The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘new-gadgets’

CrunchGear is live from ShowStoppers in Las Vegas and we’ll be interviewing folks from Plastic Logic, MadKatz, Iomega and more. We’ve got a nice table, some cool gadgetry, and lots of bandwidth so you can expect some quality stuff. We’ll be bringing folks up to our area for about five minutes each so take a gander and keep checking CrunchGear for more CES 2010 coverage.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Billshrink has put together one of their handy charts comparing the total cost of the Google Nexus One, including the device cost plus carrier fees. The verdict? On the high end the Nexus One costs $2,580 over 24 months. The iPhone weighs in at an impressive $3780, almost 50% more.

The reason are AT&T’s iPhone plans v. the T-Mobile plan. Unlimited voice, data and text messages runs $100 on T-Mobile, and $150 for AT&T.

The chart, which also compares the Nexus One to the Palm Pre and Motorola Droid, is below.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Why pay for text messaging anymore when you can send texts for free? That’s the message GOGII is trying to send to users via its textPlus application, which has been wildly successful on the iPhone with over 3.2 million downloads.

As with many other successful iPhone applications, textPlus is moving to Android and bringing free texting along with it.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Looks like Amazon has decided to go on holiday vacation early, and invited all of its customers to go along with it. Amazon and Amazon Web Services seem to be down, and people are noticing it.

This is bad news for any companies relying on Amazon’s cloud services. Many startups use Amazon Web Services to host files in the cloud including images and other key content. And it isn’t the first time this has happened (though its competition isn’t much better).

And, of course, those looking for extremely last minute holiday gifts are out of luck.

We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment, and we’ll update you on the status of Amazon.

Update: Amazon looks to be back up from here. Is it up for you?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Regular readers will know my affinity for Apple products. In general, they’re high quality, and I’m willing to pay a bit more for that. But a lemon is a lemon, regardless of who it’s made by, and must be labeled as such. These new 27-inch iMacs? Lemons.

In case you haven’t heard yet, the screens on these massive things are failing left and right. Granted, not all of them seem to be affected, but 110 pages worth of support questions/rants on Apple’s Support page for the issue tells me the problem is pretty widespread. That’s 1,640 replies, so far. And that thread has been viewed an incredible 264,630 times. The next closest recent page with that many views has 26,852 — and guess what? It’s also about a problem with the 27-inch iMac screen.

Two days ago, Apple issued a fix for the issue. The only problem? The fix doesn’t appear to work.

It did look like the fix was working for a little while, but today I’m back with the same constant flickering and random screen shutoffs that have plagued many of us. It basically makes the machine unusable. The support board is already filling up with users who applied the fix and still have the same problem. And, in fact, the only other TechCrunch writer with the new 27-inch iMac also has had the same issue and the fix hasn’t worked for him either.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Apple was delaying further shipments of the 27-inch iMacs until it could get to the bottom of the screen issue. Many believed the fix two days ago was the solution, but it’s not. And so Apple appears to have a very big problem on its hands, literally. If I have to send this bad boy back, it will be the second time I’ve done so. The first time, it shipped to me with a crack in the screen. A problem which is also not an isolated one.

Perhaps you read about how the FDA delayed the replacement one because it thought it was a piece of fruit. I was mad, but I shouldn’t have been. The truth is, these new iMacs are a piece of fruit. They’re lemons.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Each time we write about Dazzboard, a browser-based syncing solution for getting photos, videos, and music onto your mobile handset, it’s pretty much a given that someone will comment that it doesn’t support their handset of choice yet. Everyone’s a critic, right?

While it still doesn’t support the much clamored-for iPhone or iPod Touch (nor does it seem likely that it will anytime soon, due to software restrictions – thanks Apple!), they’ve just added support for a different hot-ticket item: Android phones.

Read the rest of this at MobileCrunch >>

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We’ve had a chance to play SGN’s Skies Of Glory WWI person-to-person dogfighting game for the iPhone. But now they’ve released this trailer for the game to really show off what they’ve built. Look for a launch date shortly.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

This is, apparently, not a fake exchange. A young journalist comes to Aardvark user Ryan Asava for help. Things go downhill from there. If you never quite understood the service, you’ll get it now. Our previous coverage of the company is here. Thanks Marshall.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Launch48 event in London this weekend has seen six teams attempt to launch a startup in, you guessed it 48 hours. The event, which was basically created by some UK startup enthusiasts, is different to StartupWeekend in that separate teams come together to each work on their own project rather than one. After frantically coding for the last couple of days, the results were presented tonight at the event, so here they are in order of presentation. I liked Given and Grapeshots. As you can see some were more fully formed than others:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

When the next generation of touchscreen tablet computers hits the market, one of its highly anticipated uses will be as a full-color reader for books, newspapers, and magazines.  Of those three, the main beneficiary may very well be old-style magazines. The black-and-white Kindle doesn’t do magazines justice, and they never really quite translated to the Web. The magic of a magazine is all in the layout—the interplay of lush prose with stunning photography or standout illustrations.

A tablet computer holds forth the promise of a high-resolution color screen that is big enough so you won’t have to squint at it. Tablets will be portable and comfortable enough to hold in your hands while you are sitting in an easy chair.  And subscriptions can be delivered on an ongoing basis as quickly as an issue or an article can be published, without those pesky printing, paper, or shipping costs.

It’s not hard to understand why beleaguered magazine executives and editors can’t wait for these tablets to appear. They are already talking about creating a Hulu for magazines—kind of like a giant digital newsstand which delivers its digital editions to tablets and other devices from all of today’s major print magazines.

But what will a digital magazine look like exactly? My former editor Josh Quittner, who is now working on some prototypes for digital magazines at Time Inc. (among other things), recently offered the following perspective on re-imagining magazines for these devices:

Don’t overestimate the importance of the right device. With no imagination at all, we can envision a 10-inch iPod Touch, which would render beautifully packaged magazine-style content in a far more reader-friendly way than the Web. Even the “lean-back” experience of the Kindle, as primitive as it is, is far more conducive to long-form reading than trying to read on a desktop or laptop. I mean, it’s not coincidental that the killer app on the Web is the browser. The Web is built for browsing—not deep reading. Everything about reading on the Web is designed to shorten your attention span. Every link promises that whatever you’re currently reading isn’t nearly as interesting as the thing behind the link. Not that there’s anything wrong with that for some things. But it can’t possibly work for everything.

When I read that, I did a double-take and asked Quittner whether he was he actually suggesting removing the links from digital magazines. He responded, and even wrote another blog post, saying that is exactly what he meant:

Magazines don’t need links. They should be like wonderful applications, surprising and delightful and fluid to use. If you want to browse the Web, close the app.

What Quittner is evoking here is the iTunes model, where you download self-contained apps to your iPhone. Imagine magazines for sale on iTunes, but for a bigger device. And they are not just filled with words and pictures, but have interactive elements, perhaps video too, and operate more like an information app.

I think that’s a great idea, and would love to see magazine “apps” like that.  But not including links in the text would be a mistake.  And in fact, Quittner’s analogy only goes so far because many iPhone apps support links which then open a browser. That kind of hybrid design could work for digital publications as well.  Digital magazines should be immersive, self-contained experiences, Quittner argues.

I agree with the immersive part, but if it’s too self-contained you end up with a CD-ROM.  When was the last time you bought one of those?

But Quittner seems to want e-mags to be more like e-books, which don’t have any links at all. In his mind, every link “leaves the barn door open” and points “away from the product . . . to the wide-open Web,” where nobody wants to pay for anything.

Sorry old pal, but that horse left the barn a long time ago.  I can appreciate the challenge magazine companies have of transitioning from print to digital without losing paying subscribers, but they ignore the link structure of the Web at their peril. Those links are there whether they acknowledge them or not and people will seek them out.

If the Web has taught us anything it is that information does not exist in a vacuum.  An article without links is a dead story.  An interesting artifact perhaps, but not something that will engage and delight the modern reader, who finds information these days by following links or passing them around.  If you close the door to the Web, you’ll only be locking yourself in.

And that raises another question about these digital magazines.  Will each story have an associated link, and will people need a tablet reader to open up those links and read them?  While you can create a much richer experience in a dedicated app than in a browser, the gap between the two is quickly closing.  The latest Javascript rendering engines, HTML5, and  a whole slew of advancements are turning the browser into a rich application platform.

When Google launches its own electronic book store, the books will be delivered via the browser.  No special electronic reader will be required. The same should be true for digital magazines.  New browser technologies can make digital magazines more immersive than a standard HTML Website, and in fact a magazine’s Website can be programmed to unlock different features depending on the type of browser and device that is being used to view it.  If it detects a touchscreen tablet, maybe the UI changes to deliver the most compelling experience.

There will always be demand for information that is packaged in an informative and entertaining way.  But the most vibrant magazines (and newspapers) of tomorrow will live on the Web (not some jewel-encased app), and they most certainly will have links

CD-ROM image by Clinton Little; Tablet magazine image via Gizmodo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors