Apple today announced that it expects sales of its new Apple TV to top one million units later this week. The new Apple TV offers the simplest way to watch your favorite HD movies and TV shows, stream content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and MobileMe, all on your HD TV for the breakthrough price of just $99. iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day.
I’m thinking of getting an Apple TV: my fantasies of a minimalistic home is just not realistic with three kids, especially with a hundred or so DVDs littered everywhere. I know it will take a very long time but I plan to transform these DVDs into streamable files on iTunes. Then I’ll hide the DVDs and take a small step toward realizing my minimalistic dream home.
And it’s okay that Apple TV can only stream H.264 video at 720/30p: we only have DVDs and that’s our old Toshiba’s limit anyway.
The official debut of Sprint 4G is coming to San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Silicon Valley and other cities throughout the Bay Area on Dec. 28.
I’m writing this post tethered to my iPhone 4, which is connected to AT&T’s 3G. Works decently, but for $45 per month I am limited to just 2GB of data. I just turned on tethering tonight so I don’t know how soon I’ll burn through 2GB, but I’m thinking it’ll be pretty soon and way before one month is up. It is quite convenient since all I need is my iPhone.
But 4G sure is tempting. If I were to use Sprint I’d be paying 33% more: $60 per month. But the additional $15 gives me a lot more: 5GB of 3G data and unlimited 4G. With Sprint’s 4G I won’t need to worry about going over my data limit.
Early next month I’ll be going to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Unfortunately, AT&T is notorious for having terrible connectivity during CES. I might not be able to connect at all if nothing has improved since CES 2010.
I might have to get Sprint’s 4G, which is already available in Las Vegas. Since AT&T requires a data plan with an iPhone I’d still need to pay $15 per month for 250MB on top of the $60 for Sprint’s 4G. That’s getting a bit expensive, but 10x 3G speeds… is very tempting. The cheap (and slow) way to go during CES would be to turn off 3G on my iPhone and go 2G, which should probably work.
SPOILER ALERT: less than 10 percent of those asked said they’ll buy a 3D television in the next year.
Another 15 percent polled said they might buy a 3DTV, but that’s not so promising when over 60 percent said they they definitely won’t buy a 3DTV. And when only narrowed down to North America, just 3 percent of North Americans say they plan to buy a 3D set in the next year.
Samsung → Akihabara News, Engadget: Plane to Line Switching. What a terrible name and just barely better than In-Plane Switching. Samsung’s Super PLS is a new wide viewing angle LCD technology geared for mobile applications. The pixel format is stated as WXGA but that could mean either 1280×720 or 1366×768. Samsung claims Super PLS LCDs will be 10% brighter, 15% cheaper and have better viewing angles than the best. The best being IPS at the moment. Samsung expects to mass produce Super PLS LCDs early next year.
Samsung claims its Super PLS LCD will be 15% cheaper to manufacture than IPS. There is no way to really know until it begins mass production. Material costs are one thing but total costs involve variables such as manufacturing yields that only come into play when you start making them.
Brightness is certainly important especially when you are out in the sun. I don’t know the specifics but my guess is that Samsung improved light transmittance by increasing the aperture. Aperture can be increased by reducing the area that the TFTs (thin film transistors) take up. In other words, at the same level of brightness as an IPS LCD the Super PLS LCD consumes less power. Since the display generally is the most power hungry component in a smartphone this is a good development.
I wonder how Samsung will be positioning its Super PLS against its Super AMOLED…
[...] Again, the typography (and type rendering) are poor in Project. And I find the navigation to be frustrating. You swipe left-right to page between different articles, and up-down to “scroll” between the pages of a multipage article. [..]
First, typography should be a focus since the effort will clearly bear fruit on such a beautiful display. It should be even more important when iPad 2.0 comes out. Second, we flip magazine pages sideways. Some flip it left to right and others right to left but either way we flip pages on a magazine sideways. That’s how we read and we have been reading magazines this way for decades. This new UI makes us strain when all we want to do is experience the pleasure of reading.
