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- SlashGear Weekly Roundup Video – April 10, 2011
- For a Former Gadget Reviewer, I’m Rubbish At Advice
- SlashGear Week in Review – Week 15 2011
| SlashGear Weekly Roundup Video – April 10, 2011 Posted: 10 Apr 2011 02:52 PM PDT For this week’s video we have a slightly different format, highlighting 5 news topics of the week rather than our usual 10. We wanted to talk more about each while keeping our videos nice and short. Also, product reviews and featured columns of the week are grouped together towards the end. And, we have a special giveaway to announce, so continue after the cut to find out what it is! 5. Commodore 64 4. Facebook Open Commute Project 3. Bluestacks is Android’s Parallels for Windows 2. Acer Iconia Tab A500 1. Google & Android News Product Reviews: Columns: Like Us on Facebook! Relevant Entries on SlashGear
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| For a Former Gadget Reviewer, I’m Rubbish At Advice Posted: 10 Apr 2011 10:14 AM PDT I was reading through Chris Davies’ column on giving gadget advice, and I thought I would add my perspective. I used to be a gadget reviewer. The first product I ever reviewed was the Sony D-EJ01 anniversary edition Discman. A Discman, for you young ‘uns, was a large music player that played compact discs. A compact disc? It’s like a record, um, or a DVD, err . . . it’s a single-use MP3 made out of plastic. I know it sounds silly. We were silly in the 90s. [Image credit: Mr B] I was allowed to review the D-EJ01 for etown.com for the simple reason that I owned it, and the editors weren’t getting a review sample. I was certainly not expert enough to offer my opinion about sound clarity, but I could talk about usability, and the DJ-01 was a unique device in those respects. In any case, after a long hiatus from gadget writing, I started reviewing again in 2004. I started small, writing mostly about laptop bags, accessories, and occasionally software. In 2006, I started working for a gadget site, mostly reviewing phones. Within a year, I was running the site, and we expanded to cover cameras, laptops, multimedia players, GPS devices, and more. I believe that between the years of 2006 and 2010, I reviewed more phones than any other single reviewer at a major tech site. At least that’s the claim I made in my last job interview, and they bought it, so it’s probably true. Like Chris, I get the question all the time. “What phone should I buy?” My first answer? Buy a Samsung (disclosure: I now work for Samsung). But even if I stick with my paid bias, that still doesn’t settle the question. There are plenty of Samsungs, after all. My next question is always “What do you want to do with your phone?” That’s a question I learned working at the Apple Store. The problem is, most people have very simple ideas for what they want to do. Most people who ask for advice have simplified their expectations on purpose so that they don’t end up with something too complicated. At the Apple Store, nobody ever came in and said “I want to create awesome videos of my family vacation that look like movie trailers,” or “I want to create multi-track music that I can share with friends.” No, usually it was “I want to send email and browse the Web.” The same is true for phone advice. When I ask someone what they want to do with their phone, I usually get the same answer. “I want to take photos and maybe send text messages.” Face, meet palm. What I should do is tell them to walk into any cell phone store in the world and throw a dart. If they hit a phone, buy it, because it will definitely take photos and send text messages. It is difficult to find a phone that doesn’t do such things. The answer I dread is “I just want a phone that makes good calls.” Sorry, buddy. Phones don’t do that anymore. I’m kidding, of course. But call quality is much more dependent on where you are making your calls than on the phone itself. Trust me. I work in a lab with an anechoic chamber. Our phones sound great, but when you try making a call from a supermarket with thick lead walls or in a moving convertible with the top down, that quality is significantly compromised. So, I don’t give phone advice much anymore (except to tell people to buy a Samsung (see disclosure above)). What really interests me is the effect that reviewers have on products. It’s a question I’m constantly asking. Do reviewers reflect the desires of their readers? Can reviewers gauge the tastes of the consuming public? Or are reviewers more accurately described as taste-makers? When I was a reviewer, I tried to be the former. I wanted to reflect what my readers would feel when they actually purchased a device. I aimed my testing at real-life scenarios, and tried to express my results in terms to which most users could relate. I shunned the scientific. I hate benchmark scores, because very few consumers unwrap their new laptop and immediately run a benchmark. Benchmarks have no meaning in real life tasks. But I did describe the effect of using a very fast machine to play very awesome games, or edit very large movie files. I tried to be as subjective as possible. There is a significant emotional component in making a technology buying decision. Because of the nature of technology today, we tend to keep our devices close, and use them more than we use almost anything else. I use my laptop far more than I use my car, my sofa, or my bath towels. I tell my laptop secrets I would never tell my food processor. My laptop is the only thing besides my house that I leave protected by a key, and I’m more worried when I leave my laptop unprotected than when I accidentally leave the front door unlocked. There is also an emotional component to the instant the buying decision is made. If you’ve ever been inside a perfectly lit Apple Store, with those gorgeous butcher block tables, then you know what I mean. If you’ve ever waited twenty minutes for a Best Buy salesperson to come to your aid, you also know what I mean. This might not be the best way to make an informed buying decision, but it would be foolhardy to think it isn’t a factor. Increasingly, I’ve come to believe that reviewers are actually taste-makers more than reflections of the public interest. That isn’t a bad thing, it simply changes the way manufacturers approach a potential reviewer. I see many reviewers and tech journalists fawning over products that would make little sense in the lives of an average consumer. Not bad products, just products that don’t make sense to a practical, budget-minded buyer. The MacBook Air is one example. I know far too many people who bought a MacBook Air. A disproportionate number, I’m sure, compared to the general populace. For most of these people, it was a second, or even a third machine, and it fulfilled an emotional desire more than a practical need. I have no problem with that. When I hear tech journalists writing about having two different tablets, a 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab and an iPad, for instance, I start to question their judgment. I read a story recently from a writer recommending buyers consider multiple tablets for different applications. Talk about living in a silicon tower. Two tablets will probably run you $800 – $1000, and will invariably do less overall than a PC you could buy for a comparable price. Better to buy one thing that fits most of your needs than splurge on two things that only do half of what you want. In the end, though, Chris is right. There are very few ‘bad’ devices out there, if you’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel. If you spend more than $100 on a phone, you’re probably getting a fine phone. If you spend $600 on a tablet, as long as it’s not buggy and obviously rushed to market, you’ll end up with a capable device. I’m not suggesting you spend too much, but there is usually an acceptable range in which almost every available device from a reputable manufacturer is going to be a satisfying pick. Relevant Entries on SlashGear
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| SlashGear Week in Review – Week 15 2011 Posted: 10 Apr 2011 06:20 AM PDT Welcome to another edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! Early Monday I ran across a cool printer hack that turns your ink jet into a printer that prints with invisible ink. The ink is lemon juice and the person that needs to read the invisible ink sprays it with an iodine solution to make the letters viewable. The commercial for the Touchwood SH-08C from DoCoMo has turned up on YouTube. The commercial uses a big handmade wooden ramp with xylophone keys that play classical music when a ball rolls down the ramp. A dude showed off the prank he played on his wife on April Fool’s day. He took his name on her iPhone, changed it to AP Mobile, and then sent a text saying that the Pentagon had confirmed the Roswell crash was alien. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer got its official product page Monday. The official product page turned up cementing the final information missing for consumers, though we already knew all there was to know about the Transformer. Anonymous has hacked Playstation.com and Sony.com as part of its retaliation against the legal action with GeoHot and other hackers by Sony. I am sure this will only lead to more legal action by Sony. What may be the coolest Wii mod ever turned up Monday called the Wii UNLimited Edition. The hack out the Wii components inside a different case that is liquid cooled. Hackers have accessed the database of one of the largest email marketing firms out there called Epsilon. The hack opened up email addresses belonging to customers of JPMorgan Chase & Co, Kroger, Capital One Financial, and TiVo to more spam. Nikon unveiled a cool new DSLR camera this week called the D5100. The camera is reasonably priced at about $900 in kit form, records HD movies, and has up to ISO 102,400 when extended plus lots more. Ubisoft Battle Tag has crossed the FCC. This is sort of like laser tag for the kids of today. Developers of Android apps are saying that fragmentation in the Android market is a huge problem. The fragmentation is thanks to a bunch of different OS versions and different handsets with vastly different capabilities. A prototype leaked that is supposed to be a 5th generation iPod touch with 128GB of storage inside. The image also shows that the physical home button on the device has been replaced with a capacitive one. A strange product that is likely fake surfaced called the RE-35 that looks like a can of film for 35mm. The device supposedly has a sensor that makes your 35mm camera into a digital camera to print digital prints. Analysts are claiming that the Motorola Xoom and Atrix 4G are failures. The claim comes after the analyst did channel checks and found sell-through to be low thanks to stiff competition on the market. A cool all-touch HP webOS flavor called Stingray leaked mid-week with the Verizon Pre3 smartphone. The OS would make the keyboard free smartphone work better and might get HP back into the smartphone market if the Pre3 doesn’t suck. We put up our review of the T-Mobile Nokia C7 Astound this week. We think it could be a contender, but has less mindshare than Apple and Android devices. GameStop has confirmed plans to offer a gaming tablet later in 2011. Right now, the company is still trying to decide on using its own design or another slate design available via OEMs. Apple has rejected an iPhone app for lack of functionality that offered all iAds in one place. The crazy thing is that Apple later offered its own app that does the same thing. Michelin has developed new inner tubes for bicycle tires that can repair their own punctures. The tubes use a special design and air pressure to seal the puncture and have a fluid inside to seal the puncture as well. The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 has been spied in the wild. It has a touchscreen and the QWERTY keyboard that BlackBerry is known for. Android is expected to own 49% of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. As Android is growing fast, Symbian will be shrinking nearly as quickly. Geeks around in the 80′s will remember the Commodore 64 computer back then that was cool and really expensive. The Commodore name is back on a new computer that has Intel Atom power inside. Reports came in that a student is making $50,000 yearly jailbreaking iPhones. He started for friends and then put ads on Craigslist and turned it into a profitable business. The FCC mandated new data roaming rules for AT&T and Verizon this week. The new rule forces the big carriers to open up their data networks to smaller carriers just as they do with voice networks. Apparently a geek picked up a very cheap 500GB HDD that was a Chinese knock off of a real HDD with 500GB of storage. Unsurprisingly the thing didn't work and when it was opened it has short-term memory inside not HDD storage. AMD has been trying to round up some new Andorid talent for its operations. The company is looking at offering chipsets and other hardware with support for the Android OS. If you are a fan of the video game Portal, you will be glad to hear that Portal 2 is almost here. The game is set to come out on April 19. An elementary school in Main is issuing iPad 2 tablets to Kindergarten students for free. A teacher found with her own iPad 2 that the tablet helps kids having trouble learning significantly and the school board was so impressed that they voted to purchase the tablets for all kids. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time! Relevant Entries on SlashGear
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