Today marks the inauguration of the first announcement of a serious android competitor to the iPad.  Today, Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab and, man, does it look sweet.  Now, don’t get me wrong, the iPad is the type of device I have been waiting years for, but Apple’s militant ability to alienate themselves amongst all of the tech world leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  I love my iPad, I really do, but I love compatibility even more. Convergence is key.

The Galaxy Tab will ship with Android 2.2 and a 7″ screen, and, yes, it does have a video camera, but not much more is known at this time.  Hit the link for the teaser video.

Teaser Video

                          

Feel free to write any other funny captchas you have seen in the comments below…

Click here to see the complete screenshot.

                          

I finally have had the chance to put the cloud based gaming service, Onlive, through its paces.  I must say that the results are very impressive, but still, only time will tell.  The market can be quite finicky with new technologies like this.

Initial Thoughts

On the morning of the 17th I woke up like a kid on Christmas.  I ran to the computer, went to onlive.com and … received a message that accounts were being activated slowly and I should be able to download it soon.  Fast forward to the next day and I was able to download the software and actually jump in.

The software connected and I was eager to test out the service with the free game that I had received a code for.  This brings up and excellent point, though.  Onlive is sparing no expense when it comes to courting new customers.  They are offering a free subscription for a full year and one free game to get you started.  I was initially going to get Mass Effect 2 as my game, but was unable to find the game in the marketplace, even though it was tauted by Onlive as being available.  Oh well.  I chose to go with Boarderlands.  I figures it was a nice balance of twitch game play, RPG elements and decent graphics.  It would also allow me to test out a decent multiplayer match or two as well.

I was pretty impressed with the interface even though it is a little sparse.  My resolution is 1680 x 1050 and the interface looked good, but it was not as crisp as I would have liked.  I can only assume this is due to the fact that you don’t set the resolution.  I am not sure what resolution they are running native in but it was generally good enough.

Interface

The interface is pretty nice , but seems strangley limited.  I guess it does everything that it needs to do, but I guess I was looking for just a little more customization.  Maybe with time more features will be added.

Gameplay

This is the topic on everyone’d minds.  I have read many articles and comments on articles where people said that it would never work.  So and so was a networking expert and mathematically this and that, but I am here to tell you that is does work, and quite well.

Is it perfect?  No.  Is there latency?  Yes.  Is there a latency issue?  No.  This is the part that will most likely cause the most arguments.  I play games to be fun.  I do like to have a powerful computer and crank out the best game play experience that I can, but fun always comes first.  Onlive is fun.  The lag is barely noticeable.  It is there, but after a few minutes of playing my brain adjusted and everything was just fine.  As far as the multiplayer experience goes,  everyone is basically on an even playing field so that shouldn’t be a problem  either.

Conclusion

There is not much more I can really say about this service.  I believe it completely redefines the entire industry from how games are played to how they are purchased and rented.  This paradigm shift will not be ignored for very long by the big guys.  I truely believe that Microsoft will buy this company and integrate this tech into their next Xbox (at least they should).

Onlive fixes so many problems with the current model of the video game industry.  It eliminates piracy, games can be sold much cheaper since their is not physical media, crass gaming from console to computers, cross gaming from PC to Mac, and the list just keeps going.  With the tech working this well simply from its beginning as a startup, I can’t wait to see how its doing in a few years.

Onlive truly is the next generation of gaming.

                          

Blizzard recently talked to videogamer.com and spoke about the industries shift towards DRM and their stance on it.  Basically it seems that Blizzard realizes that DRM will simply disallow honest gamers to access their content during glitches while pirates play cracked software (ie the whole Assassin’s Creed 2 fiasco).

So, instead of locking it down with crazy DRM strategies, Blizz will be using the ingenious idea of getting people to want to play it on their servers.  Lets be honest, there has never been a form of DRM that has not been cracked other than keeping the game connected to the server constantly.  So if that is the goal, how do we reach that?  The two possible solutions are to force constant connection or encourage the connection.  I could hack my Xbox and play burnt games until my hearts content, but I would lose out on the awesomeness that is Xbox Live.  Blizzard seems to realize this as well.

Frank Peaarce, co-founder of Blizzard and Starcraft II producer told VideoGamer.com “If we’ve done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way people will want to be connected while they’re playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends on Battle.net and earn the achievements on Battle.net,”

“The best approach from our perspective is to make sure that you’ve got a full-featured platform that people want to play on, where their friends are, where the community is,” he added.

“That’s a battle that we have a chance in. If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it’s really a losing battle for us, because the community is always so much larger, and the number of people out there that want to try to counteract that technology, whether it’s because they want to pirate the game or just because it’s a curiosity for them, is much larger than our development teams.  We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.”

Wise statments form an ever increasing monolith of a studio.

We can only hope that other studios learn to take this stance as well.

                          

$2.2 billion.  Not too long ago that would have seemed like an insurmountable amount of cash…a Doctor Evil putting his pinky up to his mouth amount of cash…  But nowadays it seems more and more billionaires are born everyday.

After reading this article on Japan building a moon base by 2020 (a robot controlled moon base) for that sum it makes me wonder how long until private companies start their own similar projects.

Is it possible that the next moon base after Japan’s will sport a colorful  Google logo?

                          

The entire car is powered with 8,320 cylindrical lithium-ion batteries (laptop batteries by Sanyo), but had to drive rather slow to achieve this feat.  It went a mere 30 miles an hour for most of the ride.

This speaks volumes for the potential of EVs in the future.  A future free form fossil fuels and super cheap electric cars…

yes, please…

                          

The factory employs over 300,000 people and builds products for HP, Apple, and a host of other major tech developers.  As six busloads of journalist were guided around the facility they got a chance to see banks, bakeries and tons of other shops on palm tree lined streets.  The factory is a veritable city and probably the closest thing to a real life version of Willy Wonka’s fictional chocolate factory … but these Oompa-Loompa’s aren’t too happy.

Last Tuesday Li Hai, 19, jumped to his death after only working in the factory for 42 days.  This was the 10th suicide at the plant this year alone.  One high profile suicide happened last July when Sun Danyong, 25, jumped  to his death after being questioned about a missing iPhone prototype.

While it may seem insane for that many people to kill themselves at one factory it may seem easy for the sheer number of people that work there to not register.  Let me say it again…300,000 people are employed at the plant.  Statistically they are actually below the norm for suicide percentages.  The average suicide rate is 14 deaths per 100,000 according to the World Health Organization.

Apple and HP have both launched investigations into working and living conditions at the plant.

On a brighter note there is a pool that employees are allowed to use in their off time…hey, look…  0.001% of the employees are using it right now!

                          

As soon as I downloaded the app I fired up the pdf version of the book I am currently reading and found the experience to be just as enjoyable as the epub reader I had been using. Options were the to either organize the text on the screen and swipe up or down to change the page or view each page as a whole with smooth scrolling.

I have tried many different pdf reader apps and each had some great concepts, but none of them really seemed to hit the nail on the head.  Its nice to have an official version from Adobe.

                          

I love my Droid, I really do, and in general I like all of my Google products, but the browser in Android really rubs me the wrong way. It amazes me that the same company that produced the simplistic perfection of Chrome can miss the mark so poorly on Android’s stock browser.  There have been some decent attempts to spruce it up (most notably xScope), but none seemed to have the polish needed.

Along came Opera.  Opera mobile 5 browser blew me away with its slick visuals and smooth handling of tabs.  ”This is it!!!”, I thought…until I attempted to visit any Google mobile website.  What a horrible experience.  The sleek polish that the websites have with the stock browser is gone and a cheap imitation of bad UI design is left in its place.  This blows me away.  Does Google only allow these sites to be displayed on the stock Android browser (seems pretty “un-Google” like to me”) I would gladly pay money for the Opera browser if it used its UI as a skin over the stock Android browser.

This brings me back to Fennec.  Please, PLEASE Mozilla … do not fall prey to the same fate as Opera.  Figure out what has to be done to retain the usability of Google mobile websites and you will easily become the de-facto browser on Android.  Since most Android users happen to be heavy users of lots of Google products, this seems like a no brainer.