This screw-in coffin seems very economical, both in saving ground space and not having to have heavy equipment to lower your family members into the ground. Cemeteries have limited ground in meatspace, so putting people in edgewise just makes sense.
Best of all, that lid comes with a religion-appropriate top, so that any Duckist can show off the proper symbol for their faith. [Random Good Stuff]
Glasgow’s Dutch-built “amfibus” resumed testing today after being grounded for an unnecessarily deployed airbag. From the video on BBC‘s website, it looks just like a big yellow schoolbus, but runs in liquid and allows writers to make water puns.
I imagine that these amphibious busses will be useful in places that get hammered by rain, and be vital for cities that need flood evacuation. Each one costs £700,000 ($1.09 million), and will be used to replace ferries. So instead of taking a bus, a ferry, and then a bus again, you can just take one vehicle and pretend you’re in MI6. [BBC
The upcoming i5 MacBook Pro refresh might be closer than we thought, with TUAW discovering that Best Buy emptied their systems of the current version. Since they’re not likely to go MacBook-less for long, that points to soon. [TUAW]
Google’s two new announcements: integrating a Twitter-like service into Gmail and a goal of a real-time speech translation service shows what direction they’re taking the company: Into the space between you and every other human being on the planet.
To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you’re talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company’s other products have been hinting at. Here’s a list of Google’s major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.
• Google Voice: This is a big one, and it’ll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you’re using it the way Google wants you to use it, you’re already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google’s tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you’re talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.
• Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone’s email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that’s not enough for Google, which is why they developed…
• Google Wave: It’s email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that “openness” loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google’s biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google’s maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn’t you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?
• Google Docs: For longer documents.
• Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.
• Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn’t have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.
• Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.
• Everything else. There’s Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren’t quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.
But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don’t think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they’re going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.
Do you know what type of organization that would deny you a fax—by sending you back another fax—to tell you the first fax you sent was upside down?
If you guessed the US Patent & Trademark Office, you probably work at the US Patent & Trade Office, or deal with them regularly. The relevant text is:
The faxed submission was received upside down. We are unable to continue processing these images.
So we have a few assumptions we can make about the setup over at the USPTO. They either still take manual faxes, as in stuff prints out in reams of paper over in the bowels of some bleak office structure, or they take faxes digitally and don’t have the expertise to use an image rotation program to rotate the damn image so it’s right-side-up. Either way, it’s hard to think of a situation that reflects worse on the people who are supposed to be judging our society’s technological advancements based on merit. [BNET]
Delta’s Touch Sensitive Faucet does one thing and one thing well: It dispenses water when touched with any part of your body, then shuts off when touched again. Not only that, it’s also a pretty fantastic faucet.
$547 on Delta’s site, but $300ish if you shop around
This is a high quality faucet, even without the touch features, and most likely beats whatever faucet you have installed in your house when you built/bought it. Add the touch features to that, and you get the first true revolution in sink faucets that I’ve seen in a while.
This actually isn’t Delta’s first touch-sensitive faucet. They had one model before that had this feature plus a motion-sensitivity, and discovered that most people only used the touch-sensitivity and decided to focus there instead.
It’s a little bit of a hassle to install, because you actually have to follow a series of instructions that has you removing your old faucet and installing this one (with the electronics that controls the touch-sensitivity). You actually need two people at one point, when you want to make sure you align the faucet correctly above the sink while the person below tightens.
It’s not completely undoable if you have a spare hand and you’re somewhat knowledgeable with tools, but I had a Delta professional install it to ensure optimum performance, and it didn’t take too much longer than an hour.
The touch sensitivity, if installed correctly, is good, but not overly sensitive. The faucet and water handle, on the right, are both smart enough to detect the difference between a grasp—when you’re moving the thing around—and a tap—when you’re turning it on and off.
You turn on the faucet like any other faucet, by using the handle and switching it left for hot and right for cold. Once it’s “on”, you can tap anywhere on the body or the handle to turn it off. Tap it again to turn it back on. When you’re completely done with washing, pull the handle down to the off position to ensure that a cat or a jumping baby brushing past it doesn’t activate the water flow. It’s also got a 4-minute timeout, so even if you do forget to turn the thing off, an accidental activation won’t flood your house.
It’s pretty great as an actual faucet too. The head has a pull-down for spray flexibility, and you can adjust the type of spray (like a shower) in one of two modes.
If you install it yourself, make sure you install the base plate insulation unit, because if you don’t, you’re going to get finicky performance from the touch-sensitivity part. I had to have the installer revisit a couple times because it’s not so clear in the instructions that many sinks need it, so even if you think you don’t, put it in. Not doing so will make the touch only work 1 out of 3 or 4 times, which is a painful grey zone between not working at all, which is fine, and working all the time. If something like this happens to you, you can luckily disable the touch portion and just use it as a regular faucet until you get around to repairing it.
Also, be aware that you’re going to get false positives occasionally when you’re reaching over and grabbing something off your sink and you brush against the faucet. This is much less frustrating than the alternative of the thing NOT working when you want it to.
Perhaps. You use your sink every day, but it’s not that often that your hands are salmonella-tained enough to not be able to touch the handle and turn on the water manually. This is for those times. It’s definitely a fantastic faucet, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a luxury. If you install this yourself without hiring a person to do so, $300 isn’t too much to pay for the ability to turn something on with a touch. At my house, every guest that’s seen it has been impressed. [Delta]
Touch works well, and allows you to turn it on with your arm, face or foot—whatever is currently less dirty than your hand
Works well as a faucet even without the touch technology
A little pricey, but not absurdly expensive
Installation might be tricky if you’re not handy, and make sure you install the insulation plate, or you’ll have sensitivity issues
Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
As you might’ve seen, our friends at Engadget have shut down their comments, which had become overrun by troll hordes. Trolls lurk everywhere, but our system—often mystifying to newcomers—is designed to keep them out. Here’s why it’s better.
Most comment systems let anybody comment, and have their opinion seen, as long as they have a profile that’s verified as being a real human being. Often, there’s a level of moderation—like digging vs. burying on digg—that hopefully floats better stuff, letting crap sink to the bottom, but there’s not much of a real gatekeeper to keep the assholes out. It’s a little bit different here.
There are three levels of commenters: Unapproved, Approved and Starred. You basically have to audition for the right to comment, by leaving a smart blurb—if it’s good, you’ll get approved by an editor, one of our moderators, or a starred commenter, and then people can see your comment. Your comment is also approved if you sign in through Facebook Connect, since it’s tied to an identity. Truly excellent commenters earn stars, which grant them moderation powers, and makes all of their comments featured (more on that below).
There are three levels of comments: Unapproved, Approved and Featured. Unapproved are only seen by moderators. Approved can be seen by everybody, but a casual reader will have to work a bit to see them. Comments that moderators think are awesome—as well as comments left by star commenters—become featured, which means they’re in bold, and right up front on every post. Think of it as a super version of the karma scheme that Slashdot’s used forever.
The idea is this: Bad commenters (hopefully) don’t get in. If they do slip in, we ban them. And the best comments, and the people who make them, are front and center, so it’s easy to see the smartest (and funniest) takes on the stuff we all love talking about. We’ve put a lot of work into our comment system to try to elevate the comments here above the average anonymous internet crap, but we can’t do without your excellent commentary. So, we’re glad to have you. But let’s keep it smart—not just for us, but for you too (I read on the internet reading too many dumb comments melts your brain).
Our system’s not perfect (it’s gotten unruly before), but we think it’s part of why we have a solid community with guys like OMG Ponies and Kaiser Machead, and we’re working on it all the time to make it better. If you’re new, leave a comment, and we hope you’ll stick around.
On a broader level, the fact that Engadget had to take such a drastic step says something quite depressing about the state of internet commentary: Assholes are getting the upperhand. If you’re not one of these assholes, and you’re actually an intelligent, civil commenter, come on over. We’ve got a nice system in place that will hopefully let you say what you want to say, while letting you enjoy comments that add to the site, not take away from it. But if you’re an asshole, stay away. We don’t want you either.
We’re all fighting them together, so the dudes at Engadget have our support—hopefully some chill time will let them get their comments back in order.
Seagate’s BlackArmor PS110 USB3 drive kit brings USB3 to laptops without USB3. And your transfer speeds will be 3 times what they were through USB2. If you weren’t excited about USB3 before, you should be.
$180
It’s three times faster than USB2, which is a pretty good jump this early on in the life of the standard. In theory, you can get somewhere around ten times as fast, but you’re then running into bottlenecks such as the actual drive itself and the computer you’re transferring data to. But our biggest complaint is it’s not OS X compatible.
Here’s how we tested. The kit comes with an ExpressCard adapter that can drive any one USB3 port. However, the adapter does need to be plugged into a USB2 port for supplementary power. So we used a MacBook Pro (an older one with ExpressCard) booted into Windows 7 to test. We also used a CyberPower P55 tower with USB3, because we wanted a more powerful unit to make sure the bottleneck wasn’t with the computer we were using. And we went with CyberPower, because they’re one of the only OEMs now that are including USB3 on most (all) of their builds.
Here’s CyberPower’s test results first. Comparing the USB3 drive to a similar Seagate USB2 drive showed that direct transfer rates on big files are about 3 times faster. A bunch of smaller files evened up the match, since that’s more dependent on the hard drive itself to seek the files rather than the actual data transfer. Even still, USB3 came out ahead.
Similar results came out when we tested on a MacBook Pro bootcamped to Windows 7, because the ExpressCard kit doesn’t support OS X. The difference between USB3 and USB2 is less pronounced here—not quite twice as fast—because of the bottleneck with the machine, rather than the transfer. But it is faster, which is great if you’re constantly moving large files around on the go.
Beyond the fact that the kit doesn’t support OS X at all, Seagate also brilliantly placed the drivers for the ExpressCard adapter on the USB3 drive itself. This is somewhat confusing, because they don’t tell you that you don’t have to use the adapter to access the data—you can plug the drive into a USB2 port, get the drivers off, install it, then plug the adapter in.
This USB3 drive costs a little extra from Seagate, since the 1TB version of their USB2 drive goes for $150, and this is $170 with just 500GB, but does come with an ExpressCard adapter. But if you plan on getting a USB3-capable laptop (everyone will), you might as well future-proof yourself now. And if you’re looking for a USB3-compatible PC, there’s CyberPower, which has them on just about all their systems now. [Seagate, CyberPower]
Fast
Comes with an ExpressCard kit
ExpressCard kit needs a extra USB2 slot to power
Slightly pricey
Doesn’t work with OS X
Microsoft’s Arc Keyboard isn’t so much designed small because it’s great for traveling—laptops already come with compact keyboards—it’s more for compact spaces or controlling media center machines. I gotta say, it looks really nice, even if it’s awkward.
$60
Pretty good. Like we said above, it’s a very pretty keyboard, curved in the same way that their Arc Mouse is. They’re two devices made with the same idea in mind: Shoving as much functionality into as a tiny space as possible. To that end, Microsoft’s made a few concessions on the normal keyboard design.
The arrow keys have been replaced by one 4-way key, the higher end of the F-keys have been changed out to the Home/End/Page Up/Page Down keys (and those F-keys get “function” status on top of the F1-F6 keys), and there’s no numpad. The upside to these changes is that it definitely does save space, but the downside is that the D-pad arrow keys are awkward and slow to use.
But how does it type? Pretty well, for the most part. The main keys move with a pleasing amount of travel, and it’s more like a laptop-style scissor key than a clunky big boy style IBM key. The biggest complaint we have is that the sensitivity on the space bar seems to be low, so we often get phrases that are typedlikethis. An annoyance, to be sure, because you have to train your thumbs to mash down harder than on any other keyboard you’ve used.
It’s a pretty solid wireless keyboard to stash away when you need to do some quick typing on an HTPC across the room. The 2.4GHz wireless dongle goes into a recessed magnetic slot on the back of the keyboard for safekeeping, similar to the way Logitech has been unifying their tiny wireless dongles on their latest mice and keyboards.
I wouldn’t recommend using this to do a whole lot of heavy typing on, because the D-pad and the quirky space bar will get grating after a while, but for quick text input on a machine while simultaneously saving space, the Arc Keyboard beats normal wireless keyboards. It’s available next month. [Microsft]
Very compact
Very pretty
Price isn’t too bad for a “portable” keyboard
Hard to type on for long periods of time: keys have weird sensitivities and the arrow key is hard to use
These were the tablets of our dreams. The devices we thought we’d use one day. But what do we get in reality? The iPad. The showmanship level definitely isn’t as high (Tom Cruise wasn’t available), but the usability is proven.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010, 10am Pacific. The moment when Steve Jobs (or Phil Schiller) will step onstage and (probably) announce the Apple Tablet is almost here. Tune in NOW at live.gizmodo.com, so you don’t miss a bit of our liveblog.
So far, we’ve got our usual pre-game countdown, with observations of the line, celebrity look-a-like sightings, angry rants about how cold it’s going to be in SF, and photos of what people are wearing. Us? A tasteful Target and Walmart ensemble, naturally.
And if you’re a developer, work in the industry or are a member of the press that will be at the event tomorrow, email Brian Lam (his email’s in the masthead on the left <—) for info on a meetup tomorrow night. [Liveblog]
It’s not enough that Motorola shows a woman with expertly grown legs throwing off a robe before getting into a tub before cutting off the video, they tease an upcoming MOTOBLUR smartphone as well. Tell us about the phone! [Motorola]
9to5Mac claims that they’ve talked to a few content publishers (magazines, newspapers), and those publishers are claiming inside knowledge about the device. Most importantly, that it’ll be “[nowhere] near $1000, as has been reported elsewhere.”
These publishers 9to5Mac talked to didn’t actually see any prototypes, but it was described to them as a 10-inch glass screen that’s smaller than a Kindle DX, but “with a similar weight.” That the software is going to be the “game changer” is nothing new, but Apple’s supposedly going around describing the tablet in comparison to the Kindle as the change from black and white TVs to color.
Other interesting bits: current ebook distributors on the App Store now are going to get screwed once Apple’s official one hits, and don’t expect a lot of content until “mid 2010 at the very earliest.” [9to5Mac]
I doubt Leica would make a 24-carat gold-plated camera for my 60th anniversary, but they did for China.
Each one of the 60 limited edition cameras costs 199,900 yuan (about $30,000), and is individually numbered from 1949 to 2009. I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to be someone pretty important (and in China) to get one of these, but if you’ve got 30 grand and a connection, Leica’s probably not going to say no. [Itechnews via Engadget]
Up to 50 different “Apple Tablet” type devices were “detected” by Flurry Analytics testing various types of apps that may make its way to the upcoming machine. Flurry was able to geographically locate the devices to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.
In short, there were about 200 different apps being tested on the devices, most of which were games, media or some type of entertainment-type program. It more or less mirrors the type of applications we’ve been seeing in the app store for the iPhone.
In addition, the devices were running OS 3.2, which means either that the Tablet is running an iPhone-like OS, or that this is a bigger iPhone/iPod Touch type deal, and not exactly like the tablet we’ve been picturing. In any case, if earlier rumors were true, developers are already building apps for it.
Flurry didn’t give any other details about resolution, memory or anything else they determined from their analytics tracking.
Apple Tablet – The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket
Using Flurry Analytics, the company identified approximately 50 devices that match the characteristics of Apple’s rumored tablet device. Because Flurry could reliably “place” these devices geographically on Apple’s Cupertino campus, we have a fair level of confidence that we are observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing. Testing of this device increased dramatically in January, with observed signs of life as early as October of last year. Apple appears to be going through its cycle of testing and polish, which is expected from any hardware or software company as it nears launch.Apple is expected to announce the yet-to-be named hardware on Wednesday, January 27 in San Francisco. There has been broad speculation about the functionality of the tablet, and what kinds of content and media partners the new device will feature. Additionally, there has been speculation about the most likely use cases for this kind of device, as well as which operating system the device will support. The choice of operating systems is particularly important for application developers because if the tablet runs on the same or upgraded operating system as the iPhone, then current applications running on the iPhone will also run on the tablet.
On these devices, Flurry observed approximately 200 different applications in use by testers. Studying category trends provides insight into the kind of user Apple is targeting and how it expects the device to be used. Below is a chart that shows the number of applications in use by category across test devices.
For Play not Work
Historically, tablet devices have been considered substitutes for anything where workers use clipboards, note pads or day runners. In more industrial settings, they could be used for inventory management, taking purchase orders or data entry. However, there was a surprising dearth of applications that support these use cases. Instead, the largest category was games. With a larger screen, more memory, multi-touch and multi-tasking expected, games will play better than ever on Apple handheld devices.
A Media MachineThe tablet device clearly targets consumers. The mix of applications observed comprises mainly of media and entertainment consumption as opposed to enterprise, productivity and computing. Specifically, popular tested apps include news, games, entertainment and lifestyle. In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio. In fact, the most widely downloaded of any single specific application was a new app. In its October Pulse report, Flurry studied iPhone as an e-reader and the threat this poses to Amazon Kindle. With rumors of large newspaper and book publisher deals, combined with its reading-friendly form factor, we speculate that the new Apple tablet will focus heavily on daily media consumption. Finally, across all applications detected, there was a strong theme of sharing and/or social interaction including social games, social networking, photo sharing and utilities like file transfer applications.
Not the Battle for Your Living Room
The device is positioned to appeal to the users who are out-and-about rather than compete directly against the TV, stereo and game console in the living room. With supply chain reports from Asia that light-weight 10.1″ LCD and OLED screen components are in short supply due to large purchases presumably by Apple, we can surmise that the device will be thin and light, designed for portability. Further supporting this notion is the pattern of apps we detect for restaurant, movie show times and other apps that help users find points of interest around them, including travel guide applications.
A Rocket Booster for Developers
A noteworthy observation is that the Apple hardware we detected was running on OS 3.2, which has not yet been released. Currently the iPhone and iPod Touch are running on OS 3.1.2. Historically, Apple releases OS upgrades just before releasing new hardware. With significant expected changes (e.g., multi-touch, multi-tasking) for the tablet device operating system, there was concern among application developers that the tablet would not support existing iPhone applications. However, from the testing we observed, it appears that Apple wants to leverage the 130,000+ applications already available in the App Store on day one for the new device. For the developer, this is good news. Senior research analyst with Piper Jaffray, Gene Munster, is forecasting 2010 sales of iPhone and iPod Touch devices at 36 million, an increase over his estimate of 25.7 million for 2009. With tablet shipments for 2010 perhaps reaching 10M, according to AVI Securities, we see this as a major boost to application developers.
This week in Lifehacker, we’ve got a fix for lousy Windows menus, a better dock for your mouse, proof that not moving around is bad for you and a revelation that you’re probably tying your shoes wrong.
• ShellMenuNew cleans up that “new” menu in Windows (About time)
• Add Chrome-like incognito mode to Firefox
• Keeping your muscles inactive for too long hurts your health, regardless if you exercise (Nooooo!!)
• Circle dock gives you shortcuts centered around your mouse
• Believing you can be smarter makes you smarter
• The best tech tools to keep in touch
• The world’s most boring video teaches you how to tie your shoes correctly
• Make a minimalist desktop for productivity
• Make a PDF from any URL
Like many of you, many of us are huge Star Trek fans. It not only shaped everyone’s view of technology from a young age, it’s arguably one of the driving forces of technology today. And now you can live it.
Here’s a quick intro to what Star Trek Online is all about. It’s about 30 years after the last Next Generation movie. You play an ensign that gets promoted (like new Kirk) to Captain because every officer above him gets killed. It’s a hell of a way to climb the rankings, but it leads to you being placed in command of your own starship, but still being green enough to require tutelage into how everything works.
You spend half your time controlling a ship and half the time on the ground with an away team.
This is by far the more satisfying part. Who hasn’t wanted to sit in Picard, Kirk, Scott Bakula or any of the lesser captain’s chairs and order people to fire everything? Who can say that they haven’t wanted to smoothly say “make it so” and have something—besides your wife giving you dirty looks—happen? This is that.
Although the main philosophies of the Star Trek universe revolve around exploration, and peace, and diplomacy, blowing shit up has always been the reward for sitting through Picard’s flute playing. And this is supremely satisfying. Phasers and photon torpedoes fire with the correct sound effects, Klingon cruisers explode with a bass-rattling pppptththhhbbffffooooo, and maneuvering the cruise ship-like vessels feels natural, not clunky.
And here is where the developers need more work. The bugs are evident, from the fact that you sometimes materialize on the ground as a starship, or when your away team fails to beam down with you, or when certain mission objectives are gone entirely. The game’s still in open beta, which is why we’re giving our impressions now, so there’s time to get everything in better shape before launch.
On the whole, the ground portion feels like a more Star Trekked version of City of Heroes, which was made by the same developer, Cryptic. It’s tolerable (fun, even), but going on away team missions wasn’t exactly the funnest part of the show. It’s what Picard sent Riker to do while he sipped tea in his ready room.
We’ll go more in depth about how the mission structure works, how leveling up/advancing in rank gets you more access to ships, and how closely the game stays to the established Trek “feel” that everyone is used to. Plus, what pre-order bonuses you should get in on.
If you want more coverage, check out Kotaku’s Star Trek Online page. We’re going to mostly focus on how the game appeals to Star Trek fans, but if you want more info about how the game is as a game, Kotaku’s got you covered.
The age old conundrum of how to eat chips at a keyboard without making a giant mess has finally been solved. So how do you keep your hands clean? By using another hand. A robotic hand.
As this lady demonstrates, you push the button on the shaft to clamp the hand around the chip, which you then shove in the direction of your face. It’s soft enough to not completely crush through the chip—which is bad—but still stable enough to carry it without dropping. You might say that there was too much thought and engineering effort going into a problem that nobody needed solving, but you’d be wrong. Very wrong. [ITmedia via Crunchgear]
This generator looks like it’s a great idea. Plop it down in a windy spot—like anywhere in the Bay Area right now—and it’ll give you energy enough to power small devices.
It’s a good design in that it looks neat and folds up nice and compact, but did they really think this though? The feet don’t look very stable since they don’t dig into the ground, and a strong gust of wind will easily blow it over, since it’s made out of aluminum and carbon fiber to keep it lightweight. No problem, right? It’s not like you’ll use this in a windy area or…oh wait. [Ecofriend via Likecool]
