iPhone Review

 

So, I won’t say how due to security restrictions, but I have gotten to take an iPhone for a run. Not much on there so far that wasn’t demoed by Steve. So you all know the good stuff, so instead, here are my complaints:

1) battery is not replaceable (we all remember the ipod battery fiasco), this for me, is a killer, Im not paying another 5-600 in a year when the battery dies
2) web browsing is slow and cumbersome. Even on wifi, its equal or slower to a Blackberry with Edge. Overall, i’d only use it if i had to, looking up info on the web is still impossible.
3) No gps, come on, this should be standard now
4) Google maps, especially without wifi, is slow, very slow. Unlike on your computer, google maps on the iphone loads smaller squares, which lets you preview the map earlier, but takes forever to see everything.
5) No additional memory. Seems like 8gb is enough, but if they allowed a SD card, i could reserve some internal memory for important stuff, and quickly move pictures off and on the camera
6) the sim car has its own slot! wtf? why not make this a memory slot? b/c they dont want you taking the back off, maybe because they dont want you to replace the battery.
7) Typing is easier on the Blackberry 8300. Sorry, i said it, its just plain easier to feel the buttons, and i dont mess up the text as much.
Have to use iTunes for everything, good because its simple, bad because with it comes lock-ins and restrictions.
9) Movies look good, but as usual they kill the battery.

So, I’d buy it myself if 1) the price were lowered and 2) the battery were replaceable those are the deal killers for me personally.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/05/01/iphonesurvey/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

2/3 surveyed won’t buy it either.

Microsoft Silver Light

Heard of Flash? Its a very powerful platform.

Almost every person on the web has it installed, so when writing an application online, it makes sense to use it. Ajax can be tricky on different systems and browsers, flash will work 95% of the time on any system. Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, it has expanded flash to work on the desktop using Adobe Apollo.

Now, websites can develop, almost simultaneously for the web and desktop. However, Microsoft has not sat on its laurels. It just announced Silverlight, and its come guns a’blazing.

Notable features include, more functionality than ajax or flash, new and impressive effects, and finally 720p video online! Like Youtube but decent quality.

Most importantly, competition is important, and as big a monopoly Microsoft is, its good to see competition with flash, finally.

It looks very promising, hopefully it will be successful, Microsoft could use a win for morale, its been a while…

New Box.net Widget

Just found this thing, its great! Its a flash widget that plays music, photos and videos, and downloads other documents.

I love it for two reasons

1) Media just looks great in it, and it manages lots of files well

2) Why have a youtube, slide, music widget? on your page, this does everything! It does what it says beautifully, it allows you to access and share your media. I’m adding their demo for now, until i can find a use for it.

In the meantime, make one for yourself, it works almost everywhere: Get a Widget

Firefox

08

In case you haven’t heard, Firefox is the best browser around.

Its no wonder its the only browser recommended by Google, has fewer noticeable bugs and security holes, more features, and is one of the fastest browsers around.

Surprisingly, after its initial launch and large NY Times advertisement campaign, I haven’t heard much in terms of its market share increasing. At one point it was rapidly increasing. I’ve seen numbers that show its at most 10-12%, not much higher that it was 2 years ago.

Aside from Firefox, is a little mentioned app called Thunderbird. Its the simpliest way to access your email offline. I use it to backup my Gmail, and to allow me to access is on the go, where i cant get internet access. Check it out.

Link

Cell Chip

 

A CPU (Central Processing Unit) chip the size and weight of a fingernail, albeit a LARGE fingernail, has just been announced by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. This “cell chip” will be the most important microprocessor upgrade perhaps for the next decade for many reasons, the most significant being that this chip is designed for grid computing. Grid computing is a remarkable departure from today’s computer use. When you ask your computer to process something, for example, to rip a song from a CD, it does it without worrying about much anything else. This can be very wasteful if, for example, you are simply writing a document in Microsoft Word. This type of activity leaves about 90% of the computer processor essentially unused. Grid computing allows another cell chip user on your network to access and use these unused computer cycles. Now imagine computers using these chips world-wide. Using cell chips changes the independent desktop into a global computer, with people sharing processing power all over the world. This is also economically important as it now makes computing power a utility. People with cell chip computers can decide from whom they would like to rent extra cycles from (cycles being the unused processing power of your processor) and companies can build computers simply to “rent” their computing power to, in any country with fast internet.

Why should you care? The reason you should care is because the cell chip is set for a PlayStation 3 release promising movie-like quality in games. It has been tested to run at 5.6 GHz and promises to go even faster. As a comparison, most desktops run at 1-3 GHz. SO for those of you who spend the weekend playing Halo 2 in Bolton, this will make For samples of the cell chip in action, watch E3 this spring for movie demos of the PlayStation 3.

Open Source

 

For those of you who read my last article on iTunes and liked or disliked it, I received both kinds of email, let me say that the purpose of it was not so much to compare it to other services, but simply to let you, the reader, know what Apple tries to hide. Rather than write an article correcting Zach Gage’s pro-iTunes inaccuracies, I thought it might be better to show you programs that are not made from money-sucking, vampirish, and yes EVIL corporations. These programs are aptly called “open-source.” The programs mentioned below are alternatives that are either free of cost, or simply a better solution to what companies offer and charge for.

Open source is loosely defined as software whose source code (a program’s code) is made publicly and freely available for use and/or modification. Open source software is made so that anyone can download it for free and modify it to their personal satisfaction. It is the main reason behind Linux’s success in the operating system world. Companies can replace all their Microsoft and Apple software with comparable programs that are free.

 

1. My favorite open source program is Gaim. It is my favorite because it replaces the ad-filled and otherwise crummy AIM program with a very similar interface and offers more features. Gaim, to put it plainly, is a chat program for instant messaging. You may have heard of Trillian, also a very good chat program, but Gaim goes beyond that. I don’t have the space to list all the benefits of using Gaim so let me just name a couple. Gaim has no ads, it can become partially or wholly transparent, and will work with other chat services including AOL’s AIM, ICQ, IRC, JABBER, MSN, Yahoo and Napster. It has a very clean and simple interface that can be customized with plug-ins. As with most open source it requires less memory and runs faster. After some initial learning time, you won’t want to go back to AIM.
2. There are many great programs to list so I’ll be brief. Another favorite is Firefox. My first technology article was all about it so I won’t go into the whole speech again, but here is a quick list: it is fast, ad free, simple and clean, can block ads, can display weather, is safer that IE (Internet Explorer), and uses less memory. I will probably end up listing this for all the programs because less system memory usage means more RAM for other programs which can translate into faster performance.
3. I recently found a wonderful program called musikCube. It looks similar to iTunes, so some of you in favor of that interface may like this as well. The advantages of musikCube are that it is very fast, uses very little memory, is ad free, doesn’t make you install software, can play music iTunes can’t, and has features most players do not.
4. Any of you work with audio? Audacity is a great program for editing or recording audio. It is very easy to use, unlike professional software I have tried, and is very fast. I used it once to edit out applause on a cd I have and it worked flawlessly; it even re-saved the file as an mp3. Another program I recently found is called Kristal and is also very feature-rich and free.
5. For those of you who use Norton anti-virus, Sophos, or Mcafee, I personally don’t use any of them, you might notice how annoying they can be. All of these force you to update when it might not be very convenient to do so. They also might start scanning files when you don’t want them to and make your computer, overall, very slow. Enter ClamWin. It is much less advanced, but that is a good thing. ClamWin will scan your computer for viruses manually or automatically and will auto-update its virus library, and that’s it. And really, that is all one needs. My only recommendation is to go into the preferences and tell ClamWin automatically to remove the virus, not simply notify you. ClamWin is significantly faster and much less of a drain on your system. I did a test with it and Clamwin found the viruses the others did, only faster. If you are not convinced you can also simply use an online scanner; I recommend Housecall (search for it in Google).
6. Tired of Microsoft Office or want a free alternative? OpenOffice, made by Sun Microsystems, is a free and feature-rich alternative, which looks very similar to what you are used to. There are 5 main components in Openoffice.org 1.0. They are Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Math. Writer is a word processor like Microsoft Word; Calc is a spreadsheet application like Excel; Impress is a presentation application like PowerPoint; Draw edits digital graphics; Math constructs mathematical equations. This suite can not only read Microsoft word documents but can save them as a MS document as well.
7. For those of you who want but cannot afford the $700 Adobe Photoshop there is GIMP or (GNU Image Manipulation Program). There is not much to say about GIMP other than it can do much of what Photoshop does for free.
8. Finally, there is VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player. If any of you watch movies you have ripped or downloaded, or watch DVD’s, VLC can play anything, and I mean ANYTHING. It’s free, fast, takes very little memory, and can play any movie or audio format known to mankind.

If you’re interested in more, here is a list of a few more great programs: LameFE, Monkey Audio, foobar2000, Quicktime Alternative and Real Player Alternative (highly recommended), Filezilla, DAEMON tools, and Emule.

Summer Fun

Seeing as this is the last article for the school year, I thought I would share with you a bunch of gadgets and websites that will keep you busy during the summer.

 

The Fanning – Useful for those of you hanging around the beach this summer, wearing sandals, drinking beer. These sandals have an integrated bottle opener built into the bottom of the sole. http://www.reef.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While still not as fashionable or easy to use as the iPod, Sony’s newest mp3 player, the NW-HD5, holds 30 gigs of music with an abundant 40 hours of playback (compare to the iPod’s measly 12). The best part is Sony has developed a LCD screen that tilts with the user, as you tilt the device left or right, the screen appears to do the same, giving the user the optimal viewing angle at all times. Besides having the longest battery life of any portable player, it also has a removable battery, offering the ability to have a backup battery.

 

 

 

Are you one of those people who use your laptop for your music and hate the tinny small sound it produces? You probably would appreciate the Creative Audigy 2 ZS Notebook. This is a sound card that you plug into your laptop’s PCMCIA slot. It adds significant quality to the sound being recorded or played on you laptop, most noticeably reducing that hiss noise you hear when you turn up the volume on your speakers. Great for audiophiles.

 

 

 

 

Well, soon the PlayStation 3, Xbox 2 and whatever the new Nintendo system will be called, will all be out. Recently, pictures of the Xbox “360” have surfaced on the web. While it may not be the actual thing, it’s said to be authentic, so here is a sneak peak. It should be a very nice system, not as powerful as the PlayStation 3, but out long before it and with some nice features. It will be officially announced on May 12^th.

Notable Websites

 

Notable Websites

Slashdot – A news site updated often and run by Geeks. The news they post can be very sophisticated at times, being only of interest to hardcore Linux fans, but most of what they post is very interesting and there first. I’ve seen them post news stories well in advance of other papers, so that some even link back to Slashdot. One of the best and most popular tech news sites on the web.

www.slashdot.com

 

Gizmodo – A Gadget depository. It is run by a guy who sits in his apartment in NY, reading emails people send him about gadgets and other interesting stuff, and posting what he likes. The editor also provides many amusing comments along with the gadgets. Highly recommended, you’ll find out about gadgets well before they are released.

www.gizmodo.com

 

Google Maps – I love this site, they are doing amazing things with their technology. Google has recently released an update that tracks all the taxi cabs in NY city, allowing you to find the closest one in real time. There have also been tons of hacks online where even universities are adding information like the Boston subway system to the maps. Very clean interface.

maps.google.com

 

Cartoon Fridge – I was recently shown this by a friend. This site has tons of cartoons viewable online such as the Simpsons (seasons 1 – 12!), Family Guy, Futurama and others.

http://www.cartoon-fridge.com/

 

Enjoy your summer, and wear sun block.

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/ped_7_1_What_You_Need_To_Know_About_Skin_Cancer.asp?sitearea=&level=

Gadget of the Week

 

 

My first gadget isn’t really a gadget, but is still worth mentioning. Skype is a free VoIP (voice over IP) program. Imagine AIM with the ability to talk, but better. It is the best attempt thus far to turn your computer into a phone. I had all my family members install Skype and we now all talk to each other for free. It has saved my brother, who lives in Peru, hundreds of dollars a month in phone bills. Check it out at www.skype.com

 

To make up for last weeks missing gadget of the week, let me mention the PSP (PlayStation Portable). The newest, and by far shiniest, portable gaming system. Having been able to try one myself I can say it lives up to all the hype. The best part of the PSP is by far its sharp and vivid screen. The downsides, which I love finding in electronics, are the following: it can only hold up to 1 gb of mp3’s or movies, it can’t play common movie formats without being converted lowering quality, battery life isn’t long enough, can’t read from common memory formats like compact flash, is expensive. Otherwise, it’s the best available, I suggest you try one for yourself.

Things you probably didn’t know # 2

For this article I would like to continue dispeling rumors and misconceptions in the technology world.

 

1. Backing up my files to a CD is safe; not any longer. If you look on the back of a CDR, or recordable blank CD, you might see a deep blue or green color; these are the most common types of recordable CDs. Blank CDs have been selling for some time with the promise that they can archive your data for a hundred years. Studies are now coming out showing that some CDs may only last as long as 5 years! When a CD is created, it is literally burned. The drive uses a laser to read and burn pits on the disc to create ones or zeros. Over time, the dye used in the CD starts to decay, making if harder and harder to read the data on the CD. Some people have found CDs created only 5 years ago are today indecipherable. Also, leaving a burned CD face up in the sun for only one day can do the same thing. You might notice CDs you buy in the music store have a silver or gold back.. These are far more likely to last 100 years as they are made of better quality materials, but can’t be created by the home user. The best bet one has is to re-burn your CDs every 5 or 10 years. Another option is to buy “gold” backed CDs made by a company called Mitsui; some claim these will last longer than the rest. They cost more than the Memorex’s you’d find at BestBuy but are worth it for archiving.
2. Mega pixels, the more the better. This is not necessarily true. In fact, scientists who work at NASA only used a one mega pixel camera on the Rover Spirit, the one currently on Mars. For now, more mega pixels do give you a sharper picture, but many cameras in the 8 mega pixel range are sacrificing image noise for more pixels. Noise in a digital camera picture can be seen often in pictures taken at night or in homogeneous surfaces. Noise in a picture appears as monochromatic grain or colored waves which can produce some very noticeable defects in a picture (imagine a bunch of colored specs covering parts of a picture). The problem with most digital cameras is that when a company adds more pixels, the size of each pixel has to be reduced which in turn increases the amount spillover from other pixels (when a pixel becomes saturated from light photons, it can affect others around it). The only solutions so far to this problem are to buy a single lens reflex camera, very expensive, or to use clever algorithms to remove noise. Many cameras with this problem try to reduce the noise by automatically using a longer exposure time, resulting in less noise but blurrier images. My suggestion is if you must have those next generation 16 mega pixel cameras, get an SLR. SLR (single lens reflex) cameras inherently have almost no noise because they use much larger light sensitive chips.
3. Flash memory or USB keys can die, quickly. You have probably noticed all those flashy USB memory keys being sold everywhere. They use flash memory just like your digital camera does and so are very useful for quickly moving files. When you write data to a USB key, you are lessening the lifespan of the device. Imagine the memory on a USB key as a very small metal grid. Each time you change a bit on that grid, a link has to be melted and broken. This can happen only so many times before the materials are destroyed. This does not mean one shouldn’t use flash memory; I use my USB key often. One way to extend the life of the key is to save to your hard drive while typing a document and wait until you’re finished to move it to the USB key. Don’t impulsively save every other word to the USB key or it will be gone before you know it.