Posts Tagged ‘crunchgear’
Sentiment Is Split On The iPad: People Either Love It, Or Hate Others For Not Shutting Up About It
Now that the iPad is here, and everyone who waited in line has one in their hands, the opinions are coming in from actual consumers and everyone else. All of this iPad mania is splitting people into two even camps: either you are one of the few who is lovingly stroking one in your hands right now (or wish you were), or you don’t get what the fuss is all about and just want to stop hearing about the stupid iPad.
If sentiment on Twitter is any guide, people Tweeting about the iPad either love it or hate it. And the haters are a slightly larger group at 51 percent. TweetFeel is showing 59 percent positive Tweets rights now. Most of the positive Tweets are along the lines of “Man, this iPad is sweet!” or wishing they had got one today.
The negative ones are more like this one:
You only need the Ipad if you are a giant ok people? It’s a giant ipod touch (which is stupid. i thought it was supposed to get smaller XD
Or telling everyone to shut up about it:
OMG! SHUT UP ABOUT THE FRIGGEN IPAD ALREADY!
Or this one:
In honour of the release of the stupid iPad which is stupid http://bit.ly/GoH91
The iPad is so stupid, apparently, the guy had to make a comic about it. Oh well, love it or hate it, everyone’s still searching for information about the iPad it seems (it is also a trending search term on Google).
Help Key: Everything You Need to Know About the iPad
When will I be able to get one?
If you hit the stores, I suspect your local Apple store may have some in stock. This isn’t iPhone level hysteria. If you order one now on-line, though, you won’t get one via UPS until April 12.
If I go today, will I still be able to get one?
Call first, but I doubt they’re totally sold out everywhere.
WiFi/3G or WiFi-only?
I’d say 3G, but that’s just me. I’d love to be able to use this at press events without WiFi. Your mileage and use case will vary.
Can I jailbreak it?
Not yet, but GeoHot has been working on a method that may soon work.
Rugged Camera Round-Up: The Round-Up
So we’ve looked at four rugged and waterproof cameras this week: the $150 Kodak PlaySport, the $200 Fujifilm XP10, the $300 Casio EX-G1, and the $400 Olympus 8010.
Which, if any, is worth your hard-earned scratch? Spoiler alert: I prefer the Casio. But here’s a quick rundown of their pros and cons if you’re not convinced.
Rugged Camera Roundup: The Movie
Before each of this week’s rugged and waterproof cameras gets examined on terms of usability, image quality, and so on, I had to check whether their makers were pulling my leg about their rugged qualities. A quick trip to the park furnished a suitable environment to test this out, and here’s the video.
My first impression is that it’s going to be hard to recommend one of these over the other, given their wildly different price points and designs. But review I must. The important part is they all survived some minor abuse, and that really recommends all of them. Stay tuned for the individual reviews coming throughout this week.
Twitter Sets Chirp Free… Well, Cheaper
There’s a lot of excitement about Twitter’s first conference, Chirp, which takes place next month in San Francisco. In fact, the tickets for the event, despite their $469 price, have been selling out quickly (they’ve been releasing them in waves). And today brings great news for those still clamoring to go: there is a new type of ticket, and they’re significantly cheaper.
Today, Twitter is putting on sale tickets for the second day of the conference for only $140 (yes, 140, like Twitter’s character limit). To be clear, this is just for the second day of the conference, but for those on a budget, it’s a much better deal to be able to take part in the event. The second day is the hack-a-thon event taking place at Fort Mason in the city. And it actually begins at 7 PM PT at the end of day one of the event, when Twitter buses people over from the Palace of Fine Arts, where the day one events (including the major keynotes from Twitter execs) take place.
(If you want to catch those day one keynotes, you better hurry, Twitter only has about 200 of those tickets left.)
Those who buy these $140 day two tickets will have access to the Ignite event, the breakout sessions, the hack event, and the party which will take place at the end of day two.
And, not to be upstaged by Facebook, which is offering student tickets to its f8 event (which is exactly one week later in San Francisco) at $75, Twitter is unleashing tickets for students to both days of the event for just $50. To get these heavily discounted tickets, student will need to bring a valid student ID.
Much was made early on about the price of Twitter’s conference as compared to the rival f8 event, but actually, f8 is $425 this year (up from even the $325 we initially thought it would be). So Twitter’s conference is just $44 more, and that’s despite no outside sponsorship (which the Facebook event has).
Chirp is being produced by Carsonified, the group behind the popular FOWA events. It runs April 14 and 15 in San Francisco.
Twitter Launches A New, Dynamic Homepage
Twitter has just rolled out a new homepage that’s a marked improvement over the current offering, and does a much better job at capturing what the service is all about. The new site features a ‘See who’s here’ section that introduces new Twitter users to some of the celebrities and brands they can find on the service. It also includes a new, constantly updated section for Top Tweets, which are algorithmically selected interesting tweets (Top Tweets also has its own Twitter account here).
Twitter’s homepage is important because it’s typically the first thing people see when they visit Twitter for the first time (once you’ve created an account and signed in, the service automatically directs you to your Twitter feed). Twitter last refreshed its homepage last summer, when it started featuring its search engine front and center (you can see a screenshot of the old page below). This introduced users to the site’s powerful real-time search, but it didn’t do a particularly good job explaining exactly what Twitter was.
I suspect the new page will do a better job enticing new users to explore Twitter, as they’ll be more quickly exposed to interesting tweets (via the Top Tweets section) and will immediately see a smattering of the major brands and celebrities using the service. And they’ll have something to look at other than tweets talking about Justin Bieber.
Note that the page only appears to be showing up sometimes (I just reloaded and no longer see it).
Update: Twitter has just posted a blog post talking about the change. Here’s an excerpt:
All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.
New Homepage
Old Homepage
“Text 2.0″ Eye-Tracking Reading Companion: Crazy Or Crazy Awesome?
It’s an interesting time to be in the e-book business. E-readers in their many varieties are sussing out the perfect user experience, and the race to the bottom might end up with students packing a Kobo into their bag instead of 20 pounds of expensive textbooks. When it comes down to it, though, you’re selling a mostly static experience — as indeed books have been for a long time. Interaction in books is the realm of children: pop-ups and coloring books. But the move to new and interesting devices has some people excited about the future of text — and this Text 2.0 idea may just change how you think about interacting with books.
The idea is that it tracks where you’re looking, and based on a number of factors, triggers one of several context-sensitive actions. An eye-tracking interface is an entirely new beastie, however, and somehow I’m not convinced that real life usage will be quite as easy to collate and react to as this video seems to suggest.
Dirt Cheap And No Features To Speak Of – Will The Kobo Sell By The Million?
If you follow e-readers, you might have seen the post I wrote not long ago detailing and judging the various secondary features e-readers are sporting in order to catch the eye of the spendy book-lover. I am ashamed to say I missed a very important one: extremely low price. I mentioned it in passing, but the truth is that once a device like this creeps below $100 or so while retaining its fundamental function, it gains access to a few different markets, a circumstance worth looking at.
The Kobo e-reader is the spark that set this post off; at $150, this 6″-screen, 0.1″-thin, half-pound device is among the very cheapest e-readers out there, yet Kobo also runs its own bookstore, which has the usual classics and bestsellers — probably 90% of what gets sold for e-readers. It’s going to be sold at Borders, and with its modest price tag might make for more of a temptation to browsing customers.
But as long as consumers are being bombarded with promises of Android, touchscreens, cool dual-screen form factors, the Kobo is going to look mighty shabby in comparison. And by the time Kobo gets some press and is widely available, we’ll probably be hearing about all the cool stuff that’s going to happen next year. What’s a cheap, functional e-reader to do?
Join us for the CrunchGear and Friends podcast
Join us at 3pm New York Time/Noon Pacific for the CrunchGear and Friends podcast with a live interview with ZipDX founder.
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Join us for the CrunchGear and Friends podcast
E-Book Readers: Will Secondary Features Win Consumers’ Hearts Or Leave Them Cold?
How many e-book readers do you think are out there right now for you to choose from? If you did a little digging, I bet you’d find 50 or so. Maybe 10 really worth checking out. But right now is a bit of a weird period in e-reader history. The Kindle cemented e-readers in the consumer headspace, catapulting them from weirdo alternative technology to mainstream gadget. That’s what the iPad threatens to do with tablets — we’ll see about that. But the Kindle and the iPad are two important data points in the current e-reader wars; the question, upon the answer of which depends the success of many a device, is whether “bonus” features like second screens and weird form factors in e-readers will be enough to differentiate them from the high-profile devices pressing them on both flanks?
See, the vast majority of e-readers were designed as a response to the Kindle, not to tablet computers, which may or may not obsolete e-readers altogether. It’s a bad situation: the whole time you’re improving your competitor’s product, someone else is skipping your entire device class on the grounds that it will be made ridiculous by their awesome gadget. Some of the special features developed to combat the Kindle will stay, and some won’t live to see their own first birthday.
