Over a year ago, the Leap Motion was announced and it looked to cool to resist (for me). A long time and two address changes later, it finally arrived – to the right address, mind you.
Leap Motion is a little black doohickey that plugs in to your computer and sits in front of the keyboard. It can track your hands in 3D space with surprising accuracy. I’m not sure how it does it, I suspect it uses technology similar to the MS Kinect; which projects a star field of infrared dots and then uses cameras to map out 3D space based on how the star field hits things.
Quick impressions:
The box is huge given the size of the contents. It reminds me of the boxes used for Apple products. What a coincidence.
It doesn’t ship with drivers. You must go to the website and download them. They have drivers for Mac and for Windows.
After you download and install the drivers , a program called Airspace launches. There’s an intro/demo with yoga music in the background that lets you wave your hands and see pretty stuff on screen. This happens while a few other programs download from the app store (how original!) in the background.
One of these programs is Cut the Rope. This game is quite good on touchscreen…. how good can it be in thin air?
Ok, obviously this is my first game, it’s late and I’m tired, and I am recording it while I’m playing. Perhaps I’ll get better with time.
Readers of this blog know I am an avid RSS reader. Specifically, I’ve used Google Reader for years but now they’re closing. People panicked – but they shouldn’t. This is just as if people had panicked when Netscape Navigator died: “the end of the web!”? No. Just use a different web browser.
I just moved my 240 feeds to feedly. So if you came here to see my detailed analysis of all the competitors then you came to the wrong place. I picked feedly because it was free and Reeder works (or will work) with it. I don’t like that it uses my Google account – I like to keep my accounts independent of each other.
Have you been affected by the Apocalypse closing of Google Reader? What have you migrated to? I’m interested to hear.
Moi pre-ordered the famous Pebble watch on Kickstarter. It was supposed to arrive in December… it finally did in March. Since he lives in Mexico, he ordered to my house, which means I get to test drive it. Here are my quick observations.
PAN
Quick observation: We have WANs (Wide-Area Networks, as in cell phone networks or the Internet) and LANs (Local-Area Networks, as in your WiFi network). I first read about PANs (Personal-Area network) a long time ago: a bunch of devices you wear communicating with each other. Honestly I thought it was a utopian futuristic pipe dream.
The future kind of snuck up on us, even though Bluetooth has been around for a long time. I have a smartphone in my pocket, wirelessly connected to my Bluetooth headset on my head. And now a watch that communicates with the phone. Some people use other devices: heart rate monitors, little Nike+ shoe thingies… it’s crazy, it actually happened.
Design
The watch looks good in the same way a decent but cheap watch does. A little bigger than I’d like but my wrists are smaller than average. The buttons are big (good) but squishy (bad). The monochrome screen is low-resolution but readable enough. Animation is choppy. You can more or less tell what tradeoffs they had to make in order to have decent (~7 days) battery life. You recharge with a special cable that uses magnets to attach to the watch. All in all it’s good looking enough.
Functionality
Pebble promises all sorts of apps. Too bad they aren’t out yet. Today this is all you can do:
Change the watch face from many downloadable ones (use the iPhone app).
See what song is playing on your phone.
Control the music.
See some notifications like text messages from your phone.
Basic things like a stopwatch are still missing. The promised apps better come soon.
Conclusion
I don’t wear a watch, and the Pebble doesn’t provide enough cool things to change that. If there was something really cool then things would be different: RunKeeper integration, lap counter for swimming, or some super cool thing I haven’t thought of.
I decided to Moi can keep his watch.
One last thing
Nothing is for free. Usually by the end of the work day my phone still has 30% or so battery charge. On my Pebble test day I did not use my phone much more than the usual. But at the end of the work day my battery was all but dead.
One day last May I bumped into an interesting thing on Kickstarter: Twig: the amazing ultra-portable cable for your iPhone.
Clever thing, really: a short iPhone cable inside a flexible rubber casing that transforms itself into a small kick-stand. Smart, simple. Not to mention amazing and ultra-portable. I really like amazing things. This is what the 3D computer render looks like:
Nice, huh?
I am pretty skeptical of Kickstarter projects in general, not because I think the people behind said projects are out to rip me off, but because all sorts of unforeseen things tend to pop up during product development and I don’t get the feel that the people behind these projects take those into account.
But heck, this is no Bluetooth enabled e-ink watch. It’s a freaking cable inside a rubber casing. How hard can it be?
Quite hard, it turns out. Almost six months later, I finally received my Twig. Six months. Never mind that between my “pledge” and the Twig actually arriving I upgraded to a new phone that is incompatible with it. Never mind. Never… mind.
So how is it? Well, this is it:
Basically, it’s what you’d expect the offspring of Gumby and an iPhone cable to look like. An obsolete iPhone cable, that is. One that doesn’t fit my phone and is barely stiff enough to hold the phone’s weight.
LTE service has been randomly popping up on my iPhone 5 in the North Austin area these past couple of days. Note that Sprint LTE has not yet launched in town.
It only lasts for a few minutes, and the speeds may differ from what we’ll get once it goes live. But the fact that they are testing is a sign that the launch is imminent.
Proof:
Obviously, when I saw LTE, I had to run a speed test. Speeds were a little disappointing compared with what I’ve read about LTE; but are about a million times better than the notoriously slow Sprint 3G service. Boy I hate CDMA.
For comparison’s sake, here are other results I’ve gotten. They vary from run to run and each run depends on a lot of factors, like how far you are sitting from the cell phone tower or WiFi station, or how much other network traffic there is at the moment. But they do provide a good idea of what to expect:
Provider
Ping (ms)
Download (Mbps)
Upload (Mbps)
Sprint LTE (Austin, test)
76
7.77
0.71
Sprint 3G (Austin)
332
0.21
0.44
Sprint LTE (Woodlands)
56
7.95
9.44
Home (Time Warner Cable)
85
16.90
2.18
Work (jealous?)
48
48.35
23.76
AT&T LTE (Austin)
57
30.05
19.45
As you can see, 3G is soooo slow you can almost hear this. Can’t wait for LTE to go live.
Update: Reader Rolando O. sent a screenshot of SpeedTest results in AT&T LTE. They are amazing. I’ve added the numbers to the table.
“A heat shield has to slow the spacecraft from 13,000 mph to about 800 mph. Then a giant supersonic parachute has to unfurl properly to slow the rover further to about 200 mph. Then onboard radar has to detect the surface, and rocket engines aboard a kind of jet pack have to fire, slowing Curiosity to a crawl. Finally, a bridle has to lower the rover from the jet pack to the surface.”
…and it worked. NASA’s Curiosity rover landed a few hours on Mars. It’s the size of a small car. How incredibly cool.
Google announced the Nexus 7 tablet on Wednesday during their Google I/O conference. This is the first Google branded Android tablet ever. In summary:
$199 for 8GB, $249 for 16GB.
Quad-core Tegra 3 processor
7″ inch 1280 by 800 pixel screen.
New Android version 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
My friend Andy wanted to know what I thought of it, so here it goes:
Android
Based on the reviews I’ve seen, it looks like after four years of stutter and jerkiness, Google got very serious about making the Android UI fluid and responsive. This was hard because Android was originally developed to be a Blackberry clone and some basic architectural decisions were made that prevented having a smooth interface. This is one example of Google aggressively fixing the most serious flaws in Android and it looks like they are making lots of progress. That and the deep integration with Google’s excellent cloud services. Android is getting better.
Price point
To beat the iPad, it is not enough to have a comparable product. You either have a much better product or you have a much cheaper product.
After many attempts, no Android tablet was good enough. So Google chose plan B: sell a much cheaper product. The Nexus 7 hardware does cut some corners (back camera, cellular radio, expansion ports) but what it has is very good. And it is being sold at cost – hoping to make it up later by selling movies, apps, songs, ads.
So rather than being a direct iPad or Windows 8 competitor, the Nexus 7 is aiming at the cheap Amazon Kindle Fire. And it looks like it is much, much better product.
Sucks to be Dell
These are tough times for OEM partners: Microsoft releases Surface and has the advantage of early access to software and direct access to Windows engineers. Now Google does something even more ruthless to its parners: on top of all the advantages of owning Android, they decide to sell hardware at cost.
Dell, HP, Asus, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. cannot sell tablets at cost without a way of making up their losses later. In the brave new world of tablets, Apple’s “making the whole widget” way is the way and Microsoft and Google seem to have caught on to that.
Bottom line
This is the first Android product I’ve ever wanted to own. It appears to be really good, and the price is great. Best of all, it’s very light (340 g). Sure, they had to destroy the trust of every hardware partner they have in the process. Too bad for them.
By now you’ve heard that Microsoft announced its own tablet: Surface (formerly a largely vaporware table). If you haven’t, go read about it before continuing.
On the surface (pun intended) it looks like a cool product that may challenge the iPad for best tablet. I like following what happens in the tech sector, so I have a bunch of thoughts.
OEM backstabbing
Microsoft for the most part has been a software company. Notable exceptions are their mouses and keyboards, Xbox, Kinect, Zune and Kin. They make a huge chunk of their money by selling Windows licenses to companies like Dell and HP, who then build largely identical PCs and sell them to you.
Now Microsoft is going to compete directly with its partners, with the handicap of earlier access to software, the ability to better integrate the software and the hardware (Apple style), and without the added cost of software licenses.
Yeah, people at Dell are pissed, even if they won’t admit to it publicly.
Even more confusion
Windows licensing has been a complicated mess for some time: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate, etc. I don’t even think people who work at Microsoft know what the hell the difference between them is.
Now it’s worse: Windows 8 will also run on ARM processors. But it will be a special version of Windows 8 called Windows RT. Windows 8 has desktop interface and tablet (Metro) interface. Metro will work great with fingers but horribly with a mouse. Desktop will work with a mouse but will be unusable with a touchscreen. Windows RT only supports Metro. And it won’t run any of your existing Windows applications because those are built for Intel processors.
But Microsoft is releasing two (!) tablets: one that runs Windows RT and will be comparable in size and weight and price to an iPad, and another one that has an Intel processor and will be comparable in size and weight and price to a MacBook Air. But in tablet shape. The expensive one will run your current applications, but they will probably be unusable unless you use a keyboard and mouse/trackpad.
Are you confused enough yet? Is it obvious to you which one you should buy? Why are they making such a mess? Because…
Nobody at MS can make a decision
And this is the heart of the problem. To me it seems like nobody at Microsoft has the balls to make a decision: “We’re going to do ARM.” “We’re going to do full Windows with Intel.” “We’re going to pick keyboard A or B.”
The lack of a clear message confuses customers and ensures that no matter what you end up buying, you will at some point regret your choice or at least having a nagging solution that you should have bought the other model: my tablet is too heavy! the battery life sucks! I can’t run all applications! the cover is too thick! the keyboard has no travel! I can’t use the pen! I paid extra because of the pen and I never use it!
Protecting the Monopoly
All of this reeks of desperation. They see Android and iOS slowly but surely threatening the Windows PC monopoly. Tablets are growing, PCs are not. They don’t trust OEMs to come out with cool or cool enough products running Windows 8. They felt like they had to do it themselves. And maybe they had to. Maybe Apple’s do-it-all approach really is the way to go if you want the better (but not necessarily cheaper) product. And maybe more people are buying the better, not necessarily cheaper, product.
Timing
So why announce all of this now? They have no prices yet. They announced no specs. No battery lifetime. Not even the ports on the device. They had no Intel-based tablet on display at all. And nobody was allowed to touch the keyboards – the most important and arguably innovative thing about Surface. They clearly are not ready. This is vaporware.
The reason, I think, is that they had to show something before Google very likely announces their own tablet next week at Google IO (also backstabbing their own hardware partners in the process).
They had to do it even if it means pissing your partner off. Even if it means that nobody with a clue will buy a Windows Ultrabook until the Intel Surface comes out so that proper reviews exist – a full three months after Windows 8 ships! Crazy.
Surface vs iPad
Surface and iPad are both tablets. But I think there are some fundamental differences in the basic usage philosophies surrounding both. Time will tell which one is right or if there’s room for both approaches. But if Microsoft’s tablet history (they’ve been pushing tablets since the nineties, believe it or not) is any indicator…
First, iPad is meant to be used mainly in portrait orientation. That’s why it has a 4:3 screen ratio, the home button and cameras and dock connector are where they are.
Surface is meant to be used mainly in landscape orientation. That’s why the keyboard attaches where it attaches. That’s why it has a 16:9 (optimal for video watching) screen.
iPad is primarily meant to be used while holding it up with your hands and with your fingers.
Surface is meant to be used as a traditional laptop: on a table, with a keyboard and trackpad. Since it sits at a 22 degree angle when using the built-in kickstand, I bet that tapping on it with your fingers is too likely to knock it down.
For all these reasons, I think Surface is more a laptop that looks like a tablet (as defined by the iPad) and not as direct of a competitor to the iPad as one would think initially. It’s a very basic different approach to computing, and one that’s understandable knowing where Microsoft comes from.
Surface vs Android
Android on tablets has failed so far. Let’s wait and maybe talk about it later.
One more thing: Windows Phone 8
Windows Phone 8 was announced yesterday. It’s a nice and much needed upgrade. But it’s not shipping yet, and one thing they did say is that no Windows Phone 7 hardware will get upgraded to the new OS. This is reasonable because under the hood they are quite different pieces of software even if they look similar.
But what schmuck would go out and buy a Windows Phone 7 today knowing this? Only a clueless schmuck. Nokia is already hurting, now it’s going to get worse. Thank you, from Finland!
Conclusion
Yeah, I think that it’s desperate for MS to release a tablet and betray it’s partners. I think combining a tablet/touch interface with a desktop/mouse/keyboard interface in one OS is a mess: you’ll get a horrible experience at least part of the time regardless of what kind of machine you have in front of you.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Windows 8 is really really good and developers will get behind it and it will be a great success. Microsoft has lots of money and a few monopolies that allows them to push this for a while even if it costs them dearly.
Astronomers have figured out, among other things, how big the Universe is. Most people have no idea how they figured it out.
This video by the Royal Observatory Greenwich does a fantastical job of explaining it to mere mortals using no math but outstanding visualization. It’s so well made… you gotta watch it if you haven’t yet. Yes, even if you are one of my dear astronomer readers:
I used the stock Debian Linux image and copied it to an SD Card on my Mac. After hooking everything up it booted!
I was able to play with it for a bit, but not much. I’m no Linux expert but the online guides were very helpful. Later I’ll try to play some video or something on it.
The HDMI to DVI Apple-branded adapter costs about the same as the Raspberry Pi.Web browsing is glacially slow. Maybe something can be done through software improvements but I don't think there's a lot of hope. Here you can see the world's best website as rendered by a Raspberry Pi. This is not Photoshopped. Heck, it's not even GIMPed!
