Last week, I said that The Beatles on iTunes wasn’t a big deal. What kind of diddy hadn’t ripped the CDs or torrented the discography already?
The kind of diddy that buys 450,000 Beatles albums and 2 million individual tracks, it seems.
Oops.
Category: Technology
Shiny gadgets and clever computers
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Beatles for sale. So what?
About 200 years after it stopped mattering, The Beatles’ catalogue is finally available on iTunes.
Do you remember where you were when Apple made its world changing, unforgettable Beatles announcement? I was right here, on this chair, in front of this computer, making this face: meh.
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Fembots, bats, twats
A few things I’ve written are online: first up, I’m doing Techradar’s weird tech section and I’ve got scary fembots, splattered bats and USB sticks as art.
If we were asked to describe the last seven days in one word, we’d say “week” – but if we weren’t allowed that word, we’d say “roboty”, “batty”, “flashy” or “printy”.
And here’s a wee piece about the government’s exciting new plans for “Silicon marshes” in London’s East End and some Google-friendly changes to our intellectual property laws.
Is it just me, or is there something horribly unethical about all of this? Having Google and Facebook throw Shoreditch a few crumbs while avoiding hundreds of millions, even billions of pounds in tax is a bit like someone stealing your dinner and then offering you a half-chewed chip.
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How many people will Google’s car kill?
A fascinating post by Jean-Louis Gassée on Google’s self-driving car:
The hardware and the software will fail, no question. The real riddle is determining the socially acceptable failure rate. Today, there are about 40,000 car fatalities per year. Note the euphemistic “car fatalities†or “car accidentsâ€, as if the drivers weren’t to blame. You can imagine the news headlines when the first self-driving car fatality happens: Killer Robot! Killer Software! (A literal killer app?). Isaac Asimov, the author of the Three Laws of Robotics will spin in his grave.
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Windows 7 isn’t right for tablets
Stating the bleedin’ obvious it may be, but Lenovo says Windows 7 isn’t right for tablets and that Android 2.2, aka Froyo, isn’t ready for them either.
Lenovo’s director of new technology Howard Locker, explained it this way: “The challenge with Windows 7 is that it’s based on the same paradigm as 1985—it’s really an interface that’s optimized for a mouse and keyboard. It has to be optimized for touch. How do you do that?”
I think the – really rather impressive – Windows Phone OS would be a better fit for tablets, and Android won’t be tablet-focused until version 3 comes out next year. On that basis I think it’s madness to buy a non-Apple tablet right now.
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How Nokia lost the plot
Reviews of the new Nokia N8 are coming in thick and fast, and they’re not good: the consensus is that it’s a great piece of kit hobbled by not so great software. Via The Guardian, here’s a piece in the Helsingin Sanomat that attempts to describe the problems facing Nokia and what caused them. I can’t help thinking of Microsoft when I read it.
Hit mobile phones emerged and went into production. Devices that many people remember even today, such as the 2110 or the 6110, with its infra-red port and menu icons.
Then along came 2000, and thereafter a decision was taken to increase the number of available Nokia handsets.
“Two new models a year was no longer enough, but there was a perceived need to bring out as many as 40 or 50 models a year.”
“An utterly terrifying number.” -
iPads are ace, but we still need netbooks
Me at Techradar: there are still areas where netbooks are better than iPads.
… [Adobe] Flash. Sure, there are reasons to loathe it, but in my house my wife matters more than Steve Jobs, and many of my wife’s favourite sites use Flash. Until they see the light and switch to something else, the iPad isn’t a fully functional web browser.
It’s not just Flash, either. Some things simply don’t work, either because of overzealous browser sniffers that don’t recognise Mobile Safari (“Your browser is old or strange! You can’t come in!”) or because of a lack of testing. For example, I’ve found many sites that use RBS Secure card authentication don’t work on the iPad because the box that asks for your password doesn’t display at all.
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Orange owners, meet T-Mobile. T-Mobile owners, meet Orange
Orange and T-Mobile customers can now roam across each firms’ networks, although for now it’s only 2G (ie. calls and texts, not Internet). You’ll need to sign up for it.
If you’re on Orange, you need this link.
If you’re on T-Mobile, you need this one.
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The problem with books: they’re too quiet
Books are rubbish. They just sit there with their words and their plots and their characterisation and their background detail. Where’s the fun in that? What books need is… 3D audio clips!
From the press release:
Pan Macmillan Marketing Director Becky Ikin said:
‘We wanted to celebrate the phenomenal global publication of Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants with a genuinely exciting digital offering that built on Ken’s unique ability to take readers back in time to the sights and sounds of his period – in this new epic, World War I. 3D sound is something the games industry is beginning to dabble in, film is investing in 3D visuals and we think it’s exciting for the book industry to be experimenting in this way. So far books have looked at video or audio to sit alongside or after the main text (they force you to switch from reading the book) but this is a genuine ‘enhancement’ and far beyond the usual audio experience. It just hopefully fires your imagination alongside the author’s words.
There’s an iPad version too, where “sound files have been embedded into the ebook”. Personally I can’t think of anything I’d like less, but if you’re interested the website is over here.
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Keep taking the tablets – iPads, PlayBooks and Galaxy Tabs
Want to know the key differences between Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry’s PlayBook? You do? Well, looky here then.
You won’t be able to buy a PlayBook until well into 2011, and by then Apple should have iPad 2 ready to roll. The second generation iPad may well address some of the apparent weaknesses in this company; we’d certainly expect more memory, a faster processor and a camera or two to appear in Apple’s 2011 tablet. And of course, Apple isn’t the only firm making tablets. The next few months are going to be very interesting indeed.