We Have Moved!

Please note that Fecund Musings has departed the humble abode of its childhood to move on to greener pastures.

Change your bookmarks, subscribe by RSS and point your browsers towards www.fecundmusings.com.

Send the link to your friends, family, acquaintances, pure strangers, dogs, cats, fish and other household pets. Then paint a 500-foot billboard with

GO TO WWW.FECUNDMUSINGS.COM NOW!!!

written on it and hang it in Times Square (or local equivalent) in the dead of night. Hiring a few of those people who walk around with signs strapped to them and getting them to wear the same message would also be helpful.

That should be fine. Thanks guys!

Why You Shouldn't Buy the iPad 2

AVOID THIS

That's right. It's not a typo. I'm actually telling you to avoid purchasing an Apple product.

If you haven't got an iPad, go buy one - the original. You can save around £400 on the top of the line iPad 2 if you get a brand new top of the line iPad 1 on Ebay.


If you already have an iPad 1, don't upgrade.

Why?

First, let's clear something up:

I love the iPad - I got up at 5am on US launch day (April 3rd, 2010) to get in line and be one of the first to get one - a cool two months before the rest of the UK. I'm not a hater, I love Apple products, and I certainly don't endorse buying the Motorola Xoom or Blackberry Playbook.*

And yet I still stand by the title of this post, for one simple reason. Apple are being lazy. Lazy, cheap and overconfident, knowing that they control over 90% of the market and that there is no legitimate competition from Windows, Android or Palm OS in the tablet market. They have the best product on the market, and they aren't currently under any real pressure to improve. The iPad 2 is a shadow of what it could have been, had Apple not done the admittedly smart move to secure their profit margins.

Apple altered the design, added two terrible cameras and upgraded the processor and graphics processor speed. At face value, this doesn't seem half bad. But when you consider everything Apple could have done and chose not to, probably to save for the iPad 3, consumers aren't getting the greatest deal, not by a long shot.

Apple omitted two key features to the iPad 2, both of which could have been easily implemented - early leaks even suggest they were part of an original draft of the device.

1. Retina Display: the iPad and iPad 2's 720p screen resolution gives it a measly 132 PPI (pixels per inch), compared to the iPhone 4's 326 PPI. This makes a huge difference to the sharpness of text, movies, and pictures. everything on the device looks better - as is easily seen comparing an iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4.

2. SDXC card port. Seen in a leaked iteration of the iPad 2, this would have been a huge addition to the iPad - no longer would customers have to pay Apple's excruciatingly large upgrade prices to get a larger storage capacity, or connect the iPad Camera Kit in order to easily download photos.

That's it.

That's all Apple needed to add, to make the iPad 2 a vastly superior product to the one it is now. Those two simple additions make such a world of difference to the overall iPad experience that it was lazy and greedy of Apple to leave them out. Despite this, the uneducated masses, and undoubtedly a fair share of the educated masses, will happily gobble up the iPad 2.

That's why I implore you not to. Buying an iPad 2 is giving in, an act of relinquishing common sense and morals for the sake of a meagre technological improvement. Wait for the iPad 3, or buy a hugely discounted iPad 1. But whatever you do, DON'T BUY THE iPAD 2.






*These are comparably expensive products with comparable hardware to the Pad 2 but are nowhere near as polished or well made, especially on the software side.

Absent Apple

CES starts this week. Macworld starts on the 27th. Apple will not be present at either. Neither will they be at the Macworld Expo in London in the fall. Years ago, Apple left the Macworld Expos in Boston, New York, Paris and others. Historically many great announcements have been made at these shows. The iPhone, at Macworld San Francisco in 2007. The infamous Microsoft Deal at Macworld Boston in 1997, the birth of the Apple Retail Stores at Macworld New York in 2001. Yet one by one, Apple has left all of these trade shows, many of which have since perished. The culmination of this exodus was the final, Steve Jobs-less keynote at Macworld San Francisco in 2009. The show has gone on to flourish without Apple, a feat many other shows could not duplicate.

One question - why? Why did Apple leave?

For (relatively) very little money, an entrance at a trade show generates enthusiasm and publicity for a company, while giving it the chance to showcase its products and interact with consumers and journalists alike. To most companies, the choice is a no-brainer, but for Apple, it is far more complex. Apple is a very special company in that they don't need to generate enthusiasm, or publicity, because the press and their fans (often one and the same), will do it for them. For free.


When Apple needs to announce a new product, they hold an announcement of their own - they make you come to them (if you're lucky enough to be invited), not the other way around.

If anything, Apple probably gets more publicity from not being at the show than from being there. People, like me, spend so much time bemoaning or analysing their absence that they become a popular topic of discussion, without ever having to spend a cent.

Their absence enhances their carefully cultivated walled garden of secrecy, which also serves to generate interest, merely because of curiosity about the unknown.

MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air

No longer the nouveau belle of Apple's laptop line, the MacBook Pro has taken the backseat in Apple's advertising push as the company attempts to dazzle the public with the svelte figure of the new MacBook Airs. About two weeks ago, I was forced to decide between the ageing powerhouse Pro and the gorgeous new contender - the Air. My early-2006 polycarbonate MacBook was a mere month away from its 5th birthday, and its meagre hardware specs and dated software were taking their toll.

Originally, my choice was between the 13 inch varieties of both the Air and the Pro. Though, on paper, the choice seemed one of power vs portability, further investigation revealed an entirely different story. Because of its pioneering use of flash storage soldered straight onto the motherboard, the Air was actually just as fast, if not faster than the Pro at many day-to-day tasks. The reason? The MacBook Pro, like most computers, uses a hard drive for storage. Hard drives have moving parts and, as a result, are much slower and less reliable than Solid State Drives (aka Flash). The catch? SSDs are very, very expensive - a 500GB SSD costs around £500 more than a 500GB Hard Drive.

The SSD gave the Air a definitive advantage over the 13 inch Pro - the performance was similar, but the portability and form factor seemed to tip the balance of power toward the Air. Unfortunately, the MacBook Air comes with half the RAM of the Pro (2GB vs 4GB) as standard, with an £80 upgrade for the Air putting them on level footing. A few minutes surfing Apple's website later, I realised that to get a large enough drive and enough RAM, the Air would cost over £400 more than the cheapest Pro. Are the SSD and portability worth that hefty premium? For some, undoubtedly so. But for me, doubt loomed over my shoulder, peering closer with every passing second.

To add insult to injury, I quickly spotted that the maxed-out MacBook Air costed the same amount as a 15 inch MacBook Pro. And therein lay my answer. The Core i5 processor found in the base 15 inch Pro easily bested the Core 2 Duo processors found in the Air and 13 inch Pro models. 4GB of RAM came standard, as did a hard drive larger than that on the Air and the Pro.


The extra screen real-estate, the extra ports, the faster processor and the equal price tag of the 15 inch Pro easily bested the thin frame and ultra-portable design of the MacBook Air.

A further analysis of my time using the 15 inch Pro is coming soon. Two main points stand out however:

a) Those two inches make an unbelievable amount of difference to the experience of using the screen

b) During graphics intensive tasks, especially gaming, the heat of the laptop is such that it may leave you without a lap. Or a top.

Facebook Messages

A recent comment by 'polishsupporter' on the Guardian online caught my eye.


While anyone who has ever used Facebook will be able to identify with that statement in one way or another, it seems quite poignant in the light of the recent introduction of 'Facebook Messages'.

A service designed to merge all of our communications into one universal format, Facebook Messages is designed to augment and possibly replace SMS, email, instant messaging by combining them into one streamlined, organized and simple program. In an effort to make communication less formal and more intimate, all messages are threaded into 'conversations', with each Facebook user given the option to create an @facebook.com email address if they so wish. To quote Facebook, "all you should need to send a person a message is the person, and the message...we want this to feel like a conversation among friends... no Subject line, no Bcs and no Cccs...when you come back to your computer or your phone, you should be able to pick up right where you left off".


The most important innovation present here, however, seems to be the so-called "social inbox". In a short promotional video (embedded below), it was stressed that logging into your email to find a message from your mother sandwiched in-between a bank statement and a bill meant that there was something wrong. Facebook aims to change this by offering a standard inbox view in which only messages from from your closest friends and family are shown, each ranked according to a system that you develop and you control.

This provides both an effective way of dealing with spam and those annoying promotional emails from companies who send you emails because they forced you to register an account with them. Unfortunately, if someone who does not use Facebook sends you an email, you will have to authenticate them just as you would with a normal email service. Thankfully, Facebook makes it very easy to block people you do not want sending you messages, and vice versa.

Also included is a service called "social context". Log onto your email or your Facebook Inbox right now. Don't worry. I'll wait. Done? Okay. Find the messages from your friends. Read out the subject lines. I've found three - "you", "christmas" and "hey". Facebook realizes that

a) This tells me nothing about the content of my messages.
b) It's annoying.

So they've designed a system in which messages are organized by sender and by content. If you send a friend a text, and they want to reply by email, then great - it works. If you write on a friend's wall and they Facebook chat you back, great - it works. So what Facebook has done is allow you to streamline your electronic communication in a number of ways that I believe are excellent improvements.

Looking at the new Facebook Messages service head on, it seems spectacular. Finally, a fix for nearly all of the problems that plague electronic conversation. But just consider this. Facebook will, if you sign up for and use this service, know who you text, who you email, who you chat with, who your friends are and in what order you rank them. They will know everything you say and they will know everyone you say it to. They will take that information and they will sell it to the highest bidder so that you can be the subject of targeted ads on your phone, your computer, your iPod and your tablet. The question is, do you care?

7 Inch iPad - The Evidence

The recent frenzy surrounding the potential advent of a 7 inch iPad to be released or announced sometime around the new year has abated slightly due to recent claims from Apple CEO Steve Jobs that 7 inch tablets are "terrible". Now this can only mean one of two things.

a) The 7 inch iPad has been confined to the Apple hall of unreleased products never to see the light of day.

b) Its announcement is inevitable.


Lets take a look at the arguments for either side. The best arguments against the release of a 7 inch iPad were brought up by Jobs himself in a recent Q4 Earnings conference call - namely that the screen is actually only 45 % the size of the 10 inch iPad because of diagonal length. To put that into perspective, the 7 inch iPad's screen would be smaller than the bottom half of the 10 inch version. Now Steve argues that this is too small to create "great tablet apps" on and that it sacrifices too much of the iPad's screen size and processing power while offering too little of the iPhone's portability.

And yet Jobs has a history of denying the existence of a rumoured product in the run leading up to its announcement, and has done so with almost every major Apple product launch in the last decade. I wouldn't count on this and this alone however - reading Jobs is never as easy as it seems.

To understand why Jobs & Co. may see the 7 inch iPad as a viable product, one must first examine the way in which it might fill a gap in the market. Many people criticised the iPad when it was announced because they decided that there was no gap in the market that it filled - essentially, they said that the void between smartphones and laptops didn't need filling or was already filled by netbooks. Apple proved them wrong, but can it prove to consumers that there is a gap between the 10 inch iPad and the iPhone? Possibly, but it is a difficult task.

The 7 inch iPad would have to be a device that performed certain tasks better than the iPhone and better than the iPad, or perhaps just one that performed them in a similar way but in a more portable enclosure. Unfortunately, most people do not have a 7 inch pocket, and most people do not feel comfortable browsing the web for extended periods on a 7 inch screen. Apple could change all that, or they could decide against introducing a 7 inch iPad. Either way, something tells me that this will not be the last we hear of this mythical beast.

Back To The Mac

Earlier today, Apple introduced a host of new products under the umbrella title "Back to the Mac". iLife 11, available today, was demoed and described and it looks like an excellent upgrade from iLife 09, especially considering the generous pricing of just $49. Big features include increased social integration in iPhoto, Movie Trailers in iMovie and a feature in GarageBand that provides you with piano and guitar lessons.

A powerful beginning to a characteristically classy performance from Jobs, but one that was easily overshadowed by later developments. The charismatic CEO moved on to announce a piece of software that inevitably had to be coming - FaceTime for the Mac. I have always said that FaceTime, an interesting but admittedly limited feature when it was first announced for the iPhone 4, needed to be expanded. After all, what's the point of only being able to video call the few people you know who actually also have an iPhone 4. Jobs hinted that expansion was coming when he described it as a 'Open Standard' during his WWDC keynote back in the summer, but it has yet to be adopted by Android or Windows. Since then, it has been added to the iPod Touch and, today, the Mac. It seems certain to be headed to the iPad in its next iteration as well. Once FaceTime is on all of these devices, Apple hopes that companies making competing devices will adopt the technology too, meaning that the range of people available for you to place a call with will be greatly expanded.

As you may or may not have guessed by the wonderfully orange-tinted picture of the roaring lion to your left, the next Apple announcement was a 'sneak peek' of a future version if Mac OS X. Big-cat-themed operating system names are commonplace now in the Mac community, and Mac OS 10.7 is no exception, adopting the name "Lion". This lends itself quite well to the theory that we are reaching the end of OS X's lifespan - after all, how do you top Lion? Mountain Lion? I think not.

Steve talked about how iOS was born from Mac OS X and illustrated the circular movement of innovation with his usual elegance, showing how ideas from Mac OS X were useful in developing iOS, and how features from iOS will inevitably be equally useful in future versions of Mac OS X. With this cumbersome mantra imprinted onto your consciousness, try to envision some of the new features making their debut in OS X Lion. Yup, that's right. Multitouch. Nope, not on the screen, apparently "touch wants to be horizontal, not vertical". So we're stuck with trackpads and Magic Mice for now. Yep, they have actually added "Launch Pad" - basically the Mac equivalent of your iOS home screen that shows all your applications. And yes, there is finally, FINALLY, FINALLYa Mac App Store. The tagline? "Fart apps coming to a Mac near you." Like it? I thought so.

On a more serious note, what does this actually mean? Well it means that Apple is trying to make even more money - they want developers to produce apps for your Mac and sell them through a channel that they regulate, they control, and they receive 30% of all sales from. It also means that you will probably have a whole lot more apps on your Mac now that there is actually somewhere to get them from. But more importantly, it means that Apple is making a move towards closing the Mac platform just like they have closed the iOS platform. They want you buying your Applications from them, not anyone else. Is that a good thing? It depends on your philosophy and whether you actually care. What is a good thing, is seamless integration - App Store apps will automatically download in the background, update, and 'just work' as the saying goes.

Lion looks intriguing to say the least, but the exposure we were given to it today was minimal to say the least, and more information will surely be coming sometime soon. To anyone watching the live stream not familiar to Mr. Jobs' mannerisms and speech structure, it would have seemed very logical for him to finish the product announcements there. But, as ever, there was one more thing.



Heavily rumoured in the days and weeks leading up to the presentation, Steve announced two new Macbook Airs based on an entirely new, streamlined 'ultra-portable' design. Last updated in June 2009, the Macbook Air seemed due for a refresh, and boy what a refresh it got. Described by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as what would happen if "a Macbook and an iPad hooked up", the new Macbook Air weighs in at just 2.6lbs for the 13.3 inch version and just 2.3lbs for the 11.6 inch version. That's less than half a gallon of milk. The laptop tapers down from just 0.68 inches thick to an incredible 0.11 inches thick. The low end model costs just $999 - remember that the original Macbook Air cost $1799 when it first came out, and comes equipped with an 11.6 inch screen, 2GB of RAM, a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor. The biggie? Only 64GB of flash storage. Why flash? Well, because it's smaller, more power efficient, twice as fast and far more high technology than a hard drive. Unfortunately, GB for GB, its also far more expensive. After all, a Macbook costing the very same $999 has a 2.4GHz processor and a whopping 250GB hard drive. The Macbook is also twice as heavy. The MacBook Airs boast 5 and 7 hour battery lives, increasing with screen size, and 30 days of standby battery life - another feature influenced by the iPad.

The high end Macbook Air costs $1599 and the extra dough will upgrade your machine to a 13.3 inch screen, 256GB of flash memory, and a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo Processor. For $100 less, you could nab a MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz processor, double the RAM and 320GB of hard drive storage. But the Macbook Pro weighs nearly 3 times as much.

If you want far more power, and far more hard drive space for the same price in your next laptop, the new Macbook Air is most definitely not for you. But if you simply must have the latest gadget, or just desperately need the huge boost in portability and slim form factor, it may be worthwhile to consider it. Can the Macbook Air justify its price tag because of its portability? It depends on your needs.

Windows Phone 7

Derided heavily by none other than yours truly for its frankly ridiculous name, the Windows Phone 7 Series was unveiled in full by Microsoft today. Several things spring to mind upon first glance, none of which have ever before been used to describe a Mircosoft product before. Things like "Damn, that looks cool" and "Is that the new iPhone?". Divided into several "hubs", apps on Windows Phone 7 finally break free from their gridlocked positions on the iPhone and Android platforms and are arranged in a refreshing format. Each hub slides smoothly open to reveal the apps contained within - take the 'People' hub, for instance, described by Microsoft as a "social central, a place to stay connected and in the loop." In other words, you'll find Facebook, address book, and other social apps located there.

From what we can see, Windows Phone 7 is very speedy - partly because of the high standards that need to be met by 3rd party hardware makers in order for their phones to qualify for the software, and partly because of the software itself. After all, Microsoft is a software company.

And yet for all its slick, polished user interface and innovative home screen, Windows Phone 7 in its current form lacks something vital. It lacks a sense of self. Microsoft themselves say that their phone delivers "A phone to save us from our phones" - i.e. a device that lets us get in, grab the information we need, and put it away. In other words, not a smartphone. Yet, of course, this platform is a smartphone platform. Contradiction? Definitely.

All WP7 enabled phones come with XBox Live, a fantastic way to integrate social networking and gaming, and a classic use of the 'halo effect' between the Xbox and WP7 devices. And yet Microsoft seems to be trying to target the enterprise crowd with its Microsoft Office suite. They are trying to entice the social crowd, the young crowd, and the geeks, attacking RIM, Google, Nokia and Apple all at once.

I'd like to remind Microsoft of a wonderful little company called Palm who, much like Microsoft, was blown off the smartphone scene, casually tossed aside by Google, RIM, Nokia and Apple. Palm fought back with the clever, but inevitably doomed Pre, and now they and their excellent WebOS operating system are no more. The Pre was like Windows Phone 7 - it had an excellent user interface, a clever design and some new and innovative features. But like Windows 7, the Pre had no focus. Blackberry has business, Nokia has mass market, Google has the geeks and Apple has the regular consumers and, of course, their cult followers. Have Microsoft spread themselves too thin? Only time will tell.

The iPod No-no and the Apple TV

Earlier today, Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts.

Apple only had two surprises in store for us today.

The first was the brand new iPod Nano (pictured). Sporting a shuffle-esque look (complete with clothes clip and bright colours) and a multi-touch screen, it is a truly radical redesign. To give you a sense of just how minuscule the new Nano is, take a look at an iPhone or iPod touch. See the icons on your screen? The iPod Nano's screen holds only four of those per page. Obvious problems arise when taking this approach. They all centre around the fact that the device itself is impractically small. So small, in fact, that when Steve Jobs himself was using it, he had to take off his glasses and bring it up to his face to see properly. You can't watch videos on that screen. You can't look at photos. You can't even see your album artwork! Apple took out the video camera. They took out the accelerometer (to rotate the screen you need to use two fingers). They took out the clickwheel (the only iPod that still uses a clickwheel is the iPod Classic, and that was the only iPod not updated today). Apple took out everything that defined the Nano and made it appealing. They took it out, kept the price the same and added a screen many people will need a magnifying glass to see. Everything about the new Nano screams downgrade not upgrade. The problem? This iPod is not a Nano. It is an iPod Shuffle with a screen - an iPod Micro, of you will. It needs a micro price tag to succeed. With the new retina display, dual camera and iOS 4 equipped iPod Touch a mere $50 upgrade, the Nano is no longer relevant. The Nano is overpriced, under featured and poorly designed. It might as well not exist, and to reflect that, I hereby dub it the iPod Nono - 'an iPod Nano without the iPod Nano'. The iPod Nono proves that sometimes less is not more. It's just less; after all, if you tried to play a song beginning with the letter "Z" you'd still be scrolling down when the next version came out! That said, the device looks extremely cool and critics of Apple products are proven wrong more often than not.


The other surprise? A new iTunes feature called Ping. A stab in the dark aimed directly at the heart of Twitter, Apple's "Social network for music" is intriguing. It allows you to follow artists you like and connect with your friends. It allows you to post about cool music you've heard and gigs you'll be attending. Even better, it creates a Top Ten Most Downloaded list tailored specifically to you and your friends. Unfortunately, that is the extent of my ability to comment on Ping. Why? Because social networks need people to function, people to turn the cogs of the machine so that people like myself can see how it works. Right now, Ping has no one.

But there was "one more thing" as indeed there always is. Unsurprisingly, the Apple TV, the previous ugly duckling of Apple's product line, was provided with a major upgrade. Apple took out the hard drive from the old model (and apparently lots more) and the new, matte black version is a mere 1/4 the size of it's predecessor. It revolves around a different philosophy than the one Google used when they introduced their Google TV. It revolves around the philosophy that people don't want their televisions to be computers. They have computers for that. A television is a separate product, and it shouldn't sync to a computer either. The new Apple TV is a fully autonomous entertainment hub capable of streaming rental only $0.99 HD TV Shows and $4.99 HD Movies. Not only that, but with WiFi (802.11n) and Ethernet built in you can stream videos, photos and music from your computer or iPad. You can access Netflix, YouTube and several other internet services as well. The deal breaker? The last Apple TV cost almost $250. This one costs just $99 and it ships in 4 weeks. Sound too good to be true? That's because it is. The only networks that have currently signed up for $0.99 TV show rentals are ABC and Fox. But with more sure to sign up soon, however, the new Apple TV looks like a very attractive product.

Headphones Reviewed!

If anyone is in the market for some new headphones, check out my newly posted video review of the Beats By Dr. Dre Studio headphones.

I'm going to be honest here. I'm sick of reading, writing, hearing, even thinking about the iPhone 4 and its supposedly faulty antenna. Apple handed the issue poorly, journalists handed the issue poorly, I never should have written about it in the first place. So I'm going to say it right here and right now. My Dad bought an iPhone 4 yesterday. The reception is far better than that of the 3G. The speed, the screen, the cameras, the OS, and the design are all fantastic. I've tested the phone in 5 areas of different reception and the most I've lost from the death grip was one bar. ONE BAR.

The fact is, Steve Jobs is right. He may not have handled the problem well, but when he calls it a minor issue he is correct. People are getting free cases not because they need them to improve reception, but because they are available. This solution was the correct one given the situation, though it should never have been needed. If a Nokia or HTC phone behaved this way, only the geekiest geeks would even know, and only the most obscure blogs would have offered the story more than a single article.

The point is, Apple brings this sort of media attention upon itself. The antenna design is one barely legitimate chink in the armour of the best phone on the planet. To quote the now famous John Mann

"If you don't want an iPhone 4, don't buy it.
If you bought one and you don't want it, bring it back.
But you know you won't."

Oops!

By now the entire world will have heard about the disastrous antenna issue plaguing what seems to be every single iPhone 4 on the market. To add insult to injury, yellow spotting on the screen and various issues with Exchange have also been reported, making this product launch one of the most disastrous in Apple history.



One may well recall the Mobile Me fiasco of a few years ago, and while that disaster was truly one of epic proportions, the floundering mess of design and engineering mistakes that the iPhone 4 has become eclipses those in every way. But nobody seems to care. Apple has sold over 1,700,000 iPhone 4s, despite news of the product's many flaws being common knowledge.

The truth is that people (me included) are so blindly devoted to Apple that they are willing to line up around the block to purchase a "perfect" phone. Except they aren't purchasing a perfect phone; far from it. They are purchasing a flawed, inherently broken product which is discomfortingly easy to break and, in many cases, does not function as a phone unless you hold it in a certain way. They are purchasing the idea of a perfect phone, purchasing the hope that Apple will resolve these issues and purchasing the blind belief that somehow everything will be okay, that somehow the pros will outweigh the cons.

Ask yourself this question: do you want an iPhone 4? Do you want a phone that doesn't work properly? Do you want a product that can so easily end up looking like the picture below? Would you sacrifice the harsh reality to believe in the dream? Stupid as it may sound, I know I do.

Why You Should Get Laser Eye Surgery

A few weeks ago, my friends and I took a trip to the cinema in the hope that our minds and eyes would be well and truly blended into disbelief by the supposedly unparalleled spectacle that was 3D Avatar. To this day, I can never be sure, however, if my was mind successfully blown due to the fact that my astigmatism ruined the three-dimensional experience.

After further research on the subject, it appears that I am not alone on the matter and that over half of Americans do not have 20/20 eyesight, and therefore will not be able to experience the full effect of the third-dimension.

But even worse entails for the sufferers of the so called 'lazy-eye' who will not be able to experience 3D! I was somewhat looking forward to jumping on the 3D bandwagon, but it seems things were not to be.

It is, however, reassuring though that I will still be able to look like a complete badass with the ridiculous image-brightness reducing (not a good thing) nVidia 3D sunglasses even if they don't actually work on me. Oh well.

New poster incoming

Just a brief update for you:

As of today, I will not be the only one posting on this blog. My elegant prose will occasionally be punctuated by the sarcastic ramblings of my tech-enthused friend, !!1!one!. Enjoy!

The Future Is Here

It will change the way we play games. It will change the way we watch movies. It will change the way we use computers, and change the way we live our lives.

And it is called... Kinnect! Wait... kin what? That's a horrible name! No product could possibly sell with a name like Kinnect. Some sort of demented fusion between kinetic and connect? Oh. Ok. I get it now. It's a MICROSOFT product. The people who brought us the wonderfully named 'Zune' *scoffs* and the soon to be released 'Windows Phone 7'. Catchy. I mean, seriously, its. If these guys had launched the iPad, they probably would have called it the 'Microsoft Tablet Device Home Edition... 7'. And then changed the name a month before release to 'Kinslate'. Not only that, but they would probably name the English version 'KinRobert Green'.

But all overfunded marketing department jokes aside, the Kinnect is actually a very good product. It works as advertised (at least, it appears to) and is literally able to track your entire body and understand what you are saying. The possibilities are endless - who wants to play a game with a controller when you can just interact with the screen as you would the real world. Who wants to flick through channels with a remote when you can do it with your hands?

Kinnect will do the same thing to home entertainment and electronic interfaces as Apple's multitouch did to phones. 5-10 years from now, this technology will be built into our televisions, perhaps even our computers, paving the way to a future without buttons.

Rock Band 3

Since the initial introduction of Guitar Hero in 2005, the Music/Rhythm video game genre has never really been able to deliver on its true potential. Having the player, or players in recent games, mash coloured buttons is extremely fun (I would know), but always leaves me with the feeling that, perhaps if I had spent that time playing my real guitar, I could be truly excellent.

This type of game has the potential to teach hundreds of thousands of people how to play actual instruments. The coloured prompts that flash down the screen could represent chords, or individual notes, and a
real guitar/controller hybrid could well be used to teach players how to play real music.

With the introduction of the original Rock Band in 2007 and Guitar Hero World Tour in 2008 the genre took a step towards that direction, offering players the opportunity to hammer at a brightly coloured drum set. This set mimics real drums, allowing proficient drummers to play the game as they would a real drum kit.

Rock Band 3, slated for release this fall, is the game which finally fulfils its original promise. Not only does it use a 102 buttoned, real string controlled guitar controller, but the game will also include a Squier Stratocaster hybrid controller, and a built in 'Pro' mode which, lo and behold, teaches players how to play a real guitar.

That's not all. A two-octive, MIDI keyboard can also be purchased.
It will also work with the game, functioning just like a real keyboard, and bringing the Music/Rhythm video game experience that one step closer to a fun, enjoyable game that can be truly called educational

Cool? You bet.

iPhone 4

Lets start with a brief rundown of the situation preceding the monumental geek fest that was Steve Jobs' WWDC Keynote. Apple was lagging sadly behind the leaders of the smartphone pack, exhausted by the stellar efforts of Google and its Android operating system. Having revolutionized the industry, it seemed as if Apple's dominance was to be short-lived.

I wrote last week about how Steve Jobs needed to pull an ace out of both sleeves and his shoe to impress the people who would eventually be buying Apple's new product, i.e. not me (sadly). It seemed unlikely that we would be presented with anything we hadn't seen before - after all, Gizmodo revealed most of the hardware specs of the new phone after 'acquiring' (whether or not by legitimate means remains to be seen) a prototype almost two months ago.

We knew that the phone would be slickly designed, featuring a front facing video camera, and have a second mic for noise cancellation. We knew, among countless other tidbits, that it would be fashioned out of glass and stainless steel, a camera with an LED flash sitting proudly on its back and, after closer inspection, that it would sport an IPS Display.

Everything mentioned above is true, and while those features alone would have made for an interesting refresh, they would hardly have been the decisive leap forwards that was needed sustain the platform for another year.

What's changed since then? A lot. Much like Mr. Jobs, I will be displaying my opinions by highlighting several key features of the new device. The following provides merely a brief glimpse at the hundreds of new features sported by the iPhone 4, but in my mind, they are the three most important.

Feature 1 - the display. In the past, the iPhone led the way with its remarkably high resolution display, boasting an impressive 480x320, a pixel density of 163ppi. By contrast, a 42 inch Full HD TV has a pixel density of only 52ppi. The iPhone 4 obliterates even the slightest inkling of respect for its predecessors screen by increasing the pixel count by 4, to 960x640, a pixel density of 326ppi. Yes, that is correct. Four times the pixel density. That means that EVERYTHING looks better. From text to images, apps to videos, everything you see on the iPhone 4 will, essentially, look four times as good as what you would be seeing were you viewing it on the 3GS.

Feature 2 - the operating system. Formerly the iPhone OS 4, rechristened the iOS 4, the software run by the iPhone 4 is jam packed with thousands of new features, not the least of which is Multitasking. In the past, only one application was useable at a time. Now? As many as your device's RAM can hold at a time. Folders, iAds and and multiple inbox email are also among the touted 100 user-accessible improvements.

Feature 3 - Video Chatting. This one strikes fear into the hearts of every single technophobic luddite (my mother) who complains that technology is making our interactions less intimate. Video chatting has existed on our desktops and laptops for a while now, but now that it has finally reached our phones, it stands a chance at replacing text and audio chatting as our primary form of electronic communication. When available, it is almost always preferential to see someone's face and their surroundings when conducting a conversation. After all, body language and facial expressions communicate just as much as words themselves. That Apple leads the way in this field is not surprising. That they have opted to make their buddy-list and setup free video chatting service essentially available to all is. Because any phone maker can build in Apple's software and a front facing camera means that the technology has definitive potential to be widely adapted within the next 5 or 10 years.

But is this enough? I say yes. We only need to wait another year until Apple shocks the world again with the iPhone 5, but the iPhone 4 should easily keep Apple's platform ahead of the competition for the time being. In the end, this only means good things for us consumers. Competition breeds innovation and, after all, we do love flashy new gadgets. Is the iPhone 4 truly magical, truly revolutionary? No. But that doesn't mean it isn't excellent.

What Does Google Want?

After conquering the ether with their wildly successful search engine, Google was not content. This was not enough. And so Google accomplished a feat most other companies can only comprehend the notion of fathoming, even in their wildest chemically-induced slumbers. Not only do they make their brand a household name, but the company now lives on forever as part of... the dictionary. No, not that dictionary, this one.

But the never ending checklist of despotism was nowhere near completion. The two gaping holes in gOOgle had to be filled. Where to start? How about buying YouTube, the 3rd most visited website in the world (guess what's at number one?). *tick* And what about revolutionising webmail with the miraculous Gmail? *tick* Preponderating the online world's thoughts by acquiring their blogging service? *tick*.

Yet the hungry beast can not be satisfied. It wants to dominate the browser market, the ad market *tick*, the phone market, the OS market and Schmidt knows how many others. Wait...no. No it couldn't be...is it?.

Will Google monopolize the web and ergo the world like it has monopolised search?

I have no idea.

WWDC 2010

When the iPhone was first announced, it shocked the world with its extortionate pricing and lacklustre enterprise features. When it first came out, it shocked the world once more. It was mind-blowingly complex, yet miraculously intuitive. In a word, thaumaturgical. And so began the saga.

A year later and the 3G brought a desperately needed update for our spec hungry minds, though its cheap plastic back sacrificed a little of our hearts to do so. And it also brought the revolutionary app store, the seemingly final knock-out blow aimed squarely at the solar plexus of all contenders to the iThrone.

Another year past and the 3GS was a punily unnecessary upgrade over the 3G, opening up a gap in the market which the aforementioned competitors thought might never come. Android gained momentum, market share and features (*cough* multitasking *cough*) that the iPhone lacks even now.

And here we are today. In a week and a half, Steve Jobs will take to the stage and announce the rumoured iPhone HD. It will propel Apple and the iPhone back to their rightful place as undisputed smartphone kings. Or it will dump them in the dust by the side of a newly paved and freshly patented Android highway. A highway to the future.

Thoughts on 3D

Will 3D TV ever catch on? That is the million dollar question. Or, rather, the 31,010,000,000 dollar question if Sony's current market cap is anything to go by.

At the helm of a technology behemoth with nothing to lose, Welsh/America Sony CEO Howard Stringer has made the ultimate gamble. If he wins, he and Sony will go down in the record books as the people who first the paved way into a new dimension of immersion, metaphorically and literally. If he loses, they disappear off the face of the planet.

Pulling out all the stops, funds and chutzpah, Sony has taken literally every single department's resources and thrown its collective might at trying to convince the public that they want 3D. Because, at heart, they don't. Yet. In the past, present and foreseeable future, 3D has been met with a certain amount of hostility, nausea and regurgitated popcorn. Why should now be any different? The technology is by no means still in its infancy. 'Old' 3D (the red and blue filmed cardboard glasses) is a decades old. In recent times, however 3D has re-emerged, stronger than ever, spurred on by meticulously rendered blue aliens scantily clad in leafy fatigues. Here's the lowdown:

Currently, in the 'new' generation of 3D, there are two main types of technology being pioneered.

1. Something called 'active shutter' technology, these hefty glasses require charging but deliver (marginally) superior picture, clarity, and no ghosting because they flick on and off dozens of times a second to match the also flickering displays. Cost? Anywhere from £50-£100. Read more here

2. RealD 3D, or passive glasses. You'll be familiar with these already if you've gone to see Alice In Wonderland, Avatar or another 3D movie in the past year or so. The dirt cheap (5p ish), plastic sunglass lookalikes are the regular fare for the less discerning viewer. Read more here

Sony currently backs both options, RealD in movie theaters and Active Shutter for its home viewing Bravia series. Both technologies present several problems - On one hand you have the Passive Shutter glasses (RealD 3D). Cheap, light, and nowhere near as good as its counterpart in terms of pure viewing experience. On the other you have the Active Shutters. Expensive, heavy, yet excellent where it counts.

Neither technology is perfect, yet there is currently nothing else out there. And there lies the catch. "Outrage!" I hear you shout. "I've just blown hundreds (possibly even thousands) of pounds or dollars on your shiny new 1080p Plasma, LCD or LED and I've gotta go buy something new! Not only that, but if I plan to watch a movie with more than two people I need to spend hundreds more to even get a good picture out of my television?".

Well.....yes. And it gets worse. "Worse!?" you shout "What could possibly be worse?". If you go ahead and buy that TV, be prepared to buy another one in about five years. But this time, it'll be glasses-less. Yep. No clunky, inconvenient, expensive, easily losable glasses. This technology is still very much in R&D, but if it works it could spell the end for all the companies, like Sony who have thrown their weight behind the risky current tech.