Author Archives: Zeeshan Ahmad

Klipsch Gallery G-17 Air soundbar review

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If you’ll recall, it was back at CES when we realized that AirPlay devices would be “set to explode” by this year’s end — and it’s certainly proving true as a storm of new speakers have hit the market over the last few months. Of all the speakers we’d spotted on the show floor, however, a select bunch AirPlay-enabled speakerbar prototypes from Klipsch’s newly unveiled Gallery lineup of high-performance home audio wares really perked our ears — and widened our pupils. It wouldn’t be until July that the smallest version, known then as the $400 Gallery Studio, would be officially unveiled as the Gallery G-17 Air, priced at a spendier $530.

Now, nearly four months later the G-17 is finally hitting retail (albeit with a $20 price increase), aimed just a notch below $600 options like B&W’s Zeppelin Air, but well above others including iHome’s $300 iW1. We’ve been testing a model G-17 Air for a few days now, so join us past break to find out whether its beauty is deeper than its insanely glossy black shell.

Klipsch Gallery G-17 Air soundbar review
Hardware

 

To be frank, our G-17 Air unboxing has been one of the more interesting ones to date. Upon opening it up, the first things we noticed were a pair of white Mickey Mouse gloves and a sheer black, scroll-like cloth — this is a speaker, right? Of course, mixed in were the usual manuals, a dinky remote, a power adapter and a metal-and-tinted-glass base with four screws. Finally, we reached the G-17, which was lovingly wrapped in a scratch-free cloth bag. Pulling the cloth back, we we’re nearly blinded by the unit’s glossy reflection, which also reveled the impetus to Klipsch including those gloves — it’s a fingerprint magnet.

 

Although the 7.5-pound G-17 can be wall-mounted, the glass stand was more than adequate for our needs — plus, it makes it look sort of like a giant Kinect. Gloves still on, we lined up the base’s bracket with the speaker’s back and after a few uneven attempts, attached both with the included screws, which then remain hidden by a rubber insert. While we wish it was a bit easier to bolt together, the base stays in place with a firm grip and extremely secure overall fit. From there it was a matter of finding a listening area to set it down on, plug it in to the wall and to grab a look at it fully assembled while up AirPlay. We managed the whole process without a single smudge to the unit, so suffice it to say, we’re fans of the Mickey’s. And that cloth? Turns out that it’s a speaker grill (doh), which magnetically attaches to the back top and bottom of the speaker with a snug fit if you’d prefer a simpler look.

We’ve seen our share of oh-so fancy AirPlay speakers, but the G-17 Air raises the bar on beauty. The build is rock-solid across all of its angles, and it not only looks, but also feels worth its weight as high-end piece of audio equipment. Our geeky side loves how fierce the unit looks grill-off as an eye-catching gadget, and we also respect how the grill quickly subdues it enough to blend into a room. Better yet, it’s no different in appearance than the rest of the Gallery lineup, meaning folks who may have other G-series home theater speakers in their abodes can keep the theme going.

 

We’ve seen our share of oh-so fancy AirPlay speakers, but the G-17 Air raises the bar on beauty.

As far as tweak-ability and extras go, the G-17 is totally leaving things to its from-the-factory sound performance and visuals, opting away from an extensive feature set and notably devoid of an onboard EQ. On the right side of the bar, you’ll find a column of black buttons with translucent markers for the power, volume up and down, input source and wireless. All of the buttons depress smoothly with a reassuring click, but oddly, only the power and WiFi / AirPlay button (which also haphazardly indicates volume) light up. At best it’s a minor quibble, but when controlling the unit without iTunes or an iDevice, it’s essentially impossible to visualize if the volume is at, say, 6 or 11. While we’re on its controls, it’s worth noting that the included remote replicate all of the 17′s functions and adds in Fwd / Rwd and Play / Pause button, but it’s sadly missing those for shuffle, repeat and mute. It feels like the dime-a-dozen type that ship with many an AM / FM radio, but then again, you’ll most likely be controlling things from your iDevice or iTunes directly, anyway.

Moving to the back, along the left and right are a duo of mounting brackets, and in the center is a deeply set connections panel with a reset button, power input, USB port (for audio and iDevice charging) and 3.5mm line-in jack if your WiFi should ever go on the fritz. Considering these connections are in tow, we’re disappointed that a measly audio cord and 30-pin to USB cable weren’t included for the price. Notably, the deep positioning lets wires easily drop down from the G-17 if wall-mounted, but it did make them a bit tricky to plug into — even with our long and slender fingers. Lastly, on left side you’ll find a large bass port, while on the front-center there’s an IR receiver planted between its woofers. On the one hand, you won’t find a variety of standard connections like others in G-series, but it’s completely acceptable — after all, its main purpose is being a wireless system.

Like the iW1 we recently reviewed, the G-17 Air takes an oddly long amount of time (up to 40 seconds) to boot-up and connect to WiFi. It’s evidently a trend with these AirPlay speakers, and laughable, considering that our massive 750-watt bass guitar amplifier, MacBooks and iDevices startup quicker. Klipsch has informed us that this is a limitation of the currently available Airplay chip, and that advancements to shorten the startup delay will be issued via a firmware update when they become available. What’s impressive, however, is how cool the speaker (and its power brick) remains even when left on for days — at worst it gets slightly warm to the touch, even with moderate volume. So, folks opting for anchoring it to the wall likely shouldn’t worry about heat causing cracking or discoloration to their paint.

AirPlay and setup

 

As far as wireless connectivity is concerned, up to four G-17 Airs will work over 802.11b/g WiFi networks, and setup can be done using Klipsch’s Air iOS app (an iPad-optimized version is slated for next year) or a computer. Using our iPhone we loaded the Klipsch Air app, and were greeted by a step by step process with clear instructions and visuals on what to do. It worked within our first try, allowing us to quickly rename the unit and hook it up to our secure network. Better yet, it’s done over ad-hoc WiFi, meaning we didn’t need to plug our iPhone into the G-17 as we’ve experienced with other units. Notably, the app also features tips on using AirPlay and follows Klipsch’s various social feeds.

Of course, if you don’t live the iOS lifestyle, AirPlay can be setup using a computer, although, you’ll still need iTunes in order to steam. Up until now, we’ve been used to failed network setup attempts over ad-hoc WiFi with our MacBooks and other speakers, but the G-17 Air worked like a charm. Upon latching onto the unit’s ad-hoc WiFi signal, we entered its IP address in our browser and gained access to a local G-17 setup webpage. From there, we were allowed to change its name, sync it to our WiFi network and get firmware information. This method does take quite a few minutes longer and doesn’t look as pretty, but thankfully, it’s not very complicated either.

 

BridgeCo AirPlay chip
Apple AirPlay
DLNA

As expected, with the G-17 Air hooked up to our network we were able to give it a whirl using our iPad, iPhone and iTunes on our MacBook Pros. Anytime we selected the G-17 from our devices we were promptly connected within a few seconds, and our music almost always came streaming out of its speakers without a hitch. Be that as it may, AirPlay’s slight lag between various commands still exists here, and there is the occasional sound cutout. It’s certainly not specific to the G-17, but it is worth noting if you’re new to AirPlay.

So, “What about other devices, like Android?” you may find yourself asking. Well, the unit is technically capable of wireless DLNA streaming, although, currently Klipsch isn’t “announcing the feature,” citing that its “test results showed inconsistencies between devices and DLNA compatible apps.” That said, the company did note that many AirPlay-enabling apps can be found within Android Market.

Sound

 

For its size, the G-17 Air gets loud.

Alright, welcome to the section about sound — the part where G-17′s speakers do their, er, “speaking” using our tunes! As soon as we began streaming our albums through the system, we we were blown away by the performance. For its size, the G-17 Air gets loud and stays clear doing it, predictably blowing systems like the $300 iW1 out of the water. Even with the volume maxed out the G-17 didn’t break a sweat, remaining free of rattles or perceivable distortion. Of course, being a soundbar it doesn’t give out the widest soundstage, but we were impressed at the detail we could pick out at even five to six feet away. Klipsch notes that the maximum listening distance is ideally under 12 feet away — we found it could easily fill-out an average living and then some. The unit is bi-amplified, utilizing a duo of 2.5-inch Klipsch long-throw IMG woofers (rated for 20 watts each) and two 90 x 90 degree Tractrix-horned .75-inch tweeters (rated for 10-watts each), all wrapped up inside of its “bass-reflex” enclosure — doing that name itself justice, if we may say so.

 

The system pumps out a massive of amount of natural and thumpy low end, reminiscent of playing our Fender Jaguar Bass through our 4 x 12 bass cabinet from a gigging life passed. In saying natural, we really mean it and imagine many a bassist will appreciate its level of articulation. Dynamics are amazingly present in the mix, and we could accurately hear and feel the flow and nuances of various bass lines from Matt Rubano’s melodic Taking Back Sunday licks to LMFAO’s throbbing Party Rock beats — even dubstep wobble was right at home with this rig. It was hard to believe an external subwoofer wasn’t helping to achieve the feat, but placing our hand in front of the hurricane of air pressure coming out of the bass port quickly quelled our doubts.

 

Flipping over to the highs, we were equally satiated. Whether it was the tight horn section in a Rick James track or the bashing cymbals and aggressive snare hits of Every Time I Die’s blend of southern metal, things remained quite silky with a pleasing attack. We’re also happy to report that while the highs are lively — as we’ve come to find with Klipsch — they’re not harsh or overly sibilant. Basically, you’ll get the chills from the clarity of vocals, without shrill inflections stabbing your eardrums.

Basically, you’ll get the chills from the clarity of vocals, without shrill inflections stabbing your eardrums.

This brings us to the mid-range, which is where we’re a bit torn. Overall, the system has an incredibly thick sound, but the mids have a slight scoop in level among the overall mix to our ears. When songs kick in with the full force of a band, certain intricacies of guitar-work seem to almost gasp for some extra air — if you like chunky electric guitars mixed-in closer to the front, it’s something to keep in mind when considering the G-17 Air, as it doesn’t have an onboard EQ. With that out of the way, the rig still handles this area dutifully, with a warm tone that’s right at home across many music genres.

 

Wrap-up

 

To say the Klipsch G-17 Air exceeded our usual expectations of an Airplay-enabled speaker would simply be an understatement — it’s clear that the folks at the company put a great deal of work into what was merely a concept on the CES floor nearly eight month’s ago. The speaker itself is built like a (glossy) rock, and the sound that comes through is as solid as the foundation. If we had to nitpick, the rig could benefit from a quicker bootup time, clearer volume indicators, an improved remote and possibly an app-enabled EQ (a lá Libratone) to raise the mids. AirPlay itself still has some minor quirks as usual, but overall the implementation for setup is a breeze here, and the performance generally pleasing.

iHome iW1 Review
B&W Zeppelin Air review
Libratone AirPlay speakers
Compared to less expensive AirPlay speakers like iHome’s $300 iW1, the $550 G-17 Air is an unquestionably a major step up, and we’d easily choose this puppy over options like the slightly spendier $600 Zeppelin Air. That said, the G-17′s certainly quite pricey for a single unit, but if you’re looking for a primo AirPlay hookup for the casa, we can’t say enough good things about it. As it stands, Klipsch’s G-17 Air is the current AirPlay-enabled soundsystem to beat at its price point. Any takers?
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Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet review

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Back in April, the Nook Color underwent a magical change of sorts: a software update that transformed the device from a color screen e-reader into an honest to goodness Android tablet. It was the company’s first swipe at the space — a backdoor approach that beat out fellow e-reader manufacturers like Amazon and Kobo. Its follow-up, the Nook Tablet, marks the company’s first out-of-the-box shot at the consumer tablet market. Not to mention, it also goes head to head with the Kindle Fire, a device that’s sure to be one of the best-selling gadgets of the holiday season, thanks to its price and wide content selection.Does the Nook Tablet have what it takes to topple the Kindle Fire? Do the product’s benefits justify its $50 premium over Amazon’s device — or the recently discounted and soon to be upgradedNook Color for that matter? Find out the answers to these questions and so, so many more, after the break.

Nook Tablet review
Nook Tablet unboxing

 

Hardware

 

 

Kindle Fire review
Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet…fight!
Kobo Vox unboxing and hands-on (video)

Need a fun way to pass the time this weekend? Why not roll down to your local Barnes & Noble for a round of “Nook Tablet or Nook Color?” It’s the gadgety game that’s sweeping the nation. Yes, it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: the Tablet is nearly identical to its predecessor. When we asked Barnes & Noble why it opted to go with the same form factor, a company rep told us it was because the Nook Color was such a successful device with an immediately recognizable design. In other words, the Nook Color wasn’t broken, so B&N didn’t fix it — besides, the company surely wanted to make the most of its Yves Behar investment.

The only major changes to the body are a lighter color (a metallic silver to the Color’s dark gray) and a slightly more textured back, which should help when it comes to keeping the thing from slipping to the floor during a particularly saucy D.H. Lawrence passage. Also, in spite of some revamped innards, the company managed to shed a little more than an ounce on the reader, knocking it down to 14.1 ounces (400 grams) — half an ounce less than the Fire.

However, familiar it is, the Nook Tablet has a distinctive design in a market filled with iPad lookalikes. And yes, its chief competition, the Kindle Fire, looks an awful lot like the BlackBerry PlayBook, as we’ve mentioned many times before. The most distinctive feature, hands-down is the little carabiner loop that juts out from the bottom left corner of the reader, a design decision largely to set the device apart from other tablets according to B&N — and to offer some protection for the slot that lies on the other side.

The Nook tablet measures 8.1 x 5.0 x 0.48 inches, making it slightly larger than the Fire in every respect, particularly height. The Nook is tall for a seven-inch tablet. This is thanks, in part, to its sizable plastic outer bezel, as well as a bar below the screen that houses the home button, which is better defined here than on the Color. The black bar is flush with the display this time out and at first glance appears larger than the one on the Color. Still, once you turn on the Color, you’ll notice a black bar lining the bottom of the screen, which effectively cancels out the benefit of having a narrower bezel

Two large volume buttons are located on the top of the Tablet’s left side, with the power button on the right side. The Nook has four physical buttons in all — three more than the Fire’s solitary power button, a plus for easy access and those moments when the touchscreen acts up, which has certainly been known to happen on these budget tablets. Oh, and unlike the Fire, you can actually adjust the volume without diving into the settings. Point Barnes & Noble. A headphone jack is located along the top of the slate, with a micro-USB port positioned at the center of the bottom. Flip the device over, and you’ll see a small speaker grill. The speaker has been bumped up a bit this time out. It can achieve a audible volume, but like the Kindle Fire, the quality is abysmal. You’ll most likely find yourself reaching for the headphones (not included).

The back of the Tablet is convex (which is why it comes in a tiny bit thicker than the Fire), so it conforms to the hand a bit better than the perfectly flat Kindle Fire. A big, indented lowercase “n” sits in the middle of the non-removable back. On the bottom, next to the carabiner is a silver strip reading “nook.” Pry it open with a fingernail and you’ll find the microSD slot.

The Nook has a nice size and shape that come in handy during long reading sessions — something B&N clearly took into account when building it. Your thumb grips comfortably around the plastic bezel, with your fingers on the upside down horseshoe on the rear, which brings to mind the Nook Simple Touch’s concave backing.This might have served as another avenue for aesthetic distinction here, though no doubt would have ultimately served to add more girth to what is already a largish footprint for a seven-inch tablet.

The Nook ships with a micro-USB cable and AC adapter, which you’ll need to charge it up — no PC charging for this guy. The former has the device’s “n” logo on one end, changing color with battery status: yellow for charging and green for full. Sure, you can simply unlock the device to find out, but it’s a nice little extra touch.

Nook Tablet vs. Nook Color vs. iPad
Internals

 

Here’s where the Tablet shines, compared to its older brother. Here, B&N has given us a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, both upgrades from the Color’s 800MHz single-core CPU and 512 MB of RAM. The RAM is also double that of the Fire, though the processor clocks in at the same speed. As with the Fire, the Nook Tablet only comes in one flavor, spec-wise — B&N likely didn’t think it would be able to get away with offering another level for $50 more. After all, it already chose to keep the Nook Color around for $199.

The Nook Tablet steps things up on the storage front, too, with 16GB — double that of the Kindle Fire. Things get a little tricky here, however. As with the Fire, around 2 to 3GB are monopolized by OS-related content. A full 12GB of the Nook’s storage, meanwhile, are devoted to content downloaded from B&N, like books and magazines. That leaves a paltry 1GB of storage for non-B&N content — i.e. all of the stuff you’re side-loading onto the device. That may not sound like a crazy proposition if you’re only planning to store some documents on the thing, but if you were planning on storing a bunch of music and movies from your own collection, you’re kind of out of luck. And, indeed, the ability to simply drag and drop content from a PC and have it show on the device is certainly a selling point for the Nook Tablet.

Barnes & Noble assures us that, as the company moves forward with multimedia deals in the year ahead, more third-party content will be storable in that 12GB section. There are a few things to note here on top of that promise. First, like Amazon, B&N is really focused on streaming multimedia content here through apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora, all of which come preloaded on the Tablet. Also, there’s the aforementioned expandable memory, a feature that Amazon has roundly eschewed in its Kindle line. Pick up a microSD card, and you can rock up to an additional 32GB of storage.

Connectivity-wise, we’re talking WiFi. As with the Fire, there’s no 3G option here, and if the Color is any indication, don’t expect to see one any time soon. The Nook maintained a WiFi connection fairly well, even managing in some places where the Fire failed. The company is also taking advantage of its brick and mortar presence to offer up free in-store WiFi on the Tablet, as with its other Nook brethren. As far as Bluetooth goes, however, you’re gonna have to look elsewhere.

Display

 

 

Pick up an SD card, and you can rock up to an additional 32GB of storage.

As with the rest of the outside of the Tablet, Barnes & Noble left the Nook Color’s screen intact. Like the Fire, we’ve got a 1024 x 600 seven-inch IPS LCD. Placed against Amazon’s device, the Nook Tablet seems a touch brighter. B&N is talking up the diplay’s lamination, which helps reduce glare, helping improve the Tablet’s viewing angles. The glare does appear to have been reduced just a bit, but again, we were hard pressed to detect any major differences between the Nook and the Kindle in that department.

Again, the perpetual e-reader vs. tablet disclaimer is in place here: if you’re just in the market for a device to read long chunks of prose on, invest in a Nook Simple Touch or Kindle Touch. E-ink is easier on the eyes than backlighting for long stretches and is much more easily read in sunlight. That said, you can read the Nook Tablet in a dark room, without the aid of a booklight, and there’s surely something to be said for that, right?

Battery

 

As with the Fire, the Nook Tablet’s battery pales in comparison to its E Ink brethren, but as far as seven inch color tablets go, the device didn’t do all that shabby in our standard battery rundown test, managing eight hours and twenty minutes on a charge. It’s not quite the “up to nine hours” promised by the company, but it still handily beat the Kindle Fire’s seven hours and 42 minutes. That’ll get you through a lot of Archer episodes on Netflix.

 

Tablet
Battery Life
Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet8:20
Amazon Kindle Fire7:42
Apple iPad 210:26
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.19:55
Apple iPad9:33
Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.99:21
HP TouchPad8:33
Lenovo IdeaPad K18:20
Motorola Xoom8:20
T-Mobile G-Slate8:18
Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus8:09
Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet8:00
Archos 1017:20
Archos 80 G97:06
RIM BlackBerry PlayBook7:01
Acer Iconia Tab A5006:55
Toshiba Thrive6:25
Samsung Galaxy Tab6:09

 

Performance

 

[Kindle, left; Nook, right]

As mentioned earlier, the internals are the key distinction between the Nook Tablet and its still very much alive predecessor. This time out, the Nook is rocking a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, and yes, there’s a noticeable difference in speed, even with something as simple as loading an app like Angry Birds. The distinction is a bit less pronounced between the Kindle Fire and the Nook, though it is there, with the Nook just beating the Fire when loading apps. The Tablet was able to take just about everything we threw at it with minimal hiccups.

The most clear performance distinction between the Fire and the Tablet can be seen when playing video.

There isn’t a ton of distinction between the Nook and the Fire, when it comes to browsing. The Kindle seems a bit more equipped to handle text and the Nook does a better job with images when loading pages. Both devices do pinch-to-zoom, scrolling and the like capably. SunSpider 9.1 told a bit of a different story, with the Nook racking up a 4,135 — that’s low, especially compared to the Fire’s score of 2,440. The difference in results may have something to do with the Kindle’s Silk Browser, which utilizes Kindle’s massive server resources, to do the heavy lifting for page rendering — a tool that the company promises will continue to improve over time.


The most clear performance distinction between the Fire and the Tablet can be seen when playing video. We streamed Shutter Island on Netflix and were blown away by the difference. The Nook’s video playback handles motion far more gracefully than the choppy Fire. And it picks up on subtle details that bleed and blur when played back on the Kindle. The Nook Tablet definitely wins that round.

Interface

 

Amazon seemingly went out of its way to mask all traces of the Android interface it was running on top of. Barnes & Noble made some big adjustments to the operating system as well, but anyone who’s used Android for any length or time will likely recognize the operating system. Where the Fire is locked into a bookshelf-like UI, the Nook offers up a pretty standard mobile desktop — one with a default wallpaper that is thankfully less busy than the one offered up on the Color.

The Color’s top bar is largely intact here, however, deferring to the Tablet’s reader roots by offering up the name of the book you’ve been reading. Barnes & Noble is having it both ways, however, pushing the device’s multimedia functionality at the same time. Click “More,” and you get a list of your books, periodicals and Netflix picks, if you’re online and logged into the service. A row of icons offers up apps you’ve used and books you’ve recently read — these can be dragged and dropped onto the desktop, if you’re so inclined. Below that row are icons for including movies (via Netflix and Hulu Plus), music (via the built-in music player and Pandora), and a list of apps. Barnes & Noble is really driving home the fact that it’s got a true multimedia device, this time around.

Nook Tablet software

Still below that row is a battery-level indicator, the time, and an open-book icon, which is visible across many of the Tablet’s features, a gentle reminder that, even in the face of streaming movies and music, this device is a reader at heart. Clicking the “n” button brings up yet another menu, offering up ways of accessing home, library, the shop, search, apps, the web, and settings. Clicking the library icon will bring up an interface more like the Fire’s default screen, complete with shelves. It doesn’t look as good as the Kindle’s classy wood design, bit does the trick. There are shelves for apps, books, magazines, newspapers, kids books and further customizable options.

As with the Fire, the app selection is limited to those Barnes & Noble wants on the device. Of course, there are workarounds — lots of them, in fact. We were feeling a bit saucy and managed to load the Amazon Appstore on the slate (here’s where that microSD card comes in handy) with little effort. Or, you can always just root the Tablet. Barnes & Noble would prefer you score your content through officially sanctioned channels, of course, but the company hasn’t exactly made it difficult to find other avenues.

Browser

 

Where the Silk browser was one of Amazon’s major selling points for the Fire, browsing speeds are less of a focus on the Nook Tablet. After all, Barnes & Noble doesn’t have its servers doing all of the work for the device. The Nook browser doesn’t offer a lot of bells and whistles, though unlike some seven-inch Gingerbread tablets like the Kobo Vox, the thing actually renders pages in their desktop form, rather than as mobile sites.

Layout-wise there’s not a whole heck of a lot of differences between the browsers on the Nook Tablet and Color. At top is an address bar, a back button, a star icon for bookmarks and an icon for additional options like opening up new windows, viewing bookmarks, refreshing, and paging forward. Hold down on a page, and you’ll get options for searching on it, getting page info, adjusting settings, viewing your downloads and bookmarking.

Zooming and scrolling are zippy on the reader. You accomplish the former by either pinching, double-tapping or clicking plus and minus buttons that pop up as you scroll. And, yes, unlike some other tablets, this one is fully capable of playing Flash video, and it does so quite smoothly.

Magazines

 

The thought of reading an image-heavy magazine on, say, the Nook Simple Touch, seems like a downright nightmare — the grayscale images, the clunky zooming, the endless scrolling. Compared to its e-reader predecessors, the Nook Tablet’s full-color multitouch screen is a delight. Given the real estate limitations of the seven-inch screen, however, there’s a still good deal of pinching to zooming and scrolling happening here to properly take in all of the text and images.

As we suggested in the Fire review, a 10-inch display is a far more ideal size for reading standard format magazines. Many magazines not formatted specifically for the device will show a black bar on the bottom to format them to the page — of course, this will go away as you zoom in.

As with other texts, the Nook Tablet will offer you the option of picking up where you’ve left off, if you’ve been reading a copy of a given magazine on another device. The pages have animation similar to that on the iPad, simulating the experience of flipping through a physical magazine. Tapping a page in the center will bring up buttons for the table of contents, brightness adjustment and a handy gallery of thumbnail pages that you can quickly swipe through to find a spot in the periodical that you’d like to check out. Along the top of the page is a black bar offering up the magazine’s name in one corner and a plus in the other that you can tap to bookmark a page, dog ear-style.

Comics

 

Comixology on the iPad is still the gold standard for digital comics reading. That said, the Nook Tablet’s built-in comics reader certainly does an admirable job recreating the experience. The screen offers up vibrant screens for brightly color books. The blues and reds of Spider-man’s costume really pop on the seven-inch screen.

Unlike the Fire, the Nook Tablet can pinch to zoom in those spots of artwork that require closer inspection or pieces of text that are just too small to read with the page at full-size. However, the Fire’s panel-by-panel reading method is really the ideal way to experience a comic on a screen with limited screen space. With the Nook, you regularly find yourself pinching to get a closer look and scrolling around like mad to make it around the page. Once you flip the page, the whole thing pops back into place.

 

If you’re reading a book with two-page splashes, you can shift the device to landscape mode, to look at two at once. Of course, given the size constraints, the text becomes much harder to read. The preview gallery found in magazine mode is also present here, and it looks really great flipping through brightly-colored action pages.

 

Children’s books

 

The full-color screen is also great for kids books, and thanks to their relatively limited text, they generally scale better than magazines or comics. Given the Nook Tablet’s smaller size and cheaper price point, it actually may be a better option for young readers. When you click open a compatible title, you’re greeted with three options. Read By Myself gives you the standard reading experience, Read and Play offers narration that reads for you as you flip through, and thanks to a built-in mic, Read and Record lets parents record narration on a selection of kids titles, so children have someone to read to them when they’re not around.


A little arrow icon on the bottom of a page offers up a similar thumbnail gallery with large images of the book’s pages. Some of the titles, like the Michael Chabon-penned The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man offer up activities on each page. Clicking the star icon on the top lets kids know how they interact with the book, such as touching characters to see animations.

Books

 

This wouldn’t be a Nook without the reading, right? In spite of all of its flashy multimedia capabilities present, Barnes & Noble clearly considers the Nook Tablet a reading device at heart. The reading experience doesn’t stray too far from the one offered up by the Nook Color. The pages are monopolized almost entirely by text, save for the ubiquitous bar at the bottom offering up WiFi strength, battery level and page numbers, with both your present page and the total number in the book, a feature curiously absent from the Kindle’s default layout. Clicking on the numbers brings up a slider for adjusting your place in the book. You can also just enter a number manually by clicking Go to Page.

As with the Fire, you can navigate through the text by swiping forward or back or tapping a margin. Tapping on the center, meanwhile, brings up a menu offering up the table of contents, a search function, sharing, text, brightness adjustments and a Discover feature, which offers up texts similar to the one you’re reading. Interestingly, both Barnes & Noble and Amazon opted not to feature a pinch-to-zoom option in the standard reading interface, choosing to use a simple method for adjusting text size instead.

In the menu, you’ve got a healthy number of options for looking at the page, however, including eight text sizes, six fonts, six color themes from black on yellow to white on brown (for when the white LCD gets to be too much), three margins and three line spacing layouts. Barnes & Noble does a solid job leveraging the color screen here by giving you a ton of viewing options for the reasonably simple task of looking at plain text on a page.

Wrap-up

 

The market was already crowded well before Barnes & Noble announced the Nook Tablet, a situation that certainly didn’t improve for the company with the announcement of the Kindle Fire. Anyone eyeing the Nook Tablet either as a gift or for themselves will almost certainly be cross checking it with Amazon’s new much discussed slate. And then there’s the fact that the Nook’s predecessor didn’t actually go away with the announcement of the new device — rather, it got cheaper and better.

At $249, the Nook Tablet also costs a full $50 more than those products, a difference that’s not negligible when we’re talking about budget devices. The words “under $200″ mean a lot to shoppers. Of course, you get some decided advantages along with that premium, including more RAM, great video, a microSD slot and attention paid to smaller things, like the built-in mic, which lets users do things like recording narration for kids books.

Amazon, on the other hand, offers up a smaller form factor, price and better proprietary media options. There’s really no clear winner here, but with the addition of two now solid products to the ever-expanding world of tablets, there’s an even greater chance that the consumer will get precisely what they’re looking for.

 

Source : http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/21/barnes-and-noble-nook-tablet-review/

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus review

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We’ve already established that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a great tablet. Then, just recently, we summarily found that the 1.2-inch smaller Galaxy Tab 8.9 is an even better tablet — at least for anyone who wants to take their slate places. So, following that logic, the even more petite Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus should be the best of the three, right?

Not so fast. We’ve been here before, and things weren’t exactly great. The original Galaxy Tab was, of course, a 7-incher and wasn’t universally well received thanks to a number of problems — the first being a $600 MSRP. Another issue was an Android 2.2 build that tried its best but was ultimately ill-suited for tablet duties. This new 7-inch installment packs a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, a tablet-friendlier build of Android 3.2 Honeycomb and a somewhat more palatable $400 price tag.

So, it’s clearly better equipped than its predecessor, but that one shipped a whopping 12 months ago. How does the newer, fancier Tab compete in this newer, fancier present? Read on to find out.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus review

 

Hardware

Samsung’s last tablet really did look like a slate that was run through the wrong washing cycle and came out a size 8.9 rather than the 10.1 it started as. The 7.0 Plus, however, is a rather different beast, slotting in somewhere between the 8.9 and the Galaxy Note both in terms of styling and, of course, size.

It has the same faux-brushed metal backing that Samsung calls Metallic Gray — despite being far closer to black and not having a hint of sparkle. And still being plastic. But, it does look cool and sophisticated and is far more pleasing to touch than the smooth plastic the company originally put on its 10.1. The non-removable back is perforated to allow the three megapixel camera and its LED flash to poke through, units that appear to be borrowed from the 8.9 and 10.1 that came before.

With Skype installed those looking to make some calls on a comically large celly are certainly welcome to do so here.

That is paired with a two megapixel camera on the front peering through the top-right portion of the LCD’s bezel when held in portrait. That’s a very different location than on the other recent Tabs, which put the shooter front and center on the top when you’re holding the tablet in landscape mode. Why the change? Well, the 7.0 Plus is aping some phone styling here, including a gash in the bezel for a speaker and even a microphone on the bottom. The WiFi-only version we were sent of course doesn’t support proper calling, and with Honeycomb it’s clearly not meant to be a phone, but with Skype installed those looking to make some calls on a comically large celly are certainly welcome to do so here. The only thing missing is a proximity sensor to disable the screen — and maybe an invisibility cloak to hide your look of shame whilst holding a 7-inch slate to your face.

So this is a device intended to be held portrait-style, reinforced by Samsung putting its logo on one of the short sides rather than on the long side where it’s typically found. This is again similar to the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab, which had its array of four capacitive touch buttons on the same, shorter side. No such buttons here — Honeycomb has of course nixed that — but the intent is still the same.

The IR emitter opens the door for the 7.0 Plus to be the biggest, beefiest Harmony there ever was.

The physical buttons here are limited to power and a volume rocker, are also in the same place as on the original Tab — on the side on the upper-right. However, slotted in beneath them on the same side is something new and interesting: an IR emitter. IR has long-since fallen out of favor as a means of intra-device communication, replaced by Bluetooth and NFC and the like, but it is still the mechanism of choice for controlling home entertainment systems, opening the door for the 7.0 Plus to be the biggest, beefiest Harmony there ever was.

The standard 3.5mm headphone jack is found up on the top, shifted to the right, but continue around to the left side of the device and you’ll find something a little less common: a microSD slot. Through this you can easily add up to 32GB of storage for music or movies or whatever. Pick up the 3G version of this device and you’ll also find a tray for a SIM slot.

Finally, on the bottom lies Samsung’s proprietary 30-pin connector, flanked on both sides by two tiny little speakers that emit decent sound but at a maximum volume too low to be of much use in all but the quietest of small rooms. Connectivity options on this model include 802.11a/b/g/n at both 2.4 and 5GHz along with Bluetooth 3.0. The 3G model adds on 21Mbps HSPA+ (900, 1900 and 2100MHz) and quad-band EDGE/GPRS (850, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz).

Display

While the Galaxy Tab 8.9, the increasingly mythical 7.7 and even the Galaxy Note manage to offer the full 1280 x 800 resolution offered by the big boy 10.1, the 7.0 Plus sadly is asked to make do with a measly 1024 x 600. That’s the same as the original Galaxy Tab and, while we wish this device had the resolution to match its bigger (and even smaller) siblings, it is otherwise a very nice display. Colors are rich and bright, contrast is good and, while it can’t quite deliver the sort of mouth-watering saturation that the company’s Super AMOLED Plus panels can manage, color reproduction seems to be spot-on.

If the stock color temperature isn’t to your liking, there are two others you can choose: Dynamic, which is a little too over-saturated for our tastes, and Movie, which tones things down a bit. Whichever you choose you’ll have a great looking picture that doesn’t go bad even at extreme viewing angles.

Performance and battery life

The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus uses internals that are quite familiar at this point: a dual-core 1.2GHz processor paired with 1GB of RAM and either 16 or 32GB of storage. Unsurprising, then, that performance was also quite familiar. Despite being quite smaller than the 10.1, this guy blazes through most tasks with similar aplomb. Apps launch promptly and flipping through and examining pictures in the gallery is as smooth as you like. The only occasional hiccups came into play on web browsing, where webpages occasionally got a bit sticky and browsing became sporadically unresponsive. Disabling Flash helped — as it usually does — but out-of-the-box surfing wasn’t quite all we’d hoped it would be.

Benchmark
Galaxy Tab 7.0
Plus
T-Mobile Springboard /
Huawei MediaPad
Quadrant2,7001,871
Linpack28.98 MFLOPS (single-thread) / 69.47 MFLOPS (multi-thread)46.22 MFLOPS (single-thread) / 58.81 MFLOPS (multi-thread)
Nenamark 159.3 fps43.2 fps
Nenamark 241.827.9 fps
Vellamo1,1981,161
SunSpider 0.9.11,6792,471


When we ran our usual spate of benchmarks, the results almost unanimously confirmed that this is indeed one speedy tablet. You’ll see it bested the 7-inch T-Mobile Springboard ($430 off contract) in almost every test, save for the single-thread version of Linpack. Meanwhile, the 7.0 Plus blitzed through the SunSpider benchmark with an average score of 1,679.

But it’s in battery life that it really starts to pull away from the competition. In our rundown, which involves looping a movie off the tablet with WiFi on and the brightness fixed at 65 percent, it managed an impressive eight hours and nine minutes. That’s really something when you consider the Springboard lasted just six and a half hours and the Acer Iconia Tab A100 came to a wheezing halt in less than five. And in case you’re wondering, the 7.0 represents a marked improvement over the original Galaxy Tab, whose runtime was two hours shorter.

Tablet
Battery Life
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus8:09
Apple iPad 210:26
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.19:55
Apple iPad9:33
HP TouchPad8:33
Lenovo IdeaPad K18:20
Motorola Xoom8:20
T-Mobile G-Slate8:18
Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet8:00
Archos 1017:20
Archos 80 G97:06
RIM BlackBerry PlayBook7:01
Acer Iconia Tab A5006:55
T-Mobile Springboard (Huawei MediaPad)6:34
Toshiba Thrive6:25
Samsung Galaxy Tab6:09
Velocity Micro Cruz T4085:10
Acer Iconia Tab A1004:54

 

Software

For the most part the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus feels like any of the other Galaxy Tabs to use. It’s running Android 3.2 Honeycomb, customized with Samsung’s TouchWiz interface that adds a number of useful tools to the mix: a task manager, a world clock, a finger-friendly note taking app, a calculator and a music player. They’re all accessible by tapping on the little up-arrow at the bottom of the screen. TouchWiz also simplifies the look of Honeycomb a bit and adds some useful toggles to the settings menu that you get when tapping the wrench in the lower-right of the screen.

All standard fare, that, but the Plus does bring something new to the software table: the Peel Smart Remote app. The app typically requires a $100 accessory to work but, thanks to the IR emitter built into the top of this guy, you can use it like a jumbo-sized universal remote control. To set up the app you’re basically asked to turn off all your devices and sit somewhere in their general proximity. Rather than digging through endless lists of obscure product names as you struggle to remember whether you bought the Onkyo SR504 or sprung for the SR604, the Peel app just asks you to remember the brand of your device.

It then starts firing out IR commands with wild abandon, asking you after each one whether your device turned on. Once your TV or receiver or DVD player springs to life, happy day, you’re configured! That said, if it never does you’re in trouble. The app automatically prompts you to email Peel’s customer support and enter the particulars of your device, something we had to do for one of our recalcitrant receivers, and they were quite quick to respond.

This does cause problems in some cases, though. For example, we use a Harmony remote with a Nyko BluWave IR receiver to control our PS3. That works great for media playback and navigating through the XMB, but there’s no way to turn the console on or off with this. And, if you can’t turn the device on, the Peel simply wants nothing to do with it. So, watching movies on our PS3 was not something the Plus 7.0 will allow — at least with this app. But, we can’t wait to see what other developers can do.

We also had problems with our TV, an older Sharp LCD that lacks discrete commands for its inputs. With the Harmony you can configure the remote to cycle through the available inputs as you switch from one activity to another. The Peel app, on the other hand, refuses to play nice.

Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus software

So, you certainly lose some configurability with Peel compared to the Harmony platform, but it is a very easy to set up and use app, and once configured it makes finding things to watch a snap. The app asks what your favorite type of shows and movies are and it goes out of its way to help you find those things on live TV. You’ll get an easy grid highlighting what’s on. Tap anything you like and it’ll take you directly to that channel.

You can also browse by genre and, in general, look at your TV listings in a whole new way. This is great if you often find yourself struggling to find something good to watch — bad if you’re the type who finds yourself idly sitting in front of the TV when you should be getting things done.

The competition

Just who exactly is the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus trying to usurp? That’s hard to tell, as the 7-inch slate category is still a bit under-served, but it’s safe to say that this guy’s strongest competition comes from its own big brother, the Galaxy Tab 8.9, which loses the IR emitter and microSD expansion but adds on a higher-resolution screen with a bit more room.

If you’re squarely stuck on the 7-inch size the T-Mobile Springboard is a solid competitor priced at just $30 more off-contract and, for that money, offering 3G connectivity. Of course you’ll have to pay for data if you’re hoping to take advantage of that, but anyone willing to sign on for a two-year contract will find themselves paying just $180. We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention the Iconia Tab A100, which costs just $330, though, again, that discount means you’ll have to settle for considerably shorter battery life.

Galaxy Tab family

Stepping away from Honeycomb we have both the $350 BlackBerry PlayBook, $400 HTC Flyer (with Gingerbread), $200 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet. The PlayBook and Fire are well-constructed but, with their angular shapes, a bit less comfortable to hold — they’re heavier, too. RIM’s tablet adds HDMI output to the mix, making it great for hosting boardroom presentations, while Amazon’s tablet offers an easy view into a very impressive collection of premium media, and of course costs just $200. The Flyer adds stylus input to the mix, while the Nook Tablet is of course quite comparable to the Fire — just with slightly better specs and aesthetics.

Wrap-up

 

Samsung unveils Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, packing 1.2GHz dual-core CPU and coated in Honeycomb
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus WiFi approved by FCC
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus now shipping from Amazon, confirmed to use Exynos SoC

The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus really is a gussied-up, slimmed-down, priced-right version of the original Galaxy Tab. If that tablet had released last year looking and feeling (and costing) like this one does it would have been a revolution. As it was it never found that level of success and, while the 7.0 Plus is definitely a far better device, it just doesn’t have anything that makes it stand out among Samsung’s increasingly busy selections.

The performance is good, the IR capabilities are a nice touch and the expandable storage will definitely tempt those with a few extra microSD cards lying dormant. But, for just a little more money, the 8.9 feels like a much more comprehensive tablet and the 7.7, if it ever releases, will quickly make this guy obsolete with its 1280 x 800 Super AMOLED Plus display. And of course there’s the Note, which can do proper double duty as a phone along with everything else the 7.0 Plus can do.

While the ideal size for a tablet is a personal decision, amid the increasingly chromatic scale of tablets Samsung is offering we can’t help but feel the 7.0 Plus comes in just a little flat for our liking when compared with the almost pitch-perfect 8.9. That said, those looking for something a bit more portable will sing high praise for this 7-inch slate.

 

Source : http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/21/samsung-galaxy-tab-7-0-plus-review/

 

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Up To 30 Gbps: New Chip Enables Record-Breaking Wireless Data Transmission Speed

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It looks like we can expect faster wireless connections in the near future: Japanese electronic parts maker Rohm yesterday announced [JP] it has developed a chip that reached a wireless data transmission speed of 1.5 gigabits per second in experiments, the highest level ever. And according to the company, even 30Gbps will be possible in the future.

The semi conductor device uses terahertz waves for data transmission, has a micro antenna attached to it and is 2cm long and 1cm high (size of the module). Rohm developed the technology in cooperation with a research team at Osaka University.

According to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, Rohm expects the new chip to cost just “several hundred yen” to produce (100 Yen currently translate to US$1.30). By way of comparison: the terahertz-based wireless chips out there now cost “several million yen”, are about 20cm square and reach a top speed of just 0.1Gbps, The Nikkei says.

Rohm plans to start mass-producing the new chips in three to four years.

 

Source : http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/up-to-30-gbps-new-chip-enables-record-breaking-wireless-data-transmission-speed/

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Comment 10 inShare88 4.74 — Facebook Wins By Getting Us Closer Than Six Degrees

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Facebook users are getting more connected to each other as the service grows and matures, according to a new study by the company’s data team and the University of Milan. Instead of the traditional “six degrees of separation” that researchers have historically observed between all people in the world (and Kevin Bacon), the number of degrees has been dropping since 2008 on the site, from 5.28 then to 4.74 now.

This isn’t just an interesting factoid about the modern world, it highlights Facebook’s long-term strategy, and its dominant market position in social networking. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed for years that his goal is to make the world more “open and connected.” In practice, that’s meant features across the site that do things like reveal what friends you have in common with any other user, and suggest that you become friends with people you’ve never met in person and have no friends in common with.

Those features have a big impact on the average user. Let’s say you meet a stranger in real life who you want to know more about. For example, you can Google-stalk them to try to find out anything interesting they’ve done over the years, but you’re going to go to Facebook to see if you have any mutual friends. Then, you might friend them. Repeat that process for its 800 million-plus users over the years and all these connections are just getting tighter and tighter.

Facebook’s big goal is to be the social layer for everything in the world — the way you get recommendations for music, news articles, products to buy, and anything else. These closer social connections mean that Facebook is getting more and more information about what you, your friends, your friends of friends, your friend of friends of friends of friends, etc. like or don’t like. It uses all of this information to make smarter recommendations for all of the ads on its site, and to create a more valuable platform for any third-party developer. Any rival that hopes to offer its own separate social layer is going to have to work harder and harder to beat these ever-strengthening connections and the possibilities they create.

 

Source : http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/facebookdata/

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eBay Buys Hunch To Improve Long-Tail Shopping Recommendations

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Screen Shot 2011-11-21 at 6.50.59 AM

Hunch, a service that provides a “taste graph” of personalized recommendations based on users’ interests, has just been bought by auction site eBay, the companies have confirmed. The amount hasn’t officially been disclosed, but Michael Arrington (who had the scoop this morning) hears that it’s around $80 million.

[Update: We caught up with Dixon and eBay chief technology officer Mark Carges by phone just now, and got some more details on the deal and what it means for both companies. Our notes below.]

Founded in late 2007 and launched in 2009, the New York company will be used by eBay to help improve buying and selling recommendations for its users. From the release:

Hunch’s technology talent and its deep expertise in areas like machine learning, data mining and predictive modeling are expected to help eBay expand and grow merchandising and relevance capabilities to further improve the shopping and selling experience for eBay customers. For example, eBay buyers are expected to benefit from Hunch’s predictive ability to generate meaningful, yet often non-obvious, recommendations for items available on eBay based on their specific tastes.

Cofounder Chris Dixon (a regular contributor here at TechCrunch) says on his company blog that the relationship with eBay started after Hunch began allowing other companies to use its Taste Graph. As part of eBay, Hunch will continue to operate somewhat independently — all of its employees are staying on at its New York headquarters, and the Hunch.com site will stay live.

Hunch had raised around $20 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures and Ron Conway.

Interview notes: 

Dixon and Carges say that the deal will help surface more quality recommendations from eBay’s “long tail” of unstructured listings. Let’s say a coin collector is on eBay looking to add to their collection. As Dixon explains, Hunch might be able to surface relevant items that aren’t obvious, like microscopes that are especially good for coin analysis. Traditional machine learning won’t necessarily be able to identify the same sorts of connections.

Of course, other retail sites, like Amazon, provide recommendations as well — “users who also bought X bought Y” — but those methods rely on existing catalogs, Carges says.

The 20-person Hunch team will begin working with eBay’s data science team “ASAP,” and will anchor the auction company’s physical expansion into New York. Carges is planning to hire more data and engineering employees for that office, along with product-oriented staffers, like designers.

In terms of results for eBay users, there won’t be any drastic changes. Hunch will rather be providing more nuanced recommendations on the back-end, resulting (they hope) in more meaningful discoveries, more stickiness on the site, and ultimately more buying and selling.

The two aren’t commenting on the deal price, or on Hunch’s current revenues. The Hunch.com site will stay live, and will continue to experiment, similar to what eBay has done with local search acquisition Milo last year, according to Carges. There a no changes planned for Hunch’s open API or its other partnerships.

We’re also talking to Dixon, a serial entrepreneur and investor, about having him do one of his TechCrunch Founder Stories interviews with, er, himself… we’ll figure out how to set that up.

 

 

Source : http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/21/ebayshunch/

 

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Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough”

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Peter Thiel New Yorker spread

Peter Thiel is a grump, but a special kind of grump. He is a dystopian utopian (if such a person can exist). The investor who wrote the first check for Facebook both believes in the power of technology to transform our lives, and is perennially disappointed by it.

A lengthy profile in the November 28, 2011 edition of the New Yorker (summary here) states: “his main lament is that America—the country that invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer—has lost its belief in the future.”

It is an argument he’s made before. Last September, at Disrupt SF he made the case that innovation is dead across most of the economy (you can watch the video of the session below). He is co-authoring a book on the subject with Max Levchin and Gary Kasparov, called The Blueprint.

But what about something like the iPhone?  ”I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he tells the New Yorker. Technology simply isn’t creating enough jobs or moving the needle in areas like transportation, health, or energy.

From the article, here is his assessment on the impact of the Internet, Apple, and Twitter:

“The Internet—I think it’s a net plus, but not a big one,” he said. “Apple is an innovative company, but I think it’s mostly a design innovator.” Twitter has a lot of users, but it doesn’t employ that many Americans: “Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy ? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.”

Thiel is a natural contrarian who is never satisfied with the status quo, which is a good thing in a venture capitalist and startup mentor.  But I think he dismisses the global impact of technologies like the iPhone and social networks a bit too easily.

Having a fully functioning computer in your pocket opens up entirely new experiences—and markets.  Was it predictable?  Yes.  But that doesn’t make it any less transformative.  Social media, combined with mobile technologies, are powering protests and revolutions around the world and changing the way people consume information.

But will these technologies improve living standards? The fact that the companies creating the technologies are capital efficient shouldn’t be a mark against them. What about the economic value created by the people who use the technologies. Putting a computer in the hands of business people away from the office, or a farmer in the field could yield significant improvements in productivity. It all depends on what kind of value you place on staying connected.

 

Source : http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel-new-yorker-grump/

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Fondu Is Foursquare For Foodies

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Fondu

Last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Gauri Manglik and her two cofounders launched SpotOn, a mobile recommendation app for bars and restaurants based on where your friends have checked in on Foursquare. The people who ended up using the app used it more as a social network than as a recommendation tool. So Manglik and her team took what they learned and built an entirely new product called Fondu, which they are launching today as an iPhone app.

“We are building a social network for writing bite-sized reviews,” says Manglik. It is a Foursquare for foodies. You can search for places nearby or pull up a list of your recent Foursquare check-ins, and review each place with a short comment and give it a one-to-four petal rating with a swipe of your thumb. The app gives you a feed to follow your friends’ ratings and mini-reviews, or you can see what is popular on a map near you.

Fondu is designed to be an antidote to Yelp. “You write your review on Yelp and it goes to a community directory,” notes Manglik. “There are so many people you don’t care about on the service.” With Fondu, you see only reviews from your friends and popular reviews which have been given “cheers” by the community.

The company raised a $575,000 seed round led by ENIAC Ventures. The NYU Innovation Fund, Harbor Road Ventures, Blazer Ventures, Lawrence Lenihan, and Zach Aarons also participated in the round.

 

Source : http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/fondu/

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Apple May Have Won The PC War… By Losing The Windows Battle

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What exactly is a PC? That question is likely to become a hot topic over the next few years.

Originally, we thought of PCs as the Apple II or then the IBM PC. They were machines that had to sit on a desk because, while significantly smaller than a mainframe, they were still big and bulky. They had large monitors, boxy bases, and big keyboards. The original Macintosh attempted to make this footprint a bit smaller and the package more compact, but the IBM clones won the day. Windows won the day. PCs by Compaq and HP led to machines by Gateway and Dell. Boxy bases were joined by massive towers. Bigger seemed better. Small monitors were replaced by huge monitors. Then something changed.

While laptops had existed in various forms for years, by the mid 2000s, the prices, performance, and size made them viable “desktop replacements”. They were different enough from traditional PCs that they had their own name, and people thought of them differently. But eventually, as they started to dominate the market, people just began thinking of laptops as PCs as well. They were, after all, personal computers.

Now we’re in the midst of another new age. People are now carrying around computers in their pockets, called smartphones. But those aren’t considered PCs. Instead, they’re considered descendants of the original mobile phones. The truth is that they’re closer in just about every way to a personal computer — in fact, they may be the most personal computers ever. But they look more like phones, so we consider them phones — even as people make fewer and fewer actual phone calls on them.

And now this line is being further blurred by the rise of the tablet. Cosmetically, it’s almost like a PC screen merged with a smartphone. People have still been very hesitant to call this a PC. That included Steve Jobs, whose iPad dominates the market. Jobs instead thought of the iPad (and the iPhone) as ushering in the “Post-PC” era. He did not want to lump his new devices together with the PC world he had long since lost.

But is that right? Again, if anything, these machines seem more personal than the personal computers of yesteryear. To some, we’re simply arguing cosmetics. The iPad isn’t a PC because it doesn’t look like a typical computer. Of course, neither did a laptop to most people back in the day. Others argue that since devices like the iPad can’t do quite as much as a traditional computer, it’s not a PC. But it’s silly to think that this won’t change over time. The lines will continue to blur.

That’s why I agree with British research firm Canalys’ decision to include tablet sales alongside PC sales in their new report. That’s going to piss some people off because the combination has them projecting that Apple will become the top PC vendor by the middle of next year. If their data is right, Apple will unseat HP to take the crown.

That statement is amazing when you consider that just 15 years ago, Apple nearly went out of business. And just 5 to 10 years ago, they still had single digit market share in the PC space. But that may have actually helped them pull off this stunning comeback. Because they didn’t have the baggage that other PC makers had, they were free to re-invent the wheel — the personal computer — with their iOS devices. Because Apple lost the PC battle to Windows in the 1990s, they may end up winning the personal computing war.

Again, not everyone will agree over this classification of the iPad as a PC. But the whole classification system is really nothing more than marketing (which Jobs also clearly knew). Who cares what the computer looks like or what category it falls in? What matters is what it does and who is using it.

Other numbers released today by eMarketer are staggering. By 2014, they believe there will be close to 100 million U.S. tablet users (the vast majority using an iPad). Meanwhile, HP reported their quarterly earnings today. The traditional PC numbers continue to fall. Things are bleak enough that HP had said they were going to sell off their PC business entirely (though they ultimately decided against that after a CEO change).

Things are crazier still when you look at the numbers from a bottom-line perspective. Apple is the juggernaut making far more profit than anyone else in the industry. We’re arguing semantics about the meaning of the term “PC”, but doesn’t this matter more? Shouldn’t the most successful PC vendor be aligned with the most successful company in the space? Otherwise, who cares who is winning the “PC War”? Great, some guys losing money sold more desktop PCs than Apple last quarter. Does that mean anything of any significance other than showing that the traditional PC business is a shitty one to be in right now?

One high profile person who does believe that tablets should be labeled at PCs? Steve Ballmer, as Nick Wingfield reminds us on Bits today. But Ballmer wants us to buy that so he has a justification for putting Windows on these machines. He doesn’t seem to realize and/or care that by helping to unify the personal computing space, he’s eroding his company’s own dominance.

Apple is set to become the top personal computer maker in the world. They’ll never win the desktop PC battle, but who cares? That fight hasn’t mattered for years.

 

Source : http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/a-tablet-is-a-computer-too/

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Apple Promises iOS 5 Update In A Few Weeks To Suck Less Battery Life

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imgresFor the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard the same thing over and over again. “The iPhone 4S is awesome, but…” And it’s a big “but”. The battery life. It sucks.

Well, to be clear, it sucks for some users, but not all. For example, I’m not noticing anything out of the ordinary on my device. It’s essentially the same battery life I got with the iPhone 4 running iOS 4, as far as I can tell. But today Apple has acknowledged that some bugs are causing some issues with the battery life. But they say it’s not an iPhone 4S issue, but rather an iOS 5 issue. In other words, it’s software, not hardware. More importantly, a fix is coming.

“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks,” an Apple spokesperson told us today over the phone.

“In a few weeks” sounds a bit vague, but it may actually be a bit sooner than that. This afternoon,Apple issued the first iOS 5.0.1 builds to developers. Guess what’s included? Yep — “Fixes bugs affecting battery life “. They’ll need to test this build with developers for a bit to ensure there are no other bugs, but assuming that goes well, this should be out soon.

In the meantime, we published some tips yesterday to help with battery issues if you’re having them. Again, the good news here is that this is a software issue in iOS 5, nothing fundamentally wrong with the iPhone 4S.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/02/iphone-4s-ios-5-battery-fix/

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