If you own an HDTV, you probably have fallen for the infamous HDMI cable rip-off. Unless you read this.
I almost fell for it for this reason:
“If you’ve already splashed out on the huge flat-screen tv, a state-of-art Blu-Ray player, and a satellite dish with a monthly subscription that brings with it hundreds of channels, then it probably seems like it’s a small price to pay for HDMI cables. But, this is exactly the mentality that gets people to pay for this habitually over-priced bit of technological excess.”
Take a look at the video below flaunting what is supposedly Wired’s iPad app. Well, actually, it’s a digital version of the magazine that Wired created with Adobe. But hey, we all know where this is going. The magazine app seems slick and the experience is out-of-the-world rich. It may make me walk down to the Apple store and get my third and most expensive Apple product.
My essential question to this is, why couldn’t Amazon do this with Kindle? They came out with a product that was just a (first) step in the ladder to where we want to be with digital media consumption. And their revisions to the Kindle have landed utterly short of the vision.
“… you can use it with a SIM card from most GSM operators worldwide.”
I’m still under contract with AT&T and won’t be replacing my iPhone any time soon. But, this phone is suddenly looking like a serious candidate for doing that, which I guess will happen in the next year or so.
In the meantime, I hope Google/HTC will fix the infamous touchscreen problem, enhance the battery life, and provide a cheaper contract option with AT&T.
If Apple’s diversifying into female sanitary products business, Microsoft, not willing to be left behind, is making a bet on package delivery services. Last month, Apple introduced the much anticipated iPad. For some time we’ve been hearing about Microsoft’s new in-the-works tablet called Courier. Today, interesting photos and videos of Microsoft Courier appear in engadget.
Microsoft Courier
Although I have reservations about the split book-like design, some of the concepts really caught my eye. Having two independent screens is attractive particularly if you are used to working with more than one monitor at work. It lets you organize things a li’l better and interaction amongst multiple applications or entities becomes so much easier.
I am getting all warm-and-fuzzy thinking about an interface that supports a combination of pen and finger gestures. It seems quite a natural way to use the device. But, my engineer head tells me that the software to do that will be hard to pull off. There’s a reason iPhone kept it simple. Still, despite all its efforts, those styli are bloody hard to get rid of. Look for a very tempting application of them in the video where the artist uses them to mix colors on a palette.
Dealing with different kinds of media without going through arrays of menus is going to be more of a norm than exception. It’s interesting to see some new takes on that here. From the looks of it, it tries to go a notch above handwriting recognition – it’s intention recognition. Put a box around a TODO list to convert it into a digital Post-it note of sorts. Flick the images around and it understands what to do with them. Again, all that seems cool in a video. How much of it happens it in reality, remains to be seen. I’ll be particularly surprised if Microsoft is able to crank out a smooth and seamless experience as shown. If they delivers this at all, that is.
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