Caught this over on gizmodo.com today and I want it. I will turn it into a drinking game and it will be glorious.
Ive got no other details for you really, this was at a toy convention and I’m sure will be on shelves soon.
Not much that needs to be said about this gadget. Andy Kurovets with Yanko designed this mouse and I still can’t stop laughing. I think in this case, the pictures are definitely worth 1000 words.
I want to preface this post with that I am by no means an Apple hater. I own an iPhone that I am constantly glued to, and up until recently I owned a Macbook that I loved dearly.
That said however, I think Apple may have a flop on their hands at first glance with the iPad. Here are my thoughts:
First, let’s start off with the facts. Here are the iPad specs:
At first glance, I can see the appeal. It’s bigger than an iPhone/iPod, has a pretty screen, and is relatively portable – but dig under the surface and you have a product that doesn’t really seem to have a realistic demographic.
Let’s start with current Apple customers with iPod Touches and iPhones. What’s the use of buying this product? My iPhone can do everything the iPad can, it’s more portable, has a camera, and along with my monthly AT&T service I can make calls and send texts. iPod Touch users, you can do all the same things the iPad can as well. This iPad is essentially a giant iPod Touch with optional 3G service – that will further slow down AT&T’s already struggling network.
It’s my understanding that this is meant to compete with all of those netbooks out there. Again, Apple missed the mark. Sure, you can surf the web, but beyond that what else are you going to do with it? I know, I hear you Kindle and Nook fans out there, you can read books and stuff on it – but a Nook is in color and far less costly. You can also store photos and music on there – again, I can do that on my iPhone that fits in my pocket. Finally, a lot of netbook users out there want their netbooks for two main reasons – web and basic office functions. iWorks? I’m sorry, you want to compete out there you need Microsoft Office. Most of the white collar industry out there still functions on PC’s and Microsoft Office programs – the traveling business community out there is not going to risk compatibility issues while they are on the road between Microsoft Word and iWorks Pages. And even if you were okay with that risk, how are you going to type it? A touch screen keyboard works well on a small device, anything bigger than that you need a physical keyboard to do any meaningful work that requires typing (And yes, I know, there is a keyboard dock for it- I’m about to get to that). Not to mention no multitasking like the iPhone/iPod Touch – meaning you can’t have Pages and Safari open simultaneously.
Perhaps the biggest problem for Apple – which is a common one – is pricing. I know you get what you pay for, but let’s break this down. You can get a relatively top of the line (by netbook standards) HP netbook for about $35o. Seems reasonable for a stripped down laptop that is meant to be used mostly for web and basic office uses – all packaged together in a nice smaller package. Well, here’s Apple’s pricing on the iPad:
I own a 16GB iPhone, with all of my Apps, music, videos, and photos, it’s nearly to capacity. To me, a 16GB iPad-meant-to-be-a-laptop-thing isn’t reasonable; you start adding other files, more videos (because “…the iPad is awesome for TV shows and Movies!”) you are going to burn through that 16 GB pretty damn fast. So let’s say you go for the 32GB (again, they make iPhones with this capacity) and you can live without the 3G -which would cost you an additional $30/month from AT&T – so you are at $600+. Okay, well that’s “only” $250 more than that HP netbook; but then you buy the iPad and decide to reasonably use it at home or to type anything significant, you need that keyboard dock, and you better believe for a touchscreen device like this you are going to want that case. Let’s say this all costs another -and I’m being generous here I think- $100; BAM! You’re more than double the price a netbook that would more than likely meet all your needs.
So who is this iPad meant for? There’s not enough there for a traveling business-type to feasably use it, it’s too expensive for someone who wants to buy something like this to just surf the web, and I don’t see any reason a college student could use one (and I know, I am one). There are little components to each of these demographics, but nothing substantial it seems to justify the costly price tag (a price tag that Apple laughably advertises on their site right now as an “unbelieveable price”); you get up to that 64GB+3G range and you may as well just drop the extra 200 bones to get a more reasonable and useful Macbook.
The iPad is a device that you can use to:
Does that sound like it’s worth the $500+ price tag?
I think the Kindle and the Nook are both great ideas and products – they are also ideas that are aimed at a specific market. The iPad feels too much like a shotgun blast at several different markets with little substance to back it up. There isn’t enough included to compete in the netbook market and it costs too much to compete in the e-reader market, so where does it fit? Had apple maybe just comeout with an e-reader like a Nook or Kindle that maybe did a little more to give it an edge but still keep the price tag under $400 Apple might have a product that makes sense.
I assure you, I’m not a tech snob, and the iPad looks… neat and will probably in some way revolutionize computers down the road and it’s impressive that we even live in a world where a product like this exists, but Apple missed a mark. I love my iPhone. I use it all the time: It’s my iPod when I’m at the gym, it’s my social network outlet while I’m at work, it’s my internet on the go, it’s my handheld gaming device when I’m bored, and it even had a Kindle application for books, and most importantly it fits in my pocket and only cost me $300. Ultimately, I think Apple fanboys are going to rush out and buy the iPad, but without a clear market to corner and a hefty pricetag, I think Apple may have a flop on their hands.
Rather than throw together my own crappy best of for this year I’ve decided to give you a link over to a best of the decade that has a lot more insight and time put into it than Ive got. Engadget put together a really nice piece about gadgets that defined our last ten years on the planet. A few are debatable but things like the Ipod and Windows XP are not, in fact I still run XP and love it. So head on over and check out their list.
Big Shiny Robot’s friend Adam Olsen recently posted this review about switching from the iPhone to the new Droid phone. He has been kind enough to let us share it here:
I bought myself the first generation iPhone about 8 days after it came out, and have followed the upgrade path (getting the 3G and 3Gs as soon as they were available) clear up until about a week and a half ago, when I jumped ship from AT&T.; I love the iPhone. Sure, there are some things that bother me about it, but it really was good to me. Especially now, that a lot of the features I was missing in a phone were suddenly there (copy & paste, MMS, etc).
Everything was great until I moved from SLC to Seattle, where my data plan took a horrible turn for the worst. Even with full bars, I could rarely access webpages, post to twitter, read my headlines on facebook, or send an email. AT&T; was less than helpful, asking me to “restore” my iPhone to factory settings, which didn’t do much for me at all. Living in Utah, where AT&T; is grand, I really didn’t ever get the reports I read about their service being poor (here’s an example). Now I do.
I flew back to Utah about a week before Thanksgiving to spend the holiday with my family. Whoop, suddenly my data service works again! A couple of my friends had picked up a Motorola Droid (and thus, Verizon) recently, one of them even coming from an iPhone. Both of them said they liked it. One of them (the one that switched from an iPhone) was actually in Seattle that week for the MLS cup, and said the Verizon coverage in the city was great. So, I jumped on the bandwagon, and purchased a Droid.
Being an iPhone/AT&T; user for 3 1/2 years jumping to the Droid/Verizon has been a little rough for me. Now, while I realize that a week and a half is a pretty short time to develop a great opinion of the Droid, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a fairly good grasp of it. Here are the pros and the cons for a user switching from the iPhone to a Droid – I’m listing the cons first since I’m sure those will be the ones people will want to look at first if they are considering the change:
Cons
1. Verizon’s Visual voicemail app pales in comparison to the one provided by Apple/AT&T.; Here’s why:
• Constant notifications that a connection could not be made to the visual voicemail service. I get one each time I boot up the phone – I assume this is because the background service of the app starts before the network connection is made. I also get them randomly througought the this day.
• The service costs $2.99
• You cannot listen to or delete Visual Voicemail messages while connected to a Wireless network. If you try to do so, the application will completely shut down your wireless connection, and it won’t bring it back up automatically when you’re done.
• The app itself looks like it was made in 1999. The buttons/widgets/gradients are low resolution and generally look like crap. Take a look at the screenshots below and you’ll see what I mean.
2. The Android API itself seems to have a lot less in the way of user interface design standards and stock icons. There’s not really a common theme between different apps on the phone, let alone in the apps on available in the Android Market. The SMS has nice clean dark theme, while the Camera app appears as though it was designed to look like it was made out of brushed granite. A lot of the apps on the market have buttons with weird fonts, weird colors, and weird layout positioning. Everything on the iPhone is pretty seemless, and in most cases, has a unified design that’s familiar when switching from application to application.
3. Games. There are probably 10 games in the Android Market that are worth purchasing. No “Worms”, no “Doom Ressurection”, no “Super Monkey Ball”. I think you get the point. Sure, there weren’t many great games for the iPhone when the app store and SDK first arrived, but the simple fact is, Android doesn’t have them now.
4. You cannot surf the web and be on a phone call at the same time.
5. I don’t know if it’s Verizon’s network, or the Droid itself, but SMS messages have a hard limit of 160 characters. I know that this is the SMS standard, but somehow the iPhone gets around it. Whether it pieces multiple SMSes together when recieving, or it splits long ones into multiple packets when delivering, it doesn’t really matter. With the iPhone, you really don’t need to worry about the length of your SMS.
Composing an SMS longer than 160 characters on the Droid and sending it to a contact on another network will result in the message being truncated to 160 characters. There is no automatic splitting, the contact simply will not recieve the entire message.
There’s an SMS replacement app on the Android Market that’ll automatically split any SMS that’s longer than 160 characters, but while using it, the alerts I get from our Nagios server via Verizon’s email to SMS gateway are still truncated at 160 characters, making the messages fairly useless to me. The app is also terribly ugly, suffering from UI weirdness like I described in number 2.
6. No pinch to zoom in the built in browser. I have seen it on the Eris, and it even works in a 3rd party browser called “Dolphin”, so it’s not the hardware that’s causing this limitation, but the functionality definitely is not present in the Droid’s default browser.
7. The Micro SD card system. You cannot store apps on the included 16GB SD card. You can only store them in the 256MB built in storage. Possibly because of security reasons? I don’t know. Apps can access data on the SD card, which probably makes all of this a moot point. All of the gigantic apps I used on the iPhone consumed their space using data that could probably be downloaded to the SD card after the app is installed and launched for the first time. For instance, Doom Ressurection (50mb or so if I remember correctly), and the TomTom app (1.7GB).
Pros
1. The obvious. Verizon’s data network actually works where I live.
2. Multitasking. I love how Android does this. I love that you can keep applications open, and switch around between them at will. Sure, the iPhone’s hardware supports this, and some of Apple’s apps even make use of it, but this stuff has been purposely left out of the public SDK. The only way around it is to Jailbreak.
With Android, it’s more than just having multiple applications running at the same time. The SDK also allows you to create services that run in the background. Services that can use Android’s cool notification system to alert you of things, which brings us to:
3. The notification system. Google has created a way for applications to alert you in a non-obtrusive and super useful way. The statusbar at the top of the screen can display little icons and little blurbs of text when something of interest happens. A simple swipe of the finger and you can see a list of recent notifications; tap on one and you can switch to the application that cause the notification. The iPhone has nothing like this. It has “badges” and alert windows (which are most definitely NOT non-obtrusive).
4. The keyboards. Both of them. I like the physical keyboard because, well, it’s a physical keyboard. Yes, the keys are a bit cramped, but I did get used to it eventually. The software keyboard is somewhat better than the one on the iPhone. It does everything that the iPhone’s does, but the autocorrection is a LOT better, simply because it provides you a list of words to choose from, and allows you to click on the one you like the most instead of always just picking one for you (though it’ll do that too if you opt not to pick one).
5. The Android Market (app store) policies. There basically are none. I’ve done a touch of iPhone development, and I can tell you that Apple will most likely NOT approve an app if it doesn’t somehow help their bottom line. If you’re trying to sell a service with your app, direct business to your website, etc, then good luck. If you’re trying to duplicate functionality that’s already present on the iPhone, even if you think you can do it better, good luck with that too.
6. More on the SDK: Android allows you to replace system components. Don’t like the built in software keyboard? You can replace it with one from the App store. You can route phonecalls through the Google Voice App. You can replace the SMS app entirely with a new one. You can replace the Home screen with a new one. You can cause an app to start when another one starts: for instance, the Last.FM app will start and scrobble your music automatically when you open Android’s music player.
Also, you don’t need to buy a Mac to write Android applications. You can write them completely for free using the operating system of your choice.
7. You can download applications from random websites, bypassing the Android market all together. Find a link to a sweet app? Just click from the Android Browser and it’ll download and install for you. No way in hell Apple would let this type of thing happen. How would they get any money this way?
8. Mass storage capability for the SD card. You can simply mount the SD card on your computer (running any OS that supports Mass Storage) and copy your music/videos over. You aren’t stuck using iTunes to get music on the phone.
Some other notes:
1. ConnectBot, the SSH client on the Android platform, is quite a bit better than the options on the iphone. It supports your screen+irssi+nicklist.pl session quite nicely. It’s fast. It resizes the terminal contents corretly. With the physical keyboard, your input method isn’t getting in the way.
2. Android lacks the super sweet TomTom app that the iPhone app store has, though it does include Google Navigation. Google navigation is fine, however, you cannot use it in areas where there is low or no signal because it transfers map data over the air as you drive. The TomTom app on the iPhone takes up about 1.7GB of your precious music space, so there’s a downside to that as well.
Another thing about Google Navigation is that it doesn’t automatically shut down when you get a phone call. I found this out the hard way, answering a phone call, only to have the other person get talked over by the computerized voice trying to give me driving directions.
Conclusion
Switching from iPhone OS to Android reminds me a whole lot of when I switched from Windows to Linux years ago. I feel like I’ve switched to the better platform that isn’t quite ready yet. A lot of the apps feel like they were written by programmers who have never heard of the word “aesthetic”. Android isn’t quite as pretty as the iPhone OS. It doesn’t have core animation. It certainly doesn’t have the great team of graphic designers that Apple has. It is open, though, less restrictive, and it shows. To me, that openness is more important than the pretty looks, so even if AT&T; did work well where I live, knowing what I know now, I’d probably still consider switching. I hate the feeling I get from Apple’s greedy SDK rules and restrictions.
Using an iPhone, some programming, and some sort of sensor chip I know nothing about, NASA scientists have created what could argueably be considered the first “real Tricorder” from Star Trek lore – for lack of a better description.
The device Li developed is about the size of a postage stamp and is designed to be plugged in to an iPhone [and use an application] to collect, process and transmit sensor data. The new device is able to detect and identify low concentrations of airborne ammonia, chlorine gas and methane. The device senses chemicals in the air using a “sample jet” and a multiple-channel silicon-based sensing chip, which consists of 16 nanosensors, and sends detection data to another phone or a computer via telephone communication network or Wi-Fi.
While some robots out there find this to be “Meh.” news, I think it’s pretty cool. Not necessarily because a hand-held device can do this, but because it’s pretty fascinating how real life mimics -or in some cases, surpasses- what is supposed to be “the future” in shows like Star Trek.
Now, I will be REALLY impressed when they come up with a replicator application for my iPhone that will make me a damn sandwich anytime I want one.
You can check out the full article over at NASA.gov!
I dont have much for you today, but I think Tony Stark could possibly be a real person and posting videos to youtube. Enjoy.
Damn Swank-Mo-Tron keeps sending me Star Wars gadgets and as much as I try to not admit they’re kinda cool, this one had to be posted. I know that many of you will go throw down your $15 and snatch these things up right away and I can’t bring myself to keep this one from you. Sith Light Saber laser pointers. High quality, very detailed and relatively cheap. 
PEW PEW PEW—-buy it at thinkgeek
Pretty great commercial, huh? It got me interested enough in the product that I put in a request to review it. They were kind enough to send me both versions of the Powermat (Home & Travel) as well as a few accessories skins.
All in all I think this is an amazing product. The Powermat uses little white adapters called Powercubes (shown below) or custom skins (available for some of the more popular electronics out there) to charge your electronic devices. A magnet in the mat attracts the adapter or device to the juice and a bunch of magical things happen. I call them magical because I’m not intelligent enough to understand the technology behind it. For those more tech savvy, you can get all of that technical jargon here .
If I had to choose between the two Powermats, I would have to go with the travel version. It is the same price as the Home & Office mat, but folds up and comes with a carrying case. It doesn’t look as sexy as the Home & Office mat, but it makes the justification process to buy one a lot easier.
Both versions come with one Powercube (shown below) and about a dozen adapters to make it work with your tech gear. It also comes with a nifty carrying case for those adapters that attaches to the Powercube. The mats have a 4th charging spot via USB on the back of the device.
PROS
• Charge up to 4 Devices using 1 wall outlet.
• All the devices I tried seemed to take right around an hour to charge.
• Lots of convenient skins for popular devices so you don’t need to plug into the Powercube (iPhone, iPod, Blackberry Phones, Nintendo DS)
• The mat features a mute and lights off buttons.
• No need to keep track of a billion chargers.
• Very well designed product and packaging. Right up there with Apple.
CONS
• Out of the box you can only charge 2 electronic devices.
• To completely utilize this you’ll be spending close to $200.
• While the charging is wireless, most of your devices will still need to be plugged into a Powercube.
• The travel case for the portable unit doesn’t have designated spots for the Powercubes.
Sure, it’s a little pricey, but you’ll be the coolest geek in your office. It charges your devices quickly, and honestly is a lot less hassle. All in all, this thing is fucking awesome.
When so many of my fellow bots are designer geeks, I get sent alot of stuff like this, and while I may not be a huge design geek I recognize talent and awesome when I see it.
AC/DC was never my favorite band, but you have to give credit to them, during their time they were awesome and have created some lasting and memorable songs. This collecters edition comes jam packed with alot of stuff any real fan would love to have. Where does the gadget part come in? Oh right, the box that looks like an amp, well it is an amp. You can plug in to the box your music came in. Awesome idea, beautiful execution. The designer of this collection is a damn genius. Here’s an excerpt of everthing you get in the kit, and the full article here:
The box, which includes 3 CDs and 2 DVDs of ACDC rare tracks, recordings and videos, also includes a 12″ LP, numerous memorabilia reproductions as well as a 164-page hard bound book containing rare and unseen photos spanning 1974-2009 plus full-size re-prints of original press releases, tour itineraries, tour books, test pressing labels, advertisements and much more. A real history of the band from the inside out. Rare photography includes never-before-seen shots of the band recording at the Albert Music studio on King Street in Sydney with legendary producers Harry Vanda and George Young in 1977. Also tons of unpublished live shots from all over the world.”
