Review Horizon

Note: our detailed tutorial about how to root / jailbreak Kindle Fire is live here.
Big day today, Amazon officially announced their Android based tablet – Kindle Fire. With technical specs better than Nook Color and a lower price – $200 compared with $250, it is obvious that the new tablet will not only smashed through every other Android tablet on the market at this point, including Nook Color (which, you might not know but it is the second best selling tablet after iPad), but, it might as well prove a formidable competitor to iPad itself. Why? Well, as the recent sales for HP TouchPad proved, consumers are voting with their wallet and at $200 the new Kindle Fire is getting close to the impulse buying price point.

While technical specs are significantly behind iPad 2 with only 8GB internal memory, no webcam, no Bluetooth and no 3G (see the full list below), most of the people won’t use these features anyway. Technical specs aside though, Amazon worked hard to create their own user experience and their own UI with Android hidden somewhere behind. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still find a store (Amazon has its own Android store for a while already) and the daily free app provides is the icing on the cake, but a quite large percentage of Nook Color buyers got their toy specifically to root it later and install the official Android marketplace powered by Google. I do expect that to be also the case with the new Kindle Fire, since popular applications like Netflix or Hulu Plus are only available through Google’s own Android Marketplace. B&N never Read More…

Now entering in the 5th consecutive day of Playstation Network outage, we are starting to feel a little worried. Worried because Sony is rather mum on the subject, save some half baked blog posts mentioning a breach and promising to fix it soon. But more worried because the PSN shutdown affected my family’s TV watching habits. We belong to the category of users that cut the cable cord a while ago and rely on streaming for our TV watching, including VUDU, Hulu Plus and Netflix.

While most of the standalone media streamer boxes are not dependent of the manufacture’s online service to access Netflix and Hulu Plus, PS3 for some reason requires you to be logged-in to PSN (Playstation Network), displaying now the super annoying “you must first sign into the PlayStation network to sign into Netflix”. If you persist, you’ll eventually be able to use Netflix but not Hulu (error message “PlayStation Network is currently undergoing maintenance” or even MLB.TV.

This is not specifically described anywhere and adds a layer of unnecessary issues to your TV watching experience – you won’t only be affected by Netflix / Hulu outages but by Sony’s outages as well, including this particularly bad one. Not sure if this reliance on PSN to watch Netflix / Hulu Plus is a crappy design architecture issue or Sony’s way to gather data on our TV watching habits, but either way is equally annoying.

Now, it could be much worse, at least for me. I am reviewing a large number of media streamer boxes and my house is full of them. I can get Read More…

In a familiar move repeated more and more lately all over the industry, AT&T decides to screw their customers again by imposing new data caps on their DSL service. The new limits are 150GB for the standard DSL service while the U-verse broadband customers will see a slightly larger cap at 250GB of data each month.

The new policy will be launched targeting the heavy users. It won’t be as definitive as other ISP plans and allow you to go over the limit three times before you are charged an extra fees. You’ll also get notifications when you ate through 65 percent, 90 percent or through the whole monthly subscription limit and the extra data will be sold in chunks of 50GB for $10 each chunk.

While AT&T explains their move by pretending that only 2 percent of their customers will be affected and that it is for the good of many since those 2 percent of customers that are heavy users negatively impact the download speeds experienced by everybody else, let’s see how true is this claim and how it might affect you.

While you might not be a heavy user (heavy following AT&T current definition) now, consider this: Services like Netflix / Hulu easily eat through 1- Read More…

Some time ago I reviewed the Boxee Box and the verdict was that Boxee Box was the best media player / streamer box I have ever tested and I still stand by that verdict. It is! However, I bought it to replace my beloved HTPC (see hardware here and here, software here) and unfortunately it fell short of achieving that goal. Let’s dig a little bit and find the reasons…

Let me reiterate my goal: The reason I bought Boxee Box was to replace my trusted HTPC with something smaller, easier to use and not that power hungry. I use my HTPC in order to access HULU, Netflix and, very important for me, the local content consisting in hundreds of DVD and or Blu-ray discs legally purchased and ripped to be accessible for instant view around the house. While in theory Boxee Box is capable of doing everything I want, I found myself after almost two months of usage that it cannot deliver the level of customization I want for a device in the living room. Here is why: Read More…

Let me be honest: Boxee Box gets me excited. It should be everything PopBox wanted to be but unfortunately couldn’t: A universal media streamer box that not only play everything under the sun (and under your network shares) but also a box that offers an open development environment, Flash 10.1 support so every conceivable web client can be implemented for every popular Internet streaming service.

I’ll start by describing how I currently watch content. I can’t unplug my Dish Network system yet because there is no replacement yet in terms of HD content available (and there are the local news…). My (legal) DVD collection is ripped neatly and stored on my home server (Windows Server 2008) and I am using a Home Theater PC (Windows 7 + Media Browser + SSD) in the living-room to consume the content. In the bedroom, I have a small WD TV Live Plus media streamer box that does pretty much what the HTPC does but with a way less polished interface, no movie database, metadata display, etc. However it is completely silent, wide CODEC support and uses far less electricity than my quad core HTPC.

The problem is, I am not completely satisfied with either solution - the HTPC using Windows Media Center is eye candy but slightly noisy and a power hog. The Western Digital WD TV Live Plus while in my opinion the best media streamer box currently available for the money, has a horrific interface, it is not very often updated and implements few of the popular web clients with no prospect to add many more in the future.

That being said, Boxee Box uses the already popular Boxee software (a fork from the famous XBMC) and supports pretty much everything popular on the web today including YouTube, Pandora, CNN, Flickr, FaceBook and other 400 clients or applications at launch. It also supports UPNP (DLNA) and virtually every popular codec available and, best of all, it has a QWERTY remote control. It is a system integrator dream and, while not the cheapest box (you can pre-order it now for $200 at Amazon) it promises to replace every OTHER box. And here we open the can of worms – PROMISES. Netflix support is still not yet official although there seem to be negotiations between Intel (Boxee Box technology provider), D-Link (Boxee Box manufacturer) and Netflix (the main culprit). The problem is, Netflix is de facto power in movie streaming and they are hugely popular. I did not see statistics but I am willing to bet a regular family uses Netflix as much as all other methods of streaming video combined. If this is true, Boxee Box will never become mainstream without Netflix support (even Apple TV supports Netflix streaming, and they are not supporting much else of anything).

I pre-ordered Boxee Box from Amazon and I will post a full review when I receive it. However, without Netflix, I just don’t see it as more than a box oriented toward technology lovers and, as many as we are, we are far from being mainstream. And we need to remember the miserable failure of an equally long awaited similar product – PopBox.

Boxee Box Netflix Update (11-10-2010) – It is a great news that Boxee Box will actually support Netflix by the end of the year, it is confirmed! Hulu Plus will also come and VUDU was already announced.

Ever asked yourself how Google works? How your query provides thousands and thousands of useful or less useful results? PPCBlog released a really nice diagram illustrating the process. Various steps will have different weight, for example the page authority seems to be less important in certain situations than page content. My blog is very new, only several months old and its page rank is still 0, however it still ranks on Google’s first page for terms like “Vip 922 review”  or “top media streamer 2010″ for example, so Google has also ways to calculate the usefulness of a page.

There is a feverish activity to optimize one’s website to rank well in Google’s results since a good ranking brings traffic and traffic brings money, in advertisement or potential sales (20 billions as PPCBlog mentioned), and everybody wants a piece of the pie.  This activity is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The result pages are called SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

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Well, I tried to buy a HTPC remote control from Lenovo, an experience that convinced me to never ever order anything from them again. I want to post my experience here, not to criticize the company, but to warn potential buyers that may be in the same situation as I am.

So, as I said, I went to Lenovo’s own website and placed an order for a HTPC remote control with keyboard, for about $40. They shipped via UPS and to my surprise, required an in-person delivery signature. Since both me and my wife are working exactly between the same business hours UPS delivers (what a surprise!!!), we will not be able to accept delivery.

I called UPS and tried to divert the shipment to an alternate address with no success, apparently Lenovo doesn’t let them do it. I tried called Lenovo to ask for a solution and here is what they said:

“Per Lenovo policy, they cannot authorize a signature release; not only that, but even if I am not available to accept delivery, they will consider the package as delivered even if the package goes back to Lenovo after three delivery attempts. As a result, after the package is automatically returned by UPS, I will be charged 15% restocking fee, even if I never touched or seen the package”.

OK, I said, let’s try the only available option and add an alternate address. Well, it is not so simple. I used PayPal checkout (which is accepted by Lenovo) and PayPal only allows one delivery address per credit card (even if the credit card itself accepts more than one).

As a result, I will have to pay 15% restocking fee for an order that I will never see,  just because Lenovo is not flexible enough to remove the signature delivery condition even for a low cost item. Sure, you can say that I should have read their terms before ordering, but let’s be honest…Who does that? If I have to check shipping terms for a major company every time I order something online, I’ll probably never buy online again. After all, I regularly buy from Amazon, NewEgg, Dell, HP and never had a problem…

And by the way, unfortunately the UPS hub is one hour driving distance from my city…there is no way I’ll drive that long for a remote control!!!

Yesterday following the Apple’s release of the new iPhone OS 4.0 SDK, a specific change in terms made waves all over the internet and in many software developer’s lives. This specific change sounds like this:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

What this change means is that, a lot of software developers that previously were developing multi-platform and were using multi-platform devkits will be now forced to use Apple’s own tools. In other words it would mean going back to the programming technology of the ‘90s.

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One of my earlier posts was a review for LG 60PS80 connected TV. Purchased specifically for its connected capabilities, I complained that, while the TV supports Yahoo TV Widgets, it didn’t receive any software update in more than a year. I will try to analyze why this happened and if there is a signal that the TV manufacturers just are not interested enough in the Yahoo TV Widget platform.

Designed specifically for TV, Yahoo TV Widget platform evolved from Konfabulator^® (KON) widget platform for the PC, with specific customizations to make it work properly on the TV screens and other consumer electronic devices. Yahoo makes and distributes a Widget Development Kit (WDK) and recently opened their developer forums to a larger audience.

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In a previous article we discussed about Microsoft’s latest efforts to become relevant again in the world (not that they ever stopped to be, mind you, but it is not a good idea to rely only on Windows 7 and Office business, even when you are owning 90+ percent of the market). And you know what your investment agent tells you…diversify, diversify and diversify again your portfolio. So let’s continue to look how Microsoft tries to diversify itself and also be successful about it.

In this second part, we’ll discuss about a not released yet product (and not even officially announced), Microsoft Courier, about Bing search engine and the newly “silverlighted” Bing Maps.

1. Microsoft Courier

As usual, we’ll start with the fun part, and the fun part is a gadget, of course. Judging from the various usability movies that surfaced on the web, Microsoft wants to position Courier as a digital journal, eBook reader, Internet Browser and, even if they don’t specifically show it, I am sure it will have media player capabilities as well. After all, it is rumored to include a NVIDIA Tegra 2 at its core, and that is nothing to joke about.

So Microsoft Courier seems to be a dual screen tablet with a folding design – a smart idea to increase portability while conserving space, very light (a little bit over a pound is what Engadget says) and thinner than an average paperback book. The interface seems to support pen writing and touch as well which would be perfect since both input methods have their own pros and cons. I happen to love tablets for e-Book reading and light internet surfing while in bed, so something like Courier would fit my habit perfectly.

Now, if the iPhone’s recent very successful history has taught us something is that, the vast majority of people prefer their life simple. That means a close, proprietary device with its own application library and closed eco-system. So, following recently announced Windows Phone 7 announcement, I would expect Microsoft will have an eBook store ready by the time Courier launches, with various agreements in place to feed content from newspapers as well. So from this point of view, it will be an iPad contender. Where it will different form a iPad in my opinion is the user interface. While iPad is pretty much an over sized iPhone, Microsoft seems to have become more task oriented in their approach, so the UI will focus more on a set of activities and improve upon them, rather than just let the application developers do it at the application level. From the movies surfaced, you will have the ability to drag, organize and share content, together with the ability of using the pen input to  add drawing, notes or anything else you might like. The rumors say that the device will also have an embedded camera and I’m very sure audio out as well what modern device doesn’t?).

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