With HTC’s upcoming crop of Androids, you’ll be healthy to separate people into two distinct groups: those who spring for the brainier, better-specced Desire, and those who get bowled over by the beautiful, yet lesser-specced Legend.

The Desire (or Nexus One) is the final word in the Androidsphere—it’s a mark of someone who knows what they’re doing, who wants to show people they NEED that extra computing power. If you compare it to the Legend, you could be justified in saying Legend-salivators are more shallow, ignoring the might of a Snapdragon processor in lieu of a unibody aluminum shell and slim build.

You’d be wrong, however.

I Mean, It Is Just a Sequel

The internal upgrades are minor, when you consider it next to the HTC Hero, but like the Empire Strikes Back, sometimes sequels are far better than the original. While we found the Hero “tragically flawed” in its slugginess, the Legend’s slightly more powerful 600MHz processor behaved—well, like a legend. The 3.2-inch screen has the same amount of pixels as the Hero, but swaps the HVGA for a more superior AMOLED. The 5.0-megapixel camera is still the same quality, but has the much-welcomed addition of a flash. You get the picture—the Legend is building on the Hero’s calibre in incremental upgrades, but every change, however minor, radicalizes the experience of using the Legend.

It’s running Android 2.1, which as any Hero owner knows should be released as an over-the-air update soon. One day. The jump from 1.6 to 2.1 is impressive—it’s a lot faster, the multitouch is better, there’s greater integration of social networking profiles with contacts, and HTML5 support, amongst other—admittedly small—changes.

Design Works

Plain and simple—the Legend is the most well-built phone I’ve ever had in my hand. You just know when you feel the weight of it, the cool curved exterior of the unibody aluminum shell, and touch the ultra-responsive touchscreen. It’s that sensation when you first tenderly held the original iPhone, which has been long-missing in the market.

The bottom and top of the back is actually prefabricated from rubberized plastic though, so there are no issues with wireless signals—unlike the first generation of the iPhone. Removing part of the case reveals a very thin battery and a touch-sensitive catch which keeps the SIM and microSD cards encased. It’s a small point, but it’s also the most polished example of a phone’s innards that I’ve ever seen.

Just like BlackBerry, HTC is migrating its trackballs to optical trackpads. This is a relief, but in actual fact I barely had to use the trackpad—only when having to make an edit when typing out messages or emails. The screen is just so responsive, with nary a wrongly-actioned command made, that you can imagine HTC forgoing the trackpad altogether at a later date.

Only eight buttons reside on the Legend’s body. The on/off button up top, the two volume controls on the top left, and then on the lower face, home, menu, back and search. They all worked well, though the home, menu, back and search keys did feel a bit cheap in comparison to the high-end feeling of the rest of the handset.

Same Old Camera?

HTC’s used the same 5.0-megapixel camera as we saw on the Hero, but the addition of a flash is a new and exciting step for them—strange as that sounds. As you can see from the two photos below, the flash is very strong—too strong, I’d say. However, the calibre is decent in lowlight conditions—noisy for sure, but I’ve seen worse.

My friends in lowlight at a cinema before Alice In Wonderland 3D

In daytime I had a lot more luck. Testing it out on some cakes in my kitchen in the late afternoon sun retained the nice rays of sun crossways the cakes, with the yellow of the flowers showing up bright. But even at 5MP, the general image performance isn’t enough to ditch your point and shoot just yet.

Testing indoors with daylight

More Sense Than HTC Sense

Most manufacturers are skinning Android with their own proprietary interfaces…MOTOBLUR, Mediascape, S-Class, they’re ok, but I’d almost rather use Android in its natural flavor than have to place up with some of their issues.

There just ain’t no Android phone like a HTC Sense Android phone. It’s simply the best skin an Android could ask for, even without the minor improvements seen in the Legend. By far the pick of the bunch is the new “Leap” view—or “Helicopter view” as it was known in-house when designed. It works much like Mac OS X’s Exposé function, bringing all seven homescreens up as thumbnails. The feature is very useful, particularly if you just can’t remember which screen your mail, or the weather widget, is listed on. The pinch command takes some getting used to, but once you’ve got the gesture down-pat, it’s a godsend.

Leap—or helicopter—view

But with ever feature that will be used often comes one with no point at all. FriendStream is a nice enough widget, which collates all your friends’ updates from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr into one feed, but for anyone who’s a purist and likes to see every form of update on apiece social networking site, it will be removed quickly from the homescreen. I preferred using HTC’s own brilliant Twitter widget, Peep, for the full Twitter options, and the Facebook app to see every form of action. The Flickr integration is handy, being healthy to see when my contacts upload photos, but not necessary if you get email notifications already.

Plus, FriendStream just felt slow sometimes—in fact, on a very speedy phone, it felt incongruous in comparison to everything else, often updating with tweets quite a few minutes later than the Twitter widget did. It’s not a big problem, but for someone who relies on Twitter heavily as a source of entertainment, it became a source of frustration.

FriendStream

Respectable Battery Life

The Legend ran 36 hours before it died on me. Not too bad, considering I had an hour-long call plus about five shorter ones, sent and received around 20 text messages, and spent almost a whole day browsing the web, checking Twitter, and showing it off to my friends. After the horror of seeing my G1’s battery deplete in half a day when I first bought it, the Legend’s 1300mAh battery ran to my satisfaction.

The Legend Is The Most Solid Android Phone I’ve Used

True, other phones may be better specced, but with that premium build it’s like comparing a Sony Vaio (not a bad laptop, sure) to a MacBook. Sometimes there’s just no contest. While the extra horsepower and added touches of the Nexus One and Desire are nice, I found the Legend more than satisfactory.

It wasn’t sluggish, certainly didn’t have bugs or issues like the G1 and Hero, and while it’ll inevitably slow down and have you cursing the fact you didn’t spring for something with a Snapdragon chip, I’m going to honor it possibly the highest accolade a reviewer can gift a device: I’m going to upgrade to one.

It’s not the best Android phone. That badge still belongs to the Nexus One, or possibly the Desire, when we review it. But it’s one of the best all-rounders, when you consider the hardware—and the feeling you’re left with once it leaves your hand. I feel bereft without it.

Superb hardware quality

HTC Sense is better than ever

Addition of camera flash

Super-fast and responsive

FriendStream could be faster


Camera flash isn’t perfect

The HTC Legend hasn’t been announced for the US market yet, with the European launch sometime this month.

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“We use the epub format: It is the most favourite open book format in the world.” That’s how Steve Jobs announced the iPad. And wow, that sounds like all the ebooks you own will just work on anything. Um, no.

The intent of an open ebook format that works on any reader sounds nice. Buy it from any source, read it on any device. In a few cases, it’s true, and that open format thing can work for you. But, in reality, right now? You’re pretty much going to be stuck reading books you buy for one device or ecosystem in that same little puddle, thanks to DRM. And well, Amazon.

The Hardware

Okay, so the easiest way to place this in appearance is to quickly list what formats the major ebook readers support. (Why these four? Well, they’re the ones due to sell over 2 million units this year, except for Barnes & Noble’s, which we’re including as a direct contrast to Kindle just because.)

• Amazon Kindle: Kindle (AZW, TPZ), TXT, MOBI, PRC and PDF natively; HTML and DOC through conversion
• Apple iPad: EPUB, PDF, HTML, DOC (plus iPad Apps, which could include Kindle and Barnes & Noble readers)
• Barnes & Noble Nook: EPUB, PDB, PDF
• Sony Reader: EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF; DOC through conversion

You’ll notice a pattern there: Everybody (except for Amazon) supports EPUB as their primary ebook format. Turns out, there’s a good reason for that.

EPUB, the MP3 of Book Publishing

The reason just about every ebook uses EPUB is because the vast majority of the publishing industry has decided that EPUB is the industry standard file format for ebooks. It’s a free and open standard, based on open specifications. The successor to Open eBook, it’s maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum, which has a pretty lengthy list of members, both of the dead-tree persuasion (HarperCollins and McGraw Hill) and of the technological kind (Adobe and HP). Google’s million-book library is all in EPUB too.

It’s based on XML—extensible markup language—which you see all over the place, from RSS to Microsoft Office, ’cause it lays out rules for storing information. And it’s actually prefabricated up of a three open components: Open Publication Structure basically is about the formatting, how it looks; Open Packaging Format is how it’s tied together using navigation and metadata; and Open Container Format is a zip-based container format for the file, where you get the .epub file extension. When you toss those three components together, you have the EPUB ebook format.

While we’ve only see EPUB on black-and-white e-ink-based readers so far, like Sony’s Readers or the B&N Nook, the capabilities of the file format go way “beyond those types of things,” says Nick Bogaty, Adobe’s senior development manager for digital publishing. Unlike PDF, which is a fixed page, EPUB provides reflowable text, a page layout that can adjust itself to a device’s screen-size. With EPUB, content producers can use cascading style sheets, embedded fonts, and yes, embed multimedia files like color images, SVG graphics, interactive elements, even full video—the kind of stuff Steve promised in the iPad keynote. So, we haven’t seen the full extent of EPUB’s capabilities, and won’t, until at least April 3 and presumably much later. Even if the books you buy from Apple iBook store worked on other devices—and as you will soon see, there’s little chance of that—don’t count on the coolest stuff, like video, to be somehow compatible with current-generation black-and-white e-ink readers.

D-D-D-DRM!

But let’s not get too excited seeing the words “free” and “open” so much in conjunction with EPUB. It’s like MP3 or AAC, and not only because it’s become a semi-universal industry standard. Make no mistake, these files can be totally unencrypted and unmanaged, or they can be wrapped up in any kind of digital rights management a distributor wants.

So far, according to Bogaty, the DRM every EPUB distributor currently uses is Adobe Content Server, which conveniently also wraps around PDF files. Sony and Barnes & Noble both use it on their readers, though since Adobe’s DRM doesn’t allow for sharing books between accounts, B&N actually uses a slightly custom version, and manages the Nook’s lending feature using their own backend. (Adobe is working on a sharing provision.) It does, however, support expiration, which is how Sony’s vaunted library lending feature works.

The plus side of all this compatability that it’s actually doable to move files from a Sony Reader to a Nook, using Adobe Digital Editions to authorize the transfer. (Though according to some reviewers, that would be like moving pelts from a dead horse to a rotting bear.)

Apple, on the other hand, chose EPUB as the preferred file format, but will be wrapping DRM’d files from its iBooks Store in the FairPlay DRM, which is used to protect movies and apps (and formerly music) in the iTunes Store. As always, expect them to be the only company using it.

(There’s a precursor to EPUB’s dilemma: Audible downloads. You can buy Audible audiobooks from an enormous number of sources, but the ones you buy from iTunes aren’t going to play on any other Audible-capable device, no matter how many logos they slap on the box.)

You may be thinking that it’s just a matter of time before ebook stores all go DRM free. That would be wishful thinking at best. While ebooks might seem a lot like digital music circa 2005, you can’t rip a book, so the only way to get a bestseller on your reader is to buy it legally, or to steal it. It’s pretty much that simple. There will be free books, there will be unencrypted books, and the torrents will anger with bestsellers (as they already do). Still, DRM’s gonna be a hard fact of life with every major bookstore, since they’re going to at least try to keep you from stealing it. You don’t see Hollywood giving up DRM, do you?

Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and How The Dead PDA Business Affects the Live Ebook War

Did you know that Amazon owns Mobipocket, which mainly targeted ebooks for PDAs and smartphones, and had its own file format that with roots in the PalmDOC format? The Mobipocket format, consequently, has two extensions: .mobi and .prc. I bring it up, not because you should care about Mobipocket—you really shouldn’t—but because the Kindle’s preferred AZW format is actually a very slightly modified version of MOBI, which is why it’s easy to convert files from one format to the other. Unprotected AZW files can be renamed to the MOBI or PRC format and simply work with MobiPocket readers.

The problem with Mobipocket is that it’s not a very capable format, since it was originally designed for ancient-ass PDAs and all. So there’s another special Amazon format that’s a little more mysterious, called Topaz, which is more capable than MOBI, with powers like the ability to have embedded fonts. It’s used for fewer books, and carries the file suffix .tpz or .azw1. For what it’s worth, some people complain books in the Topaz format are less responsive than the standard AZW files. In truth, none of this may matter if and when the Super Kindle arrives.

In terms of DRM, Amazon uses its own DRM on both formats. Both have been cracked, though it apparently took longer with Topaz. This may be good news for pirates, but matters not at all from a cross-platform point of view, since that format is completely proprietary, and nothing but the Kindle or Kindle software will read it anyway.

But the old PDA legacy crap doesn’t stop with Amazon. Palm once owned its own ebook platform, which it sold to a company who called it eReader. Eventually, the format and the software platform came to be owned by Barnes & Noble. I’m only dragging you into this because Barnes & Noble actually still sells many books in this format, even while they transition to the more favourite and “open” EPUB format. You can spot an eReader format because the file ends in .pdb—but you only see that after you bought the shit thing. That is to say, even if you care enough about formats to go with the reader that supports the one you like, you still might get stuck with a limited, if not completely proprietary, stack of books.

PDF, I Still Love You

In comparison to EPUB, PDF is simple. Developed over 15 years ago by Adobe, the portable document format has been an open standard since 2008. You’re probably pretty shit familiar with it, but the main thing about it versus these other formats is that everything is fixed—fonts, graphics, text, etc.—so it looks the same everywhere, versus the reflowable format that adjusts to the screen size. Hence, Amazon offers PDF without ascent on its Kindle DX, which has the screen real estate to (usually) not muck it up too much. With smaller screens than the PDF’s native size, it requires some pan-and-zoom voodoo, and it still usually looks pretty disgusting.

Zoom issues notwithstanding, having a fixed format has advantages. For instance, a lot of “electronic newspapers” were transmitted via PDF back in the day, because it retained their design. It’s really nice for comics. (Consequently, you can bet scanned-comic piracy to explode when the iPad arrives, unless Marvel and DC come up with killer strategies to get their comics on a device that’s clearly solicitation for it.) Wikipedia covers a lot of the technical ground, surprisingly thoroughly, even if the usual Wiki caveats apply. As mentioned above, it can be fortified with Adobe Content Server DRM, just like EPUB.

The Great Shiny Hope: Apps

The other path for digital publishers: Build an app to hold your books and magazines. This is the route magazines are taking, because they’re envisioning some fancy digital jujitsu. With Adobe AIR, which is what Wired and the NYT are using in various incarnations for their respective rags, they’re healthy to do more advanced layouts, more rich multimedia, Flash craziness, and other designer bling that EPUB can’t handle, says Adobe’s Bogarty. Also, importantly you can dynamically update content, like when new issues arrive, which you can’t really do with EPUB.

Interestingly, the publisher Penguin is also taking the app route for their books, building apps using web technologies like HTML5 for the iPad, so their books are in fact, way more like games and applications than mere books. So it’s another paraphernalia publishers could take.

But the app business can help with the openness of the big ebook file formats, too. Many people read Amazon’s proprietary formats on their iPhone, because Amazon wants to sell books, and Apple wants people to use apps. Barnes & Noble has a reader app, too; while not great, it at least somewhat helps get over the PDB/EPUB confusion. It’s pretty likely that these and many other ebook apps will turn up on the iPad, unless Jobs decides that they “duplicate” his “functionality.” Since iBooks itself is an app you have to download, it probably won’t be an issue. Here’s hoping.

The Upshot

The intent of an open ebook format that works on any reader sounds really nice. And in some cases, if you pay really really close attention, it’s true. That open format thing actually can work for you. But the reality? You’re pretty much going to be stuck with the books you buy in one device working only in that same ecosystem, or at least hoping and praying for an assortment of proprietary reader apps to appear on all your devices. Now, where’d I place that copy of Infinite Jest? Was it in my Kindle library, my B&N library or my iBooks library?

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about ebooks, bookies or horse heads here with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

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The core of any long-standing technology company is research and development. Here’s how Apple, Microsoft and Sony’s last decade of spending stack up.

Note that the first graph shows research and development as a percentage of revenue (to scale the spending by company, since revenues differ so greatly). This next graphic can help you conceptualize the revenue and R&D gap:

A Few Interesting Notes:

• Now, Microsoft spends about 17% of their revenue on R&D. Sony spends about 8%. Apple spends less than 4%.

• If you were to break down the amount of R&D that goes purely to physical (non-software) products sold by Apple and Sony, Sony would spend about $11.5 million per product while Apple would spend about $78.5 million per product. (Of course, that’s rolling the cost OS X and iPhone OS development into Macs and the iPhone, which could be seen as inflating their per product spending.)

• Microsoft just spends a lot of money in R&D, period—about $9 billion last year in generalized research (that often doesn’t lead to specific products). In terms of percentage growth over the last decade, Apple’s R&D has grown the most (nearly quadrupled) while Sony’s has grown the least (not quite doubled).

In light of these bare numbers, is it any surprise that Sony is struggling the most to capture the hearts and minds of a public hungry for gadgets?

Sources:

Apple
Apple Public Relations
Apple Investor Relations
Apple Insider 2004
Apple Insider 2005
Apple Insider 2006
Apple Insider 2008
Mac Observer
Microsoft
Microsoft Investor Relations
Sony
Sony Investor Relations

Research by David Chaid

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If you’re anxious about switching from a PC to a Mac, consider this: There are a multitude of ways you can virtualize Windows within OS X, and they all work uniquely well. Here’s how to choose the right one.

There are three major virtualization products for Mac, and at their core, they’re all quite similar. Each creates a virtual machine, which is to say, crudely, a software implementation of a separate computer. When you install Windows in a virtual machine, Windows thinks it’s installed on a PC with a somewhat generic set of hardware. In fact, the hardware it thinks it’s installed on is a software construct, and any time Windows utilizes what it thinks is a hardware component, its requests are actually being passed through to your Mac’s real hardware.

Anyway! What’s going on under the hood is conceptually similar among the most favourite virtualization apps, but the ways they install, run and integrate Windows inside of OS X vary wildly. So, assuming you’re ready to take the virtualization dive, which app should you use? VMWare Fusion 3? Parallels 5? Sun VirtualBox? They’re all different, but in a strange way, they’ve ended up falling out of direct competition—each one is right for certain kinds of users. So which one’s right for you?

If You…

• Want to run Windows 7 within OS X, and basically nothing else?
• Want to run Windows apps as if they’re part of OS X, visually and behaviorally?
• Think a virtual organisation should integrate into OS X almost completely, rather than live inside its own window?
• Want to play 3D games in your virtual machine?

Then You Should Use…

Parallels 5! This is a paid solution, and while it’s a full virtualization suite—you can run Linux and other OSes from within OS X as well—it’s the one most purely dedicated to making running Windows 7 as seamless as possible. Installation is almost completely hands off, and once you’ve got it up and running, it can actually be themed to look more like OS X. This has the dual effect of making the OS look more natural when it’s running in windowed mode (where the OS is isolated to its own window, like an app), and making the so-called “Crystal” mode, which lets you run Windows apps as their own windows in OS X, and which integrates Windows menus into Apple’s operating system, such that it’s barely even clear that you’re not running native apps.

Parallels’ strength lies in how thorough it is in trying to make Windows integration seamless. Windows 7’s system-wide transparency effects, powered by Aero, work fine out of the box with Parallels; you can enable OS X’s multitouch touchpad gestures for MacBooks in the OS with a simple options menu; pulling an installation over from a Boot Camp partition is just a matter of travel through a wizard; sharing files and clipboard items between OSes was trivially easy.

DirectX support is legitimately good enough to actually run a mid-range game without terrible performance degradation. (Games like BioShock or Crysis will run, but unless you’ve got a top-end iMac, you’ll probably suffer from serious slowdowns. If you’re serious about gaming on a Mac, just install Windows natively using Boot Camp.) It’s kind of like magic!

Parallels’ Windows powers are unsurpassed, but come at a cost. First, in dollars: It’s $80. Then, in features beyond Windows integration: There aren’t a whole lot of appliances—preconfigured packages that let you install other operating systems, like variations of Linux—as compared to VMWare, and there are stability issues; I’ve had to close down the entire virtual organisation a number of times over the course of testing, and I couldn’t refer a particular trigger. One second I’d be seamlessly toggling between Internet Explorer and Safari, and the next I’d be trudging through a prolonged virtual organisation restart routine.

So yeah, it’s worth it, if you’ve got a handful of Windows apps you can’t live without, or if you want to play evenhandedly recent games without booting into a separate partition. [Parallels]

If You…

• Want to experiment with more than Windows
• Need bulletproof performance with Windows
• Want to run Windows and Linux apps as if they’re part of OS X, albeit without too many interface flourishes?

Then You Should Use…

VMWare Fusion 3! VMWare’s virtualization software is a reliable option no matter what you want to do. The way it integrates Windows into OS X is evenhandedly transparent, but not quite as aesthetically consistent as Parallels. Gaming performance isn’t as strong as in Parallels, though 2D rendering—like Windows 7’s Aero—runs a bit smoother in Fusion than in any other solution. As with Parallels, Fusion automates the Windows installation process to a degree, and makes importing a Boot Camp installation evenhandedly simple.

VMWare is a workhorse, and for most tasks—be it cross-platform website testing, running Windows versions of Microsoft office, or syncing with a Windows-only device like the Zune HD—it won’t let you down.

Tinkerers will find a massive library of preconfigured appliances, so you can try out virtually any operating system you’ve ever heard of (as long as it’s freely available) with little more than a file download and double click. Fusion 3 costs $80. [VMWare]

If You…

• Need Windows emulation
• Don’t want to pay anything for your virtualization software
• Don’t need to do any serious gaming
• Don’t mind rougher integration of Windows into OS X

Then You Should Use…

Sun VirtualBox! While the prior two options are paid, and not exactly cheap, VirtualBox is free. Totally. This means that, if you’ve got a spare Windows license, you can install Windows to run within OS X without spending an extra dime, and without suffering too much of an inconvenience as compared to VMWare or Parallels. (Full Windows 7 installation guide here)

VirtualBox doesn’t have the same level of DirectX support as either Parallels or Fusion, so while gaming is theoretically possible, it’s probably not worth your time. There is a “Seamless” mode for minimizing the Windows desktop and running Windows apps as if they’re native OS X apps, but it’s neither as seamless nor visually integrated as Parallels’ or Fusion’s.

But really, these are minor complaints. If all you want to do is run the odd Windows apps, try virtualization or configure or access some Windows-specific peripherals, VirtualBox will get the job done. It doesn’t have the polish of its paid competitors, but let’s be real here: We’re virtualizing an operating system. All solutions are by definition going to be less than perfect. VirtualBox will accomplish 85% of what Parallels or VMWare can do, in terms of running Windows apps or booting into alternative operating systems, at 0% of the cost. And for that, it deserves your attention. [VirtualBox]

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy virtualizing, folks.

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We just finished watching Google’s live declaration of the launch of the Google App Marketplace. Keep reading for information on what they’re offering users and developers. Oh, and know that the Marketplace is live today. Updating.

The event is called “Google Campfire One” and it’s all about how cushy it will be to create, set up, and install apps using Google’s App Marketplace. It appears that the big focus is on how everything—apps and existing Google products—will work together seamlessly and allow for all your tools and data to sit in the cloud. Right now the appeal is for business applications, but the potential seems incredible.

The first portion of the declaration is about what developers will give and get in this whole deal. Google is offering them access to 25 million users and only asking for a one-time fee of $100 and 20% revenue in exchange—that’s less than what access to Apple’s App Store requires. Of course, Google is providing a solid system with apps being genuine using OpenID, secured using oAuth, and prefabricated acquirable through a universal Google Apps navigation system.

While there are already 50 partners right at launch, we’re hearing that after new apps are submitted, they may take a few days to show up in the Marketplace—mind you, there’s no word on what kind of approval process there is. But once an app is in the Marketplace, it’s cushy for users or buyers to add them to their Google accounts: They agree to some terms of service, grant access to data—such as Gmail or GCal, and enable the app. Tada! It’ll show up in the new apps drop down.

Now apparently development of these apps is so simple that there are 40 developers who are on a bus traveling to an SXSW event and working on apps right now.

It looks like apps will be cushy to integrate into existing Google products as seen by a demo of a payroll app by Intuit—information from it was embedded into Gmail or Google Docs.

Now remember how there have been some nice previews of YouTube videos in Gmail lately? Prepare to see more of that from these new apps because Google is offering developers the chance to set apps to be triggered by certain emails, events, or specific types of content.

What does all this mean right now? For business users, there are plenty of apps already available—ones for payroll, data entry, management, and an office suite—and they’ll be healthy to run everything right from the cloud. For us plain Janes and Joes though, the Marketplace is full of potential at this moment. Think social media, data management, communication—all the things you already get from Google, just better.

Yes, my head’s already in the cloud. Hopefully everything else will follow and I’ll be healthy to work and play there.

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Here’s the story: I’m in love with the Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless tablet. Free from cables, it’s the best graphics paper experience I’ve ever had.

Smoother Than the Smoothest Thing

The Wacom Intuos 4 was quite a leap from the Intuos 3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen symmetric menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.

With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless paper is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I’ve ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the paper never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.

This performance is not only good for digital painting. It is perfect to retouch in Photoshop, allowing you to mask or clone with absolute precision, down to the last pixel, without having to vary the size of the brush. It makes everyday brush tasks so cushy it makes me giddy when I’m using it.

Screw the Keyboard

But plenty of other paper features also help dramatically in the regular workflow, allowing you to circumvent the keyboard almost completely.

Take the multifunction Touch Ring, a circular trackpad that allows you to perform four different, user-definable functions, like zoom: Circling my finger in one direction would ascent in. Doing so in the opposite direction will ascent out. The second function will cycle through layers, the third will change the brush size—although sadly this doesn’t work in Photoshop—and the fourth rotates the canvas to grappling the physical orientation of your tablet. To switch to the next function, you click in the middle button. An LED will change and your monitor will display an elegant transparent dialog that fades in and out briefly, but long enough to refer the new trackpad function.

The eight user-definable ExpressKeys are located in a perfect position: Four above and four below the Touch Ring. Each is tagged with a completely customizable OLED display, much like the Optimus Maximum keyboard, but presented in a starkly contrasting black and white. (The display looks so good that, at first glance, you’re sure the buttons are permanent, backlit cutouts.) Like the Touch Ring, you can define the functions for these buttons using the Wacom control panel. The labels will change according to your preference.

Another favorite feature of mine—which I’ve been jonesing for since I stopped using Alias PowerAnimator and Maya—are the symmetric menus. These are just software-based and can also be found on the Cintiq line, but they are great timesavers. Pop-up symmetric menus are easier to use than regular pop-up list menus (both for mouse and paper operation). They are also user-defined, and give you eight functions at a time, which can also be sub-menus.

However, the best thing is that all these features can be application dependent, something that was doable with previous Wacom tablets, but not with this level of detail and finesse. In Photoshop, for example, my symmetric menus are plain to fit my most used program features. The result is that I touch the keyboard very rarely, if at all.

Perfect Wireless Performance

All these cool features and exceptional performance, however, are shared with the existing, cheaper, cabled Intuos 4. The question here is: How good is the performance of the Intuos 4 Wireless over the Bluetooth connection? And what about the battery life?

Response is just as fast and just as good. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless works just like the USB-based Intuos 4.

As for the lithium ion battery, it charges quickly via USB. The paper puts itself to sleep when it detects no signal and, as a result, you can use the paper for a day, heavily, without recharging it at all. (Or just keep it around without worrying about losing power.) The advantage of USB recharging is that you can be using it while connected to the computer, with the telegram itself as the connection (the Bluetooth goes off when the paper is connected physically).

My only little gripe with the wireless component of the paper is that, on occasion, it will take a few seconds to reconnect when you turn it on. This happened when the computer wakes up first, so I suspect is an issue with Bluetooth getting silly after the Mac wakes up. 99% of the times is instantaneous, however.

A Joy to Use

If you have a Wacom Intuos 4 you can probably skip this upgrade. That is, unless you are itching to have the freedom of movement of the Bluetooth connection. That’s the joy of this tablet: You can move around freely with it. It adapts to your position, not the other way around. You don’t depend on your table. You can lay back on your chair, and lose yourself in hours of photo retouching or illustration.

Given the nature of its custom menus, any individual can take advantage of the Intuos 4 for every program. You can be using it constantly, instead of a mouse. If you just want to use it for graphic applications, however, another advantage is that you can place it away easily, without having to disconnect it or struggle with cables.

This paper could only be bettered if they prefabricated it into a wireless display. Like the iPad, but connected to the computer so I can use Photoshop on my bed, the sofa or outside on the terrace (the Bluetooth signal gets there, I tried). Like the Cintiq 12 I tried, but with the same response, weight, and form factor.

If you have an Intuos 3 or any other display-less Wacom tablet, get the Intuos 4 Wireless. Even though it doesn’t come with a mouse—like the regular Intuos 4 Medium—it’s absolutely worth its $399 price attach (just $30 more than the USB-based Intuos 4’s list price).

Amazing performance with 2048 levels of pressure and only 1 gram of minimum pressure


Touch Ring and ExpressKeys customizable controls avoids touching the keyboard


Slightly pricier than Intuos 4 Medium, and it doesn’t come with the mouse


A couple of times it took the Intuos 4 a few seconds to reconnect after being asleep, although this is probably related to the computer coming out of sleep as well

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sony’s gearing up to take on Apple this year, with the long-awaited PSP phone and a netbook/eBook reader/PSP hybrid to fight the iPad.

And just in the nick of time for our Sony tough love fest, We Miss Sony!

There aren’t extensive details acquirable yet—including any info about pricing and specs—but we can expect to see the both the PSP phone and the PSPad sometime this year. The Sony Ericsson PSP phone, in particular, has been in the works since at least 2007, but has met with various delays since then.

As for the multifunction iPad competitor, it’s not clear exactly what form that will take. Both devices, though, will leverage the media platform Sonys launching later this month. The Sony Online Service—a temporary name—is going to wage similar media content as iTunes, but will supplement its offerings with its extensive (and exclusive) catalog of PlayStation games. Mostly older games are expected to be acquirable on the mobile devices.

The project is apparently being speared by Kunimasa Suzuki, who has an oversight role in both Sony’s Vaio and PlayStation businesses. Getting previously disparate corporate divisions to work together has been a major part of CEO Howard Stringer’s turnaround plan, making the PSPad an incredibly important sign of if that fag has born any fruit. Is this the Sony renaissance we’ve been longing for? Or will it be another in a long line of proprietary format failures? We’ll find out soon, either way. [WSJ]

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With over six million views in six days, OK Go’s video for “This Too Shall Pass” is the latest in their unprecedented string of runaway YouTube hits. Lead singer Damian Kulash shared OK Go’s video philosophy—and history—with Gizmodo.

Q: At this point, OK Go may have the best track record of anyone at creating these incredible viral music videos. Why are yours healthy to stand out?

A: I think it has become increasingly clear to us, as we have chased our most exciting ideas, that there’s been a dissolution of the distribution system for music. That seems really depressing when you see that records aren’t selling, there’s no way to make any money, the system’s falling apart. But if the system itself is falling apart, then so are the rules wrought by it. Videos evolved in this very restrictive environment of MTV. There were only maybe 100 that would play at any time, and labels weren’t willing to invest in them. So now that the system is falling apart, there’s also no reason to stick within the confines of the definitions that were built up during that system. This sounds heady and pretentious, but it means for us the ability to chase our most compelling ideas. We don’t have to think so much into the box of “Will this song work on this broadcasting format?” There’s an infinite world of doable audiences out there for whatever you’re making now.

It’s not like we sat down one day and the brain trust came up with intent for “This Too Shall Pass.” Tim [Nordwind, the bass player] and I have known apiece other since we were 12, and it’s always been the animating passion of our lives to make fun projects together. Everything from making home videos to recording songs. So the fact that the band got signed and gets to make records is all well and good, but that’s all just a part of our creative relationship. Now that we have an outlet for these other things, all the better. The video for “A Million Ways” [below] was originally just a practice run for a live show. When that catches fire… We’re now in a position where we don’t see restrictions on what we can do at all.

Q: So “A Million Ways” wasn’t even supposed to be a video at first? How’d you stumble onto that dance?

A: Before we were even signed, we were all living in Chicago and there was this incredible public access show called Chic-a-GoGo. It’s like a lo-fi Soul Train. You bring a five year old in and an art student with a gorilla neck and everybody has a diversion party. We only had one song at that point. We got a chance to perform there, which was great, but it was so low budget that they couldn’t record our audio. We decided if we’re going to lip sync let’s swing for the fences, and we came up with this totally ludicrous diversion routine to the only song we’d at that point recorded ["C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips"].

Tim worked at NPR at the time, and Ira Glass was a fan. He took us on tour as his opening act for “This American Life,” and we kept the diversion routine.

Rock shows are such a known quantity. The band does this, the audience does that, and there’s a particular range of emotions people go through. But when you bring something people don’t expect, it really shakes it up and is very different and weird and fun.

As for the diversion for “A Million Ways,” we’d come out with our second record and we didn’t want to do the same diversion that we’d done for our first. My sister choreographed a new one for us, and we worked on it in our backyard. The video was a practice tape, but there was something so funny and awkward and weird about it that we just sent it around to friends. Then it suddenly had 500,000 hits, which was more records than we’d ever sold.

I truly and honestly did not believe that numbers close to that video’s were achievable again. A lot of it was dependent on YouTube being brand new at the time, and people discovering the service when the video came out.

Q: Do you feel pressure now for every video to go viral? Especially one that took as much time and effort as “This Too Shall Pass”?

If “This Too Shall Pass” could have a broader footprint than “A Million Ways” or “Here It Goes Again” did, that’s great. But that’s definitely not our intention. From our perspective, the upshot of these things being successful is the ability to do a lot more of them in the future. We’ve done a lot of videos in the last few years. I’m definitely happy with the video of “WTF?” and this latest one, but when these videos do well it makes it so much easier to get the other ideas we’ve conceived done. Saying “I’d love to do this thing [in a video] with six cars” is tough, but now it’s more likely that someone will actually give us six cars. It’s less that they’re designed for viralness and more that the operating principle of our creative life is chasing down those ideas.

Q: Where did “This Too Shall Pass” come from? Do you consider it a continuation of your previous efforts or a jump forward?

A: “This Too Shall Pass” is a combination of a bunch of things. Making the treadmill video ["Here It Goes Again"] and the cover one ["Do What You Want"] after that, I just got really concerned with these contingent systems. Looking at choreography not as diversion or movement but as a performance or a system that requires lots of disparate elements to work in perfect synchrony, or sometimes imperfect semi-synchrony. I was thinking a lot about loosely choreographed pieces. What sort of systems can you do that aren’t specifically dance, but you get the effect that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because everything works just where it should. Rube Goldberg machines are also, I think, universally magical.

Our label, bless their moronic hearts, was given our record nine months ago. It kept getting pushed back. We basically wound up with several months of our lives to just get in trouble. If we’d had to go into promo land and get on tour we wouldn’t have time to do this kind of stuff. Basically I got home when the record was done and wrote down my dream list of videos. This whole project started with a two-paragraph description that I place down online as a job post, essentially. I asked for two creative engineers, because I figured that’s about what it would take. Two engineers, and a couple of months. It ended up being more like 60 engineers, and five months of work.

Q: The set looks like a travel death trap. Did anyone get hurt, or were there any close calls?

The camera man was actually hit by the giant blue barrel that falls from the ceiling. You see the camera takes jolt at the end, right around the time the airplanes take off. That’s the big blue barrel running into him. Otherwise, there were a few bumps and scrapes and bruises. Brett got hit by the bowling ball when it didn’t stay on the ramp once. But none of the super chanceful things every hurt anyone, that I know of.

In terms of putting ourselves in harm’s way, what makes these things exciting is the experience calibre of it. The essential element of this would be lost if we prefabricated a film that depicted all these components but didn’t actually have them. I can think of other music videos that show Rube Goldberg machines, but they’re all carefully edited things. It loses the intent of being there for the people doing it or the people watching it. I pushed the design team to make the ways the organisation treats us stranger, rougher. I was hoping the part where I get rocketed crossways the room would be a catapult. The professional circus riggers who set that up said we couldn’t do that. I was pretty insistent, but they were very clear that no, making you airborne is going to hurt you. And I was like, don’t people do this all the time? And they said sure, there are stunt men who train for years and/or do this with a lot of CG. I wanted to do it, but apparently this is as chanceful as it gets.

Q: Wait… you had circus riggers on-set? What other professionals came together to help build this thing?

A: It was such an incredible group of people. The doors that start at the end were designed by a rigger/builder guy who everyone called “The Pirate.” His mains source of income is working on longships, so he’s actually literally a seaman. The mortal who painted them is the guy who designed the most recent Coke bottle. It was a crazy group of people. The reason we got that spread is we didn’t achievement into USC and ask for their brightest engineers. We posted this stuff on the MindShare Labs list. I think they’re called Syyn Labs now. They’re basically a community of nerdy, creative folks in Los Angeles. Anybody who was wont to go to a lecture series as a drinking venue had access to this. Basically anybody who sees the smart/fun/creative side of engineering.

Q: Why such emphasis on “old-school physics” and practical effects instead of CG?

A: On the basic level, this whole project is only exciting because it is real. It’s not a fag of love for anyone to go make a commercial. This is an art project for all these people. If it ain’t the real thing, it’s not worth it. They’re not there to make a video that promotes a band. They’re there to make this awesome project. Any time someone suggested a way to do something easier, I gently pushed them away from it. What makes Rube Goldberg machines so universal is very hard to describe and very cushy to lose. If you make it failproof, the thing completely loses its magic.

Q: Would you say that’s how you’ve historically approached your videos?

A: Across our videos in general, it’s not really a requirement but it’s something that attracts me. I once wrote out a list of 20 things that make a good video. One of them is that it’s something that anyone watching could, with enough time, have done themselves. Treadmills and choreography and all the things in “This Too Shall Pass,” none of those are specialized access. A broken piano costs like 70 bucks. It’s not like you have to be an engineer to get that.

Look, we were working with engineers from NASA. Three people who worked on the Mars Rover worked on this machine. And it was wonderful getting people to stop using the specialized part of their skill and get them to use the inspired part. A lot of times I had to explain what “magic” was and what they weren’t allowed to do. You want to use optical gates? Okay, but it has to be followable for the audience. What about lasers? You can’t use something from your work you worked in, but you can use a laser pointer from a gas station. What if you dissected a Blu-ray player? Fine, but only as long as people can tell it’s from a Blu-ray player. You’d be surprised how much communication it takes.

Q: Any parts in particular stand out where you could’ve been spared a lot of trouble given a CG or manual assist?

A: Almost every point in there could have been cheated. There’s no way to cheat the plateau I’m sitting on in the beginning. I suppose you could maybe place together that organisation and then animate the balls but that would’ve been incredibly difficult. Almost everything else would have been a lot easier with a manual cheat or CG cheat. The timing on everything was critical.

Take for instance the sunrise contraption, the umbrella that comes up as the sun. The timing delay between the sun coming, the flowers coming up, and the birds coming down—we could have just triggered all that stuff electronically or manually. The way it was actually done is changing the fulcrum of the 2×4s that those things were spinning on, so the weights on the end would spin around more slowly. A hammer gets hit on the fulcrum on the back, and by changing where that hammer was, you change the delay until the release of the flowers. That kind of stuff, there’s no reason we couldn’t have cheated all this, but the 60 people who built this thing wouldn’t have had the challenge and the satisfaction of the finished product.

Q: So what’s next? Do you feel pressure to keep topping yourselves?

Mostly I’m just excited because I think this makes it more likely that we’ll be healthy to do more in the future. Finding people who will help us pay for some of these things should be a lot easier right now. And finding collaborators. As wonderful as the team was, there’s no way that those people—no matter how compelling an internet posting I’d place up—there’s no way they would’ve signed up to do this if we hadn’t already done the treadmills. The success of any particular project is that rather than lifting the bar and creating pressure to come up with new ideas, it opens you up to more and more of them. Now it’s more likely that when we call to find an anti-gravity chamber in NASA, it’ll happen.

Q: Ha. Is that something we can expect to see at some point?

A: Oh, man. Weightlessness would be the final frontier, I think.

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Apple aired its first iPad ad during the Oscars last night, but it felt like something was missing, didn’t it? It was a voiceover. So I went ahead and added one for them. You’re welcome, Apple!

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It’s official, Valve’s digital distribution service Steam is coming to Mac, and bringing Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series (along with Source) with it this April. But there’s more.

Apparently, through Steam Play, gamers will be healthy to play supported titles (anything built on Source, it seems) on a PC (say, at work) then continue the game from the same point on their Mac (say, at home). Both versions of these games come bundled in one price—which is completely, totally, unbelievably forward-thinking and awesome. [Image by Kotaku]

VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MAC

Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform

March 8, 2010 - Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be acquirable in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be acquirable simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very cushy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.

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