Well that took a while…

What can I say, life hap­pened . A lot has been hap­pen­ing in tech as always. The new and excit­ing gizmo of the moment has to be the Nexus 7 tablet with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, then there’s Mac OS 10.8 Moun­tain Lion released today. Hav­ing tried these out, there are a few thoughts I have on them.

Nexus 7

The Nexus 7 doesn’t really break new ground. Yes, it is the first 7 inch tablet with a quad core proces­sor yada yada, but the most impor­tant fea­ture it has is wide avail­abil­ity. The Kin­dle Fire was the first powerful-but-easy-on-the-wallet 7 inch tablet. Prob­lem was and still is — you can only get one in the US. Enter the Nexus 7. Boom.

It’s widely avail­able, pow­er­ful and super afford­able. The only other com­pany that has the resources and expe­ri­ence to pull a hat-trick like that is Apple. Maybe that’s why the rumors of a 7.8 inch iPad are start­ing to brew.

Back to the Nexus 7. I wasn’t really sure I was a fan of the 7 inch form fac­tor until I tried it out. I love the iPad but at times I think it’s just too big to take every­where with me. The Nexus 7 is just right. It’s light and just portable enough to go every­where with. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the per­fect bal­ance between mobile phone and tablet.

It’s not with­out flaws though. There are issues with the dis­play that peo­ple are report­ing: the screen is lift­ing off the unit on the left side, dead pix­els, over sat­u­rated images etc. On the fea­tures side, it lacks a micro SD slot — a trend that seems to be get­ting more com­mon with mobile devices. The iPhone is to blame, pity the HTC One X had to fol­low suit. Despite these petty issues, it costs about half the price of the low end iPad so… hey,16 gig will suffice.

Over­all, great device at a rea­son­able price. Jelly Bean is also a great update to ICS. It doesn’t add a whole lot in terms of fea­tures but it adds spit and pol­ish to a solid Android OS. I will be look­ing for­ward to the JB update HTC promised on my One X.

Moun­tain Lion

Mac OS 10.8 is a big­ger shift to iOS than Lion (10.7) was. It’s bolder and more refined than its pre­de­ces­sor. There are more than 200 new fea­tures but the ones I have actu­ally noticed with­out dig­ging in are few.
Visu­ally it looks and feels about the same. There’s a new noti­fi­ca­tion cen­tre icon in the top right cor­ner where spot­light used to be. The dock has lost its glossy reflec­tions aaand that’s about it. It has a new dic­ta­tion fea­ture, a bunch of new apps from iOS, noti­fi­ca­tions and improved per­for­mance. At $US20 there’s no rea­son not to love the update. It make a cou­ple of com­mer­cial apps like Growl noti­fi­ca­tions redun­dant. Awe­some, unless you’d already paid for them

Well that’s all for now, tune in next year on some ran­dom day when some ran­dom things hap­pen in tech and I have time to write about them!

Updated

Well it has been a while and a lot of things have hap­pened, nat­u­rally. The update took a lit­tle longer than expected . Any­way, back to the hap­pen­ings. The Desire HD is gone, replaced by the super awe­some HTC One X. The first gen iPad is gone — replaced by the new res­o­lu­tion­ary iPad and the Kin­dle clas­sic has been sub­sti­tuted by the Kin­dle Touch. Reviews will fol­low soon. The Galaxy S3 is also com­ing up and although it doesn’t look like it, it has the best bench­mark scores of any phone ever. That said, I still have some old devices lying around and I want to go in depth on what has changed and what has remained the same on mobiles in the last 5 years. I guess the next big thing com­ing up is iOS 6 in June and per­haps some res­o­lu­tion­ary MacBooks!

Updating…

Just moved to a new and bet­ter host for anphase.com. I moved from Go Daddy to Blue­host. Faster, bet­ter, stronger, awe­somer. I am still fix­ing some data­base bugs but every­thing should be sorted in a few hours – it takes a while for the updates to rip­ple through the inter-webs espe­cially to NZ – it’s still bet­ter than what Go Daddy had though! iTunes U for iOS and iBooks 2 look awe­some by the way. If only my 1st gen iPad didn’t crash so much… But that’s another story.

2012, Year of the Tablets #2

There’s a big clash hap­pen­ing this year. When Win­dows 8 meets the iPad. Android Tablets, Play­books all the Win­dows 7 tablets and stuff are irrel­e­vant for now, the iPad is still the only tablet I can rec­om­mend. I’ve used many of the Android tablets and I have to say, they are not great. I’m not sure whether I can attribute their slug­gish per­for­mance to the oper­at­ing sys­tem or the hard­ware; at the end of the day it doesn’t really mat­ter – bot­tom line is that right now they are garbage. I won’t even go into the Win­dows 7 tablets. Win­dows 7 wasn’t built for tablets. Nuff said. The Play­book just doesn’t offer enough for any­one to take it seri­ously. It’s dead in the water.

You’ll notice that I said Win­dows 8 meets iPad and not iOS. The iPad is very pop­u­lar, so pop­u­lar in fact, that in the tablet realm, it stands on its own. Unless the next iter­a­tion of the iPad (iPad 3 I sup­pose) ins’t “rev­o­lu­tion­ary”,  ulti­mately Win­dows 8 will win.

Win­dows 8 strengths

Power

Win­dows 8 is a desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tem whereas iOS is a mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem. I’ve been using Win­dows 8 Beta since it was released a few months back and it is awe­some. Although it is not clear how much of the desk­top ele­ments will remain on the tablet ver­sion of the OS, it looks very promis­ing. With sup­port for full desk­top appli­ca­tions such as Office and Visual Stu­dio, iOS can not com­pete when it comes to software.

Metro UI

The Metro UI on Win­dows Phone is one of the most attrac­tive user inter­faces any­where. The Win­dows team has man­aged to expand on that great UI with­out com­pro­mise in Win­dows 8. The ‘live tiles’ are the next gen­er­a­tion icons. The prin­ci­ple is quite sim­ple – ani­mated tiles of var­i­ous sizes dis­play­ing some infor­ma­tion about the appli­ca­tion, that are locked into a vertically-sliding grid. They elim­i­nate prob­lems of organ­is­ing icons, know­ing some­thing about the apps and esthet­ics all in one blow. Gone are the days of the sta­tic icons that we’ve had since the begin­ning of per­sonal computers!

Famil­iar­ity

It’s Win­dows. That may be a turn-off for some, but peo­ple use Win­dows more than any other oper­at­ing sys­tem. Win­dows 7 became the most widely used oper­at­ing sys­tem around August 2011 after beating…you guessed it…Windows XP. The same can’t be said about Mac OS 10.7 Lion which is yet to beat its pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion 10.6 Snow Leopard.

What the iPad needs

More power

Yes, it’s not about the fea­tures, but the iPad 3 needs to up the ante. When I say power I’m not just talk­ing about the pro­cess­ing capa­bil­ity, I’m also talk­ing about the inter­face. The iPad is not great for input for sev­eral rea­sons – but that can change. Siri for the iPad seems to be an inevitable addi­tion com­ing to the iPad. That would offer a unique com­pet­i­tive advan­tage because even though Siri isn’t per­fect, it’s very good and it has so much potential.

Steve Jobs said some­thing like “if it has a sty­lus, it sucks”. He has been wrong before and I beg to dif­fer with him on this one. Humans have been writ­ing stuff with instru­ments for 5000 years now! Fin­gers lack the pre­ci­sion and intu­itive­ness of a pen. We use sev­eral fin­gers to care­fully coor­di­nate the motion of a pen and we learn to do this from as early as we can grip stuff and con­tinue to per­fect the craft till we die. A sty­lus imple­mented the right way is might­ier that the fin­ger for input any day.

The proces­sor, ram, graph­ics chip etc. are not very impor­tant though. At the end of the day, it’s impor­tant that what­ever they imple­ment works well. It doesn’t mat­ter if they decide to use the same proces­sor with the same 512 MB RAM or a quad core proces­sor with 1 GB of RAM – as long as the thing works well. My first gen­er­a­tion iPad is still alive and kick­ing but it crashes like crazy. It crashes more often than it doesn’t. Whether I’m using the native browser, play­ing a game or run­ning some app…crash. I don’t know about the iPad 2 but I’m guess­ing it is not immune to crashes either. I would have thought a new OS like iOS would be the first crash-less OS. There’s some research on the sub­ject using For­mal Ver­i­fi­ca­tion and Mod­els of Com­pu­ta­tion but I guess we’re not quite there yet.

Final words

There is going to be a shake up in not only the tablet space, but in the whole com­puter indus­try this year. Win­dows 8 will arrive in all it’s glory on mul­ti­tudes of new tablets from all the major man­u­fac­tur­ers. The iPad 3 will also arrive, prob­a­bly with the high­est res­o­lu­tion tablet screen for a while, together with an A6 proces­sor and a new ver­sion of iOS – iOS 6 – later in the year. Android is not rest­ing on its lau­rels either. More tablets will come out to demon­strate the full power of Ice Cream Sand­wich. It will be inter­est­ing to see if the same thing that has hap­pened in the mobile phone space will hap­pen again in the tablet space, that is, Android will take the lead in mar­ket share, the iPad will drop just below it and Win­dows just won’t take off. This is a whole dif­fer­ent type of ball game though and I don’t see that happening.

Where my robots at?

NAO robot, you can get one now…for an arm and a leg…if you get picked

For the longest time I thought 2 things were going to hap­pen before 2010. The first was that tablets were going to take off. They did. I thought Win­dows was the OS to do it since Microsoft had been try­ing for ages but that didn’t really work out. Instead, Apple came out of no where with the iPad. Actu­ally it was prob­a­bly because of a Microsoft exec­u­tive (read the Steve Jobs biog­ra­phy!) but that’s another story. The sec­ond thing that I thought was going to hap­pen: robots.

I hon­estly thought robots were going to be main­stream by now – like every­one either has one or knows some­one who does. Years ago, I used to watch a show called ‘Japan­ese Video Top­ics’ and they had all sorts of robots; from the Aibos to the the ASI­MOs of this world, both announced over 10 years ago in 1999 and 2000 respec­tively, what ever hap­pened to them? I under­stand they were quite expen­sive when they first came out but isn’t all tech­nol­ogy? I thought by now I’d have or at least I’d be able to afford a robot pet of some sort. But ain’t so.

NAO robot with 25 degrees of freedom

The NAO robot shown above is the lat­est iter­a­tion of the robot by Alde­baran Robot­ics. They have a devel­oper pro­gram whereby you apply and if accepted you pay sev­eral thou­sands to join. Once a mem­ber of the devel­oper pro­gram you get a robot with the SDK. So these things aren’t really for sale.

The cheap­est pro­gram­ma­ble robots are prob­a­bly the Roomba vac­u­um­ing robots by iRo­bot, you can buy those for a few hun­dreds. They have all sorts of range sen­sors and there are lots of ways to inter­face and pro­gram them around the inter-webs. Of course they don’t have arms or fin­gers with oppos­able thumbs like the NAO robot but it sure beats noth­ing. Funny thing about iRo­bot is that they are this high­tech robot­ics com­pany mak­ing cutting-edge mil­i­tary robots…and vacuums.

I guess it comes down to what con­sumers would want with a robot. I would want to pro­gram it for fun, teach it to do some­thing inter­est­ing like…umm…dance?… I can’t even think of a good rea­son why I would want one actu­ally. It can’t make calls or help me com­mu­ni­cate, it can’t do any­thing use­ful like fetch stuff because it’s too slow and the process is pretty com­plex (obsta­cle avoid­ance, object recog­ni­tion, nav­i­ga­tion) it can’t keep me com­pany because the AI and voice recog­ni­tion on it prob­a­bly sucks. Basi­cally, until these things are good enough for doing things in a domes­tic and highly com­plex envi­ron­ment, they will never become main­stream. Given the expo­nen­tial rate of progress, prob­a­bly by 2020 we’ll have something.

So much for that.

Kindle Classic Review

The Kin­dle Clas­sic aka The Kin­dle 4

Why on Earth…

I have to admit, I didn’t read much until recently. The only stuff I ever read were school books so that I could, you know, get along and pass my courses. So a while back, I heard the Steve Jobs auto­bi­og­ra­phy was com­ing out. I was fas­ci­nated by the man so I decided I wanted to read the book. Prob­lem was, the thought of adding another book to my fairly large col­lec­tion given the lim­ited space I have seemed like a drag. So I started to look for alter­na­tives. The obvi­ous option was to buy the ebook on Ama­zon and read it in the Kin­dle apps on either my phone, iPod, iPad or com­puter. Sim­ple. Not so much.

You see, I had tried to do the same before. I have sev­eral lengthy research papers in PDF for­mat that I’ve had to read before – this proved to be a night­mare and I ended up print­ing them out for read­ing. My biggest issue: glare. I just can’t stand it! It’s OK to be in front of a com­puter screen (or any back­lit screen) for 1 or 2 hours at a time, but when you have to spend say 5 hours straight? Night­mare. Pro­gram­ming or doing other tasks is dif­fer­ent. You have the oppor­tu­nity to look all over the screen and occa­sion­ally look away to think. When read­ing you’re star­ing at about the same spot, scrolling and all – not cool. So I decided to get a Kindle.

Overview

I decided to get the clas­sic Kin­dle. I will admit, at first I thought I would buy it then sell it to get the Kin­dle Touch but it turns out, this is the bet­ter one for me.

The Kin­dle clas­sic is bet­ter than the other touch vari­ants for sev­eral rea­sons. First off, because it lacks touch sen­sors and speak­ers, it’s the light­est and thinnest of the the ebook read­ers out there. The screen is also not as ‘deep’ as the oth­ers because it lacks touch, which means that there isn’t much of a shadow cast on the screen when you’re read­ing under a light. Such things are impor­tant since the Kin­dle lacks a backlight.

Reviews have shown that the Kin­dle Clas­sic is also faster than the other touch screen read­ers or at least as fast. The other read­ers just don’t seem to be as respon­sive. This could be attrib­uted to the touch screen tech­nol­ogy or just poor soft­ware though. The Kin­dle Touch lacks phys­i­cal page turn but­tons, in fact it has only a home but­ton and power but­ton. This means you have to touch the screen (at spe­cific oddly cho­sen areas mind you) to turn the pages. Although I haven’t used the touch screen, many oth­ers who have find the phys­i­cal but­tons on the Kin­dle Clas­sic bet­ter than the touch con­trols. I per­son­ally think they are awe­some; not that the screen would smudge or any­thing (it doesn’t because of the matte fin­ish) but the tac­tile feed­back and the quick response are satisfying.

The beauty of it

I was against ebook read­ers a short while back. I thought they were point­less, slug­gish, back­ward and gim­micky. The idea of this mono­chrome, slow-responding, sin­gle pur­pose device seemed ridicu­lous to me. I thought it was one of those things that was just going to pass. Those ideas started to change when I tried to do some seri­ous read­ing on my iPad. I just couldn’t stay focused. I found myself get­ting eas­ily dis­tracted. Besides the eye strain, I would get all sorts of noti­fi­ca­tions or I would just start think­ing about play­ing Infin­ity Blade or Sparkle or some­thing. There’s just so much that can be done on the iPad. That, cou­pled with the eye strain just left me with heaps of stuff half read.
That’s when I realised the poten­tial of these ebook readers…and I was right. There’s not much you can do on the Kin­dle, espe­cially the Kin­dle Clas­sic. With no touch screen, even the things you can do are a pain. For instance, the Kin­dle has a built in ‘exper­i­men­tal’ browser, but with­out a touch screen and with the e-ink screen, I have to say, it’s one of the worst browsers I’ve ever used in my life. I won’t even get into the ridicu­lously slow process of text input. The only thing this device is good for is read­ing books. That’s it. And that’s awesome!

When I’m using the Kin­dle, my mind is clear, it’s just me and the book. The thoughts of check­ing my mail or brows­ing the web or play­ing a game are all thwarted by the pain of the thought of try­ing to do any­thing other than read­ing the book. There’s this purity to it that I just love.

The Kin­dle has rekin­dled my inter­est in read­ing. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by all sorts of facts, peo­ple, events, tech­niques etc. but it had been a while since I had gone out to look for books the cover these inter­ests. The Kin­dle has helped me redis­cover the wonder.

The bad

That’s the good stuff. There’s really not much I don’t like about the Kin­dle but I will list a few things that could be better…or wishes rather.

1. The screen res­o­lu­tion is pretty low. It would be nice if it were sharper than 600x800 (@167 ppi). Ide­ally it should be close to the iPhone/iPod Touch Retina ppi of 326. That would be awe­some! The text is quite alright though, I rarely ever notice the pix­e­la­tion of text anyway.
2. Expand­able mem­ory would also be nice but so far the built in 2GB is more than enough for me. Each book is usu­ally a few hun­dred KBs any­way and you don’t really want to be stuff­ing any­thing other than books in it so yeah.
3. ePub sup­port would be nice too. That way I could buy books from other stores or some­thing and just load them with­out con­vert­ing. On the other hand the Ama­zon store has the largest col­lec­tion I believe and they have the best prices anyway.

Kin­dle Clas­sic PDF read­ing (my project report!)

In con­clu­sion

I love this Kin­dle, it’s the best piece of kit I’ve bought in a while. It’s not for every­one though. If you want to take notes and lis­ten to audio books or music, then the Kin­dle Touch is the bet­ter option. The other touch read­ers by Kobo and Sony are also alright accord­ing to the reviews float­ing around. You may also want con­sider the older Kin­dle Key­board if you’re big on but­tons and the form fac­tor. Oth­er­wise, if you just want the raw basics in a slim, light pack­age with a few but­tons – you can’t go wrong with the Kin­dle Classic.

The Future: Siri-ously Lytro

There are a few tech­nolo­gies that have popped up in the last few weeks that I believe are the future. One of them is Siri and the other is the Lytro cam­era. I will start with Siri.

Siri

Siri­ously awesome

Siri is the incred­i­ble new vir­tual assis­tant for the iPhone 4S. It (she) works with voice com­mands and as far as intu­itive con­trol goes, it gets no bet­ter than that. Noth­ing comes close to voice con­trol when it comes to pass­ing com­mands right now… maybe until they per­fect that Emo­tive brain con­trol system.

Why is this awe­some? Say for exam­ple you want to cre­ate an appoint­ment tomor­row for 2pm. On most devices, the pro­ce­dure would be some­thing like this:

1. Launch the cal­en­dar application
2. Select the option to add a new appointment
3. Enter the title or descrip­tion of the appointment
4. Enter the location
5. Pick the date
6. Pick the time
7. Save

Lytro

Lytro cam­era

Words can not describe the awe­some­ness of this cam­era… So I found a video to break it down. In a nut­shell, the Lytro cam­era cap­tures the light field as opposed to just a plain image. With this light field data you can refo­cus an image after tak­ing it. That’s incred­i­ble. Fur­ther more, you can parallax-pan the image and do all sorts of magic with the pic­ture data. I can fore­see this tech­nol­ogy mov­ing into mobile phones. I mean, there’s no need to focus and the cam­era is light­ning fast — per­fect for mobiles.

There is room for improve­ment though. The 8x opti­cal zoom is prob­a­bly  part of the rea­son why it has such unique elon­gated cube design. Also, I assume the large amount of data cap­tured is the is prob­a­bly why the Lytro cam­era can’t do video right now but I’m sure with advance­ments in stor­age and per­haps some opti­miza­tion and com­pres­sion, we’ll be see­ing that soon.This kind of cam­era will def­i­nitely shake things up and I can not wait to see it extend to video cap­ture and mobiles. Enjoy the Lyro cam­era demo from All Things D at the AsiaD con­fer­ence with Walt Moss­berg below.

Change

It’s really funny how things change so fast. At the begin­ning of the year, I let go of my Sam­sung i8910 and I got a new Android phone, the Desire HD. At that time it was the cream of the crop — later came the Sam­sung Galaxy S2, which still reigns supreme. Now my Desire HD is now look­ing dated; it weighs a ton, it’s thick as ever, it has a washed out Super LCD screen, a single-core proces­sor and poor battery-life. Such is the trend year after year.

Some phones seem to last though, those phones that are really good at a par­tic­u­lar thing. The Nokia N8 for instance is still the best camera-phone around, the iPhone is still one of the most styl­ish and app-rich phones and… well I guess those are the 2 big ones. Every other phone seems to have faded to black. My assump­tion is that the Sam­sung Galaxy S2 will have the same fate as every other phone. It’s really good at the things that keep get­ting bet­ter on phones and not much else. It has an awe­some proces­sor, great screen… great every­thing really, but it won’t be so hot a year from now unlike other phones. In fact, it will prob­a­bly be over­shad­owed in every way like the Sam­sung Galaxy before it — by another Sam­sung mon­ster (I’m look­ing at you Nexus Prime).

I like hav­ing images in my posts. I guess the one I picked is appro­pri­ate for this piece because we spend a lot of change chang­ing phones and such. The Desire HD is a mediocre phone. I can not say it ever blew me away. The i8910 for instance had lots of poten­tial and that drove me to the whole report/petition thing. The Sony Eric­son K800 Cyber-shot, which I had before it, blew me away with its amaz­ing cam­era. That cam­era still amazes me today with the Xenon flash and amaz­ing still shots even when the cam­era is moving.

From now on, I’m all about good prod­ucts that last. Prod­ucts that are sup­ported for as long as they are relevant.

Remember: Free Upgrades to Lion for New Macs

Mac OS 10.7 Lion

If you bought a qual­i­fy­ing Mac from an autho­rized retailer on or before the 6th/7th of June, you are eli­gi­ble for a free upgrade to Mac OS Lion (10.7). Lion is avail­able only through the Mac App­Store, so all you need to do is head over to the Apple Up-to-Date page and get a redemp­tion code; enter this code in the App­Store and you’re good to go. The 4 gig down­load is quite a pain though, wish they had a boxed option for those of us with lim­ited band­width. I heard you can down­load Lion free from an Apple Store if you hap­pen to have one in your area… or coun­try… or con­ti­nent. I had trou­ble find­ing this so hope­fully it will help someone.

Source: Apple

First Look: Macbook Pro, Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Mac­Book Pro 13 inch Early 2011

I got a Mac­Book Pro 13 (early 2011) about a month ago and I thought I should share my early impres­sions on both the Mac­Book and OS X Snow Leop­ard. Now I do real­ize that Snow Leop­ard is going to be refreshed this month — in about a week or so, accord­ing to rumours — so my expe­ri­ence with Snow Leop­ard will soon be for­got­ten but still rel­e­vant. I will also talk about OS X Lion when it comes around — I’m eli­gi­ble for a free upgrade to Lion since I bought the mac recently. The key specs are:

Intel Core i7 2.7GHz dual core, 4GB DDR3 RAM and 500GB Hard drive. It also has a Thun­der­bolt port but I haven’t found any use for it. Mac OS ver­sion 10.6.8 (cur­rent lat­est and prob­a­bly last point update for Snow Leopard)

“Miss­ing” Programs/Features

Com­ing from Win­dows, there are some pro­grams that I assumed were bun­dled in with every oper­at­ing sys­tem. For the most part, they are present in Snow Leop­ard but there are some that I miss.

Paint

I never thought I cared much for Paint until I real­ized it was miss­ing in OS X. It’s a sim­ple graph­ics tool that you can use to draw stuff, shapes, lines and what have you. Noth­ing like it is bun­dled with Mac OS X. Lucky enough, some­one made a clone called Paint­brush. It works like a charm with all the key fea­tures that make Paint such a gem.

Aero Snap

One of the fea­tures I’d grown to love on Win­dows 7 is the Snap fea­ture. This resizes open win­dows to occupy half or the entire screen when you drag them to the edges or the top of the screen respec­tively. It’s a very pow­er­ful fea­ture for pro­duc­tiv­ity — so much so that even Ubuntu now has it. Not there in Mac OS X. In fact, win­dow man­age­ment in OS X is pretty bad. Win­dows don’t always max­imise to occupy the whole screen; you can only resize win­dows by drag­ging the right bot­tom cor­ner and no where else.
There are solu­tions though, this time not free. I use Bet­ter­Snap Tool which goes fur­ther than Snap to allow resiz­ing of win­dows to a quar­ter of the screen as well. I also use Moom which has more advanced win­dow man­age­ment to allow cus­tomiza­tions like resiz­ing win­dows to 3/4 of the screen using key­board short­cuts. It’s overkill — which is why I love it!

Unin­stalling apps

Installing pro­grams on the Mac is quite dif­fer­ent from Win­dows or Ubuntu. It’s very sim­ple — drag the appli­ca­tion into the appli­ca­tions folder. Some pro­grams do have “Windows-like” installers though and oth­ers require instal­la­tion via the Ter­mi­nal. That’s all well and good. Maybe I’m being a lit­tle picky here but… The prob­lem comes with remov­ing apps. On win­dows we have unin­stallers that take care of every­thing most of the times. On OS X you have to nav­i­gate to the appli­ca­tions folder and delete the app/drag it into the trash. Worse still, parts of the apps still remain in mys­te­ri­ous places.
Once again there’s a truck­load of apps to solve that issue — sim­ply drag the app to be deleted into an app like App­Cleaner, and it will find the all garbage files asso­ci­ated with the pro­gram for you.

The good stuff

I’ve focussed mainly on the bad so far. Now for the good stuff. You’ll notice I haven’t said any­thing about the Mac­Book itself — that’s because it’s left me speech­less. It is beau­ti­fully made; from the uni-body con­struc­tion, to the back­lit key­board, to the giant glass touch­pad — it’s all well thought out and sim­ply awe­some. The only thing is that it’s heav­ier than I thought but that’s ok… I could do with a bit of a work­out.
The Mac more than makes up for the few things it doesn’t have with a boat­load of features.

Automa­tor

Automa­tor is an app for build­ing apps in a way. You can design a work­flow or a series of tasks that you want the com­puter to do for you. These can be repet­i­tive tasks like resiz­ing a batch of images based on some cri­te­ria or extract­ing data from a web­site or any­thing really. I haven’t fully tapped into it but I can tell it is extremely powerful.

Spot­light

Spot­light is like the text search in the Win­dows start menu, only way more pow­er­ful. It indexes all the files on you com­puter so they are only a few key­board strokes away. With spot­light you can quickly search for and open files, appli­ca­tions, word def­i­n­i­tions and even per­form cal­cu­la­tions. There are more pow­er­ful options on Mac through, like Alfred, Quick­sil­ver and oth­ers which can allow you to go to web­sites and even search web­sites or play songs in iTunes, write a note, cre­ate a cal­en­dar event or send an email — all from a lit­tle one line text box. Yeah.

Mac App­Store

I’m a huge fan of apps. I like try­ing them out, dis­cov­er­ing new things and doing the things that I’ve always been doing eas­ier, smarter and eas­ier. I like easy. The Mac App­Store is sim­ple and ele­gant and it has a whole bunch of apps. I find that Macu­padte still has more apps than you can poke a stick at though. Macup­date has every­thing, the old and the new — stuff that hasn’t been released (betas), stuff that has been rejected etc.

Con­clu­sions

The Mac is awe­some and OS X Snow Leop­ard is awe­some too. I will be upgrad­ing to Lion when it offi­cially comes out. I didn’t get any of the devel­oper pre­views because I wanted to expe­ri­ence Leop­ard first as much as pos­si­ble to see where it’s all com­ing from. Hope­fully my expe­ri­ence will be help­ful to any­one new to a OS X or just plain inter­ested. I will con­tinue to post more OS X stuff and a top apps list or some­thing together with the usual(or not so usual :-p) news and happenings.

Crazy Mobile Chipsets on the Way

Qual­comm Roadmap

Some insane mobile chipsets are on the way start­ing later this year. Accord­ing to this leaked roadmap, a 1.7 GHz dual core chip is com­ing out Q4 this year. It will be enable 1080p video cap­ture at 30 frames per second(fps), and 20 mega pixel 3D images. It gets cra­zier from there — another proces­sor in the leak is a 2.5Ghz quad core proces­sor capa­ble of 60fps and 30 mega pixel stills. Of course that’s com­ing out a lit­tle later on — in 2013. Looks like we’re in for a wild future in mobile.

The thing about a lot of tech is that it’s very hard to pre­dict where things are going. Henry Ford once said some­thing like

If I’d asked cus­tomers what they wanted, they would have told me “a faster horse”

Look­ing at this roadmap, these proces­sors are exactly that — ‘faster horses’ — some­thing every­one expects — and that’s great for now. I doubt that in 2030 or some­thing we’ll have 10,000 core chips with what­ever fre­quency. I can’t help but won­der what the next big inno­va­tion in pro­cess­ing will be. Per­haps when proces­sors are fast enough com­pa­nies will start focus­ing on other impor­tant things like bat­tery tech­nol­ogy which is stuck in the 80s.

Via: Net­booknews,  Engad­get

Source: M. Daou, MobileTechWorld

Will a Display Screen Let Me Recharge My Cell Phone?

This is the first Anphase guest post by Sofia Shep­pard who writes for the solar bat­tery charg­ers blog, the non profit hobby web site that she uses to share the lat­est tech­nol­ogy infor­ma­tion about solar bat­tery charg­ers for small devices. Enjoy…

French cor­po­ra­tion Wysips is focus­ing on a whole new tech­nique which will allow mobile phone touch screens to per­form dou­ble duty as photo voltaic power pan­els to recharge cell phones.
The thought is pretty inter­est­ing [1] mainly because it con­sists of lay­ing an extremely thin trans­par­ent pv film layer together with the mobile phone dis­play. The film will take energy not just from the sun, but any nearby source of light.
Expected recharge times can be about six hours from sun­light and some time longer from leach­ing elec­tric­ity from indoors lights. Wysips is at work for the 2nd devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­ogy, which seems to sup­ply half an hour of talk-time after just one hour in the sun­shine.
The major prob­lem with a solar bat­tery charger could be that the sun moves con­tin­u­ally, and my prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence have been that you must move the bat­tery charger every min­utes to help keep it in the sun­shine.
Actu­ally most solar charg­ers for cell phones can be best for indi­vid­u­als who spend lots of time out­doors, and should not read­ily uti­lize a car or wall charger for devices. Back­pack­ers, fish­er­men, etc, could pos­si­bly like this.
Oth­er­wise, you are prob­a­bly hap­pier pick­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent. The most effec­tive solar mobile phone charg­ers avail­able on the mar­ket take a long time to charge — a sin­gle hour charge will give you just enough to make a 5–10 min­utes mobile call. It requires some­thing sim­i­lar to 8–10 hours to obtain a full charge.
Another big dis­ad­van­tage of these charg­ers would be that the unit is only able to be charged approx­i­mately 500 times. This could equate to approx­i­mately 12 months in the event you used it every­day. You will never go green with this par­tic­u­lar thing, since you’d need to change it out every 12–18 months.
With more per­sons get­ting cell­phones and ipads etc.…, the drain on elec­tric­ity grids is increas­ing. So, incor­po­rat­ing the capa­bil­ity for the mobile phone to inde­pen­dently re-charge from the sun light implies they could help pull their own weight, and also you wouldn’t ought to take along another bat­tery charger or move it around.
Another inter­est­ing truth is the oppor­tu­nity to employ this sys­tem to charge the smart­phone while using the indoor light… it is a real bonus. The device could be con­tin­u­ally charg­ing as light falls on dis­play screen, mean­ing it might be top­ping off it’s power as the mobile phone just sits inac­tive.
This pro­gres­sion is much more appeal­ing than pre­vi­ous attempts to gen­er­ate solar charg­ers for smart­phones, for instance Samsung’s Blue Earth mobile [2], which included a solar charger on its back. A few months ago Apple was awarded a patent [3] for a process to charge mobile units using solar pow­ered energy, an indi­ca­tor the com­pany con­sid­ers solar pow­ered energy worth explor­ing.
The solar effi­ciency from Wysips’ charger is now only 9 %, in com­par­i­son to the most effec­tive solar pan­els used else­where. That is much bet­ter than the 0 % smart­phones offer now. The addi­tional power gained com­ing from a solar charger for instance Wysips’ could allow cell­phone design­ers to pro­duce slim­mer bat­ter­ies for their devices, or facil­i­tate faster, stronger devices with appro­pri­ate bat­tery lives.

1. Wysips Offi­cial Web site explains in greater detail how the new solar charger works
2. Offi­cial Sam­sung web page where it’s pub­lished the info about the Blue Earth Phone
3. Techcrunch writes on the Apple’s patent on pho­to­voltaic pow­ered devices.

MeeGo Tablet User Experience(Video)

The video speaks for itself. The UI is not very inter­est­ing. It’s about, swip­ing, tap­ping and long press­ing. You have pan­els that have dif­fer­ent sets of data, sort of like big wid­gets. There’s really not much to say here. It’s still early in devel­op­ment (notice the mouse pointer?) but I don’t see much to look for­ward to with the UI just yet.

The Best Tablet So Far: The HP TouchPad(Video)

HP Touch­Pad

The HP TouchPad’s is the epit­ome of tablets in 2011. It has the design, the guts and the user inter­face of a true champ. It’s even bet­ter than the Apple iPad because it beats it at its own game — blend­ing ele­gance and emo­tion with func­tion­al­ity. The Touch­Pad takes func­tion­al­ity to a whole new level.

Design

The Touch­Pad is slim and it has a glossy fin­ish. It’s got a gor­geous 9.7-inch XGA capac­i­tive, mul­ti­touch screen with a vibrant 18-bit color and a 1024x768 res­o­lu­tion. It also has a 1.3MP front fac­ing cam­era and inter­nal stereo speak­ers with Beats Audio™. A well thought out design.

Guts

The Touch­Pad per­for­mance is awe­some. Way bet­ter than any­thing we’ve seen on Android 3.0 Hon­ey­comb tablets — that’s the Motorola Xoom and the Sam­sung Galaxy 10.1. It has a snappy Qual­comm Snap­dragon dual-CPU APQ8060 clocked at 1.2GHz. Each core is faster than the proces­sor on any tablet released in 2010 and there are two of them! It is the best per­form­ing tablet yet.

User Inter­face

The UI is what sets this tablet apart more than any­thing. It’s beau­ti­fully done and very well thought out. The ‘cards’ and ‘stacks’ and espe­cially the noti­fi­ca­tions all make for an unpar­al­leled expe­ri­ence. The inte­gra­tion of ser­vices like Twit­ter and Face­book is deep — the expe­ri­ence feels more com­plete than any­thing. I’ve embed­ded a video demo posted by HP to show you what I’m talk­ing about after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Newspapers Are Dead

Ear­lier today, I launched The Daily app on my iPad. It imme­di­ately started to down­load today’s issue. This was the headline:

The Mummy Returns

Sev­eral news­pa­pers came in this morn­ing with a sim­i­lar headline.

News­pa­per head­lines today

I thought, wow. After all that’s hap­pened Mubarak won’t step down? Wow. A lit­tle while later the story changed. Turns out he decided to step down after all. The head­lines on news­pa­pers remained the same. We’ve got to wait for tomor­row to get the lat­est on that situation.

In com­puter terms, we say The Daily isn’t hard, it’s soft — it can be edited. That’s a pow­er­ful thing. Because a few hours later, the head­line and news changed to this:

Mummy’s Curse Lifted

That’s my paper­less dream. Paper must go. I mean, ok, there are times when the news­pa­per is con­ve­nient - say there are no iPads lying around or there’s no inter­net to even start with. Then yeah, yeah…

Jerusalem ‘Super Ball’ UFO Fake? (Video)

So there’s this ball of light that hov­ered over a holy tem­ple up in Jerusalem. This hap­pened on the 28 of Jan­u­ary and there are sev­eral videos show­ing this UFO. I’m a big fan of this UFO thing but I’m also one of the great­est skep­tics. I don’t believe any of it but I really want to. The folks at Disclosur3 have taken 3 of those videos and syn­chro­nised them for our view­ing plea­sure. Here’s the video and my analy­sis of it after.

My prob­lem is with the way the videos are shot. You’ll notice that when the first two videos start, the UFO isn’t the cen­tre of atten­tion! I mean the peo­ple behind the cam­era are giv­ing us a view of both the UFO and the tem­ple below. It’s almost as if they are try­ing to say “Hey look, we’re here in Jerusalem, just like the other guys tak­ing these UFO videos”. At the moment when the UFO shoots up, again the cam­era peo­ple are not try­ing to zero in on this thing to try and iden­tify it. No. Instead they’ve all con­viniently zoomed out so we can see the ball take off! I don’t know about you, but I’m not buy­ing it. as much as I’d like to. Oh, and by the way, I just made up that ‘super ball’ thing since we are in the Super Bowl sea­son, no one else is call­ing it that, sadly.

Android Honeycomb: Yet Another Real iPad Competitor, For Real

Motorola XOOM

We’ve been here before. The Galaxy Tab was the first real iPad rival. A few months down the line and we’re start­ing to hear the same thing all over again, Hon­ey­comb is the new first real iPad rival.

Hon­ey­comb is, of course, Android 3.0 — Google’s answer to the iPad/iOS in gen­eral. The iPad and iOS are both Apple con­trolled whereas Hon­ey­comb is Googles OS new Android OS sup­ported by tablets from a slew of man­u­fac­tur­ers from here on. I’ve got a feel­ing this is going to be the “iPhone killer” story all over again, only with iPad instead of iPhone.

Sev­eral tablets are going to be released with high hopes, mas­sive fan­fare, glitz and glam­our, only to turn out crappy. What we have to realise is that Apple has more than a year head start. Steve Jobs said the iPad came even before the iPhone did. That says a lot when it comes to matu­rity of the plat­form. When buy­ing an iPad or an iPhone, it’s not a gam­ble. You’re pretty much guar­an­teed of a high qual­ity expe­ri­ence that few com­pa­nies can offer.

Hon­ey­comb on the other hand is start­ing off at the rear end of the line. This is Google’s first attempt at a tablet OS. And it’s com­ing at a time when Apple is gear­ing for round 2. Now con­sider this. With Android, it took Google about 3 years to catch up. Most peo­ple agree that Android 2.3 is at least on par with iOS. They both have their issues but they just about can­cel out. Android in the tablet realm is prob­a­bly going to take about that long to catch up to iOS.

Enter­ing the game at the same time is the HP/Palm Tablet. It has all the ele­gance of iOS and with the right hard­ware it could shake things up, more for Google than Apple as it tries to gain tablet mar­ket share. These are tough times for Tablet and OS engi­neers but awe­some times for con­sumers, if they make the right deci­sions. Read the rest of this entry »

The Paperless Dream

The NoteS­late — This is it

Since the begin­ning of time I’ve been search­ing for a device to replace paper. The prob­lem with paper is that I use a lot of it. A whole lot of it. For per­form­ing a quick cal­cu­la­tion, jot­ting down some notes, mak­ing a quick sketch etc., paper is the eas­i­est, cheap­est and fastest way to get that done. But there are sev­eral prob­lems with paper.

Paper occu­pies phys­i­cal space. I have so much paper lying around every­where in the form of note­books and refills and ran­dom scraps of paper it’s crazy.

That brings me to another prob­lem. Man­ag­ing all of this paper. One can form only so many stacks and each stack can only be so high. The result is that I can never find any­thing and I just have to dis­pose of the older stuff. It’s all quite depressing.

A few years back, I got the HP iPaq 211 PDA. That was my first seri­ous paper replace­ment con­tender. With a 4″ resis­tive touch screen that has a 640x480 res­o­lu­tion and Win­dows Mobile 6.0 , I thought it was per­fect. I got the ulti­mate writ­ing app too — Phat­Pad (shown below). Read the rest of this entry »

3D Phones? Come On, Really?

LG Opti­mus 3D

Maybe 60years ago the head­line was Colour TVs? Come On, Really? And a few years before that it was Sound In Movies? Come On, Really? But seri­ously, come on, really? My point is, 3D at the movies and espe­cially 3D in the home, hasn’t really taken off. What gives them the impres­sion that it will work on mobile phones? Google cer­tainly doesn’t sup­port 3D in Android yet and there aren’t many apps(if any) that have any­thing to do with 3D in the Android Market.

LG is going to unveil the worlds first full 3D smart­phone capa­ble of 3D pho­tog­ra­phy and video record­ing at Mobile World Congress(MWC) 2011. The phone also fea­tures a glasses-free LCD 3D dis­play. The thing about 3D is that it’s not every­where. Where are you going to view these movies and pho­tos? On your phone’s ~4″ screen only? On the 3D  TV that you prob­a­bly don’t have yet? Granted, there are some 3D TVs, photo-frames and lap­tops on the way and already on the mar­ket, but they cost a lot. This 3D phone is like an invi­ta­tion for an expen­sive ride that’s going to crash.

It’s future proof though, right? Not even close. First, there’s no guar­an­tee that this 3D phone thing will take off. We might remem­ber it as one of the great flops of 2011.  Sec­ond, 3D hasn’t really been stan­dard­ised. So the kind of 3D that this phone pro­duces and dis­plays may not be the one used by every­one else, mak­ing it redundant.

The ulti­mate ques­tions are, does a 3D user inter­face have advan­tages over 2D inter­faces to jus­tify the price? Are videos or pic­tures that much bet­ter? Like the dif­fer­ence between black/white and colour, SD and HD, day and night?

Phone screens are small and you inter­act with them; tap, flick, swipe, long press etc — effec­tively obscur­ing your view of the dis­play par­tially. They are also flat; 2D with a width and a height. Intro­duc­ing depth in the UI with­out extra screen real-estate is a for­mula for dis­as­ter. Unless it’s just a cos­metic change and that makes whole thing pretty pointless.

3D phones are a gim­mick not worth pay­ing for. I won­der when cof­fee mak­ing holog­ra­phy phones are going to be announced? It’s about time! Read the rest of this entry »

The Symbian Advantage

Sym­bian OS

The Sym­bian OS is pow­er­ful. Extremely pow­er­ful. There’s noth­ing that you can’t do on Sym­bian that you can do on the other plat­forms. The same can’t be said about the other plat­forms. Allow me to illustrate.

iOS is not open, there’s no secret about that. Although Apple is becom­ing more flex­i­ble on the kind of apps you can use on the iPhone, there are still a lot of things they don’t allow. That is why the jail-breaking scene is so huge — it allows you to do some sim­ple to com­plex things that Apple won’t allow. From turn­ing the phone into a Wi-fi hotspot(coming soon in iOS 4.3 maybe?) to dis­play­ing more info on the lock screen or trans­fer­ring files via Blue­tooth - fea­tures that have been avail­able on Sym­bian devices either out-of-box or through apps for ages. We often take these fea­tures for granted. It’s when you don’t have them that you realise the cen­tral role they play in your mobile expe­ri­ence. Read the rest of this entry »