The other day I posed a simple question: How far do you sit from your TV? The results show that many of you are not getting all the definition out of your HDTV.
As mentioned, the Lechner Distance chart illustrates that there are specific distances at which the human eye has the best chance of processing all of the detail that HDTV resolution has to offer. According to the data collected in the poll, many of you are probably sitting too far away, especially those of you who sprung for a 1080p set.
Poll results in the 1080i/1080p group for sets under 40-inches indicated that a whopping of 60% of respondents were sitting over six feet from the screen. This is definitely too far away to see all of the detail.
For sets between 40 and 52 inches, 43% of you are sitting over eight feet from the screen. Again, too far away to see it all.
For sets over 52-inches, 35% are sitting between 8 and 10 feet, while 30% are sitting over 10 feet away. To put it in perspective, a 60-inch 1080p set should be about 8 feet (or closer) from you to get the full experience. Even a huge 70-inch 1080p TV should technically only be nine or so feet from your head!
In case you haven’t yet checked out the full chart at HDGuru, here are the optimal viewing distances—based on screen size—for some common-sized 1080p HDTVs:
Analysis You will notice that we didn’t go into detail about those of you who responded to the 720p portion of the test, and that’s because, by and large, you are watching at about the right distance. 720p TVs can be set out farther than 1080p, yet because they’re cheaper, they find their way into smaller living rooms. Because of the interplay of these two factors, 720p sets are all the more likely to be set up at an optimal viewing distance.
But 1080p, considered better, winds up in larger living rooms, but not always at larger sizes. The joke is, by keeping it as far off as we noted above, you are not much better off with that fancy 1080p set than you would have been, saving some cash and going with 720p.
A final observation is that 6 to 8 feet is far and away the most common distance across all TV sizes and resolutions for you folks—we don’t know what it means except that there are other factors besides Lechner distance that play a larger part in the decision to place the TV, and that most of us—Giz editors included—are unaware that we are not getting the full bang for our HDTV buck.
The situation can be easily remedied by consulting the Lechner chart and whipping out a good old tape measure. In some situations this may not be possible given the dimensions of a room, so it is up to to decide what your priorities are—like should I move the TV to a smaller room, or go out and buy a bigger TV? [Original Survey]
Natal may be the latest gaming breakthrough, but it’s just one of many evolutions and revisions in controller designs over the years. Whether it was the gamepad, analog controls, or a fishing rod, there have been plenty of neat innovations.
Galaxy Game: This was one of the first arcade games to ever come out. Pong’s Poteniometer: Pong’s controller consisted of little more than potentiometer—that round dial you turn—as its sole gaming control. Simple, but still fun to this day. Atari Paddles: Pretty much like the Pong controller, but, you know, handheld and in your living room. Atari 2600 Joystick: The Atari 2600 Joystick went in and added a big red button to go next to the joystick, giving your finger a nice target to land on. ColecoVision: As games started to ramp up in complexity, consoles such as the ColecoVision started adding more buttons and controller forms. Maybe that’s just what they wanted us to think, but either way, controllers started getting a lot of buttons. NES: The NES controller had one of the first D-pads used for gaming, changing the way we hold gaming controllers. It also managed to scale back the number of buttons on the controller. Power Pad: The Track and Field Pad gained popularity because it was one of the early control innovations that let you get in on the gaming action by mimicking real world actions. And because of World Class Track Meet, I can’t think of 8-bit track and field games with out the Power Pad coming to mind. Zapper: Light Guns. Duck Hunt. Need I say more? Ok, fine…it’s a damn shame more games didn’t use this thing. NES Advantage: The NES Advantage brought Turbo and Slow macros into play, letting you flip a switch for gameplay modifications. Turbo let the controller register multiple taps every time you hit the button once, and made the character move faster. Slow made everything move at a snail’s pace for precision gaming. The problem is, most the games weren’t designed around this idea, so it worked better in theory than actual practice. R.O.B. the Robot: As much as R.O.B. is loved, the Gyromite star wasn’t so much an evolution in gaming controls as much as he was pure gaming gimmick. His ability to stack rings was a neat demo of what was possible on the NES, but it was difficult to extend that idea to other games. Power Glove: I love the Power Glove. It’s so…bad. I feel like this is the peripheral we all wanted as kids, but none of us ever actually got. Utilizing a series of flex sensors and speakers that could read your movements and interpret them as in game controllers, the Power Glove was one of the earliest motion gaming devices. Sure, the life of the Mattel device was short lived and criticized, but the Rad Racer scene from The Wizard will live on forever. Sega Master System Controller: The Master System controller was one of the first 8-way D-pads, joining the NES in ushering in a joystick-less revolution in directional inputs. SNES Controller: Nintendo continued to push things forward by including two extra face buttons (diamond configuration!!) along with the even more significant inclusion of shoulder buttons. Now more fingers than just our thumbs were able to get in on the action. Honorable Mention: Sega Genesis Six Button Controller: The original Genesis gamepad added a extra button, which was cool, but the Six Button Controller was way better because the button layout was perfect for games like Street Fighter II. To this day, six-button gamepads are still made for fighting games. Sega Activator: This octagon-shaped ring was another early attempt at motion gaming. There were 8 IR stations around the ring, and each one corresponded to a different set of actions. Move your foot over that IR beam, and you’d carry out the action. It wasn’t the best innovation from Sega, but the idea was in the right place. Nintendo 64: Despite it’s unique shape, Rumble Pak, expansion port, trigger button, and multiple colors, the biggest innovation the N64 controller brought to gaming controllers was the inclusion of an analog joystick, which upped the ante as far as precision gaming went. And it was absolutely essential, as gaming moved into the world of 3D. PlayStation Dual Shock: The electronics inside the initial PSX controller were pretty run of the mill—D-pad, shoulder buttons, face buttons. But the controller has some of the greatest ergonomics ever seen in a gaming device. And the development of dual analog sticks, and then pressure sensitive face buttons on the PS2 iteration make it an absolute winner. Dreamcast: In addition to including some of the first analog trigger buttons, the Dreamcast controller also had a spot for the Tamagotchi-like Virtual Memory Unit, which let you play mini-games related to the larger console game, and would allow you to progress further or rack up stats while you were away from the console. Dreamcast Fishing Controller: This was one of the first console gaming peripherals to mimic the real world that wasn’t a gun or a steering wheel. It also has legendary cult status amongst Dreamcast fans thanks to Sega Bass Fishing. Samba de Amigo Maracas: Probably the game controller with the most personality since R.O.B. (wait do robots have personalities?), the Samba de Amigo maracas could keep a party going for hours. You shake, the score on the screen bakes. Nintendo WaveBird: Nintendo’s wireless WaveBird controller was the first wireless controller that didn’t totally suck. While it didn’t revolutionize the way we play games directly, it did open up possibilities for future controller designs. DDR Dance Mat: The Dance Dance Revolution mat is essentially the Power Pad revisited, but it’s the best implementation of a mat/pad-style game that you use with your feet. Stomping for fun experienced a renaissance with DDR. Guitar Hero Guitar Controller: Don’t underestimate the power of a guitar shaped controller and a little imagination. With Guitar Hero, we all lived out our deepest fantasy of shredding harder than Hendrix. Sure, you could accomplish the same exact thing with a table controller (or even a gamepad, for that matter), but would it have been half as fun? Nintendo introduced the touchscreen DS in 2004, which brought tactile gaming into the mainstream. Nintendo kept saying they saw a trend where a user didn’t want games to keep getting more complex. Rather, new gamers favored simpler gameplay and more intuitive controls. Apparently they were hardwired into the gaming zeitgeist. Overwhelming commercial success ensued. The Wii Remote, soon known as “Wiimote,” made a big break from the popular trends in gaming. Leery of dual sticks and the glut of buttons, the Wiimote is all about intuitive gameplay, making use of accelerometers and IR sensors to provide motion gaming in 3D space. It’s elongated, upright shape makes gameplay with one hand easy, but you can also add a nunchuk for slightly more conventional gaming, or plug it into a shell for some gimmicky fun. Wii Motion Plus: Well the first version of the Wii didn’t really track your movement in game with extreme precision. However, with Wii Motion Plus, which adds a gyroscope into the mix, your actions will be integrated into gameplay more than ever. EyeToy: The EyeToy for the PS2 was one of the first camera-based devices to truly let you interact with the game. Most of of the compatible software consisted of disposable minigames, but it was awesome to see your movements affecting the action on screen. Vuzix CamAR: Vuzix showed CamAR, their augmented reality system earlier this year, which overlays computer graphics onto real world settings, bringing the game into our own world. Using a pair of video glasses and a head-mounted camera, you can interact with digital elements that don’t actually exist. Neurosky Mindset: Neurosky is leading the way in mind controls with the Mindset, which monitors specific cerebral activity, and is able to translate changes in those brainwaves to in-game action. For now, you can’t control the entire game using just your mind, but seeing how gaming controls have evolved over the last 30 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they got close some day. Headtracking: Headtracking is when the game follows your own movement, and changes the frame of reference according to your absolute position in the room. So if you lean to the left or right in front of the TV, the scene on the TV will change accordingly. NaturalPoint currently has a Trakkir, a PC gaming peripheral that does just this. Homebrew hacks have also been carried out on the Wii, and in our demo, Natal seemed able to do this. PlayStation Motion Control: PlayStation’s entry into motion controlling revolves around the PS3 EyeToy, and a special wand which the camera knows to interpret specially as a controller. Sony too promises 1:1 motion gaming with their solution. Natal: Microsoft Natal is a complete, hands-free motion tracking sensor, that uses an RGB camera, infrared depth sensor and microphone to detect your position and movement in relation to the TV. Then you are put directly in the game, with what is promised to be 1:1 motion (apparently Natal can track 48 points of the body).
Got a game with a lot of commands, but are sick of supporting the Big Keyboard industry? Meet your rebel input replacement, the Peregrine. Demonstrated to us at E3, the Peregrine is basically an elastic glove with some wires sewn into it at various points. Connecting one of those points to conductive patches on the palm and thumb creates an electrical circuit, which the glove’s brain converts to a keypress. It’s like a glove but with power — a sort of power glove, if you will. The main application is MMOs, where you could touch your thumb and forefinger together to cast a spell in a role-playing game or touch your middle finger to your palm to heal yourself. Or your character, anyway. More impressions and some spec-ops intrigue after the break.
Cans are so hot right now; the bigger and gaudier the better, because nothing says “Don’t talk to me” like giant domes covering your ears. Creative’s latest set, Fatal1ty Professional Series Gaming Headset MkII, don’t really have much to offer in the flash category and certainly aren’t excessively sized, but for serious gamers they seem to be a solid option and just the thing to keep your mom from interrupting your session. Shipping next week for $99, they offer an over-ear design with memory-foam surrounds and a sophisticated but not particularly flashy look that says “I want to look cool while wearing these, but I’ll leave the chrome to my CPU fan, thanks.” They sport a detachable boom that has not one but two microphones in it and some apparently fancy-schmantsy processing that can discern your howl of war from your dog’s howl of neglect, meaning your CS teammates hear only the former. Unfortunately we weren’t able to try that out for ourselves, so we’ll have to see how well that pans out in the real world. The set uses the standard jumble of 3.5mm audio jacks to connect to your machine, but a Creative rep was kind enough to disclose plans for a USB version that’ll work sans-soundcard. That model is due sometime next month for a $30 premium.
When a bunch of reviews hit, it’s useful—and sometimes funny—to see how they echo each other, and how they differ.
In the Palm Pre reviews, nobody used the word “iPhone” as much as WSJ’s Walt Mossberg—he was a third more likely to use it than his colleagues David Pogue (NYT) and Ed Baig (USA Today) were, and he even lead with a discussion of it, before mentioning the Pre. Nobody wrote nearly as long as Josh at Engadget: His review is over 10,000 words; ours, the next longest, was just over 3,000. There was a lot of consensus here, though notable disharmony when it came to Sprint service and the Pre’s tight keyboard.
And nobody, but nobody, mastered the metaphor like Jason Chen. Except maybe David Pogue. Read on…
Of course, there’s no way to fit even all the main points into the review matrix, so if you want to go and check out the other reviews for yourself, damnit, you should!
Lots of people have Chuck Yeager aspirations but Joe Schmoe opportunities for flight time. For them there’s the flight sim. Titles like Microsoft Flight Sim and Falcon are some of the earliest to popularize PC gaming, and since the beginning they’ve been accompanied by high-price controllers that replicate the experience of flying. Logitech’s Flight System G940 is the latest. We spent a little bit of time with it in the company’s cramped meeting room on the show floor to see if it’s worth adding to your virtual hangar.
For the past few years E3 has been a tale of two guitar games. In a lot of ways it still is, with the Guitar Hero and Rock Band clans still battling it out for plastic instrument supremacy, but this year two turntable games are also vying for your attention. DJ Hero has far more brand recognition on the box, but Scratch: the Ultimate DJ has the better hardware, and we got our hands on it.
One last effort. A slow, but firm, shove of the chips. All in. Palm’s only hope to save a company once synonymous with smart handheld devices: the Pre. Their eyebrow raised, daring you to call. They flip. Full house. Respectable. Decent. Impressive even. But not the highest hand.
That’s not to say that the phone isn’t good, because it is. The software has quite a few interesting innovations that push the concepts of what people can do with smartphones, like Google Android when it debuted—only better. The market needs this. The industry needs this. We need this. But the hardware? Cheap. Flimsy. Dangerous even.
I’ve used the Pre as my main device for a week, forwarding my number through Google Voice so I could see what it was like living with it. I was able to pull my contacts from Facebook and Google into the phone quite easily, despite the Pre not supporting syncing to OS X Address Book, so it was a near-seamless transition. Sprint reception is unfortunately bad enough at my house to give me horrible voice quality, but not bad enough to drop calls. The device felt great in my pocket and in my hands, and the text and email notifications are informative without being intrusive. Other than trying to be discreet when I went to my usual exotic locales—the supermarket, Costco, restaurants and San Francisco—there wasn’t anything incredible to note. In short, it’s definitely a capable smartphone, one that I would have no problem using full time.
THE HARDWARE: Screen It’s the best multitouch screen we’ve seen yet. Pre’s screen is smaller than both the iPhone and the G2’s, but has the same 320×480 resolution that equals both, which means the pixels are just more compact. Watching the Dark Knight on both phones showed that the Pre was just slightly crisper, and just slightly nicer than on the iPhone. Though, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell unless you had each side by side. It’s like the difference between a $2,500 TV and a $2,000 TV. Unless you had both in your living room or looked at them one after the other, you couldn’t see a difference.
The black bezel also provides a great contrast to the screen, bordering it with an eye-soothing darkness that makes images pop that much more. At maximum brightness, it doesn’t seem as bright as the iPhone, but is bright enough to be just fine under the sun. The glossy finish makes it slightly harder to see if you’re worried about glare, however. In everyday indoor use, the screen is a tiny bit bluer in color temperature than the iPhone’s—either not something you’d notice or a matter of preference.
But the multitouch! I can’t tell if it’s because there’s a better CPU backing it up, or a better digitizer, or if it’s just better software, but the touch is more accurate, more responsive and just plain better than the iPhone’s. The invention of a ripple effect where you press the screen is genius, and goes partway to solving the chronic problem of passive feedback—whether or not the OS knows you’ve pressed the screen. I say partway, since the phone occasionally still doesn’t register your clicks, even when the ripple appears.
Multitouch is glorious
Screen is bright, bezel provides great contrast and overall holds up nicely to the iPhone
Body and Build The first thing you’ll notice as you slide open the Pre is the absurdly sharp ridge digging against your palm. Nowhere—not on the iPhone, the G1, the G2 or any of HTC’s other smartphones—has a phone been so threatening to the integrity of my skin. If you’re pushing up screen from the bottom of the phone, as you’d instinctively want to do, prepare to get sliced. It’s just that irresponsibly sharp.
To be fair, Palm instructs you to open the phone by placing your thumb on the screen itself and pushing up. Fantastic plan, except for the fact that it’s a touchscreen and by placing your thumb on the screen you’re actually moving stuff around. It’s a kluge; a solution thought of after the fact to salvage a horrible hardware design decision. Even if you do things Palm’s way, the top manages to catch occasionally while sliding open, especially if you’re pushing slightly above or below the middle of the phone.
Maybe I’m being a perfectionist here, but this is the one biggest flaw in the hardware; one that’s not a dealbreaker, but really detracts from the overall experience.
The rest of the body, thankfully, is not nearly as bad. But it’s also not spectacular. The two halves of the device come together fairly tightly, but not tightly enough to prevent you from being able to twist the top and bottom like a plastic Oreo cookie. It’s one of those small things that are inconsequential, but extremely annoying to people who own the phone—like the back battery cover requiring you to pry off three different points in order to get it off. Or the microUSB connector cover that takes fingernails and a blatant disregard for having a permanent hole in the side of your phone in order to remove it.
Despite these issues, while closed, the phone feels just right in your hand. It’s thicker than the iPhone, but rounded like a polished stone and shorter than you’d expect. If Palm had just been able to make the Pre feel and look less plasticky, the closed-state exterior would be almost perfect.
Build quality is only so-so, and feels plasticky
Bottom edge of the phone is way too sharp
Keyboard It’s not good enough for a smartphone. Each of my thumbs take up the width of four keys, ensuring that only a fingernail approach would get me anywhere near accurate typing. It’s a very Centro-like key layout, and each individual key feels slightly too rubbery and sticky to be pleasant. Each key offers lots of resistance and doesn’t depress quite enough to get a good tactile feel while typing quickly.
After using the Pre for a week, I’m able to get a respectable word-per-minute rate on the keys, but the fact that there’s no word prediction—the kind that saves your ass on the iPhone or Android G2—negates some speed you may have gained from using a hardware keyboard. The fact that each physical key is 30% or so smaller than a virtual key on the iPhone should illustrate to how difficult it is to hit the buttons accurately, and how much better typing on the Pre would have been if there were better auto-correction. What the Pre does do is make very very minor changes, like “teh” to “the” or “isnt” to “isn’t”, but that’s only this side of nothing.
It’s a hardware keyboard
Keys are too small, plasticky and don’t give enough feedback
Battery Life On most days, with heavier than usual usage, I was able to make the Pre last just about the entire day. Going from 8AM to 9PM with at least 20% battery left should be no problem. The only time I ran the battery down to zero prematurely was the one day where I was doing heavy testing and had AIM on, which currently has a buggy implementation that sucks more power than is necessary. It’s at the very least on par with the iPhone 3G and G2 battery life, and is way better than the G1’s.
Camera It’s a 3-megapixel camera, but when it comes to actually taking pictures, it isn’t any better than the G2 or the iPhone. Like most cheap-o cameras, photos are fine with ample sunlight, but in low-light conditions pictures become grainy—even when using the “flash” on the back, it’s only barely tolerable.
Camera doesn’t suck
THE SOFTWARE Web OS Here, if I may extend my card metaphor, is where Palm laid down four aces. The OS is really where the Pre shines, and manages to create a coherent internet-based platform that’s even more “connected” than Google Android.
On the whole, the OS is quite pleasant looking—with slick icons, a 5-app launch bar and a three-screen menu system that houses all your applications. The bit of the phone under the screen is a gesture area, which you can use to go back a screen (swipe left) or launch apps from the launch tray (swipe up to the screen). The rest of the gestures are the same as the iPhone’s, except the concept of swiping an app up, off the phone, to close it.
It’s too bad the home screen is so much wasted space. There’s just nothing there except for the five apps on the bottom. Palm’s main idea is to keep that area free; free so you can swipe through the app “cards” of the things you have open, free so you can pull up a Universal Search just by typing, and free so you can open the phone by putting your fat thumb on the screen. But this just means you can only quick-launch five apps from the home screen, forcing you to either go into the launcher (+1 click) or start typing the name of the app you want and hope Universal Search brings it up (+ a bunch of clicks).
There are a few particularly commendable features. The little notification bars on the bottom of the phone for new emails, texts, system actions and song changes are wonderful, and can be dismissed with a swipe. The swipe is also slightly different than on the iPhone, allowing you to just delete list items without having to confirm them. The font they used for emails also seems fat and generous without being overly large, and allows the same five emails to be visible at once as on the iPhone.
A lot of time and care and great ideas were put into this OS
Dialing is somewhere where Palm’s reliance on Universal Search becomes an over reliance on Universal Search. To dial a contact, you either have to pull up the contacts app and manually scroll down to the person you want (there’s no alphabet shortcut) or start typing. So, when you have hundreds of contacts, your only reasonable choice is to use the search. There isn’t even a “favorites” screen of any kind; Palm just gives you a retro speed dial feature where you can map numbers to particular keys on the keyboard—a clumsy solution for speed dialing.
Speaking of Universal Search, it does actually work quite well. It’s the same concept as on iPhone 3.0, searching your contacts, apps, Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter for whatever you type. Searching is actually faster than the iPhone’s search, but only because it doesn’t also search emails, or calendar entries or your music. So that “Universal” in Universal Search isn’t quite so Universal.
Universal Search for contacts works well
Dated speed dial implementation
Syncing to Facebook and Google Contacts via Synergy works flawlessly, and merges contacts from both services together so you don’t have duplicates of contacts floating around. A manual merge or a manual split can solve any quirks from this function quite easily. Synergy also combines your SMS and IM conversations into one window, so you can seamlessly text someone and then switch over to IM when he reaches his desk. Synergy’s basically just an easy way to make sure services like Google have your data (Contacts and Calendar) pulled down into your phone automatically.
Facebook and Google sync keeps you connected, but may populate your phones with a bunch of people you don’t actually know
A lot of fuss has been made of the Pre’s ability to multitask, and for good reason. It works. Launching a new app is just a matter of hitting the Center button (the gray button on the front), and opening something from the launcher or the tray. The new app pops up as a new card, pushing your currently running programs to the side. Pressing the Center button again pops up all your cards, which you can then flip through to find the app you want. Sliding the card up, off the screen, closes it.
Opening multiple apps at once really does slow down the phone enough to be noticeable. In fact, if you’re doing something particularly intensive, you’ll actually notice your music stutter, which we’ve never experienced once on the iPhone. Ever. The problem with giving you the ability to open a lot of apps at once means you need to police yourself and close them when they’re not in use. But it’s damn well worth it. Being able to view a PDF, then flipping over to Messaging answer a text, then over to Music to change a song, then over to email to tap out a quickie—that’s computing.
Multitasking works well, but it’s up to you to figure out how many apps your phone can take
It’s interesting that launching apps takes one extra click as you fire up the Launcher, and that the Launcher itself only has three pages of apps to use. It’s better than the one long page that Android has, but not quite as generous as the iPhone’s 9 pages. That one extra tap doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of the two years that you own your phone, that’s many seconds lost with extra taps.
Palm makes one of the first mistakes of UI design by not having text under the icons in the Quick Launch bar, making you guess at what each app is. The good news is that you can swap apps in and out from the launcher, so you probably know what those apps are, since you put them there.
Also, the actual act of launching the app is a little frustrating: When you tap an icon, the launcher disappears and all you see is the home screen, as if you did something wrong. You don’t know whether or not your app has opened successfully until it has. Seeing a totally blank screen or some kind of splash screen come up first before the app is running (like the iPhone, once again) would be a better solution.
The Launcher only has three screens, and requires a lot of scrolling to find your app
The home screen’s Quick Launch only holds five apps, but you can customize them
Music and videos, on the other hand, are handled well. The extra man-hours of getting the Pre to pretend that it’s an iPod for iTunes to sync was well worth it. All the proper files, with their metadata, make it over just fine; playlists too. Videos appear in the Videos app, and your song files can be searched and sorted from inside the Music app. What doesn’t seem to be supported are the ratings or play counts in iTunes. And although you can check the box in iTunes to initiate Calendar/Contact sync with the Pre, they don’t actually make it over to the phone.
So it’s not a perfect implementation. DRM tracks from iTunes aren’t syncable, of course, and you have to leave the Music app open at all times, in the background, for your music to play. That concept seems more than obvious on your PC, but becomes somewhat of an oddity on your phone. You’ll find yourself accidentally closing your Music app more than once.
As for video, it’s essentially what you’d imagine a barebones video player to be, supporting MPEG4, H.263, H.264, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3GPP, 3G2, and 3GP2—more video codecs than the iPhone (surprise, surprise), but not more than other phones in this class. It does the job, there’s seeking and aspect ratio fitting, but it’s nothing special.
If Palm continues to ensure iTunes syncing capability, it’ll ease the transition for people with large iTunes libraries
App rundown: • Google Maps is actually better on the Pre than it is on the iPhone, loading blocks and scrolling around being much smoother than we’re used to • Sprint Navigator (by TeleNav) is an excellent port of the same program you see in other phones—the GPS works smoothly, like in the Google Maps • Doc View and PDF view are capable enough PDF and Word viewers • There’s an alarm clock, but no stopwatch or world clock; you can download a Weather app from the App Catalog • The photo viewer works the same as the iPhone’s, with swiping gestures, and can upload directly to your Facebook account • The browser works off the latest WebKit build, and is fast and snappy; it should be about as good as iPhone 3.0’s browser, since they both use WebKit • Backup works much like Microsoft’s My Phone, storing your contacts, calendar and tasks, as well as app and system settings on your Palm profile; it comes with the phone, and is useful if you ever have to wipe or replace a lost phone • YouTube quality is just as good as any other phone, even if it does seem to take slightly longer to bring up videos on the Pre
First party apps are solid
The App Catalog is pretty bare at launch, with Pandora, Sudoku, Accuweather, AP/NYT, the Classic Palm OS emulator, Connect 4, Spaz (Twitter client), Tweed (another Twitter client), a Stocks app and some various other utilities. Their respective download screens have ample information, including links to the developer’s home page and support pages, as well as ratings and reviews. Once downloaded, the apps behave like any other native apps on the Pre, and can be multitasked just fine.
All the apps in the catalog now are made by developers with a closer association with Palm, so they get access to the native libraries. Why haven’t they opened up the SDK and allowed everyone to use native libraries instead of just web tech like HTML/Javascript? I don’t know. When it comes down to apps, lack of open SDK is why the Pre is currently inferior to the iPhone or Android. Under this plan, we’ll get a small percentage of good, solid apps, and a bunch of apps that aren’t living up to their potential.
The App Catalog has a handful of decent apps already, but the fact that Palm is singling out only trusted developers to write software for the Pre isn’t a great sign
Now for the miscellaneous complaints. The lack of a D-Pad on the phone forces you to always tap where you want, even when the list item is just one notch lower than the one currently selected. Copying and pasting only works in text fields where you can write, not when reading emails or SMS or web pages.
VERDICT
Think of it like this. The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.
I’m bored of the iPhone. The core functionality and design have remained the same for the last two years, and since 3.0 is just more of the same, and—barring some kind of June surprise—that’s another year of the same old icons and swiping and pinching. It’s time for something different. The Pre may have hardware that’s worse than the G1/G2, but the whole package—the software and the hardware—isn’t bad. It’s good. It’s different. That’s something we can get behind. I can’t wait to see what Palm gets dealt in their next hand.
Impressive start to an OS that should form the base of some quality phones in the future
Hardware quality is lacking, and feels flimsy and plasticky compared to the G1, G2 and the iPhone
One hands-on with Project Natal would make for a nice story, but it wouldn’t be complete. So we’re giving you two full sets of impressions on Microsoft’s motion-capturing E3 bombshell.
Matt Buchanan tested Project Natal today, as did I. Here is his personal take on the technology right alongside mine. We did not share our independent experiences before pasting the text below. Neither of us were allowed to shoot what was happening on screen—hence the crazy pics of our bodily reactions, and that intensely audible racing-game video.
How Natal Works The test system was an ordinary Xbox 360, connected to small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig. There are two cameras—one RGB, for face recognition and display video, and one infrared, for tracking movement and depth. Why infrared? The eye doesn’t see infrared light. And when you combine an infrared camera with an infrared emitter (also part of Natal), a room is flooded with a spectrum of invisible light that works in the dark.
Natal also has its own internal processing system handling an unspecified amount of the heavy lifting behind Natal’s cleaver image and speech recognition. It breaks the human body into 48 points tracked in real time, and it can sense your whole body in Z space, or depth. In fact, on a heat map that measured depth, my hands appeared hotter than my shoulders—because they were closer.
Natal is so smart, in fact, that, if your room is narrowed by a pair of couches, it can signal to a game to narrow the level. It can see about 15′ x 20′ of a room, according to project leader Kudo Tsunoda’s informal estimation.
Breakout Matt: My first taste was talking to the father of Project Natal, Kudo Tsunoda and watching as his simple, small hand gestures were mapped perfectly onto the screen. He started up the ballsmacker demo you might have seen in our liveblog, knocking a swarm of balls into wall with every part of his body.
When Kudo gestured to me try it, I jumped right in and immediately started smacking at balls with my hands and feet and knees and arms and head as one ball exploded into many, like a virus, until I was doing sad white ninja jerking and jumping movements. Kudo didn’t tell me how to “set it up” or what to do. I just did it. You have to realize, Kudo towers over me. I didn’t have to calibrate it to my body size, or stand in a weird way for it to adjust. It just worked. Well, until I broke it at the end—it froze up after a few rounds and had to be rebooted for Mark. Hey, it’s an early tech demo, so don’t read into it. Until that point, it worked remarkably, incredibly well—better than I expected, honestly. The bright fluorescent lights were turned off and on, and Natal didn’t flinch. My real movements translated exactly how I expected them to—the precise position, velocity—90 percent of the time, no matter how ridiculously I moved, and some of the other 10 percent might’ve just been my own bad timing. But the result is a remarkable sense of control. Immersion.
Mark: Microsoft loaded the 3D Breakout demo we saw at their press conference. I stepped up to a white piece of tape right after Matt, and given that I’m 4 inches taller, Natal needed to account for my larger size.
After about 10 seconds, the blue, ghost-like figure filled in. And he was both taller and bigger-handed than Matt’s avatar. Natal noticed that I’m a bigger guy. It made no adjustments for the fact that I’m also better looking.
The first thing I noticed was a slight lag I hadn’t intended. It’s not horrible, but my avatar moved a hair more slowly than I did. That didn’t stop me from reaching up, spiking the imaginary ball at a wall imaginary bricks, and then flailing around to keep up with 2, 3, 4, 5 and more spheres flying at me at once.
My avatar recognized both my pitiful kicks and swipes. And while my avatar never left the ground when I jumped, this turned out to be but an animation limitation within Microsoft’s tech demo. My wireframe preview image and heatmap did leave the ground. Besides, this is nitpicking. On the PS2 I played Nike Kinetic, something a bit similar. And I always wanted to be having fun. But on Natal, even in a stuffy windowless room surrounded by Microsoft execs, I was having fun. (Disregard my stern, focused face in these pictures.)
Burnout Revenge Matt: The Burnout racing-game demo was a little more abstract—in one sense, I almost wished I had a wheel to turn, a pedal to press, because I wanted the feedback. I had trouble getting used to “pressing” the gas, which you do by moving your right foot forward. I threw myself off-balance by taking a ginormous step toward the Frankenstein’s lab of demo equipment along the wall (upon which I could see myself represented in infared, covered in boxes like smallpox). But turning my air steering wheel, I felt completely in control. A lot of that was the software—it registered even the smallest pivots of my elbows that sent my forearms right or left—but the way it responded exactly how I expected it to is what made it feel so natural. Which is the real key here. It feels natural.
After I hit full speed on a straightaway, I tried to do a 180. I crashed into a wall and died. Normally, that’d make me bad. But I couldn’t stop smiling that I’d held the future of gaming control in my hands—and it was simply air.
Mark: As soon as Matt crashed, I greedily jumped in, asking him if it was OK but not waiting for him to answer. I wanted to play Natal more, and I’ve played a ton of Burnout.
Burnout showcases a few important points for Microsoft. First, it’s a real game that’s been on the 360. So Natal doesn’t weigh down on the processors so hard that you can’t play games. Second, it requires fine motor control.
I raised my hands in the air, mining a steering wheel. I hadn’t given the system any time to scan my body after kicking Matt out, but I stepped by foot forward, signaling the gas all the same. The car accelerated. I twisted my arms. The car turned just the right amount.
Microsoft had clearly tweaked the Burnout code a bit, forcing the car to feel a bit more like a powerful sedan than a street illegal beast out of some Fast and Furious sequel. And I’m guessing that Natal’s ever so slight control delay was masked by the feeling of a looser-driving steering wheel that we find in more standard cars.
So I floor it, growing confident as I wave through traffic and slowly build speed. I reach maximum velocity, throw my foot back to break, cut the wheel and toss the car into a spin. Yes. This feels right. Just right.
Holy shit.
But Natal can’t work this well. It just CAN’T. I need to break it, teach this Microsoft prototype a little humility. What if I stand on my tip toes and steer eight feet in the air?
The car handles fine.
What if I kneel on the ground and steer?
Yup, it still works, save for a moment when my knee shifted and I tricked the machine—a fair mistake, even by my highly ridiculous dork standards.
Closing Thoughts Matt: Project Natal is the vision of gaming that’s danced through people’s heads for decades—gaming without the abstraction of controllers, using your body and natural movements—which came more sharply into focus when Nintendo announced the Wii a few years ago. I haven’t been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft’s keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that’ll happen soon enough.
Mark: 2010…or maybe even 2011…is just too long to wait. I want Natal now.
For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to take you favorite classic TV shows and drag them into the 21st century. And let me tell you, I would pay good money to see Doogie Howser, /b/tard.
First Place — Snickers McPickles Second Place — Miguel Lopez Third Place — Ana Andrade
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.
The other day I posed a simple question: How far do you sit from your TV? The results show that many of you are not getting all the definition out of your HDTV.
Wii Motion Plus: Well the first version of the Wii didn’t really track your movement in game with extreme precision. However, with Wii Motion Plus, which adds a gyroscope into the mix, your actions will be integrated into gameplay more than ever.
When a bunch of reviews hit, it’s useful—and sometimes funny—to see how they echo each other, and how they differ.
It’s here.
Screen
Multitouch is glorious
Screen is bright, bezel provides great contrast and overall holds up nicely to the iPhone
Build quality is only so-so, and feels plasticky
Bottom edge of the phone is way too sharp
Keyboard
Camera
Web OS
There are a few particularly commendable features. The little notification bars on the bottom of the phone for new emails, texts, system actions and song changes are wonderful, and can be dismissed with a swipe. The swipe is also slightly different than on the iPhone, allowing you to just delete list items without having to confirm them. The font they used for emails also seems fat and generous without being overly large, and allows the same five emails to be visible at once as on the iPhone.
Dialing is somewhere where Palm’s reliance on Universal Search becomes an over reliance on Universal Search. To dial a contact, you either have to pull up the contacts app and manually scroll down to the person you want (there’s no alphabet shortcut) or start typing. So, when you have hundreds of contacts, your only reasonable choice is to use the search. There isn’t even a “favorites” screen of any kind; Palm just gives you a retro speed dial feature where you can map numbers to particular keys on the keyboard—a clumsy solution for speed dialing.
Dated speed dial implementation
Syncing to Facebook and Google Contacts via Synergy works flawlessly, and merges contacts from both services together so you don’t have duplicates of contacts floating around. A manual merge or a manual split can solve any quirks from this function quite easily. Synergy also combines your SMS and IM conversations into one window, so you can seamlessly text someone and then switch over to IM when he reaches his desk. Synergy’s basically just an easy way to make sure services like Google have your data (Contacts and Calendar) pulled down into your phone automatically.
A lot of fuss has been made of the Pre’s ability to multitask, and for good reason. It works. Launching a new app is just a matter of hitting the Center button (the gray button on the front), and opening something from the launcher or the tray. The new app pops up as a new card, pushing your currently running programs to the side. Pressing the Center button again pops up all your cards, which you can then flip through to find the app you want. Sliding the card up, off the screen, closes it.
App rundown:
The App Catalog is pretty bare at launch, with Pandora, Sudoku, Accuweather, AP/NYT, the Classic Palm OS emulator, Connect 4, Spaz (Twitter client), Tweed (another Twitter client), a Stocks app and some various other utilities. Their respective download screens have ample information, including links to the developer’s home page and support pages, as well as ratings and reviews. Once downloaded, the apps behave like any other native apps on the Pre, and can be multitasked just fine.
One hands-on with 
Matt: My first taste was talking to the father of Project Natal, Kudo Tsunoda and watching as his simple, small hand gestures were mapped perfectly onto the screen. He started up the ballsmacker demo you might have seen in our liveblog, knocking a swarm of balls into wall with every part of his body.
Mark: Microsoft loaded the 3D Breakout demo we saw at their press conference. I stepped up to a white piece of tape right after Matt, and given that I’m 4 inches taller, Natal needed to account for my larger size.
Matt: The Burnout racing-game demo was a little more abstract—in one sense, I almost wished I had a wheel to turn, a pedal to press, because I wanted the feedback. I had trouble getting used to “pressing” the gas, which you do by moving your right foot forward. I threw myself off-balance by taking a ginormous step toward the Frankenstein’s lab of demo equipment along the wall (upon which I could see myself represented in infared, covered in boxes like smallpox). But turning my air steering wheel, I felt completely in control. A lot of that was the software—it registered even the smallest pivots of my elbows that sent my forearms right or left—but the way it responded exactly how I expected it to is what made it feel so natural. Which is the real key here. It feels natural.
Mark: As soon as Matt crashed, I greedily jumped in, asking him if it was OK but not waiting for him to answer. I wanted to play Natal more, and I’ve played a ton of Burnout.
For this week’s 
Second Place — Miguel Lopez
Third Place — Ana Andrade
