New Flip camcorder jumps on touchscreen bandwagon
Cisco has unveiled another new Flip camcorder design, a big departure from what we've become accustomed to. The Flip SlideHD has a touchscreen that lets users navigate through recorded videos and watch them in full widescreen mode, eliminating the need for traditional buttons. The screen also slides up (hence the name) to expose a "slide strip," though this feature is more a gimmick than anything else.
The Flip SlideHD can record for up to four hours and store up to 12 hours of video in its built-in 16GB of memory. The touchscreen is 3 inches on the diagonal (the iPhone's screen is 3.5 inches, by comparison, so the Flip's is decently large) and the camera can record 720p video (1280 x 720) at 30 frames per second. The battery is a rechargeable li-ion battery that charges over USB, is not removable, and lasts for up to two hours on a charge.
The most interesting aspect of the SlideHD is the touchscreen, which has its own "big red button" to touch in order to begin recording (traditional Flips have a real red button). Clearly, the advantage to this is to give all the space on the back of the device to the screen, which can be advantageous for showing off the videos you have taken. Otherwise, however, the SlideHD's feature set is largely the same as other Flip offerings, such as the MinoHD and the UltraHD. It can record more video, but otherwise the resolution is the same, they're all PC and Mac compatible, they all have a "Child Safe" mode to prevent unintended button-pushes, and a tripod mount.
Given these similarities, Cisco is banking on new users going for the big touchscreen for $279. It's less likely that owners of other Flip camcorders will be tempted to switch because of the feature similarities, though, and budget-minded buyers will still be attracted to the $199 UltraHD with its smaller screen and replaceable AA batteries. Still, despite video capabilities being integrated into nearly every other pocketable device, we still think there's room in the market for Flips—in our experience, a phone might be more convenient, a Flip wins hands-down when quality actually matters.
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Google planning to open the VP8 video codec
When Google announced a deal to acquire video technology company On2 last year, the move generated speculation that the search giant was aiming to liberate the VP8 codec in order to accelerate the advancement of standards-based open video. Google has remained silent about its plans for On2's intellectual property, but signs have emerged that the company is planning to do precisely what the speculators anticipated.
According to a report at NewTeeVee, inside sources have confirmed that Google will be open-sourcing the VP8 codec next month at the Google I/O conference. Mozilla and Google will also reportedly announce plans to implement support for VP8 in their respective browsers at that time. The move could have profound ramifications on the viability of standards-based video playback and the future of rich media on the Internet.
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MacBook Pros updated with Corei5/i7 processors, 10hr battery
After an unusually long wait, Apple has finally released updated models of its MacBook Pro line of notebooks. The 15" and 17" models offer the latest Core i5 and i7 processors, though the 13" model still uses a Core 2 Duo processor. But new processors aren't the only improvement; Apple has also seen fit to increase the base RAM configuration to 4GB on all models and bump the hard drive and SSD options. And Apple claims battery life has been improved, with some models now going as long as 10 hours without plugging in.
The new 13" MacBook Pro offers 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. The lower-end model gets a 250GB 5400RPM SATA drive, while the higher-end option comes with a 320GB 5400RPM drive. A 500GB 5400RPM hard drive is a build-to-order option, as are 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB solid state drives. Both models come with NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated graphics, an update to the 9400M that previous MacBook Pros used. Combined with a 63.5WHr lithium polymer sealed battery, Apple claims these new 13" MacBook Pro models can run up to 10 hours on a single charge.
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Cutting cable's cord: couch potatoes slowly migrating to 'Net
Close to a quarter of the younger respondents to a new study say that most of the video content they watch is online. And a sizable chunk of those polled said that if cable and satellite TV prices keep going up, they're going to cut the cord.
"Whether it's their proclivity for everything digital, or they're just trying to save a buck, one thing is clear: young people have their eyeballs glued to the Internet," concludes the Retrevo company's latest commissioned survey of couch potato trends. Retrevo helps consumers find news and reviews about the latest electronic gadgets.
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Quantum fun: how identical must "identical photons" be?
I have completely lost count of how many times I have read phrases like, "Consider a light source that emits photon pairs that are indistinguishable." This indistinguishability, along with the ability of these pairs to be correlated, plays a central role in the games that we play with quantum mechanics.
This isn't only a matter of games for academics—there are also security and computational applications that depend on photons that are (theoretically, at least) indistinguishable. But real experiments use real equipment that is never quite ideal. In some ways this is a benefit, because an ideal pair of detectors would detect differences in our slightly-less-than-ideal photons, destroying experiments and generating cynical graduate students.
Now, some new research from ETH Zurich and Aalto University in Finland explores how imperfect indistinguishability alters the appearance of quantum effects.
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The Whispered World: the adventure genre abides
Adventure games aren't nearly as popular as they once were, but for anyone who grew up playing titles like Day of the Tentacle or Sam & Max Hit The Road, they retain a fond place in our hearts. After spending some time with the demo for Daedalic Entertainment's The Whispered World, it looks like fans of the genre are going to be in for a major treat when the game appears later this month.
The Whispered World takes place in a fairy tale setting and stars Sadwick, a morose little clown who hates working for his family's depressed traveling circus. Part of the boy's foul mood is due to the fact that he hasn't had a good night's sleep in months, thanks to a recurring nightmare that implies he'll have something to do with the end of the world. Sadwick's only friend is his overgrown caterpillar, Spot, who follows him wherever he goes.
Initially, Sadwick starts out wandering around trying to find potential audience members in the surrounding countryside (a difficult task, since everyone believes the world is ending and has started moving to more hospitable areas) and eventually finds himself on a quest to save the world instead of destroying it.
Gameplay-wise, The Whispered World seems like a standard third-person adventure. Sadwick and Spot roam around the land, picking up stuff that will be used in unusual ways to acquire other items or solve puzzles. Occasionally, you'll use Spot to accomplish a certain goal; early on in the demo, you end up stuffing the caterpillar into a small hole in order to open a broken stove from the inside.
Clicking on items brings up the standard "look/talk/use" options, and Sadwick has some rather pointed views on everything and everyone he comes across. A few of the puzzles are a little out there in terms of logic, but none were completely ridiculous. There's nothing unusual in terms of gameplay, but it all seems to have been executed competently.
What makes the game shine is its production values. The graphics seem to be completely hand-drawn, making The Whispered World feel more like an interactive cartoon than a standard video game. The character graphics are a little simpler than the backgrounds—which are beautifully painted and highly detailed—and in a couple of scenes seemed to feature some jagged edges due to weird size scaling, but they generally look and move great.
The audio is also excellent. There's a beautiful soundtrack, but what really takes the cake is the voice acting. The dialogue is funny, smart, and sarcastic, and the actors voicing the characters all do a great job of delivering their lines.
The Whispered World is due to be released on April 26th. Based on what we experienced in the demo, it looks like it's going to be a wonderful adventure game that will win over just about any fan of the genre. Adventure gamers owe it to themselves to at least visit the official site and check out the demo, though it's probably safe to assume they'll quickly want to buy the game outright.
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feature: Microsoft KIN hands-on: Great ideas in a teeny-bop package
Microsoft's new KIN phones aren't really for me. The company's attempts at an "edgy" kickoff for the new brand—gratuitous use of slang, a video with a kid making fun of fat people, talk of the challenges associated with taking cameraphone snaps in dark clubs, various references to Jersey Shore—only served to cement my impression that KIN is aimed at the Sidekick crowd, not at smartphone users and gadget freaks. Still, after a brief hands-on... I kinda want one.
In a nutshell, the KIN seems to carve off the cloud messaging parts of the Pre, seals them in a closed, purpose-built container (no app store on this device), and makes them work together seamlessly. It also improves a bit on the webOS experience with "the Loop," which is one of KIN's core features.
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Apple's wager
The changes to section 3.3.1 of Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement have been extensively covered on the web. Apple's position is well expressed by a pair of articles. John Gruber gives a high-level view in his Jobs-approved piece, while Louis Gerbarg provides a more technical perspective. As usual, I'm thinking meta.
The "section 3.3.1" issue is just another in a long line of events that have the same basic shape: actions taken by Apple in what it believes to be the best interest of its platform (and, by extension, itself) that run afoul of the interests and opinions of developers. Any Apple follower can surely list others: the lack of Flash on the iPhone, the App Store as the sole gateway for iPhone applications, deprecating Carbon, and on and on.
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RIM buying QNX to drive Blackberry car integration
Blackberry maker RIM has made a deal to acquire QNX, the company behind the Neutrino real-time operating system (RTOS). The acquisition, which is expected to complete next month, will give RIM a foothold in car computing and open up opportunities for smart appliance integration.
Neutrino is an exceptionally well-engineered operating system built with a modular microkernal, a sophisticated IPC system, and a lightweight user interface layer. It offers some unusual features, such as support for network-transparent distributed processing. It is principally designed for use in embedded devices, but it can also be installed and run like a conventional desktop operating system (I actually used it as my day-to-day operating system for about six months way back in the day). Neutrino is not technically open source software, but QNX makes the source code available for non-commercial uses.
Real-time operating systems are a pretty specialized niche, but there are some places where the technology has a strong presence. The market segment where Neutrino is most relevant is automotive computing systems. QNX's software is used by a number of car manufacturers to power Bluetooth integration, device connectivity, and number of other related systems. The company is developing a more sophisticated platform in anticipation of 4G connectivity arriving in vehicles. It's intriguing stuff, but the market is going to be fiercely competitive. Intel, for example, is developing its own car computing stack based around Atom and the Linux-based MeeGo platform.
RIM's acquisition of QNX could open the door for tighter integration between Blackberry devices and car computers, a capability that could be important as cars begin to drive into the cloud. RIM has also hinted that QNX's technology could be used to power a new class of Blackberry peripherals, but the company has not offered any specific details about what kind of peripherals it has in mind.
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Reconstructing the climate of medieval Europe
One of the uncertainties in climate science is figuring out how global climate trends translate into local predictions and reconstructions, and vice versa. A classic example of this is the medieval warm period, the time when Vikings roamed the North Sea and North Atlantic in shallow-draft open boats. They settled Greenland and made periodic visits to North America to get timber, placing some short-lived settlements there.
But there's a problem. We have the evidence from the adventures of the Norse, but the change to the European climate was so subtle that not many Europeans actually noted it at the time. Apart from exceptional—in both good and bad ways—years, it has been hard to gain a sense of what the typical climate in Europe was like.
To make matters more uncertain, reconstructions of the global climate show little evidence of the medieval warm period—Europe isn't the globe, after all—and some models show a warm period, while others don't. Local indicators, such as pollen grains and tree rings, show mixed evidence for the warm period. A recent paper, published in PLoS One, focuses on calibrating climate reconstructions using European data, but one side effect of the work is a further indication that the medieval warm period was really a local event.
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A brief assessment of Jobs's iPhone OS defense
On Friday, we wrote about the changes Apple is making to the terms and conditions that it requires from iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad developers before they can write software for these platforms. The new terms include a clause that prohibits a wide range of third-party toolkits and frameworks that offer developers benefits such as quicker, more robust application development and instant access to complex functionality like 3D game engines.
We believe the targets of this change to be, in particular, Adobe and Google's Android. Adobe is imminently releasing a new version of Flash that will, among other things, be able to produce iPhone applications. The new terms prohibit the use of such tools. Android is hurt because many of these frameworks facilitate cross-platform software development. As the smaller platform, Android benefits from the use of toolkits that allow developers to target the iPhone and then rapidly, and at low cost, migrate to Android.
Over the weekend, it appears that Steve Jobs weighed in on the issue. Jobs referenced John Gruber's rationale for the changes. He then, if the e-mails are authentic, clarified Apple's position, claiming that intermediate layers between developers and the platform have two results: they result in "sub-standard apps" and they hinder the "progress of the platform."
Let's take a look at each claim.
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Microsoft unveils Sidekick's next of KIN
During a media event in San Francisco today, Microsoft revealed the spiritual successor to the Danger Sidekick messaging phone. Called "KIN," the new platform is designed with a heavy focus on social networking and is targeted mainly towards younger users that Microsoft has dubbed the "social generation."
KIN is launching with two different hardware versions. KIN ONE is a small touchscreen QWERTY slider that looks not unlike the Palm Pre. It has 4GB of flash memory for storage and a 5 megapixel camera optimized for low-light use.
KIN TWO is a larger, more traditional-looking QWERTY slider, with a larger, wider touchscreen. It has 8GB of storage and an 8 megapixel camera that can shoot 720p HD video.
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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 arrive
As expected, Microsoft today announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. To celebrate, the company is hosting a launch consisting of more than 150 developer-focused events around the world. In time for the release, Microsoft made sure that developers have access to popular partner extensions earlier than before; approximately 50 partners already announced availability of products and solutions built on the two technologies.
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Ex-Infinity Ward heads create Respawn Entertainment with EA
Jason West and Vince Zampella, the ousted heads of Infinity Ward, have signed with EA to created Respawn Entertainment. The duo will own the intellectual property created in the deal, with EA Partners having the exclusive right to publish and distribute the games worldwide.
"Respawn Entertainment marks a fresh start for Jason and me," said Vince Zampella, General Manager of Respawn Entertainment. "For the past decade we led a great development team and poured our hearts into creating an epic game franchise. We're very proud of what we built—and proud that so many millions of fans enjoyed those games. Today we hope to do it all over again—open a new studio, hire a great team, and create brand new games with a new partner, EA."
Activision and the pair are still embroiled in a series of lawsuits over the specifics of owed payments and "insubordination" taking place in the house of Kotick. Activision has already stated it hopes to take Infinity Ward's Call of Duty series in a direction that would allow it to charge subscription fees for play, and Sledgehammer Games is already working on an "action adventure" game in the series. A new Call of Duty game is also expected by the end of the year from Treyarch.
In other words, no matter who is working on them, Activision will pump out Call of Duty games as fast as possible. The company has also taken this opportunity to snipe at the new company. "This agreement comes as no surprise to Activision given the myriad of improper activities detailed in the cross-complaint filed on Friday against Jason West and Vince Zampella. We look forward to continuing to work with Infinity Ward's deep bench of proven talent on exciting new projects," Activision stated.
What's Respawn working on? No details yet, but Infinity Ward was created after working on Medal of Honor became unfulfilling. Now Call of Duty has been left behind for something new. Building up and then leaving behind huge franchises at the right time is quite the trick, but it's one that Zampella and West seem to have mastered.
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Liveblog: Mobile Microsoft Event at 10am Pacific time (live)
Microsoft is holding a mobile event this morning in downtown San Francisco at Mighty. The invitation includes the cryptic phrases "All In The..." and "It's time to share." Ars will be on the scene liveblogging the event, which is scheduled to begin at 10am Pacific time (click here to see it in your timezone).
It's widely believed that Microsoft will announce some sort of mobile device or platform, including the long-rumored Pink project—which is supposed to deliver the successor to the Sidekick platform after Microsoft purchased Danger Hiptop in 2008.
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