As I proclaimed (on camera) at CES earlier this year, 2010 ushers in a new category of media consumption devices. Something us geeks have dabbled with for ages, but the trend is finally making its way into the mainstream. And while I actually missed the Sony Dash at CES, it landed on my radar big time when Netflix streaming was announced in February.
If you love a company and Google buys it, worry. That’s been my conclusion lately. And the latest evidence is the company’s acquisition of BumpTop, the company behind a cool 3D desktop interface. So far, the news for BumpTop fans is bad: The product is being discontinued and even people who have paid for it have to deal with that nasty concept “end-of-life support.”
I’m curious about Google’s intentions for the technology. It hasn’t said anything so far, but the most logical assumption is that it intends to use what it’s bought in Android and/or Chrome OS.
The good news for Apple? It’s already sold a million iPads, more than twice as many as the original iPhone had sold at this point in its history. The bad news, at least according to the New York Post? The Department of Justice and the FTC are trying to figure out which of them should be investigating Apple over its decision to prevent iPhone developers from using cross-platform tools that would allow for easy creation of apps for both the iPhone and other handsets.
Photographs by Robert Cardin
(Note: This story is republished from PCWorld.com, with permission–and is also in the June PCWorld print issue.)
What, precisely, is the iPad? Compared with its iconic ancestors, the iPod and the iPhone, that’s a surprisingly tough question to answer. It runs the same operating system as the iPhone–but you can’t make phone calls on it. It has been hailed as the gadget that may save the publishing industry–though its e-reader software, which isn’t preinstalled, does not display magazines and newspapers. It features a bevy of games–but it’s neither an Xbox 360-killer nor a handheld device like a Nintendo DSi.
Most paradoxically of all, the iPad takes on the Windows world of netbooks and even more full-featured PCs, though it doesn’t run all Web apps. Or print. Or provide a file system that lets you get to all your documents in any app. Those shortcomings would make the very concept of competing with PCs laughable, if weren’t for the way its small size, touch interface, and impressive battery life add up to one of the best devices ever built for consuming content of all kinds, from Web pages to books to feature films. It’s both more fundamentally limited than a PC and an exciting sneak peek at where interfaces are likely to go–which is why it makes much more sense as a supplement to the other computers in your life than as a replacement for any of them.
In short, Apple’s tablet competes with an array of existing devices without mimicking any of them. And the best way to figure out whether it’s a plausible alternative to a PC, an e-reader, a game console, or any other better-established gizmo is to give it a whirl. So we did–read on to see what we found. (For more coverage, browse to go.pcworld.com/ipad.)
I know many of you still stubbornly use Internet Explorer (hello, Carl). I used to, as well. But Firefox, with all its lovely add-ons and tweaks, is just more fun to use.
Let’s start with a something you might not know about: Firefox’s hidden visual tab switching tweak. Right now, you can use Ctrl-Tab to cycle through Firefox’s tabs. But if you’re using Firefox 3.6, the current revision, this tweak will give you a visual look at the tabs, just like using Alt-Tab in Windows.
(Here’s another story I wrote for FoxNews.com.)
If you think the whole Web is suddenly looking more like Facebook, you’re not imagining things. At its developer conference last week, the 800-pound gorilla of social networks made a bevy of announcements — and all the biggies involved intermingling your life as a Facebook user with other activities around the Internet.
For instance, a new Like button that’s already been rolled out on countless sites — including FoxNews.com — lets you “Like” items such as news articles, and see which your Facebook pals have liked. You can do so right at the site in question, but every time you click Like, your recommendation gets posted to your wall at Facebook, too.
Facebook is working with a handful of sites to implement even tighter integration. Listen to music at Pandora, for instance, and the online radio service may play music by artists that you’ve expressed a fondness for back on Facebook.
A couple of weeks ago, when Twitter announced that it would soon release an official Twitter app for Android phones, I fantasized that the company was going to port Loren Brichter’s miraculous Tweetie Twitter for IPhone to Android. It didn’t. But it’s done something pretty pleasing on its own terms: It’s released a really nice original (and fre) Twitter app for Android. For now, it’s replacing the very-respectable-but-not-spectacular Seesmic as my Android Twitter client of choice.
The best thing about Twitter for Android is the user interface. It’s arguably a little on the twee side: the Twitter bird is everywhere, there are animated clouds, and trending topics joggle up and down. But overall, it looks really attractive, it’s nicely intuitive, and everything’s legible–virtues which are never a given on the Android platform. (Twidroid Pro and TweetCaster are powerful Twitter clients for Android, but they make my eyeballs hurt.)
Twitter for Android’s most interesting feature is its contact syncing: You can meld your Twitterfriends with your Android contact list, merging photos and other information and putting links to tweets in Android’s contact list. (The program lets you choose between bringing all the people you’re following on Twitter into the Android contact list, or just syncing the people who are already there.) The client also supports geolocation and lists, has a widget, and is generally pretty full-featured with one notable exception: It doesn’t support multiple accounts.
I’m still getting my head around Twitter releasing its own client apps rather than leaving that challenge and opportunity to other folks. But this is a good one. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that existing third-party Android developers will respond not by giving up but by trying to beat Twitter at its own game.
A few screens after the jump.
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Apple started selling the 3G version of the iPad today, and folks are discovering that some apps behave differently on 3G than Wi-Fi. YouTube, for instance, delivers lower-quality video, and the ABC app won’t play at all. Presumably somebody’s still worried that AT&T’s network won’t be able to handle the deluge of data.
I don’t have a 3G iPad and don’t expect to get one anytime soon. Clarification: I do use my iPad on 3G all the time, because I have a Verizon MiFi wireless hotspot. As long as I remember to charge it, it works just great–and because it’s turning 3G into Wi-Fi, iPad applications don’t dumb themselves down. I also get to pay Verizon one price for Wi-Fi that works with all my computers, my iPad, and my iPhone. Recommended.
Embedding audio and video across the Web is pretty simple thanks to sites like YouTube, Vimeo and others, but embedded computer games? It’s complicated, and yet InstantAction has found a way.
The service, which launched today, allows blogs and other Web sites to post full-length PC games right into the browser. I’m not talking about Flash games, either; InstantAction supports any programming language or engine that can run on a Windows PC.
The first game to work with InstantAction is The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. Regretfully, I’m not able to get the game embedded in our setup here — how embarrassing! — but here’s the game running in Facebook, on Kotaku and on Joystiq.
When you start loading a game in InstantAction, it downloads data in chunks, giving you the most necessary bits first and filling in the rest as you play. Games run in a Web browser, and appear to be streaming, but they rely on the computer’s hardware to do the heavy lifting. In that sense, InstantAction is quite different than the upcoming OnLive, which processes all the graphics on its own servers and sends compressed audio and video to the player. If you’re worried about being shackled to a Web connection, InstantAction Community Manager Ian Tornay wrote in a comment on Joystiq that an offline client is in the works.
Monkey Island lets you play for 20 minutes before you’re asked to pay for the full version, and I expect other games to follow a similar model. The idea is to get players into the game without bothersome downloads and installations.
Things didn’t go so smoothly in my test of Monkey Island, as I had to first install the latest versions of DirectX and Java in order to play, and I’d like to see how the system handles beefier games, like the previously-demonstrated Tribes and Assassin’s Creed. Still, the concept is intriguing: If watching a video online is as simple as clicking a button, the same should be true for playing computer games.
This has been an unusually eventful week in the tech world. Let’s see, we’ve had…
HP’s rumored termination of its Windows 7 slate
Microsoft’s confirmed termination of its Courtier concept tablet
Apple’s announcement of its WWDC event (and specifically the lack of awards for Mac apps)
Blogger Charlie Stross does a remarkable job of tying everything together in this post–which says that Jobs’ aversion to Flash is really about Apple, and the rest of the computer industry, facing a life-or-death struggle over the next few years as PCs get even more commoditized and even more of our digital lives move online. Apple, Stross says, is trying to reinvent itself from a manufacturer of Macs into a gatekeeper and provider of services, and it’s trying to do it while it still has time.
One striking, subtle point about Jobs’s memo: He says “Flash was created during the PC era…” In other words, he’s saying we’re no longer in the PC era. Stross says that “the PC revolution is almost coming to an end,” which seems like as good a way to describe where we are as any.
You can quibble with bits and pieces of Stross’s overarching analysis–or the whole damn thing if you want–but it’s incredibly thought provoking. Having grown up in Boston in the 1980s, where Route 128 was lined with wildly successful minicomputer companies which no longer exist, I’m certainly not discounting the possibility that PCs will cease to exist sooner than we expect, and that none of the huge companies that make them is guaranteed an afterlife.
