Archives for category: new product

iPad 2, Crysis 2, its a multiple of 2!

March 31, 11 //
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News you care about… News and review you care about! Yes, today we have real and genuine review of two things, Crysis 2 and the iPad 2! Serious reviews too, yes something is wrong I agree but we have it.

In addition to this we also have the news for this week, several impressions and much more. Yes, normal unstructured, worst podcast in the world service will resume in the following show, but today we have a bloody brilliant programme.

Remember to go to the website which is www.gmcrf.co.uk, email us at letters@gmcrf.co.uk , and digg the episode…

GMCRF fm-Episode 44-31/3/2K11 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Back to the Mac.

October 20, 10 //
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New MacBook Air

New MacBook Air

Back to the Mac; that was the name of the Apple event for today from their Infinite Loop campus at Cupertino. And yes, they have finally done a Mac conference for the first time in a while. Yet, I can’t help but think that both the setting and how it was presented indicate how little they, or Jobs seems to care about the Mac. It was in their campus’ small conference hall, rather than in a bigger centre they did their iPod, iPad and iPhone events in – yet, they tried hard to make it think that they do.

iLife 11

iLife was the first product after the usual numbers (which wasn’t presented by Steve). iLife 11 is just the same apps as the previous iLife (iLife ’09). With enhancements, yet they only showed three. Phil the Schill-er presented the iPhoto section. iPhoto has more social capabilities, new book designs (to get more money) which apparently selects the most appropriate images for the page for you to then go and edit. They are also lots of full screen features in iPhoto. The important thing is that Steve Jobs thinks “that’s awesome” – which is odd for Steve and a new Apple product isn’t it!

iMovie was next. The UI hasn’t changes at all since that drastic change we saw with iLife ’08. They have enhanced the audio editing. Which is something iMove needed because it was absolutely awful for sound in the previous version. Also they had sound effects… which aren’t something that’s amazing. Another new feature they had was “Movie trailers” which needed no real imagination at all. It was a template where you would then edit the text on screen (you can have between two to six cast members) and then drop clips into the set slots (or let the “people finder” – facial recognition – do some of it). This is quite an interesting feature… but for many people I can’t see this been anything other than an interesting feature. Also, I have to point out, it does make the film trailers look awfully cheap (and they is even one Indiana jones clone which is the sole reason why I will buy this), but what do you expect from software.

The Steve Jobs quote that came after – “Its AH-MAZING” – Shock.

The third and final one Apple decided to show off is Garage Band – and bullied some kids in showing off their “Groove matching features”. This is just a form of auto-tune and beat matching for music. This, on stage, worked very well – surprise? For further corrections Apple created “flex-time” which is just dragging out the sound waves out for tiny-time fixing errors. In my opinion, not much new in Garage Band.

Over all the new iLife is just an addition of new features and nothing brilliant. And it’s a shame they didn’t create anything brilliant with iWeb or IDVD (which they didn’t show on stage). iLife is £50-ish (US$49) and free on all new Macs, and is out today.

OS X Lion

Mac OS X came next, Mac OS X Lion to be precise. The whole thing is about “OS X meets the iPad”. “Vertical surfaces don’t work” – He is correct here, and can’t see why he needed consumer research; he said they needed to be flat. And this is why the multi-touch mouse and magic-mouse were released. Lion will also bring the “Mac App Store”. Other than it been on the mac, it’s all the same details as the iTunes store. So, that’s interesting… something which has been rumoured about has come true. Only thing is, these rumours were about Windows 8.

Speaking of the Mac App store, it will be launching surprisingly quickly. Within 90-days.

Launch pad is something which is more usable than the App-Store. It brings up an IOS-esque window management screen. It operates in exactly the same way (with the folders, and the slide navigation) as IOS does.

Full screen apps is something they also showed off, again taking this from IOS. This should look bloody brilliant on the Mac Screens – which are all ways brilliant. Now the green plus button makes the application in full screen. Launch for OS X Lion is expected to be in Summer 2011.

New MacBook air.

One more thing though… and according to Jobs it comes back to the theme of “Back to the Mac”. “What would happen if a MacBook met the iPad” – “What would happen if they hooked up” – but don’t worry… it’s the “most amazing thing we’ve [Apple] ever created”. It’s the new MacBook air. It has complete uni-body construction and all the features you find on other MacBooks.

The details of the device are

  • 13.3 led screen or 11.6 inch.
  • 1440×900 pixels or 1366×768 pixels
  • Core 2 duo processor
  • NVIDIA GeForce 320m
  • FaceTime camera (note the change from iSight to FaceTime – does this mean the end of iChat?)
  • No Optical drive
  • No Hard drive – they have gone to complete SSD.

Now, I can only think that they have gone

to the SSD to get the 30 day standby time for the battery (on both models). Now, he wanted to make sure that they were using a conservative measurement of battery life though. Yet, this SSD appears not to be replaceable – it looks soldered onto the board.

The important thing though is the price. Yet, they are still very expensive. They start at $999 with a 1.44 GHz processor and 64GB SSD (and 11.6” screen). So, they are very underpowered units – even for laptops. And yes… they are starting to be sold today. I really do think that it is still too expensive for what you get in the device. Way too expensive – but, they will probably sell.

For once all the rumours were correct, we had the MacBook air, new iLife and new OS X. For more in-depth analysis listen to the next GMCRF fm where we will be talking about this in detail.

Always delightful… how delightful! Windows Phone 7.

October 11, 10 //
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So, today Mr Steve ‘DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS’ Ballmer has announced publicly details about Windows Phone 7. In the presentation full of meaningless adverbs there is a lot of interesting product features of the new phone operating system which I think will ensure that the product is a winner… hopefully.

Windows Phone 7's "Metro" UI.

Firstly is the “Metro” user-interface. This “delightful” UI (which is bloody brilliant to tell the truth) is one thing which I find rather interesting. It is clean, and sharp, yet most importantly completely different from the iPhone OS (iOS) and then the attempted clones of the UI which is commonly seen on Android. It looks clean, fast, functional and to an extent, fun to use and navigate. It’s like what you expect from Apple and like the experience you get with their products, it is truly brilliant and intuitive.  Yet, this “Metro” UI appears to be brilliant at handling feeds from external sites such as Facebook, Twitter… and also the phone. Microsoft has named them “Live tiles,” and this is part of their main marketing effort. But this feature truly does set it apart from the other phones, and I can see this been a part of other smartphone OS’s because of the functionality of it.

Another important thing is text entry. Again, this looks very smooth and fits in with the UI. It also provides automatic correction, with a form of undo, and also spell correction. They isn’t much more to point out here, other than it looks very smooth, fast and well integrated; just like the iPhone.

Moving on to the Xbox LIVE integration which, in my opinion, is the killer feature on the phone; it has integration with the games which are coming on the platform, and more importantly with the rest of the Xbox LIVE eco-system. Everything from your avatar to your gamer-score is included as you would expect… even the ability to customise it too. But is they also a possibility of cross-platform games as we see with PC and Xbox 360? People will be asking “is this Microsoft’s handheld console push?” Yes, it most defiantly is. Developing your own hardware and then an OS to run over that is just too much work, and then another arm for Microsoft to focus on.  So with the Re-launch of WinPhone7 I believe that they know they have a killer platform for the console, so they may as well move it up a level. I firmly believe that other competitors (Apple) know how important this feature will become as smart-phones (or App-Phones) are becoming ever more popular. We have seen Apple launch “Game-Centre” which is basically Xbox-LIVE for the iPhone. However, I have a problem with Apples effort in that it is too late. Many game developers have developed their own (for example Plus+ from NGMoco)… so I doubt that game centre will become as popular as Xbox-LIVE could be/is.

One of the key things about the Windows Phone is the Applications though. As I said when I wrote the Blackberry PlayBook column, without Applications the platform will fail. I have faith that they will be applications though, XNA developers have been playing with it for a while… so they will be many games and other apps. But one interesting thing is that EA are on board too, so this means they will be a large amount of titles which should be good, one example from EA on stage was The Sims.

Microsoft has a large amount of developers, developers, developers, and manufacturers (with only Apple (obvious!), Motorola (at first) and Nokia missing) to make a successful phone… if they can’t do it this time, they can’t do it at all. I think they is now a possibility (short term at least) of a three-horse race between Apple, Google, and now Microsoft for the mass-market device. However, it will be interesting to see how the other manufacturers retaliate with some of the new features implemented within this new OS.

So, I wonder if Steve ‘DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS’ Ballmer will pull this off. If he doesn’t, he’s fired!

The BlackBerry PlayBook – fail whale or not?

September 27, 10 //
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Blackberry Playbook.

Blackberry Playbook.

RIM, a company of phone… most recently the manufacturer of awful touch screen phones have now jumped on the bandwagon of creating a tablet. Just like HP (Hanky Panky) who keep promising a tablet, buying out companies and then not creating one, Samsung with their Galaxy Tab and of course the elephant in the room… Apple. Which, from my initial impressions will stay dominant in the market for at least two reasons.

Firstly, lets look at the actual hardware and then look at why this isn’t everything.

  • 7-inch LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
  • BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
  • 1 GHz dual-core processor
  • 1 GB RAM
  • Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording
  • Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
  • Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
  • HDMI video output
  • Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
  • Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
  • Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
  • Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
  • Ultra thin and portable:
  • Measures 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
  • Weighs less than a pound (approximately  400g)
  • RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future.

They are rather impressive, and thankfully it has a capacitive touch screen. It has more memory, the iPad only has 512MB. It also has cameras (which personally, I can’t see the point of a rear facing one) which the iPad doesn’t. But other than some of the hardware specifications… it’s a pile of crap. Whilst this is intentionally harsh I can see in the next year, specifically at the next CES of hundreds of companies making tablets with useless things on which look awful. And I think that this is the first part of the wave which we will see.

Secondly; let’s be honest, with tablets it isn’t about the hardware; it’s about the software. Let’s look at the OS firstly I have to say it looks remarkably similar to another OS… when you look at it, its almost like your looking at the PalmPad, but this aside I think that it looks a dog to use. Then we have the applications for this. They isn’t anything, they wont be anything and this is because of IOS. RIM said “This is going to be an incredible gaming platform for publishers and the players.” WHAT? They might find that even the power of Android still doesn’t have many good, worthwhile games on it. So how a tablet which has for some reason be claimed as “the first professional tablet” (which is obviously not the case because they have been used for ages by Gas-Salesmen and Normans) is beyond me, but if it does sell more than I expect it to (twenty-thousand and seven) it is defiantly not going to be the next hand-held gaming platform.

In addition, what is with the name? Seriously the “PlayBook”! They are marketing this as both a professional and gaming device and they have taken it to one end of the spectrum entirely. Why they didn’t give it a nice neutral name would be interesting, but this is probably another string in the recent mistakes (such as the torch).

From this brief press conference where RIM announced some other out-of-the-gate failures (example, advertisements) I think that this is yet another mistake from RIM. They, and most other companies seem to be looking at Apple and having knee-jerk reactions. This doesn’t work. This is a lesson which RIM and all the other crackpot companies making tablets that they need to be two-steps ahead to beat Apple, and for that matter any other market dominant force.