The Connected Circuit

With Apple’s long awaited keynote finally over and the smoke finally clearing from all the hardware/software announcements, it’s time to assess the implications of what they announced. It wouldn’t be much of an assessment without knowing what they actually announced, so here it is:

iPhone 3GS

There was much speculation on what the new iPhone would have and what would actually change, from having a rubberized/matte back finish to having a front video camera for video conferencing. Sadly, there were no outside cosmetic changes. All the changes dealt with what was inside, both the hardware and software.

Hardware changes:

Unfortunately, Apple wouldn’t reveal the details of the new hardware specifications, just that it was “twice as fast” as the iPhone 3G, leading many people to believe it has double the amount of RAM and, possibly, a slight processor speed bump. We won’t find out until someone gets their hands on this thing come June 19th and does a full teardown.

The much awaited addition of in-house video recording, editing, straight uploads to Youtube will now be standard in the iPhone 3GS, sorry iPhone 3G users this is an iPhone 3GS feature only. The camera will also see an upgrade from the non-autofocus 2 megapixel lens to a 3 megapixel autofocus camera that can record video at a resolution of 640 x 480 at 30 fps. Although, the iPhone 3G is actually capable of recording video (as long as it was jailbroken), for whatever reason, Apple has made it a feature of the iPhone 3GS only. It will also have a special macro mode and the ability to geotag both your video and photos.

The iPhone 3GS can also support a max downspeed of 7.2Mps, as long as the cell provider can support those speeds that is, which AT&T is not one of them. Small changes also include, the support for Bluetooth 2.1, an anti-fingerprint coating, built-in Nike+, voice control, and a slight increase in battery life.

Late addition, I was able to find a detailed article from one of my favorite hardcore tech sites AnandTech on the new CPU/GPU, which is, ironically, the same one in the Palm Pre, an ARM Cortex A8 with a PowerVR SGX GPU with a clock speed of 600 MHz and 256 MB of RAM.

My personal favorite update is the addition of the digital compass. GPS on phones has been a welcomed addition, but I have never been able to tell which direction I would actually need to walk. I would always need to walk a few feet before I knew if I was going the right way. This fixes that, telling you the exact direction of where you would need to walk. Small change, but one that makes this lost soul follow the right path.

Software:

With the announcement of the iPhone 3GS comes the official announcement of iPhone OS X 3.0. I have been using the beta, now in GM, for the past month or so and it brings some nice additions (some that should have been in 1.0), such as universal search, a landscape keyboard, MMS and tethering

Some caveats, although 3.0 finally enables MMS and tethering (it was also available in the betas other than beta 5), that’s going to be up to your cell carrier. So if you’re in the US and on AT&T, it won’t be ready come June 19th. AT&T is blaming it on network limitations and they’re still trying to figure out pricing, both pretty lame excuses seeing as all the other carriers around the world are well prepared for it and both have been available for years now. I’ve been able to send and receive MMS’s on my Bold since I got it, which was at launch on AT&T. Apple is planning on an iPhone 3.0 OS release on June 17th, so be prepared for a software upgrade soon you iPhone owners.

$99 iPhone 3G:

In my opinion, this is probably Apple’s most earth shattering announcements of the entire keynote. All speculation was that Apple was going to release a 4 GB lower price model, the $99 iPhone rumor started way back even before last year’s MacWorld. It brings the iPhone to level of affordability to almost anyone who wants it. I’m gonna predict market saturation of iPhones will come rather quickly now.

Other hardware announcements:

New Macbook Pros:

The 13″ aluminum Macbook is probably Apple’s fastest product to go obsolete, announced in October 18, 2008 at MacWorld, only lasting a mere eight months. But all’s good, as Apple decided to up the ante on the specs that were on that Macbook model by adding some extra battery life, though with a non-removable battery, a media card reader, and cut the price a few hundred dollars and dubbing it with the Macbook Pro moniker. Other than the glossy screen and the chicklet style keyboard, I’m pretty psyched to see this model out. It may very well be my next computer purchase. Interesting tidbit, you can apparently boot from a flash card. Oh and Apple is drastically cutting prices on the aluminum Macbook, most likely to clear stock for the new Macbook Pro models.

Other software announcements:

Official announcement of Snow Leopard, but without the cool new Marble UI, as well as a new iLife ‘09 update. The cost is an update edition to Snow Leopard is $29 and $49 for a family pack, down from the $129 cost that was for Leopard. For those who don’t know what Snow Leopard is, it’s one of those dot upgrades Apple has been pushing out since the release of OS X, but 10.6 focuses more on the background enhancements and performance tuning. Enhancements include 45% faster install, a reduction in 6 GB of disk space, more support for 64-bit applications, parallel processing, Microsoft Exchange support, new interface for Quicktime, as well as the use of the hardware acceleration via the GPU, a new dock and expose. Sorry all you PowerPC Mac users, this is for Mactels only. Safari 4.0 finally falls out of beta and into your desktops, all the details here. Some interesting notes on Safari 4, it gets 100/100 from the Acid3 test, has HTML 5 support, CSS 3 web font support, a new Javascript rendering engine, is supposed to be the fastest browser ever, built-in web developer tools and cover flow integration.

What wasn’t announced:

The Apple tablet, why? I honestly don’t think the world is ready for it and it probably wouldn’t be much of a big seller for Apple. Contrary to what most people believe, not all of Apple’s products sell well, take a look at the Apple TV, the Macbook Air or the Newton. Tablets, also, don’t do very well with the mainstream and if Apple is going to make this a multi-touch screen, which they would most likely do, it would render it useless to graphic designers needing more precise pen input from a digitizer a la the Wacom. For all of those who want your own Apple tablet and have that extreme dough to spend, jump over to Axiotron and grab a Modbook, which is essentially a Macbook modded with a digitized Wacom screen sans the keyboard, pricing is $1249 if you would like to mod your existing Macbook or a starting price of $1569 for your very own freshly modded Macbook with very barebones specs.

Matte/rubberized back on the iPhone:

All the rumors and leaks out there centered around one new design, but was ultimate proven wrong with the announcement of the iPhone 3GS. The speculation is that Apple or AT&T put out a “fake” FCC filing and photos to deter or spur on much of the hype and rumors going into WWDC. Others think that this was an early design that Apple scraped for whatever reason. It’s a shame that this one didn’t come true because that matte finish device was starting to win me over.

Front Video Camera:

I’m going to have to say this was AT&T’s fault. Video chatting and streaming is a pretty data intensive application, especially for AT&T extremely spotty service. I have a feeling that this wasn’t even a reasonable feature for AT&T and it was killed very early on.

Afterthoughts:

Before Apple officially announced that they were going to create a phone, many of your traditional phone companies waved them away, saying how this PC vendor doesn’t understand the mobile phone market. Two years later, the iPhone is quickly becoming as synonymous as its iPod is. Mobile computing is drastically changing the way we go about our day to day lives. Apple understood that and knew that the traditional form factors wasn’t really cutting it and threw everything out and started from scratch. With a melding of fresh UI design paradigms and Apple’s own view of simplicity and slick designs, Apple won over many converts, including myself. Apple’s game changer mentality is forcing all those around them to innovate or die and pushing manufacturers to one up each other. I’m hoping to see that many manufacturers don’t falter and fail under the pressure and create truly innovative devices. Palm is the first one to actually create a device/OS that rivals Apple’s own, I’m hoping I’ll see other manufacturers follow. The future in the mobile computing world is at its beginning stages and is one to watch.

Read more here, here and here.

--written by Peter To--

So CES is over and after looking at what came out there are some pretty strong themes at this year’s CES. For those who don’t realize, but CES is pretty much the precursor of this year’s trends in products and tech. What happens at CES usually, though not all the time, comes to full fruition in the upcoming year.

Let’s start with the what stole the entire show away, Palm. Palm’s press event was by and the large the runaway hit of the show. Weeks ago, Palm queitly invited some of the top tech heads to a conference they were holding at CES with a teaser ad for the “newness” of Palm. Not many people knew what it was going to be, but many people expected that this was going to be the make or break for Palm; if they didn’t do something amazing here, they would never have the chance to do it again EVER. There was much speculation of what they were going to do, but it was for sure that this was going to be their big reveal of their five year in the making redo of their dated Garnet OS. Low and behold, Palm pulled it off. They not only pulled it off by stunning people with a marvelously slick OS, but an equally slick device to complement the very polished, though still in alpha, OS. I am definitely looking forward to the Palm pre come June and may jump away from crappy AT&T and back into the arms of Sprint.

It seems as if companies are finally embracing the cloud with Apple putting their iLife suite into the cloud, Microsoft realizing that having all your information in a common place does matter to people and Palm having their entire platform revolve around premonition and the notion that your information does not only live on your phone. The year 2009 will definitely be the year of the cloud.

What was decidedly absent at the show was the number of android phones. Although CES was never known for great phone releases, I was surprised to not see even one phone from any manufacturer. The lone android phone that was supposed to be roaming the show floor, the Kogan Agora. Apparently Google went to the man behind the effort to push this phone out and asked him to not release the phone as there were features that the phone lacked that would gimp compatibility of applications. We did see one android device, the Giinii Movit, which is essentially the Nokia N800 with android instead of Maemo. From what I saw, it seems like a sweet little MID that I would gladly trade my N800 for. Hopefully, now that Google released the full source code of android to the masses, we’ll start seeing more android devices start to trickle down.

--written by Peter To--

One of the biggest consumer electronics show (CES in Las Vegas from January 7th-January 11th) is going down this week, which also happens to overlap with another, the Macworld expo (January 5th-January 9th in San Fran). Don’t ask me why they decided to pick conflicting, making people choose to going to one or the other, which essentially hurts both parties. But enough of that, in this post I’ll be laying out some predictions of what I think will go down at each.

Since Macworld is here first:
There is also mounds of speculation for what Apple is going to do at Macworld, this being their last (for those who don’t know Macworld isn’t a creation of Apple, but rather Macworld Magazine) and all. So rumor has it Apple will be announcing new Mac Minis, Apple TVs and iPhone Nanos. Hardware-wise Apple will finally introduce new Mac Minis, Apple TVs and cinema displays or cinema displays equiped with the Apple TV hardware. But what I think will happen is that Apple is going to do a more software centric keynote, which will inevitably focus on its own iWork suite. They are going to take it into the cloud or create a system where you have the ability to, think about this. What is you have the ability to install on a corporate server a collaborative software suite, where all users within the network can work and access documents easily. Apple’s aim is mainly to infiltrate into the corporate environment, which Microsoft has them beat by a wide and large margin. With the impending exit of Steve Jobs as the face of Apple, they have to do something to push into new territories and I think this is what they are going to do.

CES:
CES is a whole ‘nother monster that encompasses such a wide range of consumer electronics that I’ll just keep it to general themes. The biggest theme for this show will probably be entertainment media in the living room, which will mean bridging online content, such as from Hulu, Netflix, Youtube and what have you to your TV. There is going to be a plethora of video streaming devices out there, since there isn’t really a great all-in-one out there yet. I have an Apple TV loaded with boxee, as well as an Xbox 360 setup to stream content from my computer through my personal network in my apartment. Both have their downsides and upsides, but neither is the be all end all of streaming devices. Having both work in unison achieves something close, but it still isn’t there yet, everyone always ultimately either asks me how to do what on the thing to get it to watch something or just plain gives up and goes back to the god awful Scientific Atlanta box that Time Warner has provided to watch absolute garbage on cable TV. The dream video device would do something very similar to my beloved Squeezebox Boom, but for Video, easy to use UI and just plain works, as well as be very modular in device, both in hardware and software. Apple’s closed ecosystem has led to no one wanting the Apple TV other than your enthusiasts, such as myself who will take the time and effort to soft/hard mod it to get it to do more for which boxee is a great example.

To complement all these devices, I see a plethora of content moving away from your traditional methods of broadcasting quickly. You can see it already happening with Hulu and all the contracts the major studios are considering with Youtube/Hulu and Sling Media. But what needs to happen is that these services need to be easily accessible. After seeing the success of Apple in the digital music market I’ve learned one thing, if you create something that is easy to use and at a reasonable cost people would be willing to not pirate and proceed in ways that are much easy to obtain the content they want. Apple hasn’t been as successful in the video market as they were in the audio, but that could all change if they open up and create a subscription based model. Think about the possibilities if they were to license out an API of their software and let people go at it with Apple’s name recognition the reach for digital video nirvana could be here within months. Sadly, I do not think Apple will ever adopt either.

I also predict that we will finally see a sub-100 bluray player for the masses to just buy that Dark Knight Bluray and watch it in all its 1080p glory.

To sum it up:
Macworld: Taking applications into the cloud and the corporate workspace
CES: Convergence video devices, bluray player on the cheap

--written by Peter To--

So roughly using the Bold for almost two months, what do I think of it? My first issue is with the Bold or BB OS’s issue of not being able to install applications outside of the alloted 128 MB of RAM space. RIM really either needs to do 1. either give their devices a lot more RAM or 2. give their devices to install apps into either external storage cards or the internal memory space. I know they do this for security purposes, but their smart they should be able to figure out a secure solution, I mean what harm can one really do by installing applications into the internal memory (don’t answer that). Now don’t get me wrong the Bold is probably one of the best devices I have ever used cause things just work on it and things are real zippy, but I’m a pretty heavy user of the Bold and after having multiple applications open using newsgator, google maps, email… the RAM gets eaten worse the Firefox before version 3.0. There is no way to view a running processes to see which one if the hog and stop it, all you have is just clearing the browser cache and this memory cleaning thing, that I have no clue what it does and does not seem to work (Options -> Security Options -> Memory Cleaning). At times it feels like *gasp* using a Windows Mobile device, yes, you heard me right, Windows “slower than a snail, terrible memory management” Mobile. I have done many battery pulls to try to relinquish the lost memory more times now than I can count and waiting 3+ minutes for a phone to start back up is ri-dic-u-lous.

Other issues:

IMAP is pretty much broken, I don’t know if it is an issue with Gmail IMAP or just IMAP email handling in general (I’ve only used IMAP with my gmail account), but it is broken like no other. I don’t receive all my email and it tends to lag when marking an email as read, if it even marks it as read and I had no way to access all my folders. I have since reverted back to general default email settings, which is POP I believe, cause I actually get emails that way.

No fun applications at all. Don’t expect an iPhone like experience on this thing cause it really is great for managing your data and such, but other than brickbreaker or wordmole, don’t expect to be playing Metal Gear on this thing. Another thing is there is no easy way to install applications to this thing, don’t go expecting to simply load up an app store and simply search and install what you’d like from your phone. You are gonna have to search on a desktop to find an application that suites your needs, then you can either connect your BB to your computer or use the god-awful web browser to enter in the url and manage to navigate to it somehow. The impending app store may solve all these problems, but I have a feeling it probably won’t.

Approximately 1/2 of my lock ups, freezes and slow downs can be attributed to one thing, the web browser. It isn’t as bad as say Pocket IE, but its pretty bad. I mean on the surface it renders pages like its original pretty well, that’s if you manage to load a page without it locking up. But you can install Opera Mini on the Bold, so there is an alternative. I am really just waiting for Mozilla to release Fennec, the mobile Firefox browser.

The last issue, which some may or may not consider an issue is (I hate to say it), but the Bold just isn’t “fun” enough. I look at all the cool apps for the iPhone and I get pretty jealous, over the past year or so the iPhone/iPod Touch has really become an amazing platform for development. As much as I dislike some of the choices that Apple has made (ummm… Copy/Paste anyone) it is the phone everyone wants because of its applications and usability. I know plenty of people that have trouble getting around the BB, but know very few that have the same issues of usability on Apple’s mobile platform.

What I think RIM needs to do is throw out the book and create an OS along with great hardware that encompasses modern day techniques of UI. I’m not saying that they should scratch what they have with their current iterations, afterall they are the venerable email workhorse, but they should consider putting the effort into crafting a new platform that will herald in new users that would actually wow them not confuse. We’ll see what 2009 brings, CES next week is only that start of what I predict to be a very interesting year in regards to the common man.

--written by Peter To--

Now that I have my own place, it is time for me to trick it out media-wise. My goal here is to create the perfect media setup in my place. I’ve thought long and hard and here are the rundown of my preliminary specifications:

• 42″ Plasma or LCD HDTV
• Slingcatcher w/a 1 TB HDD
• Either a Sonos setup or a Slim Squeezebox Boom
• Either a Bluray Player, Upconverting DVD player or HD DVD Player to replace the Panasonic one that broke.

Having my own apartment = having my own network. So with all this in mind, I chose this setup because it seems to be one of the easiest to setup and fits what I want to do perfectly, which is streaming from multiple computers and devices to just one particularly type.

My original choice for a TV is the Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ85U, which I can get for an ironic $1080, but I am still looking since I hear, from all my first-hand accounts, that LCDs are def the way to go and the Panny plasma isn’t as good as I had originally thought. I’m going with the Slingcatcher because of its support for just about every single format available as well as its ability to stream internet content. It isn’t out just yet, so there aren’t any reviews of it yet, but it is out for pre-order for $300. I’m leaning towards the Squeezebox Boom because of its support for a plethora of internet radio services, Rhapsody and media resources and its alarm clock so I can wake up to my favorite tunes. This too will cost $300. So the total cost will be roughly $1680. But I’ve still not decided yet. With the Fall update of the Xbox 360 dashboard software and the ability to be easily software modded, it might save me on the cost of a Slingcatcher since it can also be extended as a Media Extender and has support for DivX/Xvid files and of course DVDs. I’d just need to purchase the absurdly expensive $80 or $40 on eBay, 20 GB hard drive and mod it with my own or get the $140, 120 GB drive, which would save me $60 or I’ve

Other configurations would be buying an Apple TV and modding it with aTV or Boxee, so $230+$50 for the aTV. For those who don’t know, aTV is the software mod for Apple TV that unlocks its use for different media products. Boxee is this cool social network media hub, it is in alpha testing right now, I signed up for it, so let’s hope I get one. I’m also taking into consideration cost and easy and nice UI, since I would not be the only person that would be using all of these devices. The TV would be a definite ~$1000, so my other cost reductions would be for everything else. If I get HDDHacker to work with my 360 I wouldn’t need to purchase a $40 hard drive and use my own with this nice software hack and install Windows Media Player 11 on my computer and just share all the content.

This is also keeping in mind what I have currently, an Xbox 360 w/Rock Band and hopefully Rock Band 2 and of course a Wii and good old PS3. Overall I’m looking to speak around $1500+ for this setup. If anyone has any suggestions for me, let me know.

--written by Peter To--

So earlier today Google decided to announce a bombshell. That they have been in development of an open source browser to compete with the very competent likes of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera. So why you say would they ever do that? Aren’t they purely a web-centric software company? Well to answer the second question, they were. Google has been the big name in search since the earlier 2000s, after the big tech bubble of the 90s, but they are now providing a wide array of applications, from apps on phones (Android) to ones on the desktop space (Google Earth, Google Desktop) and your traditional things, such as email (Gmail) and mapping (Google Maps). But to handle all of this, they decided that they needed to create something that came cope with the increasingly important dynamic webspace that is the interwebs, so what was created was Google Chrome.

To answer my first question, about why they would ever do this, is because today’s browsers are built on age old technologies that can’t cope with today’s online webspace. Let’s backtrack a little. Gears (formerly Google Gears) was created to help cope with the many complaints of having to be online to use web-based applications such as Google Docs or Zoho Writer. So the engineers at Google sought out to create some plugins for today’s browsers to handle and take the load off with the creation of Gears. But there was still a problem, today’s browsers were still extremely limiting and still very crash prone; a browser crash in today’s world could mean loss of much productivity. There was an inability to support multi-threaded applications, innate to all of today’s browsers being steep in old browser tech of static webpages. So Google one-upped itself and thought a few steps ahead and decided to create a browser that not only allowed for multi-threaded applications, but to support multi-processes.

The idea behind Chrome is basic to Software Engineering, instead of handling bugs by simply terminating the process and then restarting, there will be graceful degradation. When browsing and constantly opening up tabs, then closing some, then opening more, today’s current browsers leave fragments and remains in our current OS’s memory, never really clearing them up, so when in today’s world of AJAX powered webpages and having applications and never closing a browser is a must Chrome comes into the picture. Closing tabs means gracefully killing a process, completely removing it from memory, never leaving those fragments in memory to build up and slowing down your machine.

Development
The development of Chrome will be very unique. Google can test Chrome on its massive array web pages using its web crawlers, providing crucial data from millions of websites. Testing has been automated to a level never seen, of course, the usually external testing will still be there, but here is one way testing can come on a massive scale, making bug detection considerably easier.

Interestingly enough, Google Chrome will be a webkit based browser. Most likely because of how Android’s browser is also webkit-based, as well as, the growing popularity of that other webkit based browser made by Apple, Safari and its runaway mobile success. Other additions and modifications to take note is that Google is using a dev team from a company called V8, a company in Denmark, to develop a Javascript Virtual Machine to be able to run multitudes of types of code and render it in the engine. This will be created from the ground up. V8 has taken a drastically new approach to a Javascript VM. Firstly, while Javascript is innately classless, you can still create objects and such and give it new properties on the fly. So with the new Javascript VM, the optimization will be coupled and objects with same properties will be applied the same optimization techniques. The Javascript VM will also optimize on speed, where other Javascript rendering engines run most code on the fly, the code will be offset and the Javascript code will be converted to machine code, which is then compiled and ran on the user’s cpu, similar to Java. V8’s new rendering engine will also optimize on garbage collection, where other engines use conservative garbage collection to guess which objects need to be trashed in memory, V8’s will be able to detect what should and shouldn’t be there so memory is allocated accordingly. The interesting part of this is that, the V8 engine is wholly independent of Google Chrome, so Google wants other developers to be able to use V8’s new rendering browser, “setting a new bar,” as Google calls it.

User Interface
So this tech is all good and all, but what will it look like. Google Chrome’s approach mirror many modern day browsers, multiple detachable tabs, but unlike the other browsers the tabs are outside of the window (think file folders) and the Google’s own take on the Awesome Bar, which they are calling the Omnibox. Unlike Firefox’s Awesome bar, where anything from your web history pops up as you type for inline auto-completions, Google Chrome only auto-completes what you have typed, which can be a good or bad thing. Google Chrome will also integrate search on the fly into their Omnibox, when you have used say Amazon to search for that book of Moby Dick you’ve been itching to read, it automatically remembers it, so which search engines you have used and adds it in. Google Chrome’s startpage takes a varied approach similar in style to Opera’s Speed Dial, but a bit more dynamic. The startpage instead of showing something boring like a blank page, will present to you thumbnails of your nine most visited pages and most often used search engines just to the right of it.

Google has also taken a Safari-like approach to privacy, giving you the option to anonymize your search with a “privacy mode” that switches to a read-only mode when activated, giving you full access to your bookmarks on the web, but never recording anything. Google Chrome will feature its very own pop-up blocker. Google Chrome has also strived to differentiate its users web-experience, by separating as much of the browser from the webapps as possible, hence the name Chrome.

Security
Security in today’s world in most serious. Browser exploits come everyday, Google rationalizes and believes that you can’t ever catch 100% of the malware on the web, so they’ve built a sandbox mode right into Google Chrome, where when activated, webpages submit their right to read/write to your hard disk. Almost every single item is sandboxed, except plugins. Phishing lists are also created and updated continuously on Google’s end and served to you with these updates, so saving you the time to double check if that checking website you used was legit or not. Malicious sites are warned before blacklisted, so exploits can be fixed before your site is on the blacklist.

Plugins
Full access will still be given to plugin developers to fully utilize all of Google Chrome’s features without the fear of never being known. Plugins will run all in their own process, so when a tab crashes, the plugin is still alive and the page is still effectively sandboxed. There will also be full Gears implementation within Google Chrome.

So what does all this mean to you and everybody else. Google just threw down its gauntlet to everyone, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and the Opera team and they have open sourced it. Increasing interest substantially as well as opening the floodgates to the millions of developers out there. Just when I thought the race was getting boring, Google has just made it a thousand times more interesting.

Unique as ever Google has enlisted author of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud to create a web comic

Full Comic Explanation Here by Scott McCloud
Great Over Here From Blogoscoped

--written by Peter To--

Today I attended one of the events for Internet Week here in New York City. Mashable’s Exhibit Hall, showing off some startups and new upcoming companies, more info here. I was pretty excited to see what was looming on the interwebs. Ir started out pretty well with me meeting some guys from edopter. A website where they, by aggregating ratings from their users and a variety of other sites, tries to predict the latest trends, breaking it further down by regions (right now it is limited to major cities, but I was told it would eventually spread out to more cities) and categories that range from things on the Internet to things outside of the world of the Internet and the mainstream, as well as age and gender. Though I never tested out the feature, you could even create your own trends and see how your prediction works out with their algorithm. Eventually they will add a geographical map to point out which locations are feeding into which trends the most. They said they had to pull the feature, but will work hard to work it in by Monday, which is when they plan to do the official launch. It was a pretty robust application and worked well from the brief time I spent with it. The team was made up of three guys, two of which were present and seemed to be very knowledgeable, which I can’t say for the next company I met with.

The Rubicon Project was a mess. I loved their idea, which was an ad optimization stats site. Depending on the content you have and the current ad networks, it figures out which ads work best on your differing pages, even breaking it down to individual pages and not just the entire website. It has many cool features and can be beneficial to anyone. The project itself impressed me, but the exhibitors were unprepared and seemed very disingenius and did not impress. Since the exhibition was being held in a bar, one of the exhibitors of the Rubicon Project decided to get a beer, he was slurring his words and were not able to answer most of my questions. I came away unimpressed and downright feeling awful that any company’s PR person would act so much like a drunken idiot presenting an idea that could actually compete with the big boys. I felt so disgusted I decided to leave the event.

I hope this weekend’s other Internet Week goes well. Tomorrow I’ll trying to make it over to the Chelsea Art Museum to check out the Design and Technology Thesis Exhibit of students from the New Schools. More info here. I will also make my way to the Come Out and Play Festival here in NYC and try out their Re: Activism political scavenger hunt. I’m number 27 and only 25 get to play, so I hope I get to play. Link here. The night will end at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to check out this Improve Music Show. It sounds pretty cool, they use audience members music and remix them or use them as inspiration for their acts that follow.

--written by Peter To--

Well I think it is nigh time to finally do a review on the AT&T Tilt aka HTC Kaiser aka HTC TyTN II aka HTC 8900. After a six month study trip/finding myself adventure in Vietnam, I was in need of a cellphone again. Thinking I was off contract I decided to shop for the best phone I could find and finally drop Sprint, after much yelling and coaxing Sprint to let me off without paying a $175 ETF I jumped ship and decided upon the AT&T Tilt from AT&T.

Here is a quick rundown of the specs:

• 2.8″ 320 x 240 TFT touchscreen
• 400 MHz 32bit Qualcomm MSM7200 processor
• Full QWERTY slide out keyboard
• 3.1 MP camera
• 128 MB RAM
• 256 MB ROM
• Quad Band GSM, Triband UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100) 3G baby
• 802.11g WiFi compatible
• Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP
• Support for microSDHC cards up to 32 GB
• GPS

For more detailed information visit the pdadb info page for the Tilt here.

Hardware:
As hardware goes, this thing has everything you could ever want from a phone. A full keyboard for typing out long emails or lengthy SMS conversations as well as a large touchscreen. A real GPS chip for use with any maps application. A decent amount of space for those small applications. A quick processor. A decent camera with video recording capabilities. A 802.11g radio as well as triband HSDPA and bluetooth. It has everything. Beware, this thing is a brick and pretty heavy compared to your average phone. It also has a nice rubberized backing as well. It’s only port is a mini-USB port for all your needs, charging headphones and such, but for the latter you’d need to purchase an adapter or two and forget about dual charger/listening to music with a standard 3.5 mm without the purchase of another adapter.

Keyboard:
The keyboard is probably one of the best I’ve ever used on a mobile phone, every key feels individual and separate with full QWERTY support, the only thing this is missing is a CTRL and ALT key that will be featured in the upcoming HTC Raphael. GPS takes a few minutes to get a fix, but when it does, it works pretty well with Google Maps, as well as TomTom Mobile Navigator software. Data speeds are fast when in a 3G or HSDPA area, which luckily I am living in two cities.

Software:
The Tilt comes preloaded with a customized Windows Mobile 6.0 for AT&T subscribers. It comes loaded with much bloatware and trial ware. You’ll take some time sifting through which programs are actually usable or not.

Contacts:
Contacts are manage in the usable and the slightly ugly Pocket Outlook. It is pretty straight forward and you can add as much information about a person as if you were using Outlook’s desktop cousin.

SMS:
SMS are done in the similar fashion to emails, which is a great thing. While sending a message to one of your contacts, it will suggest individuals in your contact list. Sending to multiple people is done by simply adding a semi-colon and that individual’s name. If you are in the mood for something a tad better looking, I suggest the wonderfully free PocketCM. Download it here. It will also create a much improved contact interface as well, the only thing with PocketCM is that it still doesn’t support SIM cards.

Web Browsing:
Web browsing in Pocket IE quite frankly sucks. If you don’t ever want to see the web broken and small, then stay away from Pocket IE and use one of the alternatives, such as Opera Mobile (not free, but comes with a 30-day trial), Opera Mini (Free) or sign up for SkyFire beta. Pocket IE is terrible, it is hard for it to render websites that don’t have a mobile interface. Opera Mini, a java midlet, does this beautifully. It is a mainstay in my arsenal. Download it here.

Camera:
The camera is better than your average cellphone cam and can record video. Storage options are the phone’s internal memory or a microSD card.

Navigation:
After using the free trial of TeleNav and not wanting to pay the monthly fee for something that was built to be free and open, you’ll find Google Maps or Live Search from Microsoft. Both are great, I prefer Google maps myself, but Live Search is on par if not better in some areas. The latest version of Google Maps supports My Location, by giving you a general location of where you are, which is never accurate, but it comes in handy if you don’t want to drain your battery by turning on your GPS radio. For the people who are having trouble with their GPS radio, download GPS test here. I know it sounds silly, but it turns on the GPS module and helps to get a fix. Point your web browser here for Google Maps and here for Live Search.

Call Quality:
I’ve been extremely unsatisfied with AT&T and call quality. I’ve had to say more “What?”, making it appear as if I was deaf to the person on the other end. But this was to be expecting when I was taking into consideration other wireless carriers. GSM as a technology is kinda weak, CDMA has much better quality voice and data-wise. While on Sprint I could hear someone crystal clear, but on AT&T everything sounds muffled as if the other person was speaking through a plastic bag. I’ve also have more dropped calls in the past eight months than my entire three years with Sprint. Although Sprint doesn’t have as wide a coverage map as AT&T, if sure did cover enough for me. AT&T seems to be lacking in many areas.

WiFi:
Being significantly faster than EDGE or 3G, it works great, but is a great battery drain. The only problem is that if you leave WiFi radio on for a decent amount of time, it slows to a crawl.

Bluetooth:
Support for stereo bluetooth is great. With the right phones you can wireless listen to your turns and leave your MP3 player at home. Tethering this thing to my laptop to use it as a wireless gateway worked great albeit a tad slow, but you’d have to use the buried Internet Connection Sharing. I also tethered this to other devices and it worked great as well. Guides here and here. Bluetooth tethering eats up battery life like no tomorrow, but it isn’t as bad as having WiFi turned on.

Pros:
Robust and great hardware. Sturdy.

Cons:
Software holds this thing back. Out of the box, it is mediocre, but finding the right software for this thing makes it much better. AT&T is lacking in included accessories, mainly that it provides none other than another stylus. So unlike Sprint where they include an USB-to-2.5 mm jack, a 512 MB microSD card, a screen protector, all you get in the box with AT&T is a USB charger and the phone with one additional stylus.

Conclusion:
For the person with enough patience to put up with the software downsides of the Tilt will find a great device that has a great community that has created much software and enhancements for it. On paper this thing is awesome, but the UI is not very intuitive. At times it’ll slow to a crawl to the point of unusable, it is frustrating to say the least. But loaded with the right ROM, it becomes slightly less rocky. My hope is that there will be an Android hack to make this thing capable of running Android. But I give this thing a 7 out of 10. Slightly better than the average phone. Be sure to visit XDA-developers for other enhancements.

--written by Peter To--

It’s been a while since I’ve actually wrote a post, been a tad busy with graduating and trying to figure my life after college. Well I’ve amassed a bunch of new gadgets (new for my use that is) and I’ll try to post a review of one gadget a week along with one or two posts of related software. First up is my Tilt aka HTC Kaiser aka HTC TyTN II. I think eight months is a good amount of time for usage to review it.

--written by Peter To--