Hasta La Gadget!

Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The Blu-ray Disc Association has positioned Toshiba joining its membership as the epilogue in the company’s once pitched battle for high-definition disc domination. It could, however, merely be a new chapter in the broader story of home entertainment as it uses the players not only to fill some product-line gaps but takes advantage of their connectivity to move to a future beyond any disc standard.

Back when it was tending to its fresh format war wounds, Toshiba did not always see this potential. After it exited– and effectively ended– the HD DVD market, the March 3, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Toshiba chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida that detailed ambitious plans for avoiding Blu-ray. On the low end, Toshiba would improve DVD playback to seek near-parity with Blu-ray quality at lower cost. That idea was productized in Toshiba’s XDE DVD players and televisions. XDE was met with mixed reviews, however, and the plummeting prices of Blu-ray hardware last holiday season cut its viability short.

Flirting with connectivity on the high-end, Nishida noted that it was now possible to bridge PCs and televisions better, and that he wanted to put “even more energy” into video downloading. He may have been considering Toshiba’s Qosmio multimedia powerhouse notebooks as an engine for driving high-definition content to the television. However, the long-lingering idea of bridging the PC and television, while indeed becoming easier technologically, still simply isn’t worth the effort for most consumers. At CES 2009 as Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Samsung, LG and Vizio showed off connected televisions, Toshiba didn’t announce any broadband content partnerships for its premium Regza line of TVs.

Continue reading Switched On: Toshiba and the Blu-ray Trojan Horse

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Switched On: Toshiba and the Blu-ray Trojan Horse originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Much of the speculation around an “iPad” — a rumored 10″ Apple tablet — has portrayed it as an Amazon Kindle-killer or a large-screen iPod touch, but there’s a strong case that such a product could effectively serve as a replacement for – or a compelling complement to — Apple’s non-platform sleeper Apple TV.

Apple faces a dilemma in moving iPhone apps to a larger screen size or higher resolution. It must either scale them (ugly), ask developers to create a large-screen version (cumbersome), or run them in a window (which would beg some level of multitasking at least beyond what the iPhone OS does today). Not only that, but a 10″ device is simply inconvenient for some of the iPhone’s apps. Just try focusing on the road with a 10″ navigation screen suctioned to your windshield.

The base version of Apple TV is 40 GB, just a bit over the 32 GB that has been offered on the iPod touch and iPhone. By the end of the year, a 64 GB flash product could be well within reach for a flash-based iPad. That would easily store many consumers’ photo libraries and a Netflix queue’s worth of movies. Rumors about the “Cocktail” music experience notwithstanding, the tablet would make an excellent platform for watching and displaying video and photos. a 10″ screen would be a fine fit for 720p video and the small size would mask artifacts that could show up on the 50″ television. But the iPad would be even more versatile than Apple TV.

Continue reading Switched On: The iPad could succeed Apple TV

Filed under: Handhelds

Switched On: The iPad could succeed Apple TV originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Palm’s webOS certainly faces strong competition as it vies for attention from manufacturers, carriers, developers and consumers. But Palm was able to knock out at least one ailing offering by making webOS the replacement for the old Palm OS. For others it may not be so easy. In fact, with the barriers to entry now so high and the commitment to existing operating systems so great, webOS may be the last major smartphone operating system launched for the foreseeable future.

With webOS taking the baton from Palm OS, the number of major smartphone operating systems has stayed fixed at six. Three of them — Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Android — are intended to be used by handset makers from multiple manufacturers, whereas iPhone OS, BlackBerry OS and webOS are used only on the handsets offered by their developer. Of course, even these “purebred” operating systems owe much to older platform technologies, with Android and webOS being built atop a Linux kernel, iPhone OS having its distant roots in FreeBSD, and BlackBerry and Android building on Java. The race to attract software to these platforms has ignited an arms race of development funds to both prime the supply pump and the promotion of app stores to lead the horses to he touch-sensitive virtual koi ponds..

Developing and maintaining a smartphone operating system is a serious and expensive undertaking that can consume a company. Producing the original iPhone caused Apple to miss the self-imposed ship date of Leopard, and third-party app support did not come until much later. Whatever Microsoft is planning in a major overhaul for Windows Mobile 7 has taken long enough to warrant the release of the interim 6.5 release that still leaves the company far behind the state of the art. WebOS development clearly took up a significant portion of the $425 million investment from Elevation Partners in Palm. And finishing a 1.0 release is just the beginning.

Continue reading Switched On: The last smartphone OS

Filed under: Cellphones

Switched On: The last smartphone OS originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Despite powering only a handful of handsets available on the market, Android has already had a significant impact on the competitive landscape in smartphones. Looking at its primary rivals that run on a variety of hardware from multiple manufacturers, Android has provided a free and highly customizable licensed challenge to Windows Mobile, And competition with the Google-developed mobile operating system may have also provided the final push of Symbian into the world of open source.

Just because Android has turned the tables, though, does not mean it should be used on devices that rest on them. Recently, the infatuation with Android has led to much speculation and supplication regarding the operating system as an alternative on netbooks and less proven “gaptops” that live between the smartphone and the notebook. But while blazing benchmarks may erase any speed records set by netbooks running Windows, they can’t erase what amounts to a weak case for Android on these devices.

Recent history shows that the overwhelming majority of consumers want Windows on their netbooks. This has become especially true as the market has shifted from the quasi-appliance like original Asus Eee, with its suboptimal 7″ screen, to most netbooks running 10″ and now even larger screens and vendors such as Dell and HP that are pillars of the Windows hardware world have grabbed market share. Even these manufacturers have more to gain by going with their own twist on Linux. HP, for example, has created a unique and differentiated experience with its Linux environment for netbooks. It will take some time before various Android implementations are so unique. It’s unclear why an Android-based netbook would fare much better than Linux-based netbooks have.

Continue reading Switched On: When netbooks suffer from ‘Droid rage

Filed under: Laptops

Switched On: When netbooks suffer from ‘Droid rage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Amazon’s Kindle DX includes a few tweaks such as automatically rotating the orientation of the screen when it is placed in landscape mode and adjustable page margins because… well, CEO Jeff Bezos seems to like the feature. Literally, though, the biggest change is the new 9.7-inch electronic ink screen, which displays two and a half times more content than the 6-inch screen on the Kindle 2 and Sony Reader. The expanded display allows more detailed graphics to be seen without zooming or panning, and is better suited to a wide range of source material including maps, technical diagrams, and sheet music. But textbooks and newspapers were singled out as two printed sources that are particularly significant for the forthcoming device.

These publications both benefit from the larger Kindle screen size, but each face different challenges in finding success on the Kindle DX. For newspapers, the Kindle DX cuts down on the costs of printing. Newspapers, though, are already struggling against competitors that did away with that expense years ago, including blogs that break stories and online entities such as Craigslist, eBay and Google that have siphoned away advertising revenue. Textbooks, on the other hand, have no major electronic competition, and print still retains advantages such as better readability and color. But digital textbooks must compete with used textbooks, a major market on college campuses, and likely will not be able to be resold if other digital content is a predecessor.

At the Kindle DX launch, representatives from The New York Times Company and Case Western Reserve University both characterized their involvement with the Kindle DX as a trial or experimentation. What’s behind the arm’s length embrace?

Continue reading Switched On: Big Kindle on Campus

Filed under: Handhelds

Switched On: Big Kindle on Campus originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 May 2009 17:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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