especially since previous Zunes were lacking in battery life, to say the least). The Zune HD lacks both a speaker and a camera, though neither is necessarily a mark against it. Still, both options would be welcome.
Screen One of the first PMPs with an OLED screen (the Sony X-Series being the other major one), the Zune HD theoretically has a sharper picture and deeper blacks compared with LCD screens like the one on the iPod Touch.
The Zune HD’s screen is a 3.3-inch multitouch capacitive touchscreen, in a 16:9 (widescreen) ratio running at an ironically non-HD 480×272. The iPod Touch, in comparison, is a 3.5-inch multitouch capacitive LCD, but in 4:3 (fullscreen) ratio running at 480×320, which is more efficient for web browsing but a waste of space for straightforward media playback. They’re pretty equal in responsiveness, both being about as accurate a touchscreen as you’re likely to find.
The Zune HD’s screen is definitely sharper and with truer colors than the iPod Touch, when compared with the same video (a standard-def episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations). The iPod Touch’s pixels were clearly visible and the color seemed washed out and weak compared to the Zune HD. However, it’s not a perfect win for OLED: The Zune HD’s screen is extremely reflective, making it difficult to read in sunlight, while the iPod Touch’s LCD was quite easy to read in the same conditions.
Part of this difference is due to technology and part of this is due to UI. The iPod touch uses black text on white for music and video browsing, while the Zune HD is reversed. The Zune HD’s black background acts as a mirror, making it difficult to see anything but your own annoyed face.
Video
To take advantage of that premium OLED screen, Microsoft is really pushing high-quality video playback on the Zune HD. iPod comparisons aside, my sample HD clip (a 720p episode of Battlestar Galactica bought from the Zune store) sparkles. Tap the screen while video’s playing and “Quickplay controls” bring up every button you need.
Codec support, however, reduces the Zune HD’s appeal as a general purpose video player. It plays WMV, MP4, H.264 and DVR-MS (recorded video from Windows Media Center), which means it will play iPod-formatted clips (though of course not DRMed videos). That’s missing every codec video pirates care about, most importantly DivX for SD and MKV for HD. If you’ve got a load of torrented HD video in MKV like I do, you’re a bit screwed—I tried several converters (iSquint, Cucusoft, Handbrake) and never managed to transcode MKV to a decent-quality Zune-compatible file. If Microsoft isn’t going to include a converter in the software, the Zune HD should at least support DivX (like Samsung’s P3).
The thing is, the Zune HD is actually on par with the category leaders (iPod Touch, Sony X-Series) in codec support: All three force you to either get your video directly from the manufacturer’s stores or transcode your video into their specific formats. Microsoft could have scored huge with video freaks by supporting DivX and MKV. It’s frankly a huge pain in the ass to have to convert every single video I want to watch on my PMP.
If you’re really into torrented videos, I’d recommend the Samsung P3, although in just about every other way the Zune HD is a far superior device.
Zune as Media Center The Zune HD’s unparalleled ability to output video in 720p is a major selling point for the device, and let me tell you, it’s everything you’d hope it would be. Video is crisp, clear and smooth, looking just as good as the same video played through any bulky media streamer. The interface as a whole actually translates really well to a bigger screen, slightly dumbed down for speed’s sake (for example, there’s no background artist image on the now playing screen). It’s not as full-featured as an HTPC, but for just playing back your media, it does a great job. The screensaver on the now playing screen looks especially awesome on a big HDTV.
But to take advantage of HD content on your television, you’ll need to buy the $90 AV dock, which comes with the dock itself (including antenna for radio), a remote, an HDMI cable and a composite cable. Is it worth it? I’d say yes, if you’ve got an HDTV and plan to buy a lot of HD content from Zune marketplace. If you just want to display some video on a TV, you can buy the last-gen Zune’s standard-def AV pack for less than $20, all of which is compatible with the Zune HD. However, if you go the cheapskate route, you’ll be missing a major part of what separates the Zune HD from the pack. Not that it’s bad to toss a few 128kbps mp3 files on for a bus ride, but you wouldn’t really be taking advantage of what the Zune HD can do.
User Interface
Using the Zune HD and the iPod Touch together is jarring—they do mostly the same things, but they look vastly different. The Zune HD’s UI is everything but an example of Apple minimalism, constantly teetering between digital eye candy and complete ocular over-stimulation. It’s a white text on black layout, and has the very cool (and a little ballsy) design choice to zoom in to certain items so much that they’re actually cropped out of the screen. For example, on the homescreen, the word “marketplace” is cut off at the penultimate letter. Some will hate the design, but I think it’s a really interesting, aggressively artsy choice. Even when the UI feels too cluttered, which it sometimes does, it’s still great to look at.
Homescreen The homescreen is actually two homescreens in one. You’ve got the standard list of features, in this case “music, videos, pictures, radio, marketplace, social, podcasts, internet, settings,” but there’s also a Quickplay menu shrunk to the left side of the screen.
The Quickplay menu mirrors the new front page of the Zune software: It shows the album art and song title of the song that’s currently playing (if there is one currently playing), but also your “Pins,” “History,” and “New.” Pins are like favorites—you can tap and hold any item (song, podcast, video, photo) and pin it to this top menu. It’s great if you’re listening to something long like an audiobook or podcast. History is your recently played items, and New shows the most recent items you’ve synced to the Zune HD. That last is my favorite of all—I’ve got a huge and always expanding music collection, and tend to forget which albums I’ve just added to my PMP. It’s also great if you use the ZunePass subscription service, since you’ll be downloading so much you’ll forget what you meant to listen to.
Content Browsing The Zune HD uses the same grab-and-flick method of touchscreen navigation as the iPod Touch and Sony X-Series, though like the X-Series it doesn’t feel quite as fluid or organic as the iPod Touch. Trying to scroll really quickly through a long list of artists feels like it takes longer than it should, which is probably why Microsoft implemented an alphabet system. As you scroll through the lists of artists, albums or whatever, the actual letters are placed in their appropriate spots (on mine, the list of artists will read “Iron and Wine, Islands, J, Jay Reatard, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros). Tap any of these letters to bring up the full alphabet, any letter of which can be tapped to take you right there.
This is a decent method to get around long lists quickly, but I’d have preferred to separate the letters from the lists of actual items. I’ve accidentally hit a letter when I meant to hit an artist, and that could easily have been solved with a scrolling alphabet bar on the side.
Browsing through artist lists is mostly straightforward—mostly. There’s a bit of a continuity issue with the “one step back” function. On the now playing screen, it’s a left-pointing arrow in the top left corner, which is extremely obvious. But once you hit it, you’re on the song’s page (with options like email and rate), but now there’s no back button. Instead, there’s a word written in huge letters, so huge in fact that they’re cut off and not readable. Those letters actually spell out the name of the album, and tapping it functions as a back button, taking you back to the album. This can be fixed with a firmware update—just add a clear “back” icon like on the now playing screen!
Now Playing The Now Playing screen cleverly finds a photo of the artist and uses that as the wallpaper, and I love the screensaver that slowly scrolls the artist, track name, album name, length and album art. Microsoft nails the advanced design work—what about the obvious? How do I pause, navigate forward and backward, and adjust volume? It’s not as easy as it should be.
All of those controls are relegated to another Quickplay menu, activated either by the left side button or by tapping anywhere on the now playing screen that’s not another button. I don’t want to bring up a sub-menu to do things like pause music or adjust volume when relatively unimportant options like ratings get their own space on the screen.
Again, I get the sense that Microsoft was so enamored with the beauty of the UI (and it is certainly full of eye candy) that they refused to adjust it to insert simple playback controls.
Radio Surprisingly, FM radio has become a hot topic in PMPs, thanks to Microsoft’s announcement that the Zune HD will support HD radio and now Apple’s reversal on its long-held aversion to FM with its new iPod Nano. But HD radio is another example of Microsoft expanding the boundaries of the PMP: “So you support FM radio? We’re going to support it better.”
HD radio allows for both more stations and (hopefully) higher quality broadcasts. The Zune HD’s radio will often pick up two simultaneous broadcasts from one station, like San Francisco’s KFOG-1 and KFOG-2. The Zune HD’s reception is excellent, at least as clear as the iPod Nano, able to pick up a handful of HD stations, all with RDS data (artist, song name). Like the Nano, the Zune HD can pause and cache live radio, a great function, though it also cannot record.
Internet Browser
This is a serious surprise, after seeing the similar Sony X-Series‘s browser crash, burn, and then explode shards of awful all over me, but the Zune HD’s internet browser is awesome. The narrower 3.3-inch widescreen isn’t as spacious as that of the iPod Touch and pages definitely load a little slower, but besides that it’s a full-featured, fast and responsive browser. The accelerometer is very quick, panning is smooth and easy, and the standard multitouch gestures (pinch, drag) work nicely. Unfortunately, the Zune HD does not support YouTube or any other Flash video, which would have been a nice feature for quickly listening to new music.
The soft keyboard is functional (if a little small), built-in Bing search works well, and even an intense site like Gizmodo loads with no problem. Please, Microsoft: Stick this browser in Windows Mobile.
Syncing
The Zune software has been updated with a few features and slight UI changes to match the Zune HD. It now has a front page similar to the Zune HD’s homescreen Quickplay, and puts more of an emphasis on Smart DJ, which is an evolution of Microsoft’s Pandora-like recommendation service. If you’re not a member of the ZunePass subscription service, it’ll recommend music in your own library, and if you are, it’ll dig through the ZunePass’s massive collection. But it’s largely unchanged, which is a good thing.
The Zune HD is, like the other Zunes, Windows only. It can only sync with the Zune software, which is restricted to Windows.
This is, of course, a huge mistake on Microsoft’s part. Mac users would be right in the demographic sweet spot to be interested in the Zune HD: Media-loving, style-conscious, with money to burn on gadgets. Hell, the 32GB platinum Zune HD even matches the unibody MacBook Pro models. But with yet another Zune shunning Mac compatibility, it seems certain that Microsoft has given up on converting Apple zealots.
Apps Well, there are apps, technically. But Microsoft has stressed that the Zune HD is a media device first and foremost—there’s no SDK, so independent development is out for now, and the Zune team seems to have little interest in competing with Apple’s App Store. At launch, the Zune HD has seven games and two utilities (calculator and weather) available. The games are just ports of the games from older Zunes, like poker and sudoku. Even further, Microsoft has confirmed that Facebook and Twitter apps will come to the Zune HD, but only around November. For some, this may be the big weakness. The iPod Touch is really a pocket computer with an excellent touch-based music and video app. When you grab a Touch, you’re just as likely to play a game or check your email as you are to play some music. Meawhile, Archos and Creative both use Android, a mobile computing OS, to do similar things. The Zune HD doesn’t have the benefit of these ecosystems.
The app selection just confirms that the Zune HD is a PMP and not a mobile computer. You can’t even move an app to the homescreen; they stay stuck in the “apps” section, way down the list, confined like a grounded child to their bedroom.
However, the XNA team has just released an add-on for XNA Game Studio 3.1 that will allow developers to create apps for the Zune HD. They’ve demonstrated a multi-touch drawing app as proof, which is very cool, but remember, apps (like music and video) need to be loaded onto the device via the Zune software—and who knows whether Microsoft will allow third-party apps into the marketplace.
Best of Breed
The Zune HD is the best touchscreen PMP on the market. It’s got the most unique vision, the most impressive hardware and the most stylish software. It’s priced fairly at $220 for 16GB and $290 for 32GB, though I’d call the $90 dock a required accessory.
But I’m not sure that’s enough. PMPs like the Zune HD and Sony X-Series try to advance the genre with new and impressive media playback features, but the success of the iPod Touch shows that that media playback alone isn’t necessarily enough anymore. People seem to want pocketable computers, either in smartphone or near-smartphone form, or simpler, smaller devices like the iPod Nano and SanDisk’s Sansa line. So it’s not going to steal sales from the iPod Touch, but it should make some Samsung and Sony executives pretty jealous.
I’m left wishing Microsoft could get its Zune team to work with (read: boss around) the Windows Mobile team to put together a media phone. The Zune HD is a great PMP, but it could have been a jaw-dropping, unbelievable phone.
Flashy and unusual hardware
Excellent software integration
Advanced media features like HD video-out and HD radio
The portents have hung in the air for a while, but it’s clear now that the traditional dumb PMP is dead, like a dull and rusted Swiss army knife. In their stead we’ll have…smart PMPs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but yeah, we’re talking about the iPod touch model: It’s about platforms. That run apps. That people can develop awesome little programs for. In other words, a good PMP won’t just have great codec support and be able to push HD video, it’ll get you on Twitter or Facebook or tell you what’s good to eat nearby.
Not convinced? Check out the new Archos 5, which dumps the old OS for Android. Or the Creative Zii, also allegedly launching with Android. If you’re in the second tier, grabbing a popular app-friendly platform is not a bad way to compete.
Apple itself noted that old-school iPods were on a death march—so the company added a video camera to the nano, to keep it alive for a generation or two more. True, Sony’s X-Series appears to be keeping on keeping on, but it feels like an anacrhonism, albeit with a nice screen—no extendability, and a horrible internet browser.
The argument really comes down to the Zune HD, launching this week. It finds itself in an awkward position, essentially because of the effective limbo Microsoft’s mobile OS is in—in other words you can’t easily develop apps for both Zune HD and Windows Mobile, which Zune’s Brian Seitz basically admitted to the Seattle Times: “What we didn’t want to do was build two parallel app store experiences that didn’t work together.”
So there’s no open app store, but in the meantime, Microsoft’s providing the apps with a handful of chosen developers, so we’re stuck with games, and soon a Twitter and Facebook app. But what is clear is that Zune is a platform that people can develop for. And it seems inevitable that’ll be common with the next version of Windows Mobile, or the mysterious project Pink, if that is something else—at least, if Microsoft’s actually serious about the Zune having a future.
In other words, it’s startlingly clear now that the traditional PMP is history, replaced by PMPs powered by mobile platforms. They’re smartphones without the “phone,” and even lacking that major element, they’re surprisingly valuable, more pocket computer—with internet and apps—than glorified video player.
For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to imagine some truly shocking discoveries that the newly-rejiggered Hubble might make. And if the stuff you guys came up with really is out there, maybe we’re better off focusing on Earth.
I have spent the last two weeks reading a book on Sony’s two newest Readers, the Touch and the Pocket editions—one is overloaded with tricks but killed by glare, the other is simplified past the point of goodness.
What is an ebook reader? It is your relaxation companion, the screen you will stare at when the laptop is closed and the TV is off. In that sense, the ability to provide tranquility must always trump the latest trick. Pack in touch screens, pack in SD card readers, search, dictionary, library-book borrowing. You can pack it all in, but never, ever at the cost of that primary role. With the $300 6″ resistive-touchscreen Touch Edition, Sony fails to heed this simple agenda. With the super-simple $200 5″ Pocket, Sony seems to be flaunting it.
Mind you, neither are Kindle killers, but they never were supposed to be. They are cheaper than Kindle, in a niche all by themselves. They represent Sony’s third try at elusive ebook reader success, using its own bookstore and the necessary computer connection instead of pairing with a retail giant and a 3G wireless provider. Speaking of that, Sony takes on the now $300 Kindle with its $400 3G-capable Daily edition, which we hope to review in the coming months.
Touch Edition Up Close
The Touch, which I’ve been using primarily, has a lot of flaws but battery life isn’t one of them: I charged it 11 days ago, and it’s only now starting to die. The touch interface provides a relatively organic way to turn pages, though I always flick in the wrong direction. (You push your finger towards the next page, rather than flicking the current page back.) Update: You can set the turn motion to go either way. Thanks Weatherman!
When you tap words—with a fingernail or the included stylus—you get an instant dictionary definition, and a quick way to search an entire tome. The interface isn’t going to win any awards, and the dictionary doesn’t know a lot of words that it should, mainly past participles (“overheated”) or gerunds (“deteriorating”). But if those were the only issues, I’d say jump in—it’s a nice enough player priced well under the Kindle.
But the screen, oh God, the screen. Sony’s problem with glare continues unabated, and because the soon-to-be-launched 3G-connected flagship Daily edition also has a touchscreen, the glare problem is likely to sink that as well.
Blinded By The Light
What do I mean by glare? I mean that, lying in bed, with just my reading light on, I can see the perfect out line of my face. Sure, I am handsome, but when I read a book, I expect to be staring only at words on the page, not my own lovely mug. In a well-lit room, the glare from all sides is positively frustrating, and it shifts with every minor adjustment of my hand.
More and more LCD screens on laptops come with glossy finishes, and that can be a pain when you’re surrounded by natural light. However, LCD is back-lit. The light coming from within the screen combats the light bombarding it from outside, so you can still see a lot, and you can always jack up the brightness when you can’t. E-Ink isn’t backlit—that is its benefit. When done right, it looks like paper, with zero eye strain. But if you put a shiny membrane over that E-Ink, as Sony has done here, you get undefeatable glare—and eye strain galore.
Gimmicks Test Well
When I brought up this problem with Sony, they told me that touch was a huge selling point for focus groups. I can appreciate that, and can see how Sony thought this product “tested well,” perhaps in a setting where people are not reading for hours (or days or weeks), but are just messing around with the neat-o gadget. Also, anyone who only has the experience of the Touch edition may not realize there’s a whole world of glare-free ebook readers, from the Kindle to iRex’s Digital Reader, which actually has a touchscreen. It’s too bad Sony couldn’t figure out (or buy) iRex’s secret.
The people in the Touch focus groups should have been given a Pocket Reader too, as I was.
Pocket Edition Up Close
Literally pocketable and way cheaper, the Pocket is far more capable of delivering hours of peaceful reading. As you can see in the images, side by side, the screens couldn’t be more different. It’s not just relatively glare free, it has better contrast for even easier reading. The Pocket’s problem is that it is barebones to an almost insulting degree: No search, no dictionary, no card reader, no nothin’.
I could actually live without all of those features save one: Search. Keyword searching is to future readers what leafing around is to current ones. Don’t remember where you last saw the mysterious man in black? Do a quick search. The Pocket has bookmarks, so you can dog-ear the pages you want to remember, but search is about not having to remember—it’s about hindsight, not foresight.
Reward for Patience
In the end, I can’t recommend either device wholeheartedly, but I can tell you that if you plow through books fast and dirty, without jumping around a lot, you could do worse than drop $200 on the Pocket. It’s simple, it’s easy on the eyes, and for the time being, it’s the cheapest ebook reader out there. Add to that this lending-library feature that hopefully launches soon, and you could get the first reasonably budget reader.
The pricing situation will change dramatically within 12 months, but maybe not by Christmas. The iRex and Plastic Logic news we hope to hear by then is all about 3G Kindle competitors, probably in the $300-$500 range. There’s also this little thing about an Apple tablet that I can’t seem to forget about. One thing is for sure, no matter who the competition is, Sony is going to have a rough holiday season if that Daily’s screen is anything like the one on the Touch. [Touch Product Page; Pocket Product Page; Sony eBook Store]
Great compact size (actually fits in many pockets)
Its screen—unadulterated E-Ink—is as good as Kindle’s
Currently the best list price for an ebook reader
No touch interface, which may bother feature hounds
No helpful search function, no dictionary, no SD card reader
The book I was reading isThe Magicians by Lev Grossman. Lev happens to be an old friend of mine, but I’d recommend the book regardless, an R-rated post-Potter tale of a teenager’s induction into a magical university, fast paced and full of great insider references not just to Rowling but Tolkien and CS Lewis as well.
People don’t neglect backing up their computers because it’s hard—it isn’t, at all. No, people file into the inevitable death march of data loss for one reason: Backing up usually costs money. But it doesn’t have to.
When your concerned friends and family insist that you have to back your data up (as anyone who’s seen my atrociously beaten-down laptop in the last few months has done to me) they’re effectively telling you two things: That backing up your data will save you a massive headache in the future, because more likely the not, your hard drive will fail; and, less bluntly, that you need to buy a hard drive. And who wants to do that? It’s hard to lay out the cash for a backup hard drive, since the payoff is uncertain, and (hopefully) far away. It’s a good investment—not an easy one.
The good news is, most of us cheapskates can still keep our most important files safe without spending a dime, or wasting more than a few minutes. Here how:
Note: These methods don’t give you traditional, full backups—they are ways to keep copies of the files that matter most to you, like your documents, photos, music and videos.
Share
Do you live with someone else? Do you share a network with someone else? Then hey, you’ve got an ready-built backup system right there! There are a few ways to deal with this setup, from stupid-simple to moderately complex.
First, you need permission. Whoever your networked buddy is, sit them down and have a talk. Give them a glass of milk, and explain to them how important data backup is. Persuade them. Coax them. Scare them. Offer to store their backups in exchange for them storing yours. Great! Now you have a partner in data safety. Congratulations.
The easiest, most direct and least intimidating way to get free backups is to set up simple file sharing on your PC or Mac. On the PC, it’s just a matter of ticking a few boxes and setting a few parameters (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7) and on Mac, it’s not much harder (To another Mac, to a PC, courtesy of Lifehacker).
Now you need to decide what to back up, and how to do it. If privacy isn’t an issue, like in a scenario where you’re just syncing files between two open access family computers, you can simple copy your documents, photos, video and audio to opposing computers’ shared folders, and voila. If privacy is an issue, like if you’re trying to back up sensitive documents or embarrassing photos, you can simply create a password-protected archive of some or all of your data, then copy that over to the backup folder.
But this is all a little manual for my taste—for a longer term solution, I’d recommend something a little more automated. All we need with such a simple setup is a basic backup utility. For Windows, I’ve been happy with IdleBackup, a free little utility that’ll copy selected folders to any destination you want—including network folders—while your computer isn’t working. For Mac, Lacie’s SilverKeeper is as simple and powerful a tool as you’ll need, syncing folders locally or over a network on a set schedule—also free.
Go Online
Again, short of purchasing a whole lot of online space especially designed for the purpose of storing full backups, this’ll be a scenario in which you’re picking a choosing what you save and what you don’t; your intention here is to save and recover the files that matter most, not restore your entire operating system. Luckily, with increasingly generous offers from online storage companies, you can put quite a bit of your stuff on someone else’s servers for nothing. A few of the best:
Windows Live Skydrive: This one really deserves more publicity that it seems to get, because it hands you 25GB of no-strings-attached storage, for free. The 50MB filesize limit is a little low considering how large the online disk is, but for document, photo, and even music backup, it’s hard to beat this.
File Factory: 100GB of free storage with a 300MB file limit. The catch? It can be a little slow, so this much data isn’t necessarily that usable.
Dropbox: This is more than just a backup service—it has plenty of nifty file syncing and features, too—but it’s a super-simple way to store 2GB of data online, with well-designed clients on every major platform
Mozy: Gives you 2GB of storage for free, or an unlimited amount for $5 a month. Comes with an extremely handy Windows utility that makes it easy to specify what gets uploaded, and what doesn’t.
Orbit Files: Offers 6GB of space, but with fewer options available for non-paying customers, and no software client.
Scatter Yourself In the Cloud
The bad news is, this is the most time-consuming way to skirt proper backups, both in terms of setup and recovery. The good news is, you’re probably already doing this, to an extent.
If my laptop died right now, I’d lose my settings, a little bit of music, a few day’s worth of documents, and well, that’s about it. That’s because so, so much of my data lives in various online services, just by nature of how I work. Rather than undertaking a day-long effort to upload all your files to myriad websites, just consider changing your habits a little, and easing into a cloud over time. That these services provide useful backups is incidental—usually they’re intended as web apps—but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve the purpose beautifully. Use them for their intended purposes-be it document editing, photo sharing, or music streaming—and you’ll soon realize that, without even trying, you’ve create a wonderful, distributed backup of your most-used media across the internet.
Documents: Google Docs: This one’s a no-brainer, since a lot of you probably already use Gmail, with which Docs is tightly integrated. It can sometimes break formatting in files, but at least you won’t lose important data.
Office Live: Microsoft’s take on the online office suite comes with a free 5GB, which, let’s be honest, is an awful lot of Word documents.
Zoho: As an online office suite, Zoho offers a few little features that Google and Microsoft don’t. As a storage service, though, they only offer 1GB. Still!
Photos: Flickr: The obvious choice for photography geeks, Flickr give you unlimited storage for free, at a rate of 100MB a month.
Snapfish: With fewer options for enthusiasts, Snapfish’s draw is its unlimited storage and orderable photo prints.
Picasa: 1GB of Google’s storage space for free out of the box, with a nice client to boot.
Photobucket: Another 1GB of free storage, but this one takes video as well.
Facebook: This might seem like an unlikely recommendation, but they’ve got one of the best deals going, in a way. If you’re not concerned about the quality of your photo uploads—like, you just want them for onscreen viewing—you can upload unlimited photos here, 200 at a time. And in any case, a medium-quality JPEG is better than no photo at all.
Music: MP3Tunes: Puts your music library everywhere, with a bevy of client apps for various platforms, including the iPhone. 2GB of free storage isn’t much, but it’s something.
File Factory: Mentioned above in the general storage section, FileFactory also has a web interface for music. 100GB is quite possibly enough to store your whole library.
Deezer: A French music streaming service that also lets you upload as much music as you’d like, for personal use.
Video:
This is the most hackish of the bunch, but YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and the like usually support private or invite-only videos, which means they can act as last resort backup solutions, though the loss of quality and long upload times might make these plans a little unwieldy.
So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments—your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Happy data-hoarding, and have a great weekend!
With the the big 3D push coming in 2010, I planted my eyes on three types of 3D technologies displayed at CEDIA (home theater expo) that you may have in your next TV…and passed some judgments without pulling any punches.
It should be noted, all designs require glasses. (More technical background on the types of glasses here.)
Panasonic’s 3D Plasma Concept The Tech: Plasma with Active Shutter (alternating left eye, right eye progressive frames) As a baseline reference to get our bearings, I took yet another look at Panasonic’s 103-inch plasma display that we’ve seen twice before. My original impressions stand. It’s decent—and definitely the best technology of the three that we saw at CEDIA. Why? There’s virtually no flicker in the image because of plasma’s instantaneous response times/ability to push legitimate high frame rates. Plus, it probably helps that we’re talking about a 103-inch display (that has its own trailer). The bigger a 3D display, the better the illusion. But glasses aside, it’s not what I’d deem a perfect experience. You see ghosting around some objects. And…OK, I still can’t ignore the damned glasses. It creates an inherent distance from the image inducing an unintentionally ephemeral viewing experience.
Sony’s LCD Concept The Tech: 240Hz LCD with Active Shutter (alternating left eye, right eye progressive frames) Even Panasonic will tell you that 240Hz is the baseline speed needed for an LCD to pull off 3D. But you know what? 240Hz isn’t enough. Watching Pixar’s Up, the color and sharpness are both great, but there’s an absurd level of flicker that’s nominally better than on old timey crank projector. And on this normal-sized LCD, it’s incredibly obvious when 3D objects break the illusion by reaching the TV’s frame. Granted, we’re not talking about a final product here, but the specs seem pretty much identical to what consumers can expect to see in the high-end display market next year.
JVC’s GD-463D10 LCD The Tech: Polarized filter (two images are interlaced on the screen, each eye sees half the data, glasses don’t need power) Of the three technologies here, JVC’s is the only final product that’s actually available now. And it costs $9,153. It’s also easily the worst of the three—completely unwatchable, in fact. The interlaced 3D means that the resolution takes a huge hit. But it’s worse than just a 1080i picture. Your brain can almost make out these lines. I could say more about the tech, but I honestly couldn’t stand to look at the screen for more than 10 seconds at once. Oh, and the kicker? For nine thousand bucks, you still only get two pairs of the cheap, polarized glasses. Sorry kids, Mommy and Daddy are watching TV tonight.
There’s no doubt that some home theater enthusiasts will go out and plop down $5k or more on a commercially available 3D display when they enter the TV lines of major manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic in 2010. But I’m hoping, really hoping, that the public can resist the gimmick until the technology is perfected. To me, that means when we don’t need to deal with these silly glasses at all. But for whatever it’s worth, plasma is definitely looking like the clear front runner in execution. [Image]
If a robot uprising ever does happen, chances are it’s because we made them do stuff like this.
Who the hell wants to clean their gutters? Thanks to iRobot you don’t have to deal with the gross sludge that’s so hard to clean out. The Looj dislodges dirt and brushes your gutters squeaky clean via remote control. [iRobot via Link] After scrubbing the toilet, even a Lysol bath won’t make you feel clean again. Toto’s Neorest robo-toilets do the dirty work for you by summoning up a water cyclone that breaks up anything that might stick to the inside of the bowl. [Toto via Link] Gas station handles are a breeding ground for bacteria. Thankfully, the Dutch have come up with a robot that pumps gas for you. [Link] Cleaning bathrooms is bad enough, but imagine what it would be like at a highway rest area (or a Walmart for that matter)? The Japanese have come up with a robot that goes where humans fear to tread. Dubbed “Ladybird”, this autonomous robot happily scrubs down the area and even engages in awkward and surreal conversations with patrons. Indeed, if you ever travel to Japan you could find yourself holding your junk and asking a giant ladybug for the latest weather conditions. [Pink Tentacle] We all love our pets, but washing them is a different story. That’s why automatic pet washing machines are becoming more popular for hosing down and traumatizing your pooch. [Hacked Gadgets] Babies in diapers are bad enough, but adults in diapers are a whole other headache. That’s why engineers are hard at work developing robots that can take over some of the traditional responsibilities of a nurse. uBOT-5 can check vitals, dial 911 and help patients interact directly with their doctors via webcam. Other robots have been developed to deliver medication and even carry you around in exceedingly creepy ways. Like a Roomba for the great outdoors, the Dustbot vacuums the street and collects garbage on in areas where trucks can’t reach. It even makes housecalls via text message. [Dustbot] Robot sex dolls. Seriously, what real woman would have you? In the not so distant future, having sex with robots might be more common than you would expect. Progress is already being made in the form of Andy here—she takes one for the team with features a lifelike exterior, internal heating element, a beating heart that responds to increased “activity” and remote controlled hip wiggling. Just keep your fingers cross that real AI doesn’t happen in your lifetime. It will be a sad day when you are rejected by humans and robots. [The Register]
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
AT&T’s network is basically a huge failure. And if you want to fix their incompetence in your area, you’ll need to pay an additional $150 for a 3G MicroCell. I call bullshit.
Lighting a charcoal grill is a pain in the ass—pure and simple. A chimney works well, but this hot air starter works faster (60 seconds to be exact). The device doesn’t use lighter fluid, instead it heats up air to 1,290 degrees Fahrenheit. If 60 seconds isn’t fast enough for you, there are 
Nobody wants to wait for a bottle of wine or beer to chill properly, which is why gadgets exist to expedite the process. The Cooper Cooler claims to chill beverages 90 times faster than a refrigerator. That means a bottle of room temperature white wine will chill to 43 degrees in less than six minutes. A bottle of beer or soda will be ice cold inside a minute. [
The Taipei 101 skyscraper has 101 floors above ground and 5 floors below. Needless to say, you are going to need a pretty fast elevator in order to avoid standing in a cramped space for an extended period of time. It just so happens that the Taipei 101 has the world’s fastest elevator—capable of traveling between floors at 37.7 mph. Hit the following link to see just how fast that really is. [
Flashy and unusual hardware
Requires $90 accessory to be actually “HD”
Capacity restricted to 16GB and 32GB
Gas station handles are a breeding ground for bacteria. Thankfully, the Dutch have come up with a robot that pumps gas for you. [
Cleaning bathrooms is bad enough, but imagine what it would be like at a highway rest area (or a Walmart for that matter)? The Japanese have come up with a robot that goes where humans fear to tread. Dubbed “Ladybird”, this autonomous robot happily scrubs down the area and even engages in awkward and surreal conversations with patrons. Indeed, if you ever travel to Japan you could find yourself holding your junk and asking a giant ladybug for the latest weather conditions. [
Babies in diapers are bad enough, but adults in diapers are a whole other headache. That’s why engineers are hard at work developing robots that can take over some of the traditional responsibilities of a nurse. 
Robot sex dolls. Seriously, what real woman would have you? In the not so distant future, 
