We only got to heft the one-pound slate for a few seconds, but we got the basic feel of the device in the hand — warm to the touch, solid if a little plasticky, with a responsive glass touchscreen up top and a bottom that’s mildly rubberized.
That’s not what I saw. There was a slight delay between the touch gestures and the actual response. What makes or breaks a UI is whether or not this slight delay exists. I was also discouraged to see how much RIM copied Palm’s webOS.
Engadget: The Acer Iconia sports dual 14-inch multitouch LCDs that pack a 1366×768 pixel format each. Both LCDs are glossy as can be. Graphics is driven by Intel HD (weak sauce) and output options are VGA and HDMI. Also included is a highly unusual 1280×1024 pixel format webcam. As you can imagine a notebook with two displays don’t come light; the Acer Iconia weighs a hefty 6.18 pounds.
I would imagine typing on glass wouldn’t be as alien since a lot of us are getting use to it on our smartphones and tablets, but Engadget as well as an Acer rep are reporting that typing on glass isn’t that easy. But maybe that’s a good thing.
Back when I was in high school, I had the fortune of taking a full year of typing class. I’m glad I did because otherwise I would be crawling, well pecking, as I blog. The proper form when typing is to keep you wrist from touching the keyboard. This actually helps reduce the likelihood of carpal tunnel syndrome. The multitouch glass on the Acer Iconia demands that you type in proper form by keeping your wrist off from the glass. A good thing perhaps.
Diana Walker was the White House photographer for Time magazine for two decades. She has a new booked titled The Bigger Picture. Walker had the opportunity to take photos of Steve Jobs at his home in August 2004. Hop on over to allaboutSteveJobs.com for 14 other photos. What did he use for his monitor back then? The 30-inch, of course.
CrunchGear: Gran Turismo 5 is a tour de force when it comes to pushing the limits of visualization. It will also push the limits of your PlayStatioin 3 hardware. GT5 will be available on November 24th. Once you plunk down US$59.99 you’ll need to be patient. Installation will take about 40 to 50 minutes and GT5 will require 6.4GB of local storage on your PlayStation 3 hard drive. I have no doubt your patience and hardware resources will be duly rewarded.
IGN:
Gran Turismo 5 is a 10/10 simulator wrapped up in a 5/10 game – driving is as exhilarating as anything that’s gone before, and slavish obsession with the minutiae of many of its cars ensure it’s an encyclopaedia of automotive delights. Its brilliance on the track, however is matched by its sloppiness off of it, and there’s a lack of polish that would at one time have seemed sacrilegious to the series. Ultimately its driving wins out to ensure that it’s still a great game, but it leaves that nagging doubt; this could have been a masterpiece were it not for the fact that Polyphony was so absorbed with the detail that it took its eye off the ball.
In the case of GT5 and all of the previous GT versions the simulator makes the game. If you have a PlayStation 3, GT5 is a must-have if you want the best driving game on the planet. US$59.99
[...] if you were looking for a single excuse to buy a new video game console and racing wheel and spend the entirety of this holiday season in pure gaming bliss, we’re sorry to report that the long awaited Gran Turismo 5 isn’t it.
Let me rephrase: Gran Turismo 5 alone isn’t worth getting a PlayStation 3. I agree, but if you have a PS3, and you like racing games, GT5 is a no-brainer.
All Things Digital, AppleInsider, Cult of Mac: Apple is working on the iPad 2.0 and it’ll be a world iPad, meaning you don’t need to worry about whether the country you’ll be traveling to has GSM or CDMA carriers. The world iPad with work with either. Qualcomm’s chips will make this happen.
There is also a rumor that the iPad 2.0 will be thinner made from a single piece of metal. It might be liquid metal and/or carbon fiber reinforced. I would put my bet on a unibody construction similar to what we see in the new MacBook Airs with the unibody LCD housing.
Combine the programmable SIM (read Apple: Programmable SIM) with a thinner and lighter iPad 2.0 (read Carbon Fiber iPad?) in addition to the 2048×1536 pixel format (read 2011 iPad) and the next-generation world iPad seems to be a world-beater.
The punchline is this: 2010 will end with $966 million in eBooks sold to consumers. By 2015, the industry will have nearly tripled to almost $3 billion, a point at which the industry will be forever altered.
That would mean there will be a lot of ebook readers out there. Millions. Billions?
C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ebook has been enhanced, with multimedia. It is in EPUB format and is available on iBooks for US$10.
It is a natural evolution of the ebook to include multimedia. I can see the potential especially for multimedia etextbooks and ebooks like The Chronicles of Narnia.
But there is a problem that needs to get untangled and Wired sums it up quite well:
Again and again, enhanced e-books bump up against rights that have already been sold and assigned. The video content, including an animated timeline/summary of the story, is solid, but considering the e-book is intended as a cross-promotion with the film, it’s sad that it doesn’t even include previews from the film.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was tighter integration of all multimedia assets? But sometimes, actually most of the time, I would rather read a regular book made of high quality paper with nothing but beautiful typography to stimulate my imagination of a different world.
Richard Branson’s Project magazine is rumored to launch tomorrow. Gizmodo:
It’ll be exciting to see just what a magazine built from the ground up for the iPad can accomplish, rather than titles that have fumbled—to varying degrees—in the process of translating dead tree content into a tablet experience. Leading the charge in the inaugural issue: that Bridges profile, a 205mph “supercar,” the search for Earth 2.0, and other stuff that just seems, well, cool.
Yes, very cool.
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