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The Mysterious, Flying AR.Drone

Posted by Jared Newman on January 5, 2010 at 9:17 pm

It’s my first ever Consumer Electronics Show, so I was happy to see at least one completely ridiculous tech product upon arrival in Las Vegas. Creating a spectacle at the entrance to Tuesday night’s media event was the AR.Drone, a UFO-like toy that’s controlled by iPhone.

Three years in development, the AR.Drone was a passion project of Paris-based Parrot, which mostly designs hands-free Bluetooth devices. This gadget is quite different, using a set of fans to propel itself in the air. The Drone is supposed to fly for 15 minutes on a lithium polymer battery, but every time I watched this thing, it fell after a minute or two. Here’s a short video I shot on my iPhone:

An on-board video camera feeds back to the iPhone. The idea is to use the Drone in alternate reality games, superimposing images onto real world video. Imagine controlling this toy in the park while blasting pretend alien spaceships, or dueling against a fellow Drone owner. Yoni Benatar, the Drone’s project manager, said Parrot is talking to developers about creating apps for the product.

Benatar wouldn’t provide a price, but mentioned $500 or lower and then said “something affordable.” Parrot’s hoping to release the Drone later this year.

I’m not naive enough to think we’ll ever hear again from this novelty product, but CES would be pretty dull without the occasional gizmo whose head is in the clouds.

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A Microsoft Tablet

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 5, 2010 at 9:06 pm

The New York Times’ Ashlee Vance says that tomorrow’s Steve Ballmer Consumer Electronics Show keynote may feature…a tablet slate computer…

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A Look at the Software Behind the Nexus One

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 5, 2010 at 10:46 am

While obviously the Nexus One hardware is the star of the show here, the software behind the device is certainly what makes it all possible. Google says that the Nexus One will run Android 2.1, and took attendees at its press gathering on Tuesday on a tour of its most interesting features.

One of the first features it highlighted was something called “Live Wallpaper,” which allows for dynamic, animated backgrounds. For example, an equalizer wallpaper moves the equalizer with the beat of your music, while a water theme shows leaves falling into water, which cause ripples. Touch the water, and it ripples too. One of those useless yet cool features I guess!

Support for 3D will allow for some pretty cool applications: icons on the phone’s desktop can scroll into oblivion akin to the credits in Star Wars, and photo apps from the folks at CoolIris will allow the user to surf around their photo albums in a 3D space. Voice recognition will allow for the dictation of e-mails, Facebook statuses, what have you: you could even control the navigation of applications via voice.

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Google Calls Nexus One a “Superphone”

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 5, 2010 at 10:33 am

As expected, Google at a press gathering on Tuesday introduced the Nexus One, part of what it called an emerging class of smartphones called “superphones.” Certainly from its specs it is: the HTC-manufactured phone sports a 3.7-inch AMLED screen and a 1GHz processor, one of the fastest integrated processors in any wireless device released to date. There’s a ton of sensors on this thing, just like the iPhone: including accelerometer as well as proximity and light sensors. A trackball at the bottom of the device doubles does both navigation and notification duties — it can change color depending on specific actions. The camera is capable of  5 megapixels and includes an LED flash. MPEG4 video and one click uploading to YouTube is also included.

One of the most exciting features to me — and as far as I know new to a device itself — is active noise cancellation. The device includes two microphones which allows the Android OS to filter out background noise for clearer calls. To my knowledge, only headsets have been doing this so far, but if anybody else knows other phones doing this, I’d be glad to hear it.

Google will sell the device itself through a web store on its site, in concert with its partner, which will initially only be T-Mobile. You have to argue that the nation’s fourth largest carrier scored a big coup with this win: while the myTouch was certainly a big win for them, scoring the Nexus One is even bigger — it is much more of a competitor to the iPhone than the myTouch ever dreamed to be.

Even better? It’s price. While you’ll be able to pick up the unlocked version of the phone for $529, T-Mobile will sell the device at $179 locked with a 2-year contract.

Don’t worry Verizon folks, your time is coming too, but not until spring, as well as those with Vodafone. Either way, you all can preorder it now. We’ll give you the link when we get it.

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The Consumerist Investigates Best Buy

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 5, 2010 at 7:31 am

The Consumerist has conducted a superb, important investigation into a Best Buy “optimization” service that involves the Geek Squad pre-tweaking PCs on sale for alleged performance and usability benefits, for a  $40 surcharge. The investigation’s conclusion: The service can make it hard to buy a computer for the advertised price, and the benefits, if there are any, aren’t worth forty bucks.

It’s certainly true that many new Windows PCs aren’t as well configured as they could be–some, in fact, are so laden with demoware and other stuff that it’s downright annoying. Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t Best Buy, a tremendously powerful company in the industry, use the leverage it has to convince PC makers to do a better job in the first place, rather than trying to squeeze an extra $40 out of consumers?

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Live Coverage of the Google Phone Event

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 5, 2010 at 7:20 am

If it’s not the official unveiling of the Android-based Nexus One phone, every tech pundit on the planet will have to eat his or her respective hat–and I’ll be at Google headquarters this morning starting a few minutes before 10am PT with live coverage. Join us here.

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Skiff, an Interesting New E-Reader. But Do We Need Another One?

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 4, 2010 at 11:42 pm

Among the gazillion products making their debut this week at the Consumer Electronics Show: Skiff, the first reader from a new spinoff of publishing behemoth Hearst. The Skiff has the largest (11.5″) and highest-resolution (1200 by 1600) screen of any e-reader to date; it uses a new “metal foil” technology from LG instead of glass, making the gizmo sturdy and thin; and it emphasizes magazines and newspapers more than most e-readers, as you might expect of a reader that emerged from Hearst. (Kindle and Nook both offer magazines and books, but in a drab, text-oriented format that looks more like a 1986 CompuServe screen than a real periodical or a Web page.)

Whatever Skiff is, it’s definitely not an unimaginative Kindle wannabe, and I’m looking forward to seeing it at the show in a few days. But I’m not unreservedly excited about the profusion of new e-reading devices that are arriving. We have a sufficient supply of hardware–at least hardware that utilizes monochrome e-ink displays. And e-reading is going to be a hundred times more exciting once the industry agrees on some standards that make these devices as compatible with an array of content as Web browsers have been from day one.

Skiff apparently plans to license its platform to other devices too, and that’s smart–but it’s still a proprietary format that won’t work with every major e-reader. To mention CompuServe yet again, we’re still stuck in the equivalent of the era when CompuServe, AOL, GEnie, and others duked it out by building their own proprietary technologies and licensing exclusive content. You think it’s a coincidence that the online world only really took off when the Web knocked down those walls?

Here’s the e-reader development I most want to see: An e- format that’s largely based on existing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other Web technologies, with a dash of something along the lines of Google Gears to make it possible to peruse publications when you’re not online, plus some sort of mechanism for enabling paid content. Something, in other words, not wildly different from the Web as we know it, except in a form that provides more of the visual elegance and browsability of print. Seems simple enough to me…

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Microsoft Extends 50% Windows 7 Discount

Posted by David Worthington on January 4, 2010 at 6:23 pm

Sometimes Microsoft’s biggest competitor is itself. Huge numbers of businesses are still using Windows XP, and Microsoft is acting aggressively to migrate them to Windows 7 by extending a promotion that offers Windows 7 and Office 2007 for half price.

Windows Vista is by many accounts a better operating system than XP, but nearly 90 percent of businesses bypassed the upgrade, and opted to stick with Windows XP, because it was “good enough” for them. Office XP presents Microsoft with a similar problem.

Continue Reading →

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Buy a Movie Once. Watch It Anywhere and Everywhere, Forever?

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 4, 2010 at 4:12 pm

It sounds…well, not too good to be true, but pretty darn neat, at least in theory. The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that most of the big Hollywood studios and a bunch of major tech companies are planning to use this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to unveil the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, a plan to let folks who buy a movie or TV show in one format, and then get easy access to it in other formats on other devices.

End result: If you buy the Blu-Ray of Jaws, you might also get the right to watch it on your Internet TV box, or download it to a media player, courtesy of a digital “locker” in the sky that keeps track of what you’ve paid for. What you wouldn’t have to do is hand over full price to Hollywood each time you want to get a movie for a new gizmo.

When I think of the hassle and expense of re-repurchasing video in new forms, I always come back to the fact that I’ve bought Pinocchio from Disney so many times over the past quarter century that I’ve lost track–as a VHS tape, as a DVD (more than once, in multiple remasterings), on Blu-Ray, and as an iTunes download. DECE isn’t going to let me stop buying this particular movie, for the simple reason that Disney is the only Hollywood biggie that isn’t on board. As Stone says, it’s supporting a similar system called KeyChest. Rumor has it that it could roll out that digital locker in collaboration with Apple, which also isn’t on the DECE team.

As I’ve said many times, I’m not opposed to copy protection on religious grounds–it’s just that nearly every implementation of it devised to date has been either a minor hassle or a major one, with no benefit to those of us who pay for our content. DECE and/or KeyChest could make copy protection far more palatable–I’d be much more inclined to plunk down money for a Blu-Ray if what I was buying was not a physical shiny disc but the right to watch that movie where I pleased, on the device of my choice. And no, copies of movies that aren’t locked up with copy protection at all don’t accomplish the same thing–they’re in one format that’s not compatible with every gizmo, and they’re too humongous to shuffle around between all your devices without a lot of effort.

I’m not giddy over any of this yet–a lot of details remain unknown. Is Warner Bros. really willing to sell me a movie one last time, then give me access to it in a multitude of formats for the next few decades, or can it use DECE to parcel out access in a parsimonious fashion that’s not that exciting? Will pervasive Internet access render DECE unnecessary by providing a streaming version of movies that works perfectly on gadgets of all sorts? What happens if DECE isn’t as successful as its backers hope? (I’m instinctively skeptical of anything that involves using servers to unlock access to content–when the companies maintaining those servers lose interest, they have a tendency to shut them down and thereby cut off stuff that consumers thought they’d “bought.”)

All in all, though, I’m glad the entertainment industry is trying this. It’s surely better than doing very little to give movie fans an incentive to invest in new, legal copies of content they already own, which has usually been the industry’s strategy so far…

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