I signed up to get the “New Xbox Experience” early. I had figured it might be a couple of weeks early or so. Sadly, it’s not. It’s five whole days early. In any case, we’ll be getting it tonight at 5pm EST. Just in time for the weekend.
Now I just wish we hadn’t watched Heroes on Hulu last night because that’s supposed to be one of the few things that’s in HD. We’ll try again next week, I suppose.
(Actually, I’ve been watching the first few episodes of the new Doctor Who series that Netflix has. This will make it easier. ;))
Apparently, the most recent feature for the PS3 was Flash 9 support. Why is this great? Well, sites like Hulu use Flash 9. Does Hulu work? Yeah, mostly.
The video plays back fine, but the controls don’t work so well. For instance, you can’t switch to full screen or switch playback to 480p, so the quality suffers. I’m not convinced these things are actually Sony’s problem, though, as it might be the way Hulu is approaching it since some of them try to work but things draw in the wrong place.
However, you can get full screen playback. Use the right joystick button to zoom in. On the main player, this zooms in to the full player control, which includes the side bars which don’t have video. However, with an embedded video like you find on some of Hulu’s pages, the player doesn’t have any side controls. In this case, the zoom is perfectly full screen. Playback is smooth, but at only 360p, it could be higher quality.
In any case, it’s a pretty nice solution that should get better.
With Google Earth for the iPhone you can tilt your phone to change the tilt on the view. This is a lot of fun. You can’t rotate around by rotating the phone, though, like we’ve seen with street view on Android (and the upcoming 2.2 firmware of the iPhone). There are some problems with this, though. It means to view imagery from above, you have to have the iPhone relatively flat. The redraw time is also a little slow when tilting it about.
Google Earth makes great use of pinch and two-finger rotates. They seem to work even better when tilted than a rotate or zoom does in the desktop version.
I’ve often said, somewhat jokingly, that I wouldn’t get a MacBook until they offered it with two buttons. Now I’m typing on a MacBook Pro with zero buttons. Yet, interestingly, it works great as a two button mouse! For now, though, if your thumb has any sort of memory, it will just do the right thing with left and right clicks. I find this very slick! It would be perfect if middle-click worked for the third button. There is an option for right-click with two fingers, which I’ve turned off as it’s redundant. If that could be middle it’d be really great, especially for modern tabbed web browsers.
I have a Dell. The Dell has digital audio output via a copper cable. That connects to the 5.1 decoder on the Tritton box for my 5.1 headphones (the bass is great on them). We have a Mac. The Mac has digital audio output via an optical connection on the headphone output (lots of things do this, even my ancient CD player). This goes in to the other input of the Tritton decoder. A simple flip of the switch and I get the Mac audio. Wonderful!
Maybe there is another way to do this, but with the slightly more open beta for Skyfire for Symbian I now have a way to watch Hulu on my N95 -- even over 3G networks. It's simple: just use Skyfire and load up the hulu page. It works quite well and can be zoomed. The video is a little choppy, but I also had JoikuSpot running in the background using some bandwidth, so I'm not entirely sure where the choppiness was coming from. However, since they both ran together things can only get better.
Pretty cool stuff. This combo is already largely better than broadcast mobile TV. Why bother with that when you can basically get on-demand TV and movies -- for free?
There has been a recent trend of showing SMS prices as if they were a byte-charged service to compare them to unlimited data. Is SMS really just another data service that should be included in your unlimited data plan? After all, instant messaging on your computer doesn't seem any different and it's included with your broadband. Or is SMS something completely different?
As it turns out, SMS is different. My understanding of SMS on a CDMA network is that it goes over the public channels in the same way a call origination will hunt down a handset. Since the data is short, by definition, this the only packet that goes out. The problem is this uses up one of the channels available for connecting a voice call to a receiving handset. The channels are a very limited resource as there are only a limited amount of them per tower. This limit increase the value of the channels to the carrier. I believe this is handled similarly on a GSM network.
It's also interesting that SMS became popular in Europe, before the US, where it wasn't uncommon for each message to cost the equivalent of 25 or 50 US cents. If I also recall correctly, the first SMS in the US was billed at similar rates but that was too expensive for us Americans. So, the carriers kept lowering rates until, finally, adoption started increasing. For a while it was even extremely cheap or even free to receive SMS messages. That was replaced with bulk and unlimited plans, though, and receiving returned to the same price as sending.
Now that SMS is so popular, the per message prices are increasing. However, the bulk and unlimited plans are still around. To me, this means that the carriers are trying to get more people to sign up for the recurring charges of the plans rather than reduce usage. If SMS usage is clogging up the public channels and causing an increase in busy signal and connection failures, they may actually want to reduce the usage until they can build out their networks better.
So, I think there are multiple possible reasons why SMS pricing has been increasing again in the US. It may not be fair, but I also don't think it's fair to say that 20 cents for a 140 byte message is like paying $1,500 per megabyte since it's a completely different service. What do you think? Does the technology behind SMS matter when the user is billed for its usage?
I've been perusing the App store quite a bit since yesterday. I've been very curious on how prices were going to be. Apple has been really going after the ease of development if you already develop for a Mac. This means they've basically been targeting desktop developers. However, mobile developers have flocked to it, as well, since it's yet another mobile market. So, I've been wondering if the prices would trend towards mobile pricing more like on BREW (think Verizon or Alltel), desktop pricing, or some mid-ground like you'll find on a Windows Mobile device. Assuming there was going to be no recurring billing like available on all other mobile platforms, I was thinking things would be a bit more expensive.
It appears that it's all over the board. Pricing also doesn't appear to be affecting sales, either. Although the data appears to be unavailable now, I noted yesterday that in the case of five different Sudoku games, the most expensive at $6 had about 3 times as many downloads as the two at $3, but those had around the same amount of downloads as the two that were at $1. Strangely, though, the more expensive one wasn't even rated as well. (TechCrunch has an article with the top 50 from yesterday in spreadsheet form. Great data.)
The top downloaded game was SEGA's Super Monkey Ball. At $10, it's priced pretty normally for a small, mobile game on other handsets. However, it's also been demonstrated at multiple Apple events, so that should come as no surprise. Additionally, it's a brand name game from a big company that can market it on their own, too.
Big names tend to always do well. For instances, the MLB.com app is sitting in the number two spot. However, free will always win. Apple has made two top 25 lists to account for this. Otherwise, Apples own Remote and apps from the likes of Google, AOL (they've got two in the top 10 of free apps), and Facebook would completely overshadow any paid apps.
A big remaining question, though, is how quickly will equilibrium be reached and the proper pricing appear? And will large company apps that are basically marketing for their services, ad supported applications, and simply free apps ultimately dominate certain categories? For instance, why would anyway try to sell a streaming radio application when both Pandora and AOL Radio are available for free? Will the apps in the $30-50 range actually sell?
What is also interesting to note, however, is that there are ad-supported applications. This often doesn't exist on other platforms as carriers have specifically disallowed it (except for their own apps, of course). Some applications are even available in both paid form and ad-supported form. For example, Twitterific is available as a $10 app as well as a free, but ad-supported, app.
Anyway, time will tell how this all plays out. It's only Day 1. Good luck to all. :)
Do you have a Nokia N95? Do you want to use GPS? Does the GPS seem very slow? If so, check out these couple of tips to see if you can speed it up. Mine is fast now, and works indoors.
First, check what your current settings are for positioning. These are found pretty deep down in the menus at: "Menu->Tools->Settings->General->Positioning->Positioning Methods". Is GPS on? Is assisted GPS on? What about Network Based?
Network based will work much like the iPhone currently works. It'll get you the general area, and might be close by accident. GPS is the true GPS. Assisted GPS, however, is what didn't work for me. Until I added Nokia's positioning server. This setting is under Positioning->Positioning Server->Server address. I made mine "supl.nokia.com" and now I can get a very accurate position indoors.
If your phone didn't need this or already had a setting, let us know what it is. Mine, which I just got from Amazon a week ago, didn't have any of this set up at all.
Also, if you want to tag images in a lighter way than ShoZu, try out Nokia's beta application, Location Tagger. The site implies this will eventually be in the firmware, but for now it's a beta application that runs in the background.
So, as some may know, I've had an Apple iPhone for quite a while. I got it on one of the prepay plans because I wasn't sure if the coverage would be good enough for my needs and I didn't want to be stuck with two years at $70 per month. In addition, I've still be carrying my Verizon LG VX9800 ("The V") and the Sprint LG Musiq.
Well, two days ago (from the start of this writing) I ported my Verizon number over to the iPhone. Nothing is as simple as it sounds, though.
I signed up to get the “New Xbox Experience” early. I had figured it might be a couple of weeks early or so. Sadly, it’s not. It’s five whole days early. In any case, we’ll be getting it tonight at 5pm EST. Just in time for the weekend. 
()
(0)
Apparently, the most recent feature for the PS3 was Flash 9 support. Why is this great? Well, sites like Hulu use Flash 9. Does Hulu work? Yeah, mostly.
With Google Earth for the iPhone you can tilt your phone to change the tilt on the view. This is a lot of fun. You can’t rotate around by rotating the phone, though, like we’ve seen with street view on Android (and the upcoming 2.2 firmware of the iPhone). There are some problems with this, though. It means to view imagery from above, you have to have the iPhone relatively flat. The redraw time is also a little slow when tilting it about.
I’ve often said, somewhat jokingly, that I wouldn’t get a MacBook until they offered it with two buttons. Now I’m typing on a MacBook Pro with zero buttons. Yet, interestingly, it works great as a two button mouse! For now, though, if your thumb has any sort of memory, it will just do the right thing with left and right clicks. I find this very slick! It would be perfect if middle-click worked for the third button. There is an option for right-click with two fingers, which I’ve turned off as it’s redundant. If that could be middle it’d be really great, especially for modern tabbed web browsers.
I have a Dell. The Dell has digital audio output via a copper cable. That connects to the 5.1 decoder on the Tritton box for my 5.1 headphones (the bass is great on them). We have a Mac. The Mac has digital audio output via an optical connection on the headphone output (lots of things do this, even my ancient CD player). This goes in to the other input of the Tritton decoder. A simple flip of the switch and I get the Mac audio. Wonderful!
Maybe there is another way to do this, but with the slightly more open beta for Skyfire for Symbian I now have a way to watch Hulu on my N95 -- even over 3G networks. It's simple: just use Skyfire and load up the hulu page. It works quite well and can be zoomed. The video is a little choppy, but I also had JoikuSpot running in the background using some bandwidth, so I'm not entirely sure where the choppiness was coming from. However, since they both ran together things can only get better. 
There has been a recent trend of showing SMS prices as if they were a byte-charged service to compare them to unlimited data. Is SMS really just another data service that should be included in your unlimited data plan? After all, instant messaging on your computer doesn't seem any different and it's included with your broadband. Or is SMS something completely different?
I've been perusing the App store quite a bit since yesterday. I've been very curious on how prices were going to be. Apple has been really going after the ease of development if you already develop for a Mac. This means they've basically been targeting desktop developers. However, mobile developers have flocked to it, as well, since it's yet another mobile market. So, I've been wondering if the prices would trend towards mobile pricing more like on BREW (think Verizon or Alltel), desktop pricing, or some mid-ground like you'll find on a Windows Mobile device. Assuming there was going to be no recurring billing like available on all other mobile platforms, I was thinking things would be a bit more expensive.
Do you have a Nokia N95? Do you want to use GPS? Does the GPS seem very slow? If so, check out these couple of tips to see if you can speed it up. Mine is fast now, and works indoors.