TN-TECH

Posted by admin on August 22nd, 2008 in ALL, Mobile

SEATTLE–If you’ve ever wanted to hand control of your life off for a day, let me recommend putting it in the safe care of iPhone applications.

That’s what I did Thursday, a day for which the plan I had originally made fell through.

So, late on Wednesday night, as I was pondering what to with myself here Thursday–I’m in town for the Gnomedex conference, which begins Friday–I started thinking about my brand-new iPhone 3G and all the applications I’ve heard you can get.

And it occurred to me that it could be quite an experiment to turn my day over to the direction exclusively of some of those apps. I already had downloaded a couple, but as I looked around on Apple’s App Store, I found that there were countless others that could help get me through my day.

I began the morning by booting up LocalEats, a free app from WhereTheLocalsEat.com that offers up lists of the top 100 places to chow down in 50 American cities. It makes its suggestions based on where you are and then sorts them, nearest first.

LocalEats had a few suggestions that sounded good, but before I set off in search of food, I thought I’d give another app, UrbanSpoon, a chance as well.

UrbanSpoon has a fun interface where you can shake the iPhone, causing three wheels to spin a la a slot machine, before settling on the criteria of a single neighborhood, a specific cuisine, a price level, and offering up a restaurant. The problem is there didn’t seem to be any way to set those criteria myself. So I couldn’t figure out how to pick where I wanted to go and what I wanted to eat. I suspect I was missing something fairly basic.

So, back to LocalEats I went. I decided on an inexpensive greasy spoon, Beth’s Cafe, and then clicked on the helpful directions button.

Before I left, I decided that I should twitter what I was doing, so I ran Twitterific, an app that a couple of people told me they liked for sending tweets from the iPhone. But, for some reason, it told me that my sign-in information wasn’t being accepted and that I should re-enter it. Oddly, though, it didn’t give me any way to do that. Again, I felt like I was probably missing something rather elementary.

Instead, I went off and looked in the App Store for another Twitter app, and sure enough, I found a free one called Twitterator. It had a fairly high rating, so I downloaded it and promptly fired off a tweet informing my loyal followers of my experiment.

At last ready to set out for lunch, I grabbed the iPhone and hit the pavement. Soon, I walked by a funny intersection where on one side of the street there was a high-end health food market and on the other, a grungy-looking gun shop. Never one to pass up a Twitter moment, I ran Twitterator again and noted that the app had a feature for taking a picture with the iPhone’s camera and embedding it into a tweet. I’d never done that before, so it was kind of exciting.

So, snap away I did and off went the tweet, complete with a (badly exposed) photo of the gun shop and the health food store.

As I was walking, I was running one of my favorite (so far) apps, Pandora radio. This app lets you stream Internet radio from Pandora channels you’ve previously set up, so there I was, walking through a fairly blue-collar part of Seattle, with bands like Delerium, Portishead, Massive Attack, and others piping into my ears.

This is a really great app, but it has one drawback: Whenever you click out of Pandora to do anything else on the iPhone, the music stops. You can return to it, of course, but it seems to be a limitation of the applications that whatever you’re doing in one gets shut down if you want to do anything else–like answer a phone call.

Soon, I made it to Beth’s Cafe, and sat down to order a burger. And as I was waiting for my food to arrive, I thought I’d poke around the App Store and see what else was out there.

As I was finishing up my burger (pretty good, I must say; thank you, LocalEats) I saw that outside, the weather was looking iffy. I know that there’s a decent weather application built into the iPhone software, but this experiment was strictly about using what was available through the App Store. So I went looking for something new.

I settled on one called AeroWeather. It’s actually aimed at people who spend a lot of time in airports–pilots, frequent fliers, and the like–because all the locations it has information for are in fact air fields. But when I selected Boeing Field, which wasn’t too far off, I was pleased to find that it gave a great deal more data on weather conditions than the default iPhone weather feature.

Among the information it gave was wind speed, cloud cover, temperature (duh!), short-term forecasts, sunrise and sunset times, and more. Pretty cool, I must say. I quickly added Seattle-Tacoma International and Oakland International airports to my list, since I’ll be flying through those places on Sunday.

The only thing was that AeroWeather gives temperature in Celsius, and since I’m an American, I didn’t know quite what 17 degrees meant. So off I went in search of a conversion app.


But lo and behold, as I was searching for one, I stumbled across an AOL Instant Messenger app. I had been under the impression that you couldn’t do instant messaging on iPhones, and here was a way to do it after all.

Totally distracted from the task at hand, I downloaded the AIM app and soon found myself sharing IMs with a couple of friends. This was definitely the find of the day. As I twittered a few minutes later, “I think the iPhone just won.”

And that’s because I really kind of live on IM. There’s Twitter, sure. And SMS. And e-mail. And blogging. And I do all those things. But IM is my favorite. And my AIM buddy list is kind of my lifeline to many of my favorite people. And they’re now at hand pretty much everywhere. Is that good? I’m not sure yet.

By now it was time to pay the bill. So, I moved on over to CheckPlease, an app that calculates the total damage based on what percent you want to tip and how many people are splitting the tab. In this case, it was just me, so it was pretty simple. Oddly, though, the actual interface looks very different than what was advertised on the App Store. Instead of an elegant spinner-based system, it’s got rather ugly sliders. But, it works. And I suppose that’s what really matters.

Of course, I still hadn’t gotten my conversion program, so another quick run to the App Store and the plopping down of a buck got me iConvert, a very simple conversion program with exactly the kind of spinner-based system that CheckPlease promised but didn’t deliver. So that 17 degrees Celsius temperature that AeroWeather told me about turns out to have been 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Who knew?

The last thing on my agenda was checking out some local real estate. I had found an app called Puluwai, which allows you to search around where you are, to set minimum and maximum prices and number of bedrooms, and get a list of available houses.

I ran it, and it worked. Sort of. It certainly didn’t have every house for sale in the area–nor did it promise it would–but eventually, I did get it to turn up a listing for one that I was standing in front of by limiting the search parameters to exactly the price that was being asked.

Then, I ran the sale price through the last app of the day, MortgageCalc, to find out that, hey, maybe I could afford the really sweet-looking four-bedroom house with the big yard and remodeled kitchen I was staring at from the outside. MortgageCalc, for its part, is a simple app with a pretty nice interface that requires you to fill in, at the very least, the principal you want to borrow, the loan length, and an interest rate. Like CheckPlease, it worked well without having the most elegant interface.

The day was coming to an end now, and I was feeling like I had a pretty good sense of the way iPhone apps work. And while I’m loath to spend more than a dollar on an app right now, I think that over time, as I become more familiar with the iPhone and find more and more apps that have actual utility for me, I might be willing to throw down a few bucks for some of them.

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Posted by admin on July 31st, 2008 in ALL, Computer

The MSI Wind, on paper, looked like it could be one of the best competitors for the Asus Eee PC. We got pretty excited about this fight between a couple of Taiwanese heavyweights, but the one area where MSI was competing the best was on price. Such is not really the case anymore.

When the MSI Wind was first revealed, it was priced at a fairly reasonable $479. Somewhere along the line, they decided to downgrade to a three-cell battery, keeping the price the same. Then they installed Windows XP and priced the subnotebook at $499. Now that they’re ready to do six-cell batteries and XP, MSI is selling the Wind for $549.

The configuration for this newest price is identical to what we were originally promised at the original (lower) price. What the heck happened? Further still, some retailers are selling the six-cell Wind for $599! Online retailers were even forced to cancel pending orders at the lower price point, forcing customers to consider the new price. $599 for a Wind? You might as well get an Eee.

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Posted by admin on July 31st, 2008 in ALL, Computer

And here I thought that their relationship was going so well. It seems that Apple is no longer pleased with what Intel has to offer for its computers, so the Cupertino crew are packing up their bags and moving on. This is just a rumor, of course, but they say that Apple doesn’t want to have its laptops look so similar to other offerings on the market.

What sets Apple apart from the competition is the very fact that Apple does things a little differently. In this way, if they continue to make use of Intel chipsets and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, they may not be different enough from the Toshibas, Dells, and Acers of the world. Strangely, there is no mention of where Apple would turn for a suitable alternative. They would need new boards, integrated graphics, integrated sound, and so on.

Where could they turn? Would VIA or AMD be willing to produce an Apple-only chipset?

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Posted by admin on July 31st, 2008 in ALL, Mobile

Are you a proud owner of an iPhone 3G that happens to have white casing on the back? That touchtastic mobile could be prone to some serious damage in the form of random cracks.

It’s still very unclear how common this problem is, but several reports have begun to find their way onto the Internet (if it’s online, it has to be true) suggesting that the white iPhone gets cracked very easily. Some are saying that the white version either uses inferior material or it was constructed in an inferior manner compared to its black compatriot. It’s also possible that black iPhones just hide the cracks better.

Yes, I realize that minor hairline scratches and cracks are just cosmetic, but when you buy a device as aesthetically pleasing as the iPhone, appearances mean a lot. It’s like buying a Ferrari and having a scuff on the bumper.

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Posted by admin on July 15th, 2008 in ALL, Mobile

Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer.

Convergence has been the Holy Grail for mobile phone makers, software and hardware partners, as well as consumers, for more than a decade.

And for the first time the rhetoric of companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, who have boasted of putting a multimedia computer in your pocket, no longer seems far fetched.

“Converged devices are always with you and always connected,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Last year Nokia sold almost 200m camera phones and about 146m music phones, making it the world’s biggest seller of digital cameras and MP3 players.

In the coming year the firm predicts it will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones as personal navigation becomes the latest feature to be assimilated into the mobile phone.

Form and function

Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, said: “All of those single use devices - MP3 players, digital camera, GPS - are collapsing onto the phone.”

“We are going past the point where this was a phone with a few other things,” he said.

Symbian’s operating system shipped on 188 million phones last year and a third of those came with GPS.

“We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications; all converging,” said Luis Pineda, from mobile phone chip firm Qualcomm.

Man taking photo with phone, Roslan Rahman AFP/Getty
More and more people are snapping shots with a handset
Convergence is being driven by a combination of software, services and hardware.

The first phones powered by a chip running at 1Ghz will hit the market later this year, seven years after the first desktop chip broke the gigahertz barrier.

Qualcomm’s 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset will debut inside a number of handsets, including some from Samsung and HTC

“It’s a first in the industry for a wireless chipset,” said Mr Pineda.

As well as raw horsepower Snapdragon also features a dedicated application processor, as well as the ability to handle 12 megapixel digital photos and up to 720p high definition video imaging.

Mr Clifford from Symbian said the mobile industry had to deliver multi-function devices which did not compromise.

He said: “When we look at what is collapsing on to these devices and people’s expectations with their experiences on single-use specialized devices there is going to be rising expectations.”

Chip shop

More than 90% of the world’s mobile phones are powered by technology created by British firm Arm. It designs chip architectures that it licenses to semiconductors makers such as Qualcomm and Broadcom.

Ian Drew from Arm said future mobile phones demanded ever more processing power.

But building chips with greater processing was not a straightforward, he said.

The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it’s going to be mobile
Nigel Clifford, Symbian
“If you look at a typical phone the first thing you have got to do is get within the half a watt envelope.

“It needs to get into your pocket. And there’s no fan. It needs to work for days rather than hours.”

He added: “When you start adding multi media experiences - such as 3D graphics, video, and games - there are two ways to do that: you can get bigger and bigger processors or you have multi core where you can switch off a processor when you don’t need it.”

Arm is demonstrating a chip architecture, called Coretex A9, that will offer four cores, or processors, on a single chip.

Symbian has been working with Arm on future uses for multi-core mobile phones.

“You can use massive amounts of processing if you need it. But if you don’t you can power down the cores that aren’t required,” said Mr Clifford.

Symmetrical Multi Processing will drive the next generation of applications on a phone, he added.

“Silicon vendors are looking very seriously at how they integrate SMP.”

Mr Clifford added: “The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it’s going to be mobile.”

Quake III screenshot, Activision
The gaming abilities of handsets are rapidly improving
He said gaming would be the next feature to collapse into phones.

“That is one of the next single usage devices that will start feeling the pressure from the mobile device,” he said.

3D graphics acceleration is becoming standard on many of today’s mobile phones and specialists like Nvidia have joined the market.

Mr Clifford said today’s most powerful mobile phones, such as Nokia’s N96 and NTTDoCoMo’s 905 series have the same power as a laptop from 2000.

Nvidia’s APX 2500 chip has enough 3D graphics acceleration to handle Quake 3, a PC game from 1999, on a mobile phone.

Handset owners were also beginning to expect the same online experience they have on their desktop PCs on their mobile phones.

“Web 2.0, social networking and video sharing; that’s a real driver of horsepower,” said Mr Drew from Arm.

He added: “But you need to be able to get data in. The next generation of mobile phones need high performance radios - they will have high data rates that will enable this content to be streamed to you.”

Symbian is working on technology called Freeway to give phones the ability to move seamlessly between wireless networks, like wi-fi and cell networks like 3G and 4G.

“We don’t want people to feel the mobile web is a second class experience.”

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Posted by admin on July 15th, 2008 in ALL, Internet

Viacom has “backed off” from demands to divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched a video on YouTube, the website has claimed.

Google had been ordered to provide personal details of millions of YouTube users to help Viacom prepare its case on alleged copyright infringement.

Google, owners of YouTube, will now hand over the database but without data that could identify users.

Viacom has a $1bn (£497m) copyright infringement lawsuit against Google.

A class action by other organisations including the English Premier League has also agreed to the new terms.

“We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand for all users’ viewing histories and we will not be providing that information,” said a statement on the YouTube blog.

The decision will be welcomed by privacy activists, many of whom expressed concern over a US judge’s order for Google to provide the data in early July.

Continuing battle

YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006, is in battle with Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, over alleged copyright infringement.

Viacom alleges clips from its programmes have been viewed on YouTube without its consent.

When it initiated legal action in March 2007, it said it had identified about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes on the website, which had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Following the launch of its billion-dollar lawsuit, YouTube introduced filtering tools in an effort to prevent content that infringes copyright from appearing on the site.

Viacom had said it wanted the log data to “compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos”.

But privacy activists argued in response that the original order “threatens to expose deeply private information” and was in breach of a 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was passed after the rental habits of a Supreme Court nominee were publicised.

The new ruling means that Google will still have to hand over the data logs but in an “anonymized form”, meaning it will not divulge usernames and IP data.

An earlier Viacom request that Google be forced to hand over the source code of YouTube has already been denied by a US court on the grounds it is a “trade secret”.

Despite Tuesday’s agreement, the companies are yet to agree the process of information disclosure regarding viewing of YouTube clips by employees of YouTube and Google. This is expected to be settled in the coming weeks.

The cases are expected to come to trial in 2009 or 2010.

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Posted by admin on July 15th, 2008 in ALL, Computer, Internet

BT is to invest £1.5bn in fibre optic cables, giving up to 10 million UK households access to faster broadband.

The plans would bring 40% of homes in reach of an ultra-fast service by 2012. BT is also planning to put fibre-optic cable into about 1 million homes, making the service even faster for those customers.

However, the communications group has made clear it will only make the move if regulator Ofcom allows it to get a decent return on that investment.

Remaining customers would be offered broadband speeds of between 40 and 60 megabits a second (mbps), it said.

In order to pay for the project BT has said it will suspend its £2.5bn share buy-back programme in July - by which time it will have returned more than £1.8bn.

‘New chapter’

“Broadband has boosted the UK economy and is now an essential part of our customers’ lives,” said BT chief executive Ian Livingston.

“We now want to make a step-change in broadband provision which will offer faster speeds than ever before. This marks the beginning of a new chapter in Britain’s broadband story.”

But the firm has warned that conditions need to be right for its investment.

BT has urged Ofcom to nurture a “supportive and enduring regulatory environment” which includes removing current barriers to investment and making sure that anyone who chooses to invest in fibre optics can earn a fair rate of return for their shareholders.

Britain has been slower to invest in fast broadband than some countries, with BT in particular cautious about spending the large sums involved.

The group’s plans should enable homes to run so-called “multiple bandwidth-hungry applications” which would enable some family members to watch high definition movies while others were gaming or working on complex graphics projects.

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Posted by admin on July 15th, 2008 in ALL, Diverse

Microsoft is hoping to woo new consumers to its Xbox 360 platform with a focus on social gaming and its blockbuster franchises.

At the E3 games summit in Los Angeles, the firm announced a re-design of its online games system Xbox Live with an emphasis on building communities.

Microsoft’s Don Mattrick said the aim was to put the Xbox 360 “at the heart of the living room”.

However, reports of a price cut for the console did not materialise.

‘Next level’

Mr Mattrick predicted the Xbox 360 would outsell the PlayStation 3 worldwide in coming years.

He said the games industry as a whole was poised to become larger than both the music and film industries.

He said: “We knew…someday our industry would be the biggest form of all entertainment.

“That day has arrived. Today our industry belongs to everyone.”

He added: “Games are now the leading driver of all industry spending, outselling music and outstripping box office revenue.”

Microsoft announced a series of games and services as it attempts to emulate the success of Nintendo’s Wii in attracting new audiences.

The refresh for Xbox Live takes on board some of the characteristics of Nintendo’s system, with the introduction of individual avatars to represent gamers, something its rival has done through Mii characters.

The company also announced a social karaoke game, called Lips, which looks to capitalise on the success of Singstar on the PlayStation.

Shane Kim, head of strategy and business development for Xbox, denied that the firm was copying its rivals.

He said: “We’re not claiming to invent music games, or avatars. But we’re innovating by bringing something new to these games, and taking them to the next level.”

The firm unveiled Xbox Live PrimeTime, a new service which will introduce online quiz games made in conjunction with the TV giant Endemol.

“This is a new category of games for the whole family,” said John Schappert, head of Xbox Live.

The press conference in Los Angeles was dominated by news of releases of some of the console’s biggest franchises.

British developer Peter Molyneux announced that role playing game Fable II had finished development and would be released in October.

Gears of War 2, from US developer Epic, is due for release in November while the latest incarnation of the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIII, will hit the Xbox 360 for the first time along with rival platform PlayStation 3.

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Posted by admin on July 3rd, 2008 in ALL, Mobile

I just had a hands on with the Garmin Nuvifone here at the CommunicAsia conference in Singapore. While the phone didn’t yet have a GPS connection or internet access, because it’s still in a prototype stage, it’s definitely an impressive device.

Its smooth screen has a texture that reminded me a lot of old-school big screen TVs–I couldn’t tell if it was glass or plastic, but it was soft and non-reflective. It’s obvious that the device is very GPS-centric, with tons of icons for applications to help you find nearby points of interest.

The QWERTY keypad looked to be spacious enough for easy typing, and it has auto-word complete on it, so when I typed “happy” the word was already up on the screen by the time I got ot “ha.”

I did notice that the phone had a few kinks that needed to be worked out: some applications didn’t completely load and I was left looking at a blank screen. Two of the units on display were frozen, too, and I managed to freeze a third by attempting to launch the camera. Read on for another photo and more information.

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Posted by admin on July 3rd, 2008 in ALL, Mobile

Editor’s Note: One of the main features of the Dash Express GPS navigator, which we reviewed in March, is that it is the first plug-in navigator with an always-on cellular connection to the Internet. This lets you conduct live Yahoo searches for destinations, but, more importantly, it lets you receive live traffic data from other Dash-using drivers. Here is a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH9f2zUXct0) showing how it works.

Theoretically, the Dash will become more useful as more people buy the device, and their driving data is added to the collective. To see if the service is actually improving, we gave one to our resident GPS expert, Troy Dreier, to test out over a number of weeks. This is his first entry.
Yeah, I love using the Dash Express and yeah, I think it’s the future of GPS navigation—but man, I wish it would overcome its quirks soon.
I took the Dash with me during a recent weekend as I drove to a wedding on Long Island. The Dash proved to be a real help, twice warning me that traffic conditions had changed on my route and offering to re-route me. But other times, the Dash’s quirks made me wish that the company would hurry up and improve the software.

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