Impress (Japanese to English Google Translation), Toshiba (Japanese to English Google Translation): The Toshiba Regza 55X1 is the first cell TV that will be released December 10. The 55-inch 1080p LCD TV sports a LED backlight, which is unfortunate because back in CES 2009 Toshiba was touting its Cell TV with Resolution+. The Cell processor was used to upscale all video sources up to 4K2K or QuadHD (3840×2160). Now it’s just the standard 1920 x 1080. Original specifications included a lot of fantastic features: The LED backlight sports 512 blocks instead of the usual 96 for a 55-inch class TV so brightness is more finely tuned for greater contrast rated at 5,000,000:1. Brightness was originally spec’d at a blinding 1250 cd/m2. The refresh rate is 240Hz to minimize motion blur.
Joshua Topolsky:
Once you get the hang of the system it starts to make some sense, but it’s nothing we’d describe as intuitive, and your rhythm is thrown off by one major factor: the extremely sluggish response of the device.
Compared to the Kindle the Nook is thicker, heavier and smaller: 7.7 x 4.9 x 0.5-inch at 11.2 ounces. Screens: 6-inch 16-grayscale E Ink display up top, 3.5-inch capacitive touch TFT LCD down below. The 6-inch E Ink display is just like what you see on the Kindle. No surprise since the two are essentially the same except for: the Nook was slightly slower at turning pages compared to the Kindle.
The 3.5-inch LCD is unique to the Nook and works as “the primary method of interacting with lists and reading selections” and “your navigator, your search box (with keyboard), music player, and a Cover Flow-style book browser”. Because the slower E Ink display is linked to the faster LCD you’ll need to get used to pauses here and there. Downward swipes on the capacitive touch screen wasn’t recognized at times. Well, that’s the summary of the display portion of the review. It looks like the Nook was a solid first attempt by Barnes & Noble but will be let down by how slow it is.
AllThingsD: Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner has no real connection to Apple but is sure that Apple will release a 10.1-inch multitouch tablet in March or April of 2010. The price? $1000. Yair is most concerned about how Apple’s tablet will impact the publishing industry as well as distributors and platforms like Amazon and its Kindle. Apple’s goal is to bring books, magazines and newspapers into the digital world as it has done with music, TV shows and movies. According to Yair, Apple is proposing a 70/30 split in revenues just like it does with content on iTunes and the App Store.
$1000 sounds quite expensive for a tablet. The recently announced JooJoo is $500. There are 10-inch netbooks that cost much less. So why would Apple’s tablet cost so much more? It isn’t rocket science to note that Apple exacts a premium for its products. And there is a good reason, actually many good reasons.
Apple works overtime putting together hardware, operating system and software applications to make sure that the experience of using its gadgets is as sublime as possible. Take for instance the iPhone. I know you’ve been bombarded by iPhone analysis paralysis but I’ll make a quick point about Apple’s way when it comes to completely new devices for the company. Apple didn’t slap on OS X into a smartphone but instead redid the entire GUI to provide a smartphone experience not an OS X experience. Just note the size of the physical button and the app icons: they are about the size of your finger, pressed unto an object. That last part is important because Apple designed the iPhone so we’d be using our fingers and pressing them against the screen.
This fusion of hardware, OS, software takes time but more importantly talent, which isn’t cheap at all. These geniuses on the Apple campus are making use of their intelligence, creativity, diligence to bring about something incredible and that’s in part what we are paying for when we purchase a masterpiece from Apple.
High-quality high-tech materials are expensive too. I personally don’t like plastic much. I’d rather my computer be made of steel, aluminum, magnesium or some combination thereof. I don’t expect Apple’s tablet to be made of plastic although there might be a ‘mini’ or ‘nano’ version that makes use of plastic in white. But the lower-end white plastic version would also be a few hundred dollars cheaper than the aluminum-magnesium-alloy version.
The perfect display will be paramount in ensuring success for the tablet by Apple. I would like to see a capacitive multitouch active matrix OLED (AMOLED) display with a ton of pixels, at least 1920×1080, but more would be better. And no, I don’t think fonts will be too small since the revamped OS X tablet version will make use of the high pixels per inch (PPI) and make the fonts look as smooth as the real thing. The entire eco-system surrounding the Apple tablet will make use of the high-PPIA rendering system including books, magazines, newspapers, documents, manuals, product catalogs, etc. An extremely high-resolution 10-inch AMOLED display with capacitive touch will certainly be unique in design and function and will certainly require a huge upfront investment by Apple that will add to the premium price.
3G is an absolute must but unlike the iPhone of today the tablet will have a Gobi chipset that allows it to use both GSM and CDMA networks. This will allow Apple to get the upper hand and negotiate with all cellular carriers in the US and around the world. Of course there will be added cost to this solution but in the near term cost reductions will become realized since Apple will volume manufacture a single SKU for the entire world. Ah, there might be one exception: China. Other connectivity options probably include WiFi N and Bluetooth.
Even though $1000 sounds expensive I will believe every penny was well spent when (and if) I get my hands on an Apple tablet.
The Wall Street Journal: Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy announced that digital versions of 35 of its major releases in early 2010 will come out four months after the physical release. One of the main motivations behind this decision is to maximize profits. For instance a hardcover can command a significantly higher price than a paperback. And paperback is pricier than the digital version. Money concerns has led Simon & Schuster to make the wrong decision about digital books.
What type of customer purchases a Kindle? Someone who is an avid reader. Someone who enjoys near-instant access to purchased books and especially new releases. Not to disrespect Simon & Schuster’s CEO but clearly she has not done her homework! Or maybe someone didn’t do a good enough job researching the digital book revolution for her. Avid readers will want the digital version on their Kindle as fast as possible. And if it is a really good book some of them, maybe a lot of them, will want to purchase an archival version, a real one, to complement the digital one. By artificially delaying digital releases Simon & Schuster is going backwards and other publishers will leave this company in the digital dust.
Irradiated Software: There is a feature in Windows 7 that dramatically improves window management, but is absent in OS X. Drag the window to the left of your screen and it automatically resizes the window to take exactly have of your screen. Same thing happens when you drag a window to the right edge of your screen. This is a must-have for me since I tend to open up two windows side-by-side when blogging. But resizing windows on a Mac is a pain, to say it mildly. Cinch is a simple, elegant and must-have utility for dramatically improved window management on the Mac. Perfect.
Update: I have moved on from Cinch to a much more affordable solution called DoublePane.