A small, flat, plastic box

The “LV2″ looks like an alarm clock that an elephant sat on. It’s rather flat, and wider and deeper than most regular alarm clocks. Even the digits on the front are low and wide, which helps keep them easy to read. On top, there’s a 30 pin connector and a small support thingy that helps keep the docked device upright. This held the iPad firmly in place, but has little effect on my iPod Touch or the iPhone. This is one of those iPad accessories that probably wasn’t designed for the new 2012 iPad, but it fits perfectly.

There’s a battery compartment on the bottom. I didn’t test battery operation because I won’t be using it on the go. On the back, there’s a 12V power connector (the adapter is of course included, and comes with wall adapters for all common international sockets). There’s also a 3.5mm aux input for my Android phone, and a fixed FM antenna wire.

Waking up? There’s an app for that!

There are a couple of physical buttons on the Luna Voyager II, allowing you to set the alarms and control all of the basic functions without connecting an iDevice. But that’s not what this dock is all about. As soon as you dock your iPhone, it prompts you to install the Luna Voyager II app from the iTunes App Store, and that’s when the fun really begins. The app lets you set alarms, control volume, tune the FM radio, and sync those settings with the alarm clock. All in a familiar, easy to use iOS interface.

Sound quality

For its size, the XtremeMac doesn’t sound half bad. Mid range and high tones are about as good as you can expect from a small, plastic box. Don’t expect any bass, but it’s easily the best-sounding alarm clock I’ve ever had. If your primary function would be listening to music, I’d go for a bigger, dedicated speaker dock. But that’s a different class of devices entirely.

Verdict

The Luna Voyager II is small, easy to set up and control (through the app), and offers reasonable sound quality. It’s small enough to take with you, but doesn’t come with a carrying bag to protect it. It’s a very nice iPad dock, but unfortunately, not ideal for watching video. This is because the iPad is docked in portrait orientation.

I ran a few quick tests to see how much all those extra pixels affected overall file size. I used 130 randomly chosen jpeg images (all straight from my DSLR camera), and ran Photoshop and Irfanview batches to crop and scale them to a couple of often-used sizes. I used the same JPEG settings each time, and made sure the only difference between the images would be that the retina ones were four times sharper.

My office buddy @geerdesontwerp was kind enough to hook me up with a set of high-quality icons. I used these to run a test where I’d batch convert these to PNG, to get an idea of how efficient PNG handles the extra data in non-photographic images.

What these shows is that yes, you will need extra bandwidth to serve high-density images. But not four times as much. JPEG images seem to average at about twice the file size. The PNG test seems to indicate that PNG does a lot worse, but with only 46 test images, I’d say this warrants further investigation.

Another thing to consider is that you might be able to get away with using significantly more compression on retina images. The whole point is that people won’t see pixels anymore, and the same probably goes for JPEG artifacts.

After a couple days of usage, my wife is still very happy with the case. She was looking for a folio type cover like this, and the Porporta feels and looks like a premium product. Like all cases of this type, it may not be ideally suited for left-handed users, but it’s very well-made and fits the iPad perfectly.

This almost goes without saying, but the case of course has all the necessary holes for easy access to things like the 30-pin connector and the camera. If you’re looking for something to protect your new iPad, without impacting the environment, this case is definitely worth considering. Recommended.

Almost two years ago (and on a two-year contract), I got an HTC Desire. The Desire is basically HTC’s own version of the Google Nexus One. They manufactured Google’s flagship “superphone”, and somewhere along the line decided to introduce a slightly modified version as the Desire.

The Desire has the same 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the same excellent 3.7 inch screen, and the same dimensions. It lacks the Nexus’s dual noise-cancelling microphones, but adds physical buttons. And it became available way before the Nexus One did here in Europe.

The Good

The most impressive thing about this phone has to be the build quality. Mine looks the same as it did when I got it. You’d need a microscope to find any evidence that it’s been used. I’m using a screen protector, but not a protective case, so I think that’s pretty impressive.

Another thing I like is that it’s still fast enough. Sure, newer phones tend to have dual, or even quad, core processors, but in everyday use, the Desire still holds up. Scrolling is smooth and apps launch quickly.

The final thing I love about the Desire is the screen size. Almost all new top-of-the-line Android phones have 4.3″ or 4.7″ screens. I prefer phones that are pocketable, and the Desire’s dimensions are just right.

The bad

Despite the overall build quality, I did manage to break the on/off button last year. I spend a lot of time tying kinds shoelaces, and must’ve kneeled with the Desire in my front pocket once too often. This was fixed under warranty, and I’ve had no issues since.

The camera on the Desire was impressive when the phone first appeared on the market, but it’s been overtaken left and right, most notably by the iPhone 4S. I also suspect that during the repair I wrote about earlier, the camera in my phone got swapped along with the motherboard. The new one seems worse. I rarely use it anymore, and if I opt to get a new phone, this will be one of the main reasons.

The ugly

The Achilles heel for both the Nexus One and the Desire is their internal phone memory. You can use SD cards, but the phone’s OS and some apps just need to be in the phone’s memory. And for this duo, that memory is tiny. The Desire has 576MB, a bit more than its Google equivalent, but the extra space is used up by HTC’s Sense skin and some extra apps. Mine has only a couple of megabytes left at any given time, which can be frustrating.

I’ve recently used this little hack to get a little extra breathing room, but the fact remains that you need to be picky about which apps to install. This takes away from the fun of owning an Android phone, but it’s a trade-off I may be willing to live with for now.

So…

All in all, there’s not much left for me to desire (pun intended). Newer phones, like the Galaxy Nexus, have improved specs, but I feel no immediate need to upgrade. Considering how fast the smartphone market is moving, this is impressive to me. My wife’s iPhone 3GS of the same age feels “tired”, but the Desire’s still going strong. Google and HTC really created an excellent phone two years ago.

• Let’s say I’m out for 12 hours.
• My phone has Tweetdeck, Wordfued and Gmail active (the essentials).
• Let’s assume the average interval between checks is 15 minutes.
• That means: 3 apps x 4 times X 12 hours = 144 sessions.
• That then amounts to 14.4 MB of data use.
• That’s roughly 1 day worth of data based on their largest plan.
• Even if I received zero emails, tweets and words in that time.

I emailed Hollands Nieuwe’s support desk, and they confirmed that this is indeed how it works. They suggested I use wifi.

What strikes me most about this is how really terribly unfair this is. If you’re going to offer a data connection, charge for data actually used. Notifications and syncing are just how the mobile internet works. It’s how everyone wants to use it. It seems like Hollands Nieuwe is consciously trying to screw you over by imposing this weird rule. It’ll make your go over your limit, which means more money for them.

If you’re using your smartphone to keep up to date with your email, facebook and such, I’d recommend staying away from Hollands Nieuwe.

As I write this, an hour and a half after the launch, I still can’t get either of the websites to respond. On Twitter, the Raspberry Pi foundation has announced that at least on of them is out of stock. I guess I’ll have to wait for the second batch.

I think it looks amazing. Windows 7, despite its design “fresh-up” in my opinion looks outdated and lacks a certain elegance. It works, the new taskbar is just enough of an improvement, the overall stability is now pretty good, but there’s nothing to really love. A redesign like this could finally make Windows a truly desirable platform. Not just the reliable way to launch programs (that runs well on cheap hardware), but something users would enjoy working with. So please Redmond, do this. Do this now.

Ideally, I’d like to do something that’s a little more informal than the Amersfoort ones were, and probably also more frequent. If there’s anyone who’d like to help organize, speak at, or simply attend such a meetup, please let me know in the comments. Oh, and despite the little joke I pulled with the logo, I’m hoping to keep it as low-key and relaxed as possible. Suit and tie entirely optional, perhaps even frowned upon .

This is why I jumped at the opportunity when GearZap offered to send me their “Metal Keyboard for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″. On paper, it looked like the perfect companion for my Samsung, and it’s a lot cheaper than the Transformer’s keyboard.

Docking and connecting

In essence, this is a simple bluetooth keyboard, with a ridge that’s designed to hold the tablet at the perfect angle for typing. There’s no connector inside that ridge, the connection between the two devices relies on bluetooth alone. Mechanically, this solution installs little confidence. It doesn’t really feel like you’re docking the tablet, the ridge just sort-of keeps it from toppling over.

The keyboard is also designed to clip onto your tablet as a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 case. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work reliably either. I was able to get all four corners to clip around the tablet, but found that they pop back off way to easily. If this would happen while the combination is inside your bag, the sharp plastic corners of the keyboard could end up damaging your tablet’s screen. Perhaps a strap or rubber band could fix this, but I’d be really careful.

Tactile feedback

The main reason to get a keyboard like this is the poor feel of on-screen keyboards. If you’re doing a lot of text entry, you need tactile feedback. This keyboard however manages to feel even worse than its on-screen counterpart. When you press a key, you can see all the surrounding ones sink as well. There’s so much flex that you can press keys all the way through the metal sheet that surrounds them. There’s also barely any “click” and I found that the space bar only worked half the times I pressed it. I needed to really pay attention to press it all the way to the bottom. It’s like typing in mud.

Using the keyboard

The keyboard has a built-in battery, but unlike with the Transformer, it just powers itself. There’s also no trackpad, which would have been a welcome addition. The top row has Android-specific and multimedia keys, which are convenient. But the “feature” that ruins the whole experience is the overly aggressive, non-disableable, power saving mode. It kicks in after only fifteen seconds of inactivity, and each time it does, the keyboard needs three seconds or so to reconnect to the tablet. I found that this happens very often, and it’s annoying as hell.

Conclusion

This is a product that looks nice on paper, but has so many serious design flaws that it completely fails in practice. It doesn’t connect well, type well, dock well or protect well. If you’re looking for a Galaxy Tab keyboard, I’d suggest getting a better quality product like Samsung’s own solution, or perhaps a good generic bluetooth keyboard and a stand.

Since the introduction of Custom Post Types, it makes sense to declare separate types for different types of data. When doing so, there’s a crucial argument (passed to the register_post_type function) called “supports”. This argument tells WordPress which post features should be available for the new post type. This allows you to mix and match various features. No need for an excerpt? Require a “featured image”? Need custom fields? No problem. But there’s a catch.

Built-in features only

There’s a fixed list of features you can enable or disable. They correspond to the features present in WordPress’s two built-in types, post and pages. Nothing else. And as far as I know, there’s no (easy, developer-friendly) way to add new features. As nice as CPTs are, I think this seriously limits their potential.

Imagine being able to do something like this to create a CPT for a travel video blog.

'supports' => array( 'title', 'editor', 'author', 'thumbnail', 'subtitle' 'video', 'geo-coords', 'event-time' )

The first four features come standard, but the real fun is in the other (fictitious) ones. Being able to add a video to a post in a manner similar to how featured images work could have many potential advantages over simply adding it into the post’s content. And although there are plugins that’ll let you geo-tag and add timestamps, not all of those support CPTs, and they do not all store data in the same way. They’re all adding data to posts, but they’re all doing it in their own way.

Plugin territory

I’m not saying all these features should be in WordPress’s lean and mean core. Most of the ones I can come up with are arguably plugin territory. But it would be nice to be able to define custom post features once, and then be able to add them to any (custom) post type. WordPress could offer a coherent, standardized way for them to present themselves and store their data. A Widget API of sorts, for the backend.

One might argue that you can do all these things using meta boxes, post meta (or extra database tables) and such, but I feel there’s a certain elegance to opening up “post features” as an API. For one thing, there are plugins that let end users define CPTs without any coding, and this would give them more things to mix and match. And perhaps, something like the functionality of those plugins could eventually make it into core…?