Posted by alect on February 10th, 2010 in
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What’s less romantic: Buying something practical or buying something generic? Roses are right out. But can a gadget be sweet?
First thing’s first: I’m a guy. So I’m going to speak to my fellow men here. If the demographic reports are the least bit true, men make up the majority of our readership here.
And if my personal experience is any measure, it’s men who need the most help buying Valentine’s Day gifts in the first place.
That said, let’s remember the fundamental operating principle of all intergender relationships: Women are more like men than they are dissimilar. As the sage relationship counselor Miranda Lambert once advised men on the prowl, “We’re just like you. Only prettier.”
And if you’re gay, I suspect most of this still applies. Gay folk might have it slightly easier since they’re buying for the same sex, but they still need to get the romance right. If you’re buying for someone transgendered, they already told me what they want for Valentine’s Day, and it’s that you stop calling them “Optimus Prime” in bed.
First Things First Some More
Okay, answer me this: Are you buying something for a long-term partner or someone you’re trying to woo? That’ll make a big difference in the sort of gadgets that might be appropriate.
I asked some friends for their input.
Long-Term Has More Leeway
“Kourosh gave me my MacBook Air and an iPhone for Valentine’s Day two years ago. Best gifts, best hubby ever!” said Kristen Philipkoski.
Now it didn’t hurt that those are pretty spendy gifts, which, let’s face it, amps up the romance in the right situation. Especially in long-term relationships, where it shows you’re still in it to win it and big gifts don’t come off as desperate.
But don’t miss the most important thing: Kourosh bought Kristen two things that made her daily life better on an ongoing basis. He didn’t just drop a couple of grand to impress—the large amount of money showed his confidence that Kristen would love her gifts. You can take this sort of risk when you’re in a long-term relationship because you should have a good idea what sort of things your partner would really use.
Be careful, though! I once bought a girlfriend a sewing machine for her birthday, a gift she’d claimed she’d wanted for years. But when she never got around to actually using it, I couldn’t help but be hurt. That was on me—but just be aware before you invest too heavily in gadgets that imply that you want your significant other to change their behavior or which have a built-in fail state. (Which precariously includes most gadgets.)
Another pal, Ghostpony, warned, “I once bought my girlfriend a ricemaker for Christmas. Let’s just say it didn’t go over well. In my defense, it was a Zojirushi.”
If you have to explain to your girlfriend why the gift is really special, you’re off target—buying for you, not her.
If You’re Still Getting to Know Her
No matter how much money you’re ready to spend, keep it modest. Under $200, probably. And less is probably better. Lots of little gifts with which you can keep surprising her are probably the best.
iPods are a perennial favorite, but don’t let Apple guilt you into spending too much. A good rule of thumb for buying women gifts while you’re dating is to never spend so much that you’re going to make them even begin to question that you’re trying to buy their affection. Better an iPod nano than an iPod Touch, unless you’re sure they really would rather have a Touch.
If she’s already got an iPod of any sort, skip it. Sorry, but it’s just too thoughtless. In fact, I think that’s important enough to bold: Never buy her an upgrade.
Besides, if the relationship never goes anywhere—likely—you won’t feel like such a rube for spending too much money on a token.
Point-and-shoot cameras tend to go over well. Plus you can use it right then with her, which is a huge bonus. Especially when she’s taking pictures of you doing other romantic things.
Kindles and Nooks show that you have noticed she can read, or at least enjoys the way the squiggly shapes make her brains feel.
Try to keep it physically small. My gut feeling is that smaller, well-designed gadgetry is more “feminine” than something that’s pink or red. (Correct me if I’m wrong, ladies.) Plus, it makes it easier to…
Present the Present Properly, Poindexter
Valentine’s Day presents are about sending a message. “Hey, human. I enjoy your unique composition and would perhaps like to copulate in the future.” (You can use that on your card. No charge.)
Take whatever you’re giving out of its package. Unwrap the packing gauze. Charge the batteries. Load it up with music or apps or flash memory if it needs it. And by god, put it into a cute box or—if you must—a gift bag. You can make a cordless screwdriver at least borderline romantic if you put it in a nice box. (And if you’re incredibly good looking.)
However! Save the box and receipt somewhere else just in case! Don’t make a big deal out of it, but if you can tell she’s really not into it you can gently let her know that you wouldn’t be hurt if she decided to exchange it. Most stores will do gift receipts throughout the year, too, not only during the holidays. Wait until the day after, though.
Here’s the Real Secret
While the principle applies to gift-giving in general, it’s ten times as important during Valentine’s Day: If your gift doesn’t show that you’ve been paying attention, you have failed.
You can ignore everything else I’ve said if you just get this one right. Has she talked about really wanting a DSLR? That trumps my “keep it small” suggestion, provided it won’t be so expensive that it sends you into creepy attempted sugar daddy territory.
Heck, find her a nice used one and good 50mm lens on the cheap. The more your gift evidences your forethought and effort, the better it is.
A corollary: If you’re not sure that she’d like a gadget as a Valentine’s present, you might not even need to buy her a Valentine’s Day gift. Are you sure she’s expecting one from you?
Post-Gadget, Combo with Tradition
So flowers, chocolates, trips to the spa or weekend getaways? All the “romantic” stuff that just screams “I have no idea what to get you so I got you this baseline item”? That stuff is totally great in conjunction with a thoughtful gift. Give her an iPod because she lost her last one—and flowers. Give her a camera—in a box of chocolates. Fill up her Kindle with awesome ebooks—then send her to get a massage. Alone. (Sorry, but couple’s massage isn’t as relaxing.)
(While we’re on the subject: every woman in the world loves flowers. I don’t care how many times you’ve heard her say, “Oh, what a waste flowers are!” Even if she really means it, she’ll still be completely charmed when you hand her a bouquet. Any women who disagree with me should send me their address so I can send them flowers.)
(Oh, I closed my parenthesis before I got to the most important thing about Valentine’s flowers: Never, ever red roses. White or pink roses if you must. But lilies, tulips, orchids? Invariably a better choice. Ask your florist to make you something special for her. They do that, you know. Red roses are for toreadors and pimply junior high dancers.)
An Idea for Next Year
There are tons of great gifts available on Etsy. But did you know you can get the Etsy crafters to make you a custom product? Etsy Alchemy is like an inverted eBay: You describe what you want; people put up proposals and bids; you pick the one that seems best.
What’s clever about this is that, as a human process, Alchemy can be used to outsource your gift-giving and romance ideas. I’ve put up requests before that only described the woman for whom the gift was for—but made no mention at all of any specific item. Dozens of folks sprang into action, suggesting items she might enjoy based off of my description. Outsourced romance is the future.
A Final Warning: Sex Gadgets
This one is easy: If you live together or are in a similar long-term situation, these are fine. If you’ve just started sleeping together, avoid the toys. I think buying sex toys for a partner can be really sweet, but the inherent sexual underpinnings of Valentine’s Day sends it over the skeevy top in a new relationship. It’s like bringing a toothbrush on a first date.
Image courtesy of Rachel A.K.
Posted by alect on February 10th, 2010 in
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Have you heard the exciting news?! Comcast is rebranding as Xfinity! We decided to help them out by calling on our lovely readers to create the first Xfinity ads, and I think they did a bang-up job.
First Place—Jeffer Mitchell
Second Place—Alexander Deluca
Third Place—Die Hard Dan
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Posted by alect on February 9th, 2010 in
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The point has grown cliche by now, but it’s true. Every week your submissions to Shooting Challenges blow me away. And your polar panoramas just upped that ante on every challenge to come.
Honorable Mention (non-original photography)
Subject: Denali, Alaska
Built from 9 photos
Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm (27mm /35mm equiv.)
Aperture: ƒ/8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
As you can obviously tell by climate, I broke rule 2 because I’m a college student and don’t have time to go out and take photos, but I did want to test my hand at the challenge!
-Isaac Chambers
Second Runner Up
Camera: Sony Cybershot DSC-W50
F-stop: f/5
Exposure time: 1/200 sec.
ISO Speed: ISO-80
Focal length: 16mm
Flash: None
I leave my office right around sunset everyday and park on the top of a garage in the middle of downtown Charleston, SC. I saw a particularly nice sunset and pulled out my basic point and shoot (Sony Cybershot DSC-W50) and took a series of 5 pictures to stitch into a panoramic. After creating the Polar Panorama, I merely adjusted the brightness so that the buildings would show more detail.
-David Crosby
First Runner Up
I shot these with a Nikon D60, 18-55mm kit lens. This was seven 20-second exposures at f5 of the quad at Oklahoma City University.
-Robert Rickner
Winner
Camera: Nikon D5000
Lens: Tamron 28-135
ISO: 500
Exposure: 1/250
Location: Seattle, WA
I had gone out shooting trying to emulate the look of old contrasty but yet washed out photos of boats I had seen all over the harbor and its various shops and thought it would make an interesting juxtaposition using a new technique with an old look. Taken in the Ballard Harbor.
-Tyler Yates
This was the hardest week to judge yet, and I don’t know that anyone can really “win” at art. (So as always, praise our intrepid photographers in the comments.)
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Also, for those of you saying “I wish this was in a wallpaper,” just go here: [Gizmodo Flickr]
Posted by alect on February 8th, 2010 in
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Did you blink during the Super Bowl commercial breaks? Too bad if you did, because it means you may have missed the anemic number of gadget or tech-related commercials worth talking about tomorrow at the water cooler. But! Megan Fox!
Megan Fox is an obvious choice, for obvious reasons (if she’s your thing): She had a Motoblur, and we’re a gadget blog! See? Obvious. Anyway, tweeting from a tub on her new phone, she pondered what would happen if she sent a picture of her bathing out to the world. Hijinks ensued, people were hurt, and even a gay couple somehow got distracted by the fox that is Megan Fox:
newVideoPlayer( {“type”:”video”,”player”:”http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/qffDaLmDinw&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22″,”customParams”:[],”width”:500,”height”:412,”ratio”:0.824,”flashData”:”",”embedName”:null,”objectId”:null,”noEmbed”:false,”source”:”youtube”} );
And such is the power of Fox that there were scenes that didn’t make the final cut.
Then there was Beyonce, fresh off her Grammy performance, performing again for Vizio. Surrounded by Internet memes and celebrities, Twitter and what appeared to be an army of automobile assembly line robots (hopefully not ones from Toyota), she sang and sold that company’s Via/Internet Apps technology. Think Internet on your HDTV, not because I say so or because that’s exactly what it is, but because that’s the message Vizio assaulted viewers with during the 60-second clip:
newVideoPlayer( {“type”:”video”,”player”:”http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/cHxmRSYDazE&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22″,”customParams”:[],”width”:500,”height”:412,”ratio”:0.824,”flashData”:”",”embedName”:null,”objectId”:null,”noEmbed”:false,”source”:”youtube”} );
Tough love was the story for Intel’s Jeffrey the Robot. The commercial was supposedly for Intel’s Core processor line, but I know the truth: Robot uprising. It 20 years’ time we can all look back at this commercial, when poor Jeffrey was snubbed For The Last Time by his human overlords:
newVideoPlayer( {“type”:”video”,”player”:”http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/bbifmRBBN6Q&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22″,”customParams”:[],”width”:500,”height”:412,”ratio”:0.824,”flashData”:”",”embedName”:null,”objectId”:null,”noEmbed”:false,”source”:”youtube”} );
Lastly, there’s one we actually covered yesterday. Google. Its poignant ad about a search-happy boy in love with a French girl aired yesterday, on the Internet, which is probably fitting. We’ll revisit it again here if you missed it tonight:
newVideoPlayer( {“type”:”video”,”player”:”http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/nnsSUqgkDwU&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22″,”customParams”:[],”width”:500,”height”:412,”ratio”:0.824,”flashData”:”",”embedName”:null,”objectId”:null,”noEmbed”:false,”source”:”youtube”} );
Sigh.
Personally, for me the ads were a bit stale this year. Even the Bud Light beer ads, which have made me laugh out loud on occasion in years past, felt a little tired. Betty White was a standout though, and there were back-to-back ads depicting grown men in their underwear. Possibly a first there. Also a first: Seeing a two-timing baby talk about eTrade while his “milk-a-holic” girl on the side blew up his shit over a webcam.
The one Bud Light ad I will give props to, however, was their Autotune bit. It’s a stretch including here on Gizmodo, but we have a history with that app (iPhone, anyone?), and we’ll take an opportunity here to thank Budweiser for hopefully killing the tech off for good with this Super Bowl ad:
newVideoPlayer( {“type”:”video”,”player”:”http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/mXoPloew3bk&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22″,”customParams”:[],”width”:500,”height”:412,”ratio”:0.824,”flashData”:”",”embedName”:null,”objectId”:null,”noEmbed”:false,”source”:”youtube”} );
OK, I admit it, I smiled a bit watching that a second time. Guilty.
The entire crop is over at YouTube in one convenient package (Fox’s is notably absent at the moment, although they appear to be updating throughout the night).
Posted by alect on February 6th, 2010 in
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Like other substance addicts, tech-crazed geeks live in a state of denial. Let’s face it, if you’re reading Gizmodo, you’re probably addicted to technology to some degree. But just how addicted are you? Take this simple test to find out.
Answer each of the 50 questions below and give yourself one point per question you answer “yes” to. At the end, score yourself. Be honest, this is just for your own benefit… until you report your shocking score in comments, that is.
1. Do you eat most of your meals while at the computer or in front of the television?
2. Do you sometimes bring your laptop when you sit on the toilet?
3. Do you check your feeds more than 1x per hour?
4. Do you make a nervous habit out of refreshing your inbox over and over, just in case someone emailed you in the last 45 seconds?
5. Can you not remember the last time you didn’t check online reviews before eating at a new restaurant?
6. Do you freak out if you’re in a car and there’s no GPS?
7. Does the verb “tweet” come up regularly in your real-life conversations?
8. Have you ever changed vacation plans based on wi-fi availability?
9. Are there more than two portable electronic devices within reach right now?
10. If your house were on fire, would you run in to rescue your laptop?
11. Are you closer with some online-only friends than people you actually see in real life?
12. Are you pretty sure you’d have killed yourself if you lived in the days before Internet?
13. Do you buy things online that you could easily drive across town to get in person?
14. Do “electronics” have their own category in your monthly budget?
15. Are you a member of any sort of online “guild?”
16. Do you answer questions in support forums when you’re bored?
17. Do you bring your smartphone with you to church?
18. Do you own 3 or more video gaming systems? (Oh come on, portables count.)
19. Do you have multiple t-shirts with references to Internet memes, linux, or webcomics?
20. Do you know what the word “meme” means, for that matter?
21. Has your significant other (or mom, if applicable) ever banned you from your smartphone?
22. Do you spend more time on Facebook than you do in the presence of actual people?
23. Are you currently in a virtual relationship? (WOW, Second Life, etc)
24. Do you have 3 or more active social media accounts?
25. When something happens in your life, is your first thought usually “How can I fit this into 140 characters?”
26. Do you need multiple wall outlets to charge all your stuff at night?
27. When you sit down in a coffeeshop, do you tend to position yourself close to a power outlet “just in case”?
28. Do you generally spend most of your day looking at a computer screen and then go home… only to look at a computer screen for the rest of the night?
29. Have phrases like “BRB” and “ROFL” worked their way into your real vocabulary?
30. Do you often skip meals because you’ve lost track of time in front of the computer?
31. Do you call people by their screen names when you see them in real life?
32. Do you have more than five tabs open in your browser right now?
33. Are there more than three screens of some kind in the room you’re in right now?
34. Are there more computers in your house than there are people?
35. Do you tweet or read blogs while watching movies at home?
36. Do you put your phone on vibrate at the movie theater rather than turn it off, even though you’re not expecting anything important?
37. Have you ever turned down a romantic encounter in order to play video games?
38. Does your Internet usage cut into the time you should be spending on personal hygiene?
39. When you see the last names Cerf, Otellini, Ballmer and Berners-Lee, do you know who is being mentioned?
40. Do you ever leave your laptop open in social settings, even though you aren’t actually doing anything on it?
41. Have you ever had a dream where you were surfing the Internet?
42. Can you type text messages faster than you can handwrite the same words?
43. Have you ever left an event or date early so you could get online?
44. Would you classify yourself as an “expert” multitasker?
45. Can you read machine code?
46. Do you regularly have to put blocks of ice, portable fans, or frozen packages of hash browns on or near your computer to keep it cool?
47. Do you have carpal tunnel syndrome?
48. Do you keep multiple webcams around your house?
49. Are you up on the computer past 3am at least once a week?
50. Did you make it all the way to the end of this quiz?
Scores:
0-1: Clean as a Whistle – You are either 95 years old, or you lie compulsively to make yourself feel better about your internet addiction. Sorry to call you out like that.
2-9: Social Drinker – You’re not great with technology, but dabble. You probably play sports and actually have a significant other. Either that or you’ve recently been released from Internet rehab and haven’t slipped back to the old ways yet.
10-19: Coffee Fiend – You’re about as plugged in as the next person—but you gotta have your daily fix. Let’s face it, gadgets are everywhere nowadays, right? That’s what you tell yourself at least, but what you don’t know is everyone calls you “nerd breath” behind your back.
20-29: Chainsmoker – You recognize that you’re a little too plugged in, and you’re trying to quit. Your tech addictions are starting to ruin your social interactions, between signing out of the real world every 10 seconds and stinking up the room when you enter. Take this as your cue to shower.
30-39: Pothead – You’re addicted, but you have no desire to quit. There’s a box of Ho Hos on the desk, and you had to brush Cheeto dust off the keyboard to log into your computer, which you keep password protected with heavy encryption. You hurried through this quiz because your guild is waiting for you in the other window. You really should consider counseling.
40-49: Crackhead – You get all shaky when you think about technology, always searching for your next fix. You’ve considered constructing a biotech bathtub for your body to lie in, so you can plug your consciousness permanently into the Internet. Family members are planning to stage an intervention and check you into a clinic. You look forward to the shock therapy.
50: Permafried – There’s no higher brain activity going on anymore. Doctors should prescribe you video games and/or marijuana for medicinal purposes. Just to keep you from flat lining.
Based in New York City, Shane Snow is a graduate student in Digital Media at Columbia University and founder of Scordit.com. He’s fascinated with all things geeky, particularly social media and shiny gadgets he’ll never afford.
Posted by alect on February 6th, 2010 in
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Publishers joining Apple’s iBooks store are turning their back on Amazon and its vision of the flat $9.99 ebook. Apple forced the music industry to charge 99 cents per song, so why are they helping publishers set their own prices?
To screw Amazon.
The difference between Amazon and Apple is this: Amazon is very much in the ebook business to sell ebooks. They want you attached to their platform. That’s why the Kindle Reader is on both PC and iPhone, as well as the eponymous e-ink device. Ebooks are huge for them. They sell six ebooks for every 10 physical books. That’s why they want to own the market. Apple, on the other hand, sells content in order to sell hardware. The iTunes Store, the App Store and the brand-new iBooks Store exist so you’ll buy iPods, iPhones and iPads, which is where Apple really makes money. iTunes revenue is just a bonus, though an ever fatter one with the explosion of the App Store.
You can see that the two companies place far different values on the content they sell. A more illustrative example: Amazon has been selling books at a loss—paying $15 for a hardcover bestseller, only to turn around and sell it for $10 on the Kindle. Apple would never, ever sell content at a loss. They make a decent bit of change, but apps and music are really just a way to fill up your iPhone.
Do you remember three years ago, when Apple was battling with the record labels for control over (legal) digital music? Apple still owns 69 percent of the market and sell 1 out of every 4 songs, period—in other words, they owned the market, which deeply frightened the labels, who were afraid of losing control. Universal, the biggest label, flipped out, and even tried to build the anti-iTunes. That failed, so the music business bit the bullet (or the poison pill) and went DRM-free, not with Apple at first, but with Amazon. It became a (sorta) credible competitor to the iTunes monster, long enough to give the labels just enough extra negotiating power. When iTunes music downloads went DRM free, many of them—particularly hit singles—suddenly cost $1.29.
The situation is remarkably similar, except this time, Amazon’s wearing the market-maker pants. Some estimate Amazon’s share of the ebook market to be 90 percent, but I’ve heard from people in the publishing industry say it’s closer to 80 percent. But that’s nitpicking. At this moment, Amazon owns ebooks. The book publishers’ fears are the same as the record labels with iTunes: They’re paranoid about losing control over pricing, and their own digital destiny. They’re worried that books are being undervalued, and that once people have the mindset that the price of an ebook is $9.99, and not a penny more, they’re doomed. They needed an insurgent player: Apple.
Apple has advantages that Amazon didn’t have with music: Scale and technology. iTunes has just moved 3 billion iPhone apps. Apple’s sold over 250 million iPods. By contrast, Amazon’s sold an estimate 2.5-3 million Kindles since it debuted 2 years ago. Analysts predict Apple will sell twice as many iPads this year alone.
In terms of technology, e-Ink looks old and busted and slow next to the iPad’s bright, color display. (Even the fact that the written word is much easier to stare at for long periods of time when presented on e-ink won’t save the current Kindle.) An iPad can do more than books: Beautiful digital magazines, interactive textbooks, a dynamic newspaper. Oh, and it’s a computer that does video, apps, music. Amazon’s scrambling now to make a multitouch full color Kindle after betting on E-Ink, but that kind of development takes at least a year. Even if they churn out a full color reader that is somehow better than the iPad, it likely won’t matter: It would just be a very nice reader to iPad’s everything else, and it would be 9 months too late.
The print industry is swirling down the toilet, and apocalypse-era publishers minds’ dance with hallucinations of digital salvation via iTunes for print. It’s the iPod for books. What Amazon was supposed to deliver, but now maybe never will.
With that contrast in mind, all the publishers needed was a little push. All Apple had to whisper was, “Hey, we’ll let you set your own prices for books. You should control your own destiny. We’d love to have you. You know, $12.99 is a really good price for a beautiful color version of your amazing books. BTW, why are you letting Amazon undersell you?” It doesn’t matter that publishers make less absolute money through the agency model used by Apple—Amazon might’ve given them $15 for a book it sold for $10, but under the agency model, the seller takes 30 percent off the top. They wanted to feel in control, and that their books are worth something more. Steve gave them that, even as he’s probably got his fingers crossed behind his back.
Amazon knew what it was doing by insisting on $9.99 as the price for ebooks. A flat, easy-to-understand rate—one that’s notably cheaper than its analog counterparters—is a paradigm that works, especially when you’re trying to essentially build a whole new market. It plays into the part of our brains that like easy things. That likes the number 9. (No really, 9 is a psychologically satisfying number.) Amazon believed in it so strongly, as I said before, they sold books at a loss to keep it up. (I’m not suggesting, BTW, that Amazon would be any more benevolent to the industry than Apple. They wouldn’t.)
Price would’ve been Amazon’s major advantage over Apple too—being able to undercut Apple by setting whatever price they needed to compete would’ve been its ace in the hole against the iPad’s flashy color screen, and everything else it can do. And now that’s poofed. Apple will be able to sell you ebooks for the exact same price as Amazon. By turning the publishers against Amazon, they’ve effectively dicked the Kindle over. Why? To fill out another bullet point as to why you should buy an iPad. The real question is how long it’ll take publishers to realize that’s all they are to Apple: one little bullet point.
Posted by alect on February 5th, 2010 in
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Many airlines offer in-flight wi-fi and though you might not choose flights based on download speeds, it helps to know what to expect from each carrier. With your help, we conducted our first Mile-High Wi-Fi Test. Delta Airlines won.
The Idea
We’ve tested 3G data speeds in the past, so as in-flight wi-fi became more widely offered we decided that its performance needed to be rated as well.
Our staff can only rack up so many frequent flier miles before we get a stern talking to from our fearless leader, so we thought of asking Gizmodo readers for help. Over the holidays, many people joined Gizmodo’s Mile-High Club, and the results came pouring in. (Of course it didn’t hurt that we shared some coupon codes for free in-flight wi-fi.)
The Methodology
We asked readers to use Speedtest.net when they traveled—checking upload and download bandwidth along with ping latency, reporting the numbers back to us along with a goofy self-portrait, a la Brian Lam. We logged the speed test results along with the airline and the flight route. Our first round of testing accounts for December 2009 and January 2010.
The Results
Don, our resident number cruncher, processed all the data from the first round of testing. We did throw out a few data points which were deemed incomplete or inaccurate, and had to exclude one airline—United—for the time being because we did not have enough data for a meaningful average. All of these numbers are preliminary, but we were surprised that one airline in particular was able to rise up past the others. Here’s how our tally looks right now:
American Airlines:
Download: .88 Mbps
Upload: .23 Mbps
Ping: 231.87 ms
Virgin America:
Download: .57 Mbps
Upload: .25 Mbps
Ping: 276.44 ms
Delta:
Download: .93 Mbps
Upload: .29 Mbps
Ping: 177.91 ms
AirTran:
Download: .86 Mbps
Upload: .30 Mbps
Ping: 192.24 ms
If you prefer graphs, today is your lucky day:
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Now, based on these averages, things boil down to this:
Fastest Download: Delta (.93 Mbps)
Fastest Upload: AirTran (.3 Mbps) *
Lowest Latency: Delta (177.91ms)
*Note that Delta’s average was very close, at .29 Mbps
So, overall Delta Airlines handily outperformed the rest, but again, this is just round 1. Besides, it seems worth noting that despite differences in broadband speeds, all four of those airlines use GoGo in-flight Internet to provide the wi-fi service.
This Is Just the Beginning
We call this the first round because we’re far from done. We want to keep collecting data on in-flight wi-fi and keep getting better and better results. The more data points we have, the better reporting we can deliver on the state of in-air wi-fi.
To help us in this effort, you can simply head to SpeedTest.net the next time you fly and run the test. Send an email to me or to Gizmodo tips with “Mile-High Wi-Fi” in the subject line. Here’s what to include:
• Speedtest.net results, including download and upload speed in Mbps, and ping latency in ms
• Name of Airline
• Departing and destination airports, and type of plane
• A (totally optional) goofy picture of yourself
Not only does additional data help us make more accurate subsequent reports, it’ll help you because airlines will see clearly how the competition is doing. And if there are variables we don’t see yet, such as variations in performance based on route or plane type, we’ll be able to get a better sense of that as well, as we get more data points from you…
The Esteemed Members of Gizmodo’s Mile-High Club
We encourage you to continue taking 2 minutes to check bandwidth, and fire us an email, whenever you connect up in the air. In the meantime, we want to thank each of the boys and gals who participated in this first round of Mile High Wi-Fi testing, the charter members of the Giz Mile-High Club. Here are some of the prettiest from the charter membership rolls:
gawkerGallery(5454358,45,”);
Original Delta Airlines photo used under CC license from The Rocketeer/Flickr
Posted by alect on February 4th, 2010 in
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Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
Making Phones Bigger
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Shrinking PCs Down
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
What We Need Is a Third Approach
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
playMBX(‘video_uid=4c96d3b4191ce2c6c3&security_token=prod3.f6f48df43c519278&type=sd’);
Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
Posted by alect on February 4th, 2010 in
RSS Feed and has
No CommentsTablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
Making Phones Bigger
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Shrinking PCs Down
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
What We Need Is a Third Approach
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
playMBX(‘video_uid=4c96d3b4191ce2c6c3&security_token=prod3.f6f48df43c519278&type=sd’);
Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
Posted by alect on February 4th, 2010 in
RSS Feed and has
No CommentsTablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
Making Phones Bigger
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Shrinking PCs Down
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
What We Need Is a Third Approach
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
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Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
What’s less romantic: Buying something practical or buying something generic? Roses are right out. But can a gadget be sweet?
