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Filed under: Features, Home Entertainment

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment.

Imagine a history in which broadcast television programming was not sent directly to television sets. Rather, it was sent to another, more expensive device in the home with a smaller screen. If you paid $40 per month, you could access at best only about 10 percent of the shows you really wanted. These shows were available on demand, but under ideal conditions needed a few minutes before you can start watching them. Furthermore, to watch them in the comfort of your living room, you had to rely on a slow, unreliable connection between the box and the TV set.

This bleak situation characterized the state of much broadband video at the debut of Vudu earlier this year. Vudu’s $400 glossy black box sports a curvy perimeter that is a bit taller than an Apple TV. It delivers instant access to about 10,000 movies using a slick and sophisticated combination of local caching and distributed computing. Rent or buy the movie and it starts playing. Vudu just introduced its first high-definition movies — the Bourne movie trilogy, offering the high-definition media-free version of The Bourne Ultimatum for sale for the first time.

The physical version of that movie is available exclusively on HD-DVD, but with Vudu you don’t have to worry about the alliances of studios or video rental chains. The company has struck deals with all major studios and the Vudu device is hundreds of dollars less than dual-format high-definition disc players from Samsung and LG Electronics. On the other hand, nearly all of its content is more of a quality match for the dirt-cheap and universally-supported standard DVD player today.

Continue reading Switched On: Vudu starts on its to-dos

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Source: Ross Rubin

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Filed under: Features, Wireless

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Last week’s Switched On discussed some of the promise of WiMAX as delivered through Sprint’s Xohm service. There are at least three larger open questions about the prospects for WiMAX, particularly as an embedded technology. First, we now know more about how the service will be offered, but we don’t know at what prices it will be offered, at least for the blanket subscription. Web surfing on an EV-DO connection may not quite rival a home broadband experience, but it’s often more than adequate for most Web tasks. WiMAX will certainly have to be priced significantly below the $60 per month that today’s operators charge as an add-on to a wireless subscription or whatever they may lower prices to by 2008 and 2009.

Second, while the idea of not charging a subscription for embedded access is a step toward ubiquitous wireless access for devices, it is far from a guarantee of adoption, particularly in a competitive consumer electronics category. Embedding such products exacts a premium both at the cash register and in terms of battery life. Both the PSP and Nintendo DS include WiFi, but digital camera manufacturers have struggled with it outside of the professional market and it isn’t in any mainstream camcorder.

While the Zune and especially the Sansa Connect have some interesting features built on WiFi (as should the Slacker portable player due later this year), neither has come close to rivaling the iPod, which (at least up until this point) has lacked an FM radio, much less a a data radio. However, there’s a strong argument that WiFi’s limited coverage makes it far less useful than WiMAX (imagine if you could only use your cell phone at home or at a coffee shop).

Last week’s column discussed some of the niche devices that are slated to appear early in the Xohm rollout. However, while there are certainly strong pockets of growth among digital cameras and MP3 players, their overall growth is slowing in the U.S. (and camcorder units are declining) as average prices drop, making it more difficult to cram in new features such as WiFi and WiMAX. Saturation is driving this more than cannibalization from the cell phone.

Xohm can help its own cause. If it can breathe new life into existing devices or help spur new popular ones (say, a wireless, portable DVR / video viewer), it will drive demand and differentiation from the cell phone. However, as Sprint embraces retail consumer electronics, it will see that — on some level — the enemy is itself, a familiar position for a company that has juggled hosting the wireless networks of Helio, Disney Mobile, its cable joint venture Pivot and its own Boost.

Continue reading Switched On: The WiMAX Window (Part 2)

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Source: Ross Rubin

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Filed under: Features, Handhelds, Laptops

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Last week’s Switched On identified two groups of early adopters that have damned Palm’s featherweight Foleo 10-inch screen unseen. The pricey purists won’t give up the capabilities of Windows in an ultaportable, even if it costs them money and battery life, while the mobile minimalists have embraced and adapted to smartphones as all they need even for the excursions at which Palm is targeting the Foleo.

For some of the latter, Foleo may seem like a product that has arrived too late. In the early days, Bluetooth promised to turn cell phones into wireless gateways for laptops and other devices like the Foleo or Nokia N800, but support for such Dial-Up Networking (DUN) features was slow to arrive (and even then carriers sometimes disabled it), as were packets on the wireless networks themselves. Meanwhile smartphones started getting better keyboards and their operating systems improved. Handspring, long since acquired by Palm, did more for the mobile minimalists than any company to date with the Treo, the first smartphone that was widely viewed as successful at balancing PDA functionality and usability.

This is why Palm’s “smartphone companion” messaging may be harming perceptions of Foleo. The smartphone installed base has been growing for the past few quarters as prices have come down, but the promise of Foleo is not having two devices. It’s about providing the right device with wireless access. This is closer to the message that Nokia — which has cell phones running deeply through its DNA — pursued with its Linux-based, Bluetooth-enabled 770 and N800, and what has been responsible for their somewhat warmer reception.

Continue reading Switched On: The Foleo Imbroglio (Part 2)

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Source: Ross Rubin

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Filed under: Features

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

If anything, Palm’s Foleo seems like it was designed to elicit instant geek cred. It’s small, thin and light, and its solid state storage helps provide long battery life. It has instant-on capabilities and supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It even runs Linux and all for only $500. However, quite to the contrary, much of the reaction to Palm’s latest mobile foray has run the gamut from confusion to scorn, with some calling the product “Folly-o” or “Fooleo.”

The core problem that the Foleo seeks to address is easy to understand, but its positioning is a moving target. Here’s how early adopters are becoming lost in Foleo’s rationale:

Palm: Smartphones continue to gain more processing power and more memory.
Users: OK, that’s fair enough.
Palm: However, they are still deficient in input and output.
Users: Well, there sure are compromises, we can agree. I drag my laptop around when I need more.
Palm: So, what we need is a whole new device with a large screen and keyboard
Users: Whoa, why not create some kind of keyboard dock with a big screen for the Treo, like all those speaker docks for the iPod?
Palm: That’s clumsy. We consider this a smartphone companion.
Users I didn’t realize my smartphone was lonely.

Continue reading Switched On: The Foleo imbroglio (Part 1)

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Source: Ross Rubin

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Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

A few weeks ago a two-part Switched On column (see: here and here) discussed Apple’s approach to the iPhone keyboard. I agreed with Apple’s reasoning that, for a phone, or at least this first iPhone, the gains that could be made by going with a soft keyboard outweighed the cons. And, make no mistake (or actually a lot of them with typos), there are cons. Even in a best-case scenario of perfect accuracy, the iPhone’s keyboard has drawbacks. There are, for example, no cursor keys, (Mac history buffs will remember that this is just what the original Macintosh forced users to do as its keyboard had no arrow keys), and users must go into punctuation (albeit briefly if using the famous “Pogue period” hint) mode whenever you want to type a period.

Since Apple seems to have decided that keyboards are only for laptops and larger devices, and now has an opportunity to create an embedded appliance (call it Foleo-like, if you must) loaded not with some souped-up file viewers but embedded versions of, Pages, Keynote, perhaps some future Apple spreadsheet product, and a light version of FileMaker (which, for all of Apple’s stealth initiatives, is one of the company’s best-kept secrets). iWork, much like Safari, may well have some agenda beyond being a Microsoft insurance policy for the Mac.Continue reading Switched On: MacBook mini would answer iPhone’s call

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Source: Ross Rubin

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Filed under: Features

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

For all the attention on the love-hate relationship between Apple and Microsoft, there’s another software superpower with which Apple is increasingly butting heads. Apple was an early investor in Adobe and an early supporter of PostScript, which drove the first LaserWriters and launched the desktop publishing market. When Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, that company used Display PostScript as the imaging engine for the company’s black boxes.

Photoshop and other members of Adobe’s Creative Suite remain some of the most popular creative tools on the Mac. For years, Photoshop made cameos at Apple keynotes as the company argued the superiority of the PowerPC architecture.

But the relationship has been strained at times as well. After going on lots of minor quests involving the slaying of forest creatures, Adobe released PostScript Level 2. But Apple surprised nearly everyone when it partnered with Microsoft in 1989 to position TrueType and the now-forgotten TrueImage as a rival to Adobe’s technology. Apple would later try again to surpass Adobe’s font technology with QuickDraw GX before adopting PDF as the graphics lingua franca for Mac OS X.Continue reading Switched On: Apple’s brash Flash clash rehash

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Source: Ross Rubin

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