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Category: Geek service

  • iPhone speculations

    pace, Brian – I don’t think the iPhone has been nor will ever be a “flop”. But neither will Apple grow to dominate the cell phone industry the way it has the MP3 portable music player market.

    Here’s how I think things will play out. For one thing, the iPhone will probably see a price drop. The markup on the phone (on the basis of components alone, not counting labor or licenses etc) is about 50% for the 8GB model, and Apple is running what can only be called a scam with regards to battery replacement. Only the Apple true believers will tolerate this, and that’s a miniscule audience compared to the market size (for reference, Motorola sold about 10 million RAZR phones in third quarter 2006 alone).

    It’s also pretty obvious that a video-iPod using the iPhone multitouch interface is inevitable. The question is, will Apple sell a WiFi version, too? A device that does everything that iPhone does – except for the phone – would be a supremely compelling purchase. Especially with Wifi and ditching EDGE in favor of EV-DO. Of course, Apple would need to permit users to install third-party apps – like Skype – for it to really catch on. Imagine for a moment just what you could do with something like that. It would be a VOIP-phone, a handheld PC, chat device, video player, everything. Personally I think that device convergence is impossible; no matter what happens, you always will have to carry two. Let those be your cell phone and the uberPod. That might be a potent enough combo to banish notebook PCs to… well, the desktop.

  • the ultimate spill test

    what do you get when you pit a Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad against a NASA astronaut training tank?

    The Thinkpad lasted about 3 seconds. Impressive.

  • shoulda named it the Wiiphone

    Maybe this post is sour grapes on my part; I certainly can’t afford one. But the iPhone wasn’t exactly the runaway smash that Steve Jobs, objective observer that he is, claimed it would be. Even Brian doesn’t want one 🙂

    Who said mobs were dumb? The iPhone is a beautiful piece of electronics, so much so that Apple can’t allow you to do things with it you’d normally be able to do with a SIM-card GSM device, like swap cards out, even intra-carrier.

    and this is just wrong:

    Steve opened up with how he believes that the iPhone will change the mobile space forever…. The iPhone was driven by the fact that everyone hates their phones, and it’s all about “core competence”—making all of the features easy-to-use and self-discoverable.

    No. Most people love their phones; what they hate is their cell phone plan and provider. Why? Because of all the restrictions, contract termination fees, high prices… things that Apple does precisely nothing to ameliorate, and in fact exacerbates. Besides, anyone who’s ever seen the latest phones out of Japan knows that it’s not ease of use, but sexy features, that are what consumers want. Apple’s view that the phone features need to be “easy to use” suggest both a total lack of awareness of modern cell phones and a certain condescension towards the user.

    I think that in some ways the iPhone represents the epitome of Apple’s embrace of “cool”, which necessarily carries connotations of elitism. This contrast starkly with Nintendo, which aims for a kind of mass appeal – but not in the shoddy sense, more of a family vibe.

  • Grazr

    I’m going to have to look very carefully at this:

    Grazr is a free publishing tool for feeds. It lets you quickly and easily display RSS, RDF, Atom, and OPML files on any Web page so they can be viewed by any visitor to the site.

    This kind of blows away the old RSS-to-Javascript service. And with the OPML support.. this could really be useful.

  • Dreamliner One

    Charles Conklin, aka Flightblogger, scored a major coup: exclusive first photos of the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner rolling out of manufacturing at the Everett, WA plant.

    dreamliner.jpg

    (go to Conklin’s site for several more photos)

    The Dreamliner represents the antithesis of Airbus’ giant new A380 – a smaller, light, fuel-efficient plane that emphasizes passenger comfort over a vast behemoth that packs them in like sardines and requires airports to pay for expensive new gate upgrades just to host. Boeing is in many ways the antithesis of Airbus, too – though the argument that Boeing’s supposed civilian market prowess is partially subsidized by its vastly more lucrative defense contracts has some merit. Still. Look at that baby and tell me you wouldn’t love to fly aboard. I’ve flown aboard a few 777’s and the Dreamliner promises to be even more of a sublime travel experience.

  • browser wars: 1997 vs 2007

    Netscape has released a new version of Navigator. Netscape! And Apple has ported Safari to Windows. Its notable that for both, the main selling points of differentiation from IE and Firefox are new ways of messing around with tabs. I find this obsession with tabs on the part of these bit players to be a kind of cargo cult mentality; wave the word “tabs” around and the users will fall out of the skies.

    The real innovation on the browser front is porting the web to handheld devices. In that regard, Opera is the king – they just released a version for the wifi-capable Nintendo DS. Opera really understands that the user interface needs to be custom to the device; anyone who has used the Opera browser on the Wii can attest to how well they’ve leveraged the strengths of the unique interface there. With the DS, they have two screens, and a stylus to play with. That is definitely going to be interesting; the DS is a fraction of the cost of bulkier “web access devices” like the UMPC or Origami, and there’s already a gigantic user base.

  • XKCD and the Map of the Online

    I came across XKCD via Shamus and am hooked. I mean, this is just genius.

    online_communities.png

    (click to enlarge. original here)

  • MSI Luxium

    I wrote a while back about new standards for external graphics cards on laptops – the basic idea being that you buy a fancy PCI card intended for PCs, drop it in an enclosure, and plug it into your laptop for desktop-level graphics capability. Gaming is of course the obvious market.

    How time flies! Seems that MSI already has a product on the market, which plugs into the ExpressCard slot:

    According to the ExpressCard web site, the ExpressCard channel will limit the performance that a PCI Express x16 card offers because it only operates on a single express channel at a data rate of 2.5Gbps. Still, being able to take a laptop on the road and returning home to play games by simply plugging it into an external video card may be tempting over the choice of buying a gaming desktop computer. Rock the Luxium with a 20″ monitor, a gaming mouse, and a desktop keyboard, and you’re good to frag without the expense of a high-performance desktop.

    The thing even supports extra USB ports so it serves double duty as a USB hub for keyboard, mouse, etc. The desktop computer concept is increasingly obsolete.

  • I choose HD-DVD

    A few days ago, HeadGeek at AICN declared he’d taken sides in the nextgen-DVD format war: he chose HD-DVD. I am inclined to follow his lead. At present I am in no position to purchase a HDTV (without which the choice of DVD format is moot), but I am confident enough in HD-DVD to make the decision well in advance.

    There are a number of reasons why HD-DVD makes more sense. The fundamental reason, however, is simple: HD-DVD is backwards-compatible with standard DVD. Couple this with the fact that I will have to buy a new DVD player anyway once I upgrade to HDTV (which will be mandatory as of February 17th, 2009). My aging DVD player doesn’t support progressive scan, so watching DVD movies with my old player on a new HDTV would be masochistic. I anticipate that my TV viewing will be driven more by Blockbuster and BitTorrent than by broadcast, so the choice of DVD player becomes even more important. With a single box that supports upscaling like the Toshiba HD-A2 ($250 at Amazon), I get the full benefits of the HD resolution with my existing DVD library as well as any HD content I might be inclined to rent.

    The other primary factor is cost. HD-DVD is simply cheaper, and maintains a healthy price advantage over Blu-Ray even despite recent moves by Sony to reduce the price. The irony here is that while BR players are overpriced now, they are likely to become very cheap in the future, because you can always get one at a subsidized cost by buying a Playstation 3. So there’s even more incentive to wait. The price of any gaming console is guaranteed to drop over time; witness that the PS2 now sells for $129. If at some point I do decide that I want a BR version of Lion King (Disney is exclusively BR), I’ll go and buy a PS3 and get maximum value; I anticipate we will see the PS3 at the $300 price point within a few years, especially as the Wii and XBox continue to clean Sony’s clock.

    Much has been made of the fact that Blu-Ray enjoys wider studio support, but if there ever really is a movie truly exclusive to BR that I must have, I still can buy the standard DVD and upconvert on the A2, or I can bittorrent it down and watch on my HDTV (DRM on both formats is irreversibly compromised). But how likely is that anyway? Given that King Kong is out on HD-DVD, I’m not worried about Lord of the Rings following suit; and I’m enough of a purist about Star Wars that if Lucas gets his head out of his arse and gives me the Original, Unedited Trilogy (i.e., Han shoots first, etc) then that’s worth buying a PS3 for. Later. I can wait.

    All the debate about which format is winning, based on sales, is essentially bogus anyway. The actual numbers of players sold is so insignificant thus far that any advantage enjoyed by one or the other is illusory and can’t be used to predict the longer-term trend. So I’m not worried about being locked into a “losing” format like BetaMax – again, at a bare minimum I will have backwards, upscaling compatibility with my existing DVDs. As far as I am concerned, the “format war” is just hype.

    And anyway, Sony is evil. Some things you just can’t forgive.

  • dell coupon code: XPS M1210

    $200 off XPS M1210 Notebook: $999 after instant savings. (no coupon code required)