End User

More Wi-Fi Options Coming to Commuters in 2009

For those of us serious about ensuring that we are never unplugged, there is always a service, option, device, whatever that can make that a reality. But 2009 is shaping up to be the beginning of a period when the rest of us catch up whether we want to or not, as wireless hot spots finally push their way into transit options in a big time way. And with a major chunk of the public spending a fair amount of time commuting by planes, trains and automobiles it's about time.

Of course late last year a variety of airlines including Delta, Virgin America, American Airlines and Air Canada announced that they had launched or planned to launch Wi-Fi on a limited number of flights domestically. But most of us working stiffs are not jet setters, so that leaves trains and automobiles, right? Actually, we can expect to see some changes here as well. With regards to trains, California-based broadband provider Wi-Fi Rail Network has recently announced the approval of a contract with the San Francisco Bay Area's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system that will bring high speed Internet to commuters system-wide by the end of 2010. The BART system consists of over a 100 miles of track connected by over 40 stations, linking San Francisco to cities and residential areas north, south and east as well as both the San Francisco and Oakland airports. In tests trains moving up to 85MPH reported consistent connection speeds up to 15mbps based on a signal provided by a network of fiber optic cable laid along the train lines and transmitted to trains every mile. Service is planned on a subscription model estimated to follow a pricing pattern of: Day Passes - $10, Monthly Passes - $30, Annual Passes - $300, with corporate plans eventually available. If this service ends up being profitable, or even break even, which will be the ultimate yardsticks, look for similar plans for comparable rapid transit systems all over the country.

Carpoolers can also expect to see wireless options move beyond GPS services and OnStar soon as well, as dealerships across the country, led by Chrysler's UConnect Web system, launch hot spot functionality available with new Chysler, Jeep and Dodge models. The MSRP for the UConnect hardware is $450, not including an installation fee and a monthly access fee of about $30. The lament here, which has been repeated many times and in many places will of course be "one more distraction for drivers," which is true enough, but for those with free and responsible hands who spend hours a day watching traffic from the passenger seat, it could be a godsend. The additional caveat is that the big hit that the auto industry has taken in the current economic downtown could knock this Wi-Fi trend off track. The year is young yet, so only time will tell.

In the meantime check out video below of UConnect Web in action.

--Tom Milnes

Bites from the Apple: Faces and Places

The big news of the week is the shipment of the iLife '09 software suite, which updates iPhoto with geotagging and face detection capabilities and iMovie with easier enhanced editing functions and video stabilization--as well as updated copies of GarageBand (now with lessons from famous artists like Sting and Norah Jones--which you'll have to purchase separately), iWeb and iDVD. I just installed my copy yesterday and haven't been able to give it a full test, but I did spend some time playing around with iPhoto and have been a bit underwhelmed. The face detection feature, particularly, needs a bit of work.

And speaking of work, that's what's needed from you to get going with both the Face and Places features (the latter especially if your images don't have location information embedded in them--which will probably be most folks). For face detection, you need to select a photo and then add the face (or faces) found in the image to the face detection database. And to do this successfully, you'll need to repeat the process a couple of times before you start to get semi-reliable automated returns. Below is a screen-grab of the top returns I received after making just three initial selections:

Not that close at first blush. However, after you go through several rounds of detecting and confirming faces, its learning component definitely improves--I was pretty impressed that it was able to detect my masked face holding my minutes-old baby.

As for the Places feature, it automatically detected location information for images captured by my iPhone, but I had to manually enter information for those images snapped by my Casio Exilim. It's certainly not something I'll want to do for all my photos, but I experimented with entering specific data for images from my Parisian honeymoon. This is done either via searching through an integrated Google search field (great for finding specific addresses or touristy spots like the Arc de Triomphe) or manually dropping a pin (after searching for a particular address or nearby landmark).

I'm hoping to get a chance to fiddle around with iMovie this weekend as I've got my fingers crossed that its video stabilization feature will help with some of the shaky footage I've captured with my Flip MinoHD camcorder. For more views on iPhoto, check out reviews from Walt Mossberg (along with Uncle Walt's video review here), TUAW, Mac Observer, and Gizmodo. But for now, some sampling of the Apple-y goodness that was this past week:

• Apple quietly upgraded its affordable white MacBook with the faster NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor (to match the integrated graphics in the other new-fangled MacBooks), and it's now shipping. There are also reports that the 17-inch MacBook Pro announced at Macworld will be shipping within days.

• We may be seeing a new versions of the iMac as AppleInsider reports that availability of current models will be constrained. In other rumors, Ars Technica reports that AT&T and Apple might be collaborating on a 3G-enabled MacBook and IntoMobile reports that a new iPhone has been spotted in the code for the just-released iPhone 2.2.1 firmware update.

• When Apple's iTunes Store went (mostly) DRM-free a few weeks ago, users were offered the ability to upgrade their current lower bit rate DRM'd tracks at about a 30 percent discount. However, you were only given the choice to upgrade the entire scope of your iTunes Store purchases. Seeing that I didn't feel the need higher quality versions of everything I bought over the years (i.e., Stevie Nicks' Bella Donna), I took a pass. But this week, Apple began allowing a la carte upgrades (though it hasn't been without its problems), and I've started upgrading just my classical purchases--they definitely sound richer and have a bit more volume.

• Speaking of Apple and music, there's been a load of posts (including this one) in the gadgetosphere this week about a Steve Jobs interview with Rolling Stone back in 2003, in which Jobs (in retrospect) was quite the music biz oracle.

• Aric posted several easy-peasy DIY iPhone stands earlier this week, and now Cult of Mac offers its guide on how to turn a juice box into an iPhone case.

• The Microsoft Zune got clobbered in sales by the iPod over the holiday season, and Andrew Leonard at Salon notes that Microsoft's product placement strategy, to put it politely, is not working.

• Dan Moren at Macworld asks whatever happened to the email push notification that was promised for the iPhone 2.0 software (he doesn't get much of an answer out of Apple), but then wonders if the feature is really needed:

  Maybe that’s the simple answer: that people--to wit, users--just don’t care. They’ve learned to adapt to the iPhone’s way of doing things, and that way doesn’t include notifications or multitasking...at the moment, anyway. At some point in the future it seems likely that Apple will introduce a new feature that takes care of the issues that notifications would have addressed, and it appears that most users are content to wait until then.

• Charts and graphs via Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog give a snapshot of Apple's week in the news.

• And finally, my new favorite iPhone app is QuadCamera (link opens in iTunes), which enables you to take multiple shots in quick succession, which then places the photos in one of several layouts--2x2, 4x1, 4x2, 8x1. Some user reviews were disappointed in that it didn't provide full versions of the multiple shots, but as a longtime fan of the Lomo Action Sampler I'm quite satisfied with the results.

--Agen G.N. Schmitz

mobiBLU's New A10 UFO MP3 Player Now Landing

With their Cube shaped MP3 player now in its third generation, PMP maker mobiBLU continues to push the design envelope with the newly released A10 UFO MP3 player.  It will launch in sizes ranging from 512MB to 8GB, and plays MP3, WMA, ASF, and OGG formats.  The A10 UFO also comes equipped with Bluetooth capabilities and a 2-Watt flat-panel speaker.  Not enough power to fill a room, but hopefully that unique casing can bestow some extra oomph to the sound.  Perceptive readers will notice that this UFO is flying blind, as mobiBLU has nixed the screen in yet another gutsy design move.  Battery life is rated at only 6 hours with the speaker on, but climbs to 15 with headphone use.  [official page , via anythingbutipod]

-- Jon Dale

"jOG" Controllers Add Motion Control to Wii and PlayStation Games

Although it seems beyond old news to refer to the Nintendo Wii as taking advantage of motion-sensing technology, get ready for a new round of chatter. A UK based operation called New Concept Gaming, who according to their website are "...dedicated to the development and sale of ground breaking products that bridge the gap between video gaming and health & fitness..." are set to potentially shake up the gameplay of millions with the release of their jOG product line. Currently this encompasses two controller accessories, the upcoming jOG compatible with the Wii and the jOG-S21, which works with the PlayStation 2/PS3 and is already available in the UK. I refer to these as accessories because from the look of them that's just what they seem to be.

Taking advantage what is termed 'enhanced movement technology,' both connect to player's controllers. In the case of the Wii it attaches between the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck, and with the PS2/PS3 version between the controller and the console (use with PS3 requires and adapter). The actual motion-sensing portion of the device in both cases attaches to the player at the belt line, where apparently based on pedometer technology, it registers steps/up and down movement. This is translated into directional movement in games that can make use of it. The Wii version has yet to be released, but New Concept claims that the PS2 version is compatible with all PlayStation games, although it admits it works best with sports games, shooters, platform and adventure games. Full disclosure, I've not tested this, so take this claim with a grain of salt. They have also published a list of close to 140 games it works on. According to their website New Concept Gaming had a presence at CES '09, though probably not a large one, which is a shame because I've seen the PlayStation version referenced in several places for the relative steal of around $25. If this product ends up working well it could add considerable legs to almost every game it touches and thus be very popular. Any success would also prove New Concepts' stated commitment to merging health and fitness with gaming. If any out there doubt this simply try this little experiment. Stand up and run in place, leisurely if you prefer, while moving your hands in front of you. Do this for about five minutes. You may look a little silly, but most people who do aerobics do, and that's pretty much what you are doing. Now, have a seat and ask yourself this question. How many times have you, if you are a gamer, or have you seen someone play a game for only five minutes and not get in the least bit excited? Pretty much never, so feel free to hydrate as necessary. Look out Wii Fit. This accessory could feasibly turn just about any video game into a fitness regime.

Check out the video for the jOG compatible with the Wii: 

An jOG-S21, compatible with the PS2 and already in use in the UK and listed on Amazon's UK site.

--Tom Milnes

Philips' 56" Cinema 21:9 LCD HDTV Looks To Be the Real Deal

Do you hate how your HDTV creates upper and lower black space on your screen as it letter boxes content to approximate the aspect ratio of a wide-screen film? Myself, no. There are plenty of viewing option on most 16:9 HDTVs to deal with this. But then again I didn't know that I had a choice in the matter. With the increasing information coming out about Philips' 56" Cinema 21:9 LCD HDTV it would seem that the recent skepticism around the new unit can more or less be laid to rest, and choice is at hand.

The Cinema 21:9 is the world’s first cinema-proportioned LCD television and as such allows you to watch movies at home at the exact proportions as you would if you were sitting in a movie theater. Also, according to a press release, which is pretty much all the manufacturer supplied information available at the product website, the TVs formatting technology ensures that regular 16:9 content from sources such as TV broadcasts and games consoles are also adapted to fill the 21:9 screen. If there is no stretching involved that would be pretty slick and at 56" that should make for quite the viewing experience. The video below taken at the London-based launching does add a few details like the TV's 5 HDMI inputs, a tentative spring '09 release date and a price estimated at about 3,000 GBP, so just a little over $4,200. Beyond that we'll just have to see what we are getting beyond a different aspect ratio.

--Tom Milnes

Battling "Feature Creep" with the Roku Netflix Digital Video Player

When I was in high school, a friend of mine got a TV/VCR/stereo combo unit for her birthday. It had a very small footprint, required only one remote control (a very big deal in those pre-universal remote days) and was a pretty cool media center at the time.

Then the VCR got messed up, and instead of just losing her VCR for a few days, she lost her TV and her stereo, too. We all learned an important lesson then, about the wisdom of buying something that tried to pack too much into one unit.

Today, you won’t find as many all-in-one units as you once did, but it’s increasingly difficult to find things that do just one thing, and do it very well. I blame this on something I call “Feature Creep” which I suspect comes from too many meetings, too much input from marketing, and not enough product managers and engineers who are willing to stand up and say, “You know what? I don’t think this coffee maker really needs an MP3 player in it. It’s fine just making coffee.”

Feature Creep is everywhere, bloating our software, lengthening our startup times, cluttering up our menus, and draining our batteries, so when I come across something that has successfully resisted it and stayed focused on doing one simple thing very well, I have a little bit of a pants party.

One of the best examples I’ve come across in the last year is the Netflix player from Roku. It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.

It’s a wonderfully elegant little device. The user interface is clean, and the menus are super easy to navigate. It has outputs that range from RCA to composite video and HDMI, as well as digital audio. The remote has nine buttons on it - that’s fewer than I have on my cell phone - and they mimic the controls we’re all used to on a DVR or DVD player. It’s so small and simple to set up, my wife and I frequently move it between the two TVs we have in our house, and I’ve tossed it into my backpack and taken it with me to friends’ houses for movie nights.

Set up was incredibly simple, and it took less than ten minutes from the time I opened it until I was watching my first movie. Speaking as a life-long technology geek, the highest praise I can give it is this: I still haven’t opened the manual, and don’t think I’ll ever need to.

So I love it, but is it worth $99 to you? It depends on your movie-watching habits and your network speed. If your ISP throttles your bandwidth, or your download speed is slower than 3Mbps, you won’t get the best quality picture. I didn’t realize how much that really mattered to me, until I was forced to watch a bunch of movies that looked like they were VHS quality on my HDTV. I upgraded my service to a faster bitrate so I could get maximum resolution, though, and the next movie my son and I watched, Vanishing Point, was indistinguishable from DVD.

While the box itself and the technology that power it are awfully close to perfect, the Netflix side of the service could use some improvement. The studios still haven’t figured out how to fully embrace emerging technology, so there are only 12,000 or so movies and television shows available as of this writing, I know that 12,000 sounds like a lot (and it is) but there are some huge gaps in there, especially in the new releases department, and more frequently than I’d like, the movie I really want to watch right now isn’t available. Programs are also taken out of the on-demand service fairly often as licenses expire, which can result in some unhappy moments when you realize that all those Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who you waited until after Christmas to watch are gone. However, Netflix is adding new movies every day, and in the very near future, the player will also stream about 40,000 movies and television shows from Amazon Video On Demand, costing between 99 cents and 3.99 per rental. I don’t know what the overlap with Netflix’s existing library will be, but I expect the studios would be happy to put more movies out there when they know that they’ll be playable for only 24 hours. (Not because it deters piracy, but because the studios like to pretend that it does.)

I love the Netflix Player not just because it’s simple and elegant in a world that’s filled with unnecessarily complicated devices, but for the future it represents.

In the future, we won’t have to go to the video store, or wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail when we want to rent movies. In the future, we won’t plan our evenings around television shows, because they’ll be on-demand to fit into our schedules. In the future, we won’t have to fill our houses with physical media unless we want to. Thanks to the Netflix Player from Roku, the future is almost here.

--Wil Wheaton

(Actor and professional geek Wil Wheaton is a new guest blogger for End User.  His column will appear the last Thursday of each month, where he'll review his favorite gadgets and talk about all things tech.  He can regularly be found blogging at wilwheaton.typepad.com.)

The World's Smallest Wearable TV Set: Teleglass T3-F HMD

Advanced technology has the amazing ability to both wow and worry you at the same time. The most recent example I've come across is Scalar Impressive Works' Teleglass T3-F HMD. Billed as the world's smallest wearable TV set--yes, wearable in that Star Trek Borg kind on way--it is designed to recreate over one eye, a virtual 28-inch display projected 2m ahead of the wearer via a readout mounted on a standard pair of eye glasses. The unit is powered by two AA batteries, weighs a mere 35 grams (1.2 oz), has a physical screen just 2 cm wide, and content is feed to the screen via a wired connection to an iPod. Although the T3-F is available for sale through Scalar's Japanese site for the equivalent of $330-$1,200 depending on your configuration, it hasn't shown up yet on their English site. Scalar has an additional model available as well, so if you have some skill in Japanese definitely check out the Japanese site. Full specs are also available at the Teleglasses site.

Like I said above, "Wow." Wearable technology has been around a little while, but this looks pretty slick (note in the video how the unit extends into place with a subtle nod). But I'm also left scratching my head on this. The T3-F is designed and marketed as a product for commuters and as such makes me think back to the first couple of times that someone sharing the same personal space as myself pulled out their cell and started yammering away like I wasn't two feet away from their moving lips. Now of course that kind of thing is commonplace and sadly nearly accepted behavior. Imagine stepping into a bus or train compartment a few years from now and being greeted by a sea of assimilated tech citizens. Scary? A little, but then again you may not even notice those around you since you could be wearing your own device by that time. Again, a little too close to the way members of the Borg collective ignored those around them.

Enough with the scare tactics. Check out the video:

--Tom Milnes

Easiest Hack Ever: Build Your Own iPhone/touch Stand Out of Practically Nothing

In a world choked full of iPhone docks and accessories, sometimes you don't want LED lightshows and holographic penguins dancing along the countertop--you just want something that'll hold your iPhone or touch upright.  And there are several ways to get just that using some household items, as some clever modders have discovered:

• Shiela at Nfocus Designs made a stand out of Tinkertoys:

• Got five pencils?  Got four rubber bands?  Then you've got an iPhone easel.

• How about a stand made out of a cleverly-folded business card?

• That still too high-tech for you?  Here's a stand made from a single paper clip.

(All credit goes to the authors/stand creators listed in the linked articles.)

--Aric A.

Yahoo TV Widgets Bring the Web to 2009 Samsung HDTVs

Samsung also announced an interface that brings web content right into the set for it's 2009 HDTVs. What's especially interesting about Samsung is that they are not using a proprietary system. Instead, they are using Yahoo's TV Widgets platform. Yahoo's system has an open API, which means pretty much any developer can create new widgets to bring make different types of content available. During the demo we got from Samsung at CES, we saw the YouTube videos, finance data, weather, and news widgets we've seen on other systems, but we also saw multiple movie rental and video on demand providers, and hookups to Flickr and Twitter. The widget that excited me most was something called Rallypoint, that lets you track fantasy league scores, standings, and player stats for all the players on your fantasy team in real time while you watch games on TV.  Here's the complete demo we got.

From Our Psychic Department: Microsoft Working On a Software Portal?

So it seems Microsoft is sending out a survey to users of the Windows 7 beta asking questions about the potential usefulness of a software center.  The survey asks users to rate the importance to the user of certain tasks that would be handled by a “single place for finding and managing updates for programs” for Windows.  Among the questions are those pertaining to the user wanting to have their programs all updated automatically, the ability to search for software from one place, the ability to install software only from trusted sources, and the ability for software being installed to automatically configure itself in relation to the rest of the system (for example, making any changes needed to network settings automatically so the program to run).

In our post last October called How Windows Can Save Itself: Three Things We Want to See in Windows 7, we talked about how much we’d like to see this very thing.  As we mentioned, a version of this already exists in Linux, which is a service called a package manager.  (You can see a version of Ubuntu’s graphical interface for their package manager “apt” to the right.)  In Linux, almost all the software available for your PC is uploaded to what’s called a software repository, and the package manager is a single program you can call up that will scrape the repositories you’ve configured and show you all the software you can install—usually on the order of several thousand programs, which you can search and browse and install by clicking checkboxes next to what you want to install and clicking “Apply”.  If the program you want requires another program in order to run, it’ll download the other program (called a “dependency”) after asking your permission.  The package manager also automatically updates any programs you’ve installed using it, so bug fixes and new functionality are delivered right away.

(Note: there are several other ways to install software in Linux, of course, but package managers like “apt” are the most popular method for obvious reasons.)

Needless to say, incorporating this functionality into Windows could be a coup for Microsoft.  The Windows platform itself has many strengths, but over the years, so much software and hardware has become available for it that doesn’t always play well together—after all, what motivation does a third-party developer have to make sure that its software is compatible with that of competitors--that it can be a nightmare resolving software conflicts and driver issues on a fully-loaded PC.  It’d be great to have a “brain” that can make all the software on your computer work together, and to be able to pitch that closet-full of install CDs.

In Linux, all the software is free, but Valve’s Steam service has already done a for-pay version of this concept for their PC games with great success, and the rising popularity of desktop Linux distributions like Ubuntu are showing that people are ready for this kind of seamless integration.  Apple has been able to present a level of seamlessness of this kind in its user experience, but only by tightly controlling the hardware and certification processes; if Microsoft can keep its platform as flexible to develop for as it is now but make the installation and management side of the equation as simple for the user as it is in Linux, they might just have a game on their hands.

Keep in mind there’s no hard evidence yet that this functionality will appear in Windows 7, but the possibility is encouraging to say the least.

--Aric A.