Blackmagic Computers

Apple held its annual fall media event Wednesday. During the event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new line of iPods, as has become tradition, including a new shuffle, a multitouch-enabled nano, and an A4-powered, FaceTime-compatible iPod touch. The company also revealed details of iOS 4.1 for iPhone and iPod touch, as well as iOS 4.2 for iPad.

iOS updates

Jobs kicked off the event by announcing iOS 4.1. The update addresses a number of bugs that have affected the proximity sensor of the iPhone 4, as well as issues connecting some Bluetooth devices. Jobs said that the update speeds up iOS 4 running on the iPhone 3G, which suffered from sluggish performance for many users.

The update also brings a few new features for iOS 4-compatible devices. Apple added a high dynamic range option to the camera app, which helps address inherent tonal range limitations in the tiny image sensors used in mobile devices. In typical Apple fashion, there’s nothing to tweak or adjust; just tap the HDR button in Camera to turn it on. When taking an image, three exposures will automatically be taken and combined to reveal more detail in shadow and highlight areas.

iOS 4.1 also brings the official launch of Apple’s Game Center. Game Center is a built-in, systemwide social network for games. Like OpenFeint and Plus+ before it, it offers a centralized place to view achievements and compare scores with other users. It also includes a system to challenge other players in head-to-head competitions.

iOS 4.1 will be a free update made available to all iOS 4 users next week.

Jobs then gave a sneak peek of iOS 4.2, slated for release in November. This version will be the first version of iOS 4.x for the iPad, and will bring all the features that iPhone and iPod touch users have been using since June, as well as the new features of 4.1. It will also bring a couple of long-requested features to the iPad: wireless printing capabilities and AirPlay—wireless streaming of audio, video, and photos.

iPods

After discussing iOS, Jobs moved on to new iPod hardware. First up was a new iPod shuffle. Changing the controversial design of the third-generation shuffle, which removed the physical controls from the device itself, the fourth generation device brings back those original button controls. The new device looks like a smaller second-gen shuffle. Like the third-gen, though, it still has VoiceOver control.

The new iPod shuffle comes in five colors with a 2GB capacity, and sells for $49.

Jobs then unveiled a radically different iPod nano. The company removed the famous click-wheel that has practically defined the iPod since the very first version. Instead, the tiny device is now dominated by a multitouch-enabled screen.

The hardware itself resembles what might happen if an iPod touch and an iPod shuffle made a baby. Like the shuffle, it has an aluminum case and a clip along with hardware buttons for volume and hold buttons.

The screen features iOS-like icons for all the available features, such as playing music or videos, and makes use of multitouch. One feature uses a two-finger rotate to change the orientation of the screen, useful for when the device is clipped in an awkward orientation.

The new seventh-generation iPod nano comes in seven different colors, including a Product (RED) version. The 8GB model is $149, and a 16GB version goes for $179.

Jobs bragged that the iPod touch outsells portable Nintendo and Sony gaming devices combined, making it the most popular portable gaming device in the world. To “make it even better,” said Jobs, Apple made it thinner than the previous version. Despite shaving off size and weight, it also comes equipped with the same high-resolution Retina Display that debuted in the iPhone 4, the same A4 processor in the iPad and iPhone, the gyroscope motion control, and a front-facing camera for FaceTime chatting.

The new iPods are all available next week, though preorders begin today.

When we interviewed Tweetie developer Loren Brichter in June, he made two things clear: 1) Tweetie (now branded simply as “Twitter” after the company was acquired by the microblogging service) would definitely be coming to the iPad, and 2) Loren was really looking forward to exploring the larger screen touch interface.

Now, the official Twitter client for iPad is finally out in the form of a universal app. The team has clearly put some effort into utilizing parts of the multitouch experience in ways that third-party Twitter apps have not, and the app is certainly feature-rich. However, the interface can be confusing at times, and many of the features are not easily discoverable without some help.

At its most basic level, Twitter for iPad can be used to do the same things all Twitter apps can do: post tweets, view your timeline, see @ mentions, send and receive direct messages, look at your (and other users’) profiles, and search for people or tweets. If that’s all you really want, then you can get away with just doing those things. The visual design is nice—we have no complaints—and on the surface, it’s easy to figure out how things work.

As you can see, when you’re composing a tweet, you can choose (via the little icons in the new tweet area) to have it share your location, shrink your URLs, or attach photos/videos to the tweet.

Like the version of Twitter for iPhone, if you tap your own username at the top of a new tweet, you can choose which account to post the update to.

It’s when you try to get past the basic functionality that things start getting crazy. When you tap on a tweet that replies to another user, a pane slides in on the right that shows the whole conversation thread—a valuable feature, to be sure. This works the same way in both portrait and landscape mode; it’s just a little more overlapped if you view it in portrait.

If you tap on a tweet that has hash tags, the slide-in panel shows other tweets that use the same tag(s). You can tell which one you’re looking at by the blue highlight in the original tweet.

Tapping a tweet that links to a photo or video will display that media in the right-most pane, and tapping a tweet that links to a website will load that whole site below the tweet:

When you are presented with this kind of content, you can view it in fullscreen mode by un-pinching the screen in that area (basically the “zoom in” gesture). This is one of the features we would not have discovered on our own, or discovered accidentally.

In the same vein, you can also “zoom out” on a specific tweet in the main timeline to flip out a card showing that user’s bio information and followers. There’s no good way to describe what this looks like when it happens, so you’ll just have to try it yourself. When a few of us on staff did it for the first time (again, by accident), our reactions were all the same: “whoa.”

This screen does present you with a few helpful options, such as the ability to reply, star, retweet, or forward/save the tweet for later.

Another feature that we would have never known about, had we not read the Twitter blog post, was the ability to use two fingers to tap on a tweet and drag downward to see the replies to that tweet. When we tested this ourselves, the app itself seemed to do what it was supposed to do, but we were unable to find a tweet that would make Twitter show us the replies, even when we used Tweets that we knew people had replied to.

In all, we think Twitter for iPad is best summed up by Ars creative director Aurich Lawson. It’s part cool, part “I have no idea what’s happening right now.” We’re not sure what the solution is to make features more discoverable (and more importantly, more understandable upon first discovery), and to be fair, some of things are pretty useful once you get the hang of them. It’s just that we’re used to the simple elegance of the iPhone app, and the iPad app seems to turn all of that on its head. But again, if all you want to do is send and read some tweets, then this app serves that purpose well and joins the many other respectable Twitter clients out there.

Judging by the Federal Communications Commission’s latest survey, we’re still pretty far away from the FCC’s National Broadband Plan goal of 4Mbps Internet download speeds for everyone. The agency’s newest statistics indicate that out of 71 million wireline household connections, less than half (44 percent) matched or exceeded that benchmark, with its upload goal of 1Mbps.

Meanwhile, the number of consumers with full mobile wireless Internet accounts shot up by 40 percent from January through June of 2009, to 35 million subscribers. Twenty-five million had such access at the end of 2008.

But among those 35 million wireless connections, only 45 percent met the Department of Commerce and Agriculture’s $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program’s definition of “broadband”—advertised speeds of 768Kbps downloads and 200Kbps uploads.

Of the 113 million Internet connections out there all told (residential and business), 87 million or 76 percent reached that level. If you look just at fixed-location connections, 91 percent met that goal.

There were a few bright spots in the statistical picture. There are now four million fiber connections—a 23 percent jump, and the largest increase among fixed-location broadband services.

But cable modem connections only grew by three percent to 41 million and DSL by a mere one percent to 31 million (not that DSL is much of a measure of progress any more).

All-in-all, this latest survey offers the portrait of a nation whose consumers access the ‘Net at relatively slow throughput rates. Keep in mind that another benchmark of the National Broadband Plan is 100Mbps to 100 million homes by 2020. We’re a long way from that goal.

The data comes from information submitted to the FCC every six months by all ISPs.

The fallout from Google’s Buzz social networking aggregator continues: the company has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit over concerns that the service’s original configuration violated users’ privacy. While Google has made numerous changes to the service since its February launch and maintains that it did no wrong, the company has agreed to pay out $8.5 million to end the litigation.

Buzz launched in early February to a lukewarm reception, which was quickly followed by an enormous controversy over concerns that the default settings revealed private information. At the heart of the problem was an auto-follow feature meant to facilitate quick adoption. Users quickly found, however, that it could reveal their Google accounts to people they’d like to avoid. Journalists were concerned that confidential sources could be revealed to the public, while one woman noted that her private Google account was auto-followed by her abusive ex-husband.

Google worked quickly to make changes, turning the auto-follow feature off in favor of recommendations, and making some features easier to opt out of. Still, it wasn’t long before a federal class-action suit was filed on behalf of all Gmail users who were automatically opted-in to the Buzz service.

Google has also faced criticism from advocacy groups like EPIC and the EFF, US lawmakers, and foreign governments.

In the proposed settlement submitted to the court this week, Google agreed to make efforts to better educate Buzz users on issues of privacy and the particular privacy features that Buzz offers. Additionally, Google also agreed to pay out $8.5 million to a fund which will be disbursed as cy pres awards for organizations that focus on Internet privacy policy or education

The majority of Microsoft’s E3 keynote was dedicated to Kinect, the camera system formerly known as Project Natal, and we learned the device’s release date and heard details about its use in several games. But one important piece of information was still missing: the price. Soon after the keynote, Gamestop listed Kinect for $149.99, and now further evidence has been revealed to support that number.

Firstly, we have Microsoft’s own store, which has listed Kinect as $149.99 for those who want to pre-order the motion control device. This isn’t an official price confirmation, however; the store says that “the advertised price for pre-order items may increase or decrease prior to the date the product is released to the public.”

Meanwhile, Develop has reported on information from a “highly positioned” anonymous source claiming that each Kinect unit actually costs Microsoft $150 to manufacture. If true, this would mean that Microsoft would take a loss on each unit sold for less than $150, whereas sticking to the rumored price would allow the company to break even on the hardware.

With Kinect not due to launch in North America until November 4, it could be quite some time before we get an official pricing announcement.

“One of the major objectives of our E3 was to stress that it’s important for Nintendo that we get this level of support from partners,” Nintendo of Europe’s Laurent Fischer told GamesIndustry.biz. “Of course we’re happy about it, but it’s more than we would have dreamed of with such support from our partners at this new time for consoles.”

According to Fischer, there are currently around 70 games—both first and third party—in the works for the new handheld, including titles from Konami, Capcom, Ubisoft, and Activision.

“For hardware that started its public life only days ago that’s amazing, and what I was pleased with was you can see very, very strong support from everyone. You can see from the line-up that we have huge titles that no other publisher is doing, without us thinking twice about it. I couldn’t see any publisher that isn’t very motivated by the console so we’re really pleased by that.”

The Nintendo 3DS still doesn’t have a release date, but you can check out our hands-on impressions from E3for further details.

Today Toshiba announced the Libretto W100, an ultra-mobile PC sporting a pair of 7″ 1024 × 600 multitouch screens, a 1.2GHz Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB RAM, and a 62GB solid state disk. The all-touch device is designed to be used as a conventional laptop, and vertically, like a book.

The W100 includes haptic technology, giving the touchscreens tactile feedback; there’s also 802.11b/g/n support, Bluetooth, and a built-in camera. This is all in a slightly bulky—7.95″ × 4.84″ × 1.2″—but lightweight—1.8 lbs (just a hair more than the iPad)—package. In spite of the size, it is certainly a fully-featured machine.

Toshiba is describing the W100 as a “concept PC,” an acknowledgement that it won’t be a machine suitable for everyone. It will hit the market in August, with prices starting at $1099, albeit with limited availability. The device was shown as part of Toshiba’s celebration of 25 years of laptops; the first clamshell laptop was released by Toshiba some 25 years ago.

The company is positioning the W100 as an Ultra Mobile PC—something highly portable, but still in every sense a PC, with all the functionality that entails. The similarity to Microsoft’s Courier concept, however, is striking. Courier paired the dual-screen, book-like form-factor with specialized software that fully exploited the touch capabilities to provide a natural, intuitive interface.

However, as with so many tablet-like devices before, the W100 does not do this. The W100 includes Windows 7 Home Premium, which is a perfectly good operating system, but it is not purpose-built for pure touch machines. The user interface is designed for a mouse and a keyboard, and though Windows 7 does include some concessions to touch (for example, it includes an on-screen keyboard with multitouch support, and it enlarges certain interface elements when used with touch machines), it still falls a long way short of the purpose-built interfaces found in so many cell phones and the iPad.

To fill this gap, the W100 does include some custom software: a “Toshiba Bulletin Board,” that provides a touch-friendly, widget-based desktop, and “Toshiba ReelTime,” with touch-friendly file management. The device can also be used as a more conventional laptop, with one screen serving as a keyboard. A number of keyboard layouts are supported, including a neat split mode for use with thumbs.

The software problem is a continued issue for Microsoft. Given the hardware specs of the W100, Windows 7 is in some ways a natural fit: this is a piece of hardware that’s got the horsepower to run fully fledged desktop apps without a problem (in terms of computational capabilities, it has something like five times the integer performance of the A4 processor in the iPad). Using one screen as a keyboard—a keyboard with tactile feedback, no less—arguably also justifies the use of full Windows 7, as it makes the W100 functionally equivalent to a standard laptop.

But if that’s all the device is going to be used for, it might as well abandon the second screen and just use a regular keyboard. The unique value of the W100 is that it can be tilted sideways and held like a book with a pair of screens—only it lacks the software to really make use of this mode.

As such, it’s hard to see the point of the W100. A similar device based on, say, Android would make sense with the touchscreens, but would then be (in comparison to other Android devices) immensely overpowered, with the drop in battery life that implies. Sticking with Windows 7 limits the utility of the touchscreens, but justifies the stuff under the hood. Combined with the price, it’s not hard to see why Toshiba is labeling this a “concept PC.” The W100 is unlikely to emulate the iPad’s sales figures, and isn’t enough—yet—to herald a new era of portable computing.