Navigon Navigation Comes to the iPhone

One by one, the big names in GPS navigation are landing on the iPhone, thanks to iPhone OS 3.0′s support for turn-by-turn directions. Last month, AT&T released a navigation service powered by TeleNav. And today, Germany’s Navigon announced that the North America. version of its MobileNavigator is available on Apple’s App Store.

AT&T’s Navigator costs $10 a month and downloads maps as needed; MobileNavigator is selling for a flat cost of $99.99 ($69.99 until August 15th) and comes with a full set of maps. I haven’t tried it yet, but the idea of paying once for unlimited use is mighty appealing.

TomTom’s iPhone app is the most eagerly-anticipated GPS system for the iPhone–in part because it’s the one that was demonstrated at Apple’s WWDC keynote–and you might want to wait until it’s available before you plunk down your money for any GPS software. But one way or another, I’ll bet that lots of iPhone owners end up letting their phones tell them how to drive.

Here’s a video demo from Navigon:

Touchscreens Get Cheaper, Bigger, and…Touchier

Even in the era of the iPhone, devices with touchscreen interfaces aren’t anywhere near pervasive–and some of the gadgets that do have touchscreens aren’t that great. Synaptics, the company that makes touch-input hardware (including a high percentage of the world’s laptop touchpads) aims to help change that with a couple of new touchscreens it’s introducing for hardware makers to incorporate into their gizmos.

The new touchscreens include the ClearPad 1000, a low-cost capacitive model that only offers single-touch input–but which is priced to compete with resistive touchscreens, which aren’t as precise as capacitive ones. (If you’ve ever used a touch-enabled phone whose screen is more frustrating than effortless, chances are good it was a resistive model).

At the high end of the market, Synaptics is selling the ClearPad 3000, a model that allows for gestures involving as many as ten fingers at once. That’s a lot of fingers-and the 3000 is available in sizes up to a roomy eight inches, which means it may show up in tablet computers of the sort that don’t quite exist yet but which lots of people are talking about these days. Synaptics already offers a midrange touchscreen (now called the ClearPad 2000), which offers two-finger multitouch.

Devices with the new screens may begin to show up later this year. It wasn’t all that long ago that gadget screens made the leap from monochrome to color; it wouldn’t stun me if a very high percentage add touch capability over the next few years.

Seven Tools for Making Firefox Jump Through Hoops

Clear the decks, I’m now an avid Firefox user. It took me a long time to give up my treasured Maxthon, an Internet Explorer shell that I truly loved. When Maxthon was first released, it had features years before they were added to IE8–tabs, multi-threading, groups, add-ons — things the kids at Microsoft should have copied eons ago, but didn’t.

When I first contemplated switching, my Firefox fanatic friends insisted it could do everything Maxthon did, only better. Firefox has a multitude of free add-ons, cool extras to whittle down your browser feature wish list. The add-ons let me modify Firefox to almost replicate Maxthon. (No matter what anyone says, Maxthon outshines Firefox in managing favorites, and saving sites and favorites in groups is wonderfully effortless.) The added bennie is that Firefox offers better security than Internet Explorer.

If you’re an Internet Explorer user, I encourage you to look at Firefox. It’s free; the transition for most people isn’t a big deal (see Switching is Easy); and you don’t have to give up IE to play around with it. (But I bet you will…)

Here are a few of the cooler Firefox add-ons I’m using. Give them a whirl and let me know what you think.

Continue reading this story…

Intel Cuts Solid State Disk Drive Prices

Intel increasing the performance of its X series of solid-state disks (SSDs), and is reducing its prices by as much as 60 percent, according to reports. The price cut, combined with increased capacity, could lead to SSD adoption in mainstream systems.

Unlike convention hard drives, SSDs contain no moving parts, and significantly reduce latency for data retrieval by behaving more like memory than a disk. They are often used in high-end laptops such as the MacBook Air, gaming PCs, and servers. However, they do use more energy, and have a finite lifespan.

Intel has shifted to a new manufacturing process that provides higher density data storage, compressing more data into chips. Consequently, its costs are lower, and it can pass some of the savings onto customers. A 80GB X series drive now costs 60 percent less than a year ago, and 160GB units are 47% less, according to CNET. The prices are $225 and $440, respectively.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 is optimized for SSD drives, and could help them become more common in mid-range consumer PCs over time. Pricing has been a significant factor in SSD adoption in notebooks, as price increases have wrought a corresponding decrease in sales.

As sales increase, Intel and other memory manufacturers will inevitably reach economies of scale, resulting in further reductions. Affordable, higher capacity SSD drives will arrive; it is just a matter of when.

Yahoo’s New Look: Quite Nice

Yahoo is rolling out a revised version of its home page today. It represents no radical change, but it’s nice–and almost every change feels like it was made in the interest of Yahoo users.

At first glance, the old home page (which you can choose to retain) and the new one don’t look much different, except for the fact that the site has finally switched to a purple logo. (The Yahoo folks think that purple’s emblematic of the Yahoo brand, although I don’t know many consumers who make that connection.)

Continue reading this story…

The Xbox 360′s 3-Disc Dilemma

Sony likes to boast that it’s selling “future technology” in the Playstation 3, but let’s be honest, most games hardly show it.

An exception could come from Doom 4, a distant release that will apparently take full advantage of the PS3′s Blu-ray discs. In a Game Informer interview (via VG247), id Software’s John Carmack said the game will “almost certainly” be split into three DVDs for the Xbox 360, while the PS3 version will only require one Blu-ray disc.

This, I think, is more important than any advantage you might see in graphics. Give me a big-screen HDTV, and I’ll generally be pretty happy no matter which console you put in front of me. Making me get up after a cliffhanger moment to swap out discs — twice — is a different story.

The Xbox 360′s inability to store everything on one disc poses other challenges if games begin demanding more storage space. Carmack said another upcoming id game, a racing and shooting adventure called Rage, will need two discs for the Xbox 360 version, but still just one for Blu-ray. It would’ve been easier to split Rage in thirds for the Xbox 360 version, Carmack said, but the game is designed around two major wastelands, so three discs wouldn’t work as well.

Now, think about non-linear games, such as Grand Theft Auto. I can’t say it would be impossible to split this kind of adventure into several discs, but it could be problematic unless each disc contained the entire game world.

On the flip side, Carmack said programming for the PS3 required much more “sweat equity” than the Xbox 360, despite its lack of size constraints. But if game developers someday embrace the roominess afforded by the PS3′s Blu-ray discs, Microsoft will find itself at a real technical disadvantage.

Gadgets and Cars: Dangerous Together, Period?

The New York Times has published a scary article reporting that in 2003, the U.S. Department of Transportation came to the conclusion that talking on the phone while driving–even with a hands-free kit–was alarmingly distracting and dangerous. (In 2002, about 955 fatalities resulted from cell phone use while driving.) The DoT was afraid of ticking off Congress and never did much with its research, the Times charges.

The Times says that some studies have shown that yakking on the phone while behind the wheel can be as risky as driving under the influence of alcohol. Which inevitably leads to the question, if it’s as dangerous as drunk driving, should it be just as illegal?

And that’s only one of the questions that the Times story left me asking myself. In gizmo time, 2003 was several generations ago. Today’s wireless phones don’t just let you make calls–they provide driving directions, music, movies, social networking, and a lot more. I assume that we can all agree that you shouldn’t watch Hancock or update your Twitter status while in the driver’s seat of a moving vehicle. (If you don’t agree, I hope you steer clear of highways 101 and 280 in Northern California.) But what about GPS? Or using your phone as a radio, especially if you switch channels at 60mph?

Here in California, we have a law that mandates use of hands-free kits and forbids texting. You may be stunned to hear that it’s widely ignored and hard to enforce. It also seems a tad outdated and confusing: It says it’s “an infraction to write, send, or read text-based communication on an electronic wireless communications device.” Does that refer to text messaging, or to just about anything that involves reading or writing of text on a gadget?

And hey, is my built-in GPS navigation system any safer than one I might use on my iPhone?

I’m still sorting out my feelings here. I don’t want to be killed by someone who ploughed into my car while reading TMZ. Nor do I wish to kill anyone else while editing video on my iPhone. But I’m worried about prohibitionism, too. (Yes, outlawing the use of wireless devices while driving–including hands-free use–would save lives. Then again, so would outlawing driving.)

What’s your take on all this? Any ideas on how technology can help solve the problem? Is voice recognition part of the solution?

Facebook Crushes E-mail When It Comes to Sharing

Given Facebook’s immense popularity, it comes as no surprise that it is the top place to share information, according to Mashable and sharing widget maker AddToAny. Facebook accounts for 24% of the sharing of links to articles, videos and other content, far outpacing second-place e-mail at 11%. E-mail’s hold on the second slot is in jeopardy though, as Twitter quickly rises through the ranks. The microblogging site accounts for 10.8% of information shared, AddToAny says.

E-mail’s demise as a sharing medium is not a surprise either: Its use among netizens stands at 65.1 percent, while “community sites” reach 66.8 percent. That data seems a bit odd, given that to do anything online, you need an e-mail address. Try signing up for Facebook without one. My guess is that figure refers toactive e-mail users.

At last week’s New Hampshire Social Media Breakfast, John Herman, a teacher at Epping (New Hampshire) High School, said his students barely use e-mail, mainly as a way to sign up for other services before forgetting their passwords and never checking e-mail again. Herman’s story is anecdotal, but does show e-mail’s decline as a central hub for information sharing.

Good or bad, e-mail is not going away. Corporations are not going to share vital company data via Facebook or other public service. But, social networks are perfect for sharing non-critical information with group of people and then aggregating responses from the recipients. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social networks could be the antidote for the dreaded “reply-all” disease. Rather than in-boxes cluttered with “Me too” and “That’s great!” replies from a litany of people you may not know, social networks are serving as the catchall for everyone’s need to chime in and giving hope to those that desire to “zero” their inboxes.

Klipsch’s Apple-Friendly Headset

When Apple released the voice-controlled third-generation iPod Shuffle back in March, lots of folks understandably fixated on the fact that Apple had moved the controls to the earbud cord, making it impossible to use the Shuffle with third-party headsets. Apple said that it would license the design to other headset manufacturers. And today, Klipsch announced the Image S4i headset, which sports a microphone and the on-cord buttons needed to control the Shuffle. Available in August, it’ll sell for $99.99–twenty-one bucks more than the Shuffle itself. I’d love to know how many Shuffle owners there are out there who are serious enough about sound to invest more in a headset than they did in their audio player.

Of course, Klipsch says the S4i provides a superior experience–it’s got sound-isolating earbuds and a 360-degree microphone, among other features. And the headset also works with some fancier Apple products: the iPhone 3GS, second generation iPod touch, fourth generation iPod Nano, and the iPod Classic 120GB.

5Words for Tuesday, July 21st 2009

iPod Touch gets microphone, camera?

The race for airplane Wi-Fi.

Copyright: good for the economy!

Qwest’s DSL service hits 40Mbps.

Negroponte does an OLPC postmortem.

Hero Android phone: fatally flawed.

Macs finally get BlackBerry software.

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Barnes & Noble Ramps Up E-books

At the moment, “e-book” and “Kindle” are darn near synonymous. Barnes & Noble aims to change that with multiple announcements it made today. It’s releasing free e-reader applications for Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, and BlackBerry; it’s opened an e-bookstore with 700,000 titles, including bestsellers for $9.99 apiece; and it’s announced a deal that will make it the exclusive e-bookstore for Plastic Logic’s e-reader, due in 2010.

B&N is saying that its e-bookstore’s 700,000 digital books makes it the largest electronic bookstore (Amazon’s Kindle store has 300,000 books). But it’s also touting more than half a million free public-domain works provided by Google Books. That seems to leave it with fewer examples of recent, copyrighted stuff than Amazon: When I checked the New York Times’ top five bestsellers in hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback trade fiction, and hardcover advice, Amazon had all but one in Kindle format, and B&N had only half. But B&N is superambitious: “The company expects that its selection will increase to well over one million titles within the next year, inclusive of every available eBook from every book publisher and every available eBook original, which is a fast growing marketplace.”

I tried the iPhone and OS X editions of the e-reader software (which are based on the existing apps from B&N subsidiary Fictionwise), and found them to be a mixed bag. On the plus side, the iPhone version has some features that Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone doesn’t, including the ability to choose fonts and opt for justified or unjustified text. But there’s nothing like Amazon’s Whispersync, which keeps track of your place in a book as you move between devices. And B&N’s iPhone-friendly site for finding and buying e-books isn’t as good as Amazon’s: If you know what you’re looking for you can search for it, but you can’t even pull up a list of bestsellers to browse through.

And when I wanted to download one of the free Google Books tomes, I was flummoxed by the process: The B&N site couldn’t decide whether the book was free or cost a penny, and demanded my credit-card information even though the total price was $0.00.

Both B&N and Amazon make you use the iPhone’s Safari if you want to buy books on your phone; I’d much rather they let you do so from within the apps themselves. iPhone OS 3.0′s in-app commerce would let them do that, but they’d have to give Apple a cut of proceeds, so I’m not holding my breath.

All in all, Barnes & Noble’s e-book initiative seems rougher around the edge’s than Amazon’s–which isn’t surprising given that the latter has almost a two-year head start. B&N won’t truly compete head-to-head with the Kindle until the Plastic Logic reader is finally on sale next year, so it’s got some time to refine this first rough draft. I’d love to see Amazon get some serious competition, and long-term, B&N seems to be in as good a position as anyone to provide it.

“Secret” Questions: Not. Secret. At. All.

I still have Twitter’s document leak on my mind, and am therefore hypersensitive at the moment to the “forgot your password?” features that Web services offer and their potential for abuse by people who want to steal your information (or even your money). I just signed up for a Barnes & Noble account, which I’m bringing up here not because it’s a bad example but because it’s perfectly typical.

B&N asked me to choose a question that nobody else could answer:

And then it gave me eight questions to choose from:

I don’t see a single question here that nobody else on earth can answer. Some are the very definition of public information, like the names of parents and pets. Others are profoundly guessable, even by perfect strangers. (If you know what metropolitan area someone lives in, doesn’t that give you a gigantic head start in figuring out what his or her favorite team might be?)

As for me: Lots of people know what city I was born in, what my mother’s middle name is, and what sports team I root for. If you’ve got access to my Facebook profile you can make excellent stabs at figuring out my favorite author and movie. My favorite car is pretty obvious, too–it’s the one parked in my driveway, and I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on Twitter and in other online venues.

Oh, and my father doesn’t have a middle name and I don’t own any pets at the moment, so those questions are out.

When you think about it, there’s almost no such thing as information that’s A) known only to one person and B) virtually impossible for anyone else to guess. There are terrible implementations of secret-question security and less terrible implementations, but they’re all based on a fundamentally flawed idea.

It’s true that like many services, Barnes & Noble only asks you the security question after you’ve clicked on a link it sends you via e-mail. So an intruder would have to both have access to your e-mail and know or be able to guess the answer to your security question to get access to your account. In other words, the security question is an added level of protection, not a primary means of defense–but I still don’t like the Web-wide pretension that nobody knows my mother’s name except me.

Conclusions?

1) If Web sites insist on using secret questions–and I’m sure they’re not going anywhere–they should at least stop pretending there’s anything secret about them;

2) Letting us choose our own secret questions and answers is much better than forcing us to use one supplied by the company;

3) Providing bizarre made-up answers remains the best way to keep secret questions secret. Which is why I just decided that my favorite team is the Atascadero Wombats…

The BlackBerry Storm Gets Cheaper

So much attention is being lavished on Apple’s iPhone 3GS that it’s easy to forget that the old iPhone 3G is quite a deal at its new $99 price. And even if you never buy an iPhone, you may benefit from Apple’s price cut, since it’s inexorably going to lead to lower prices for competitive smartphones. Such as RIM’s BlackBerry Storm–which AT&T is now selling for the familiar price of $99 with a two-year contract. Verizon originally sold the Storm for $250 (before a $50 rebate) and has recently offered it for $150, so the new sticker price represents a steep discount.

Unlike most BlackBerries, the Storm was poorly reviewed; most of the real people I run into who own one don’t hate it, but they don’t rhapsodize over it, either. With the Storm now assuming the same positioning as the iPhone 3G–last year’s technology for under a hundred bucks–the big question is whether the upcoming second-generation Storm will be a smartphone that BlackBerry fans can love.

Quickoffice for iPhone Does File Attachments

For everything that’s amazing about the iPhone, there are still some things about it that are amazingly limited. One example: The sandboxing of third-party apps has meant that there’s been no way to edit documents that folks send to you as e-mail file attachments.

Today, Quickoffice released an update to its $12.99 iPhone office suite–the only real suite for the iPhone–with support for attachments, letting you edit Word and Excel attachments. Apple hasn’t un-sandboxed anything–Quickoffice came up with a workaround. Once you’ve verified the e-mail addresses you use with your iPhone, you can forward an e-mail with an attachment to files@quickofficeconnect.com. Once you do, it’s available within Quickoffice for editing. And if you need to e-mail the edited version as an attachment, you can.

It’s not as simple as if Apple simply provided the hooks for Quickoffice to grab attachments, and you probably won’t want to use it for sensitive documents, since the process involves e-mailing files to an external address. But it works quite well–it’s sort of an elegant kludge, and it makes Quickoffice for the iPhone much, much more useful. Actually, it makes the iPhone more useful, period. The new version of the suite also provides support for universal Cut and Paste, offers better spreadsheet formatting, and lets you shake the phone to undo.

Verizon First to Cave With Exclusivity Agreements

Responding to pressure on government regulators, Verizon Wireless has announced it would limit the length of its exclusivity agreements with wireless manufacturers to six months. However, for carriers to pick up a Verizon-exclusive phone after that period, it would need to have less than 500,000 customers.

Verizon’s move seems aimed at quelling complaints by small regional carriers, while at the same time keeping its edge over its more similarly-sized rivals. It’s concession came as part of a July 17 letter sent to lawmakers. Washington is looking into exclusivity arrangements, and these agreements have become a focus of their inquiries.

“Exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation in device development and design. When we procure exclusive handsets from our vendors, we typically buy hundreds of thousands or even millions of each device,” the company argued. “Otherwise manufacturers may be reluctant to make the investments of time, money and production capacity to support a particular device.”

I think its all but a given that Verizon’s pander will do little to change lawmaker’s minds. While I do see the need for some type of competitive advantage, the iPhone showed us how an exclusivity agreement can go wrong.

Consumers that want an iPhone aren’t the only ones affected. Think about AT&T’s network. People who don’t even want the phone are affected by the strain that the device has put on the carrier. That is certainly a concern.

Add to this that this concession in the end would benefit such a small portion of the industry — analysts say that less than five percent of wireless customers are with carriers smaller than the 500,000 threshold, and it may be more of an half-hearted attempt to protect themselves than an honest effort to put the interest of the consumer in mind.

DRM? Dead? Yes, But Only For Music.

TorrentFreak is reporting that Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America, declared that Digital Rights Management is “dead” in an interview for an upcoming article. The fact that the industry has basically given up on DRM in favor of unprotected music is not exactly a breaking story, but it’s a relief to see that even the organization most closely associated with anti-piracy efforts seems to be conceding that copy protection isn’t the way to go.

I persist in the idiosyncratic stance that I’m not morally opposed to the idea of copy protection–I just have gigantic issues with most of the implementations I’ve ever used. Even then, I think that copyright holders have the right to make decisions which I think are stupid and self-defeating. But as far as I know, nobody is maintaining that the gradual disappearance of DRM has put the music industry in a worse situation than it was in when most commercial music downloads were locked up.

Of course, DRM isn’t dead–it’s alive and well on the digital video front, where copy protection (albeit not particularly effective copy protection in many cases) is still standard, and an act as innocuous as ripping a DVD to your hard drive for personal use involves cracking DRM. Any guesses about whether we’ll ever see a truly DRM-free era?