Detect language Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Ukrainian Vietnamese » < option value = "ar"> Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese ( Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Ukrainian Vietnamese h = new _History (); t_ctr = new _TranslateForm (new _LanguageSelector ( 'old_sl', 'sl_select'), new _LanguageSelector ( 'old_tl', 'tl_select'), 'old_submit', 'submit_button' h ' source ',' result_box ',' dict ',' auto trans'); window.jstiming.load.tick ( 'prt') < img src = "http://www.google.com/mb/plus_sm.gif" style = "margin-right: 0.33em; visibility: hidden" id = zippyicon> < input type = hidden name = value hl = en "> < input type = hidden name = value ="">< text input type = hidden name = langpair value = "en | en"> Translate a Web Page
Back to the usual review this week, after our 20 Essential Apps list last Friday. Thankfully, it's been a pretty good week in the store, with lots of actually useful apps—including a full-fledged four-track recorder and a couple of utilities that actually add some usable core features that I wish would have made it into the 2.2 software update today. Oh, and of course, something Japanese and crazy. Onward!
Four Track: Remember how Keith Richards always said he recorded the riff to Satisfaction on a hotel answering machine? Well, now, budding Keefs can multi-track their sudden inspirations for songs about not getting sufficiently laid. Four Track offers all the controls you would want for a basic deck, has no track length limit, and can sync via wi-fi to import you recordings into Garage Band or Pro Tools. Awesome. It's $10.
Save My Docs: Safari received some nice performance and UI tweaks in 2.2, but it still does one thing a mobile browser should never do—wipe out version of pages you've already loaded for no reason. Multiple times I've loaded a long Wikipedia article on something that I planned to read on the subway, only to find the page totally blank a few minutes later for no explicable reason. Save My Docs does one thing—saves any document loaded in Safari locally, complete with images, to be read at any time later. $2
CalToDo: I can't believe this isn't a native feature: CalToDo easily syncs your OS X to-do lists (found in Mail and iCal) via a lite server app that runs on your machine. Interface is nice, and so is the simplicity. $1
iMarimo: And iMarimo, what can I say? It's floating ball of algae in front of a few blurry pictures that you can spin via touch. Apparently, the Marimo algae is beloved in Japan for its freakish, perfectly spherical growth and its ultra-rarity—found only in a single lake in Hokkaido. Damn. That's about all I can say about this on a Friday, and it costs $1.
This week's app coverage on Giz:
• iPhone 2.2 Update Review: Go Get It Now
• Pocket Jockey iPhone Game Simulates Horse Racing In Most Suggestive Way Possible
• Numberkey Transforms iPhone Into Sweet Wireless Numberpad
• Google's iPhone Voice Search Mobile App Now Available
• OpenTable iPhone App: Easiest, Most Soulless Restaurant Reservations Ever
• iPhone's Gas Cubby Car Care Tracker Is Anal So You Don't Have To Be
• Hands-On With Newber, The Location-Aware Call Redirector For Your iPhone
• Even Google Gets Shafted By Apple's Ridiculous App-Approval Process
• iPhone's Puzzle Quest Hits December For $10 [Kotaku]
This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.
detect language Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Ukrainian Vietnamese » < option value = "ar"> Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese ( Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Ukrainian Vietnamese h = new _History (); t_ctr = new _TranslateForm (new _LanguageSelector ( 'old_sl', 'sl_select'), new _LanguageSelector ( 'old_tl', 'tl_select'), 'old_submit', 'submit_button' h ' source ',' result_box ',' dict ',' auto trans'); window.jstiming.load.tick ( 'prt') < img src = "http://www.google.com/mb/plus_sm.gif" style = "margin-right: 0.33em; visibility: hidden" id = zippyicon> < input type = hidden name = value hl = en "> < input type = hidden name = value ="">< text input type = hidden name = langpair value = "en | en"> Translate a Web Page
[Via Impress]
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video
Marantz's IS301 wireless iPod dock elegantly cuts the cord originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsThe Storm's main advantage over other BlackBerry devices is that it has a larger screen, not necessarily one that is controlled by touch. However, to accommodate the removal of its trademark keyboard, RIM has taken touch-screens into a literal new dimension by requiring users to depress the screen to activate a button on the screen, which lowers and springs back like a giant keyboard key.
The screen's ability to respond to presses as a physical button (like the trackpad in Apple's new MacBooks), helps provide a more natural feel to typing on the Storm; the feedback is certainly more satisfying than the solely visual feedback that the iPhone gives. Just because it feels good, though, doesn't mean you should do it.
Continue reading Switched On: Writers on the Storm
Filed under: Cellphones
Switched On: Writers on the Storm originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.
Take the iPhone, for example, one of the most successful products in the history of consumer electronics. We like it, I love mine, but the fact is that the first generation was rushed out, lacking basic features that were added in later releases or are not here yet. Worse: The iPhone 3G was really broken. For real. Bad signal, dropped calls, frozen apps. This would have been unthinkable in cellphones just five years ago. They were simpler, for sure, but they were failure proof. Today's engineering and testing is a lot more sophisticated. In theory, products can't go out into distribution with such glaring problems undetected.
Another recent example is my iMac 24, which had the infamous video card problem out of the box. How can a machine with such an obvious problem—instantly detected by the user base—be sold like that? The same happened recently with Nvidia video boards. In fact, graphic cards—being always in the cutting edge of technology—are perfect examples of beta hardware being sold as final hardware, with many released with beta-quality drivers and requiring firmware patches.
From that to the now-universally-accepted Blue Screen of Death, from buggy Blu-ray players to the Xbox 360's red ring of death and PS3's bugs, even from kitchen ovens to faulty DSLR cameras, the list of troubled products is endless. Just this week, the eagerly anticipated BlackBerry Storm launched to mixed reviews, in part because of its crashy, apparently unfinished software.
On the other side, my parents have a Telefunken CRT TV and a Braun radio from the '70s which are still in working condition. They were first generation. They never failed. Compare that to my first plasma TV from Philips, which broke after less than a year of use. Mine wasn't the only one. The technology was too young to be released; it was still in beta state. Philips wanted to be the first in the world with a flat TV and beat the competition, so they released it. This probably wasn't a good move: Today, Philips' TV business is struggling, and is nonexistent in the US. Meanwhile, my Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Apple IIe from the 1980s still work like they did from day one, perfectly.
For sure, today's products are far more complex than those of 20 or 30 years ago. But back then, the manufacturing was also a lot worse. It was less automated, often purely manual, and imperfect. Today, in a world where automated factories run 24/7, there's less chance of error. Yet still, there are countless problems in the final products, and those problems affect every unit in an entire model line. In the age of manufacturing perfection, there are still major recalls concerning products that burn or break.
Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.
Who's to blame? Google and their web apps? Apple and their iPhone 3G problems? Microsoft and their countless buggy versions of operating systems and the Xbox 360's RROD? Philips? Sony? Samsung? LG? We all are. The manufacturers, who are driven by a thirst to expand and satisfy their shareholders at all costs. The consumers, who are so thirsty to drink in the shiniest, newest technology that they are willing to sacrifice stability. And the press too, who pours more gasoline onto the consumerism bonfire by writing glowing reviews and often minimizing things that are simply not acceptable.
Personally, I'm tired of all this. But I'm mostly tired about the fact that it seems that we all have given up. Tired because now we see "upgrades" as an opportunity to protect our investment, but in reality, it's laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying.
That's the key: We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don't know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.
Maybe the recession will put some order in this thirst of new stuff and change the product cycles. As the economy slows down, people will think twice before buying the latest and greatest; they'll keep older hardware for longer. Then, manufacturers will have to rethink their product lines, and lift their feet from the accelerator, which will result on slower cycles and better products. Maybe that's our ticket for better electronics that actually make sense.
Or maybe... maybe that will be another excuse for the manufacturer to cut even more corners and keep lowering prices so that consumers keep spending and ending up with worse products than we have now.
As expected, the new iPhone 2.2 is here and we have tried it night and morning. Like Apple says in their documentation, the stability and performance seems to have improved, but the spotlight falls specially on the new and improved Maps application, which has been polished almost to perfection thanks to its public transport and walking directions, as well as the smooth, fast Street View, and many other interface details. There are a lot of unexpected new features—no, no cut and paste—and fixes as well, and we have tried them all here:
Enhancements to Maps
• Public transport and walking mode: The most impressive part, at least for a public transport user like me, is the new public transport and walking directions mode. They work as you can expect, no glitches. This mode has all the information you need, at least here in New York, and it showed me the fastest way to get from my house to Gawker offices (cleverly avoiding the damn 6, which is always arriving late for me).
Not only it showed the route clearly, with nice new icons, but it also gave something unexpected: subway timetables. As you can see in the gallery, it tells you what's the departure time for the next Manhattan-bound L train, telling you how many minutes you have to get there on time. It can also calculate the total time of your trip, which is always useful.
• Street view: It works great. You can't access street view by clicking on any place in the map, but the way Apple has implemented it makes sense. When you do a search (or drop a pin) an new little guy icon will appear in the address pop-up. You just have to click on it and the map will zoom and smoothly change into Street View mode, rotating the display to the left automatically. From there you can navigate easily, using one finger to look around the panorama and clicking on the overlaid arrows to navigate. It works hot-butter-over-pancakes smooth.
• Other new features: When you drop a pin, it displays the exact address of the location. You can also share any location via email very easily, just by clicking on the location itself and hitting a Share this location button. It's a quick cut and paste substitute (of course, no cut and paste yet).
iTunes and App Store
• Podcasts over the air: As expected, they work flawlessly, both audio and video. I accessed the new feature and I was downloading them in no time. Unfortunately, the artificially-imposed 3G network 10MB limit is easy to reach for video content. While the TED Talks downloads work great over wireless, the store will tell you that you can't download them over 3G. One good thing: It leaves the podcasts in a queue so the next time you get into a Wi-Fi spot, they will download automagically.
• App store reorganization: It has been sightly reorganized. The interface has been polished. The categories, for example, now display bigger and with icons. As I speculated in our iPhone 2.2 rumor round-up, the icons shown seem to show the top free application
Fixes
• Improved stability and performance in Safari: In my informal testing, it feels a bit faster to me, specially on javascript heavy web sites.
• Resolved isolated issues with scheduled email: Wasn't able to test this one, as I don't use scheduled checking to save on battery life.
• Improving wide HTML email display: If you have ever ran into this problem, you know it's extremely annoying. When somebody sends you an HTML styled email, sometimes it displays very long lines and tiny text. I received a mail like that the other day from my sister and went immediately to try it. Unfortunately, the fix hasn't worked for me on that one, but it did work in another email I got from a company. Weird.
• Decreased in call set-up an call drops: Too soon to tell. So far, so good.
• Improved sound quality on voicemail message: I saw this yesterday so I went and tried them in 2.1. Indeed, there were pops and hisses. After the update I tried under 2.2 and yes, they have better sound quality.
Other little additions
• Clicking the home button while you are in the home screen takes you to the first page of the home, which is very welcomed, as that's where I store my main applications and I have several pages of additional apps and page links.
• Safari: They have streamlined the interface for address and search, like we already saw in previous leaks.
• Preference to turn auto-correction on and off: This is a welcome addition for me, because quite frankly, no matter what Jason says, my iPhone corrects fuck with duck every single time. So duck auto-correction for a little while. I'm going to ducking see if it affects my ducking speed or not.
Verdict: It works as expected, feels smooth, and the new features are a must to have, specially the new Maps application. Ducking good. Go get it now.
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Detect language Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Ukrainian Vietnamese » < option value = "ar"> Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese ( Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Ukrainian Vietnamese h = new _History (); t_ctr = new _TranslateForm (new _LanguageSelector ( 'old_sl', 'sl_select'), new _LanguageSelector ( 'old_tl', 'tl_select'), 'old_submit', 'submit_button' h ' source ',' result_box ',' dict ',' auto trans'); window.jstiming.load.tick ( 'prt') < img src = "http://www.google.com/mb/plus_sm.gif" style = "margin-right: 0.33em; visibility: hidden" id = zippyicon> < input type = hidden name = value hl = en "> < input type = hidden name = value ="">< text input type = hidden name = langpair value = "en | en"> Translate a Web Page