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Switched On: Microsoft's small tablet trap
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. More Info Microsoft reiterates that Windows 8 could see small(er) devices soon Windows Phone sees big gains at the expense of BlackBerry and Symbian Microsoft releases Surface RT and Pro updates Based on last quarter's global PC shipment numbers, Microsoft continues to feel pain in making the case for Windows is a viable tablet operating system. Theoretically, the dual-identity (Windows 8/RT) operating system has everything it needs to be a contender, but the promise is ahead of the reality on three interdependent fronts: chip-level hardware, legacy support, and app software. For example, if x86 chips were more competitive with ARM processors from a performance-per-watt perspective, then Microsoft wouldn't be as reliant on Metro-style apps for functionality. And if more developers were creating Metro-style apps, then consumers wouldn't have to go to the legacy desktop mode as much to get things done. (Until the company releases a Metro-style Office, Microsoft really can't wag its finger too much at third parties.)
Switched On: How HP learned to stop worrying and love Android
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Only those who were at the highest levels of HP at the time will likely ever know the full story of the spectacularly botched $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm and webOS. In the span of only eight months in 2010, the IT giant's plans for the operating system underwent a titanic turnabout -- from a foundation technology that would infiltrate every crevice of its device business to an orphaned open-source project ultimately sold to LG Electronics. Was the shift driven by core business softness that precluded further investment, the personal fiat of a short-tenured CEO or a justifiable reaction to disappointing sales? All three likely played some role. HP purchased Palm because it was dissatisfied with the options it saw in the mobile operating system landscape. Beyond the deep relationship the company had with Microsoft for PCs, it had dabbled with Windows Mobile on a couple of smartphones such as the HP Glisten that never saw broad distribution. It had also produced an Android device, an obscure netbook called the Compaq AirLife 100 that lacked Android Market and was distributed exclusively via Spanish telecom giant Telefonica.
Switched On: Extreme takeover, Home edition
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Facebook's management doesn't see any dichotomy in the phrase, "Go big or go home," at least as far as it might pertain to Facebook Home. After being dogged for years with questions about whether the Land o' Likes would create its own smartphone despite consistent denials, the company explained that its own phone wouldn't give it the reach it would need for its more than 1 billion members. With the exceptions of the iPhone and the Galaxy S series, a successful handset today might sell 20 million units. That's a number that many services would dream of reaching, but it's just one-fiftieth of Facebook's user base. And yet, Facebook Home will start out factory-installed on only one device: the HTC First, a mid-range Android device available exclusively from AT&T. Home is also available as a download from Google Play for a handful of other popular Android handsets, including the Galaxy S III.
Switched On: Unconventional, but not uncompromising
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. For T-Mobile, March went out like a lion, a roaring one. With passion for both invention and invective, T-Mobile roared against the contract during its UnCarrier announcement. The nation's fourth-largest (post-carrier) wireless operator will support its move away from contracts with a television spot that shows it as one of four bad guys riding into town to get people to do things their way, but then trades in its "black hat" for a magenta one as it no longer seeks to enforce those policies. T-Mobile says to watch carefully as each of the other bad guys has a distinct personality that reflects one of its main competitors. T-Mobile is in a battle for getting consumers onto a network that is described as 4G, but evaluating the appeal of its announcement comes down to looking at four S's - subsidy, selection, speed and simplicity.
Switched On: Higher stakes, higher ground for crowdfunding, part 2
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Last week's Switched On discussed the issues around crowdfunding liability, offering examples of some recent tech projects that delivered late or inconsistently, and explaining the justification for sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo denying accountability. Given this, there are a few options in how consumers choose to engage with crowdfunding sites.
Switched On: Higher stakes, higher ground for crowdfunding, part 1
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. The power of crowdfunding is that, by aggregating relatively modest donations from what is often hundreds or even thousands of backers, consumers can help artists and inventors turn ideas or concepts into reality. The Pebble smartwatch that set the record for funds raised on Kickstarter was noteworthy for breaking the $10 million barrier. That money, though, came from nearly 69,000 backers. Today, the two biggest crowdfunding destinations, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, offer different approaches to what gets presented on their sites. Indiegogo is a completely open site; there is virtually no screening of projects. Kickstarter, on the other hand, is a curated site. Projects must meet a range of criteria. As co-founder Yancey Strickler recently explained at Engadget Expand, the roots of Kickstarter were in the funding of creative and social pursuits. Kickstarter has been a haven for artists such as photographers looking to create a photo book or musicians seeking to cut a first album or create a music video.
Editors Letter: Who cares for the UNcarrier?
It seems like a year ago already, but it's been only a few days since we wrapped up our inaugural Engadget Expand event. If you weren't able to join us in person, you missed a seriously good time. Attendees got to take a ride in a Tesla Model S, perform surgery using a da Vinci robotic surgery system and cruise around the show floor on the San Francisco Special edition of the electric ZBoard, which made its debut at the show.
Switched On: Chrome on the range
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. If Chrome OS didn't start out with an inferiority complex living in the shadow of the massive adoption of its cousin Android, and with Eric Schmidt dismissing the hardware that would run it as cheap and interchangeable, the hardware companies that were early to adopt it didn't help matters. Chrome OS arrived on devices that weren't priced competitively against then-popular netbooks. Since then, though, the Chrome hardware story has been on a steady upswing. Thanks to Acer, Chromebooks broke the $200 price point. Thanks to Samsung, they made the leap to the ARM architecture, enabling longer battery life in a thin form factor. And thanks to HP and Lenovo, Chromebooks have joined the portfolios of two of the biggest names in corporate computing. While it may be nowhere near Android's scale in terms of overall devices, Chrome OS is now offered by three of 2012's top Windows PC manufacturers. That is certainly enough to show up on Microsoft's radar. Into this fray comes the Chromebook Pixel and it has clearly learned from other successful ecosystems.
Switched On: Tablets offer a new choice for voice
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. The term "phablet" has always been, at best, a relative descriptor. It kicked in with the release of the original Galaxy Note even though the voice-enabled Dell Streak had beaten that product to market. And while the portmanteau raises the question of whether there is any meaningful difference between a phone and tablet other than size, all it means is "a big phone." Up until recently, and barring the use of Bluetooth headsets, the constraints defining the upper practical limit of a phone included the ability to fit into a pocket and be held against the side of an (adult) head to facilitate a voice call. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, two companies smashed through at least the first of those criteria. Twisting the name of the PadFone, which extended the screen of a handset to that of a 10-inch tablet by use of a touchscreen shell enclosure, ASUS introduced the FonePad.
Switched On: A 4K in the road
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. The past decade has now seen at least three industry-wide technologies vie for the future of television -- HD, 3D and now 4K or UHD. The first of these -- HD -- represented a massive change for television that affected nearly every aspect of the TV experience from how it was captured to how it was consumed. A decade later, it is nearly impossible to purchase a TV that does not support high-definition. The second -- 3D -- was a mixed bag. While the technology became commonplace on high-end TVs, it has remained relevant for only a small fraction of programming. The question, then, is which of these paths, if either, 4K will follow.
Switched On: Moving forward with leaning back
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Just a few months have passed between the introduction of the Droid DNA and the new HTC One, but it seems that HTC has been turned upside down in that time. While the Droid DNA was introduced in conjunction with Verizon and can't be a wholly representative picture of how HTC might have introduced the device otherwise, it was a spec- and design-driven product -- a 5-inch, 1080p display with a 440-ppi density that appeared to spill over onto sides that included a microperforation. In contrast, little was said about the HTC One hardware itself until later in the device's introduction, surprising because the HTC One is not only the most attractive handset the company has ever built, but also certainly one of the most attractive on the market. While it is an Android device, the casing builds upon the tapered, Windows Phone-inspired 8X, substituting aluminum for polycarbonate. That said, there is also the spillover glass effect found on the Droid DNA. The HTC One retains the 1080p display found in the Droid DNA. However, since the screen is smaller, the pixel density is even higher (468 ppi) than in that record-breaking device.
Switched On: An ARM's race with Intel
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. As one would hope in dealing with two products that share the same name, Microsoft has maintained strong consistency between the Surface with Windows RT and Surface Pro. Allowing for a bit of girth variation, there's a similar industrial design as well as common features that have been nearly universally lauded (the snap-on keyboards) and lambasted (the underwhelming cameras). There's also an identical user interface as far as "modern" Windows apps are concerned. This has created an interesting lab test to see what customers really want from a Windows tablet in 2013. The early and unsurprising results indicate that it's really backward compatibility -- even at a premium of half the battery life and nearly double the price. Lenovo, which offers its Yoga 11 convertible as a Windows RT tablet, will also bring out the device in a Windows 8 version. Indeed, if one is attracted to some of the advantages that Windows RT offers on its ARM-based variants, such as the Snap and Share features, multiple devices with integrated keyboards, broad driver support and desktop Office compatibility, its toughest competitor is Windows 8.
Switched On: Battling for the bronze
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. More Info Windows Phone 7.8 hands-on Nokia is hooked on Windows Phone, now has to pay for it Editorial: Betting on BlackBerry (or hoping) Apple and Google, the latter riding on a Samsung partnership, continue to play an escalating game of units versus revenues to determine which is the top dog in mobile operating systems. However, two companies that were early players in smartphones, but late to revamp their operating systems, look on, seeking to establish themselves as solid third-place entrants, at least as a beachhead. A couple of years into the re-emergence of Windows Phone and its slow crawl up the market share mountain, the company formerly known as RIM has released BlackBerry 10. Both operating systems lie somewhere between the cathedral of iOS and the bazaar of Android in terms of their tradeoffs between integration and flexibility, with Windows Phone offering a broader range of hardware since it is licensed and has been in the market longer.
Switched On: A handset for human hands
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. In the golden era of the PDA, many debated whether future consumers would adopt a one-device or two-device approach. The two-devicers argued that the connectivity for phone calls would come from a simple, bare-bones cellphone while all the fancy data management would occur on a Bluetooth-tethered, PDA-like device unbound from cellular contracts. The Handspring Treo was for many the first converged-device handset that accomplished key tasks well enough to make a convincing case for handset integration, and the smartphone revolution ensued. The first iPhone featured a large screen for its time but not a much larger footprint than its contemporary competitors such as the BlackBerry or Treo. Competitors asked if a 3.5-inch handheld palette was good for consuming web content, wasn't a 4.3-inch display -- like that on the HTC EVO 4G better? Screen sizes and attendant resolution continued to grow with the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, 5.5-inch Galaxy Note II and culminating in the 6.1-inch Huawei Ascend Mate that debuted at CES. Samsung and Huawei are joined by LG, Sony and HTC in offering or announcing a 5-inch or larger Android phone. The latter joined the pocket-stuffing ranks with the 5-inch Droid DNA on Verizon, available in China as the HTC Butterfly.
Switched On: Compromising positions
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Windows powers tablets and PCs. It supports desktop and "Windows 8-style" apps using touch and keyboard / mouse and can run on x86 and ARM CPUs. You can even get it on hardware from Microsoft and third parties. Microsoft refers to this as creating a "no-compromise" operating system. Some of its users will run Windows on an Intel Ultrabook, which an Intel blog post has referred to as a "no-compromise" notebook. But it won't run on the Google Nexus 7, which Google describes as a "no-compromise" Android tablet. And it certainly won't run on a Wang 2200 SVP from the early 1980s, which was hailed by a sales brochure as "the low-cost, no-compromise computer."
Switched On: The 2012 Switchies, Part 2
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. The last Switched On covered some of the major Switchie awards for the year, but there are many other products to recognize: The "Category's Meow" Award for Best New Category Creation goes to Supermechanical's TWINE, a small blue box that can relay information about its environment via WiFi to a website. Its fellow Kickstarter project Ninja Blocks followed suit with a more proactive two-way link to pick up an Honorable Mention. The "Mulligans Do" Award for Best Product Revamp goes to the Apple iPod family. After a bit of staidness in the venerable iPod nano, Apple came back with larger screens and slender profiles on both the iPod nano and iPod touch. Honorable mentions go to the Kindle family of e- readers, particularly the Kindle Paperwhite, and the Samsung Galaxy S line of smartphones from Samsung, which took a huge leap forward with the Galaxy S III.
Switched On: The 2012 Switchies, Part 1
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. It's that special time of year between the holiday sales and the pre-CES hype that presents an opportunity to consider some of the most innovative devices of the year. Switched On is proud to present the Saluting Wares Improving Technology's Contribution to Humanity awards, also known as The Switchies. This year marks the seventh annual Switchies, which are decided based on a rigorous examination of the opinion of me, and do not reflect the opinion of Engadget or its editors. For that latter honor, nominees will need to win an Engadget Award. This week's Switched On will cover many of the major award categories while next week's will cover some of the more obscure ones. Let's roll out the red carpet then.
Switched On: The roads to home automation
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. At a dinner event several years ago, a former editor-in-chief of a major computing trade magazine told attendees that his first published article was about home automation. That article ran back in 1979 -- just two years after the debut of the Apple II and two years before the introduction of the IBM PC. Indeed, in its early days, home automation, like the PC, was confined to hobbyists more concerned with being able to do things rather than their practical value. However, the PC proved itself first in business and then with games, word processing and the consumer web as the internet grew. Meanwhile, home automation has largely remained the province of the very wealthy and corporations. Indeed, we're still likely many years away from all of us having smart homes, but there are signs of that future approaching and putting the squeeze on today's high-end installations both from above and below.
Switched On: The Blind Men and the Surface Pro
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. When Microsoft announced the Surface RT, it seemed clear that the ARM-based product -- with its precious adornments such as the kickstand and, of course, typing covers -- sought to appeal to those wanting to do more than is typically done with tablets. Microsoft, straight-faced, calls the Surface RT a PC, but with a connotation that it is trying to transform. There's less ambiguity around the Surface Pro. It has a capable Intel processor and runs virtually any Windows app. While someone from an earlier time might not recognize it as a PC turned off (especially with a closed Touch Cover), booting it up into Outlook would provide a convincing case. In the story of the blind men and the elephant, the protagonists each discover some element of the majestic animal and draw conclusions about its nature without understanding the bigger (literally, in that case) picture. Now that we know the size of the Surface Pro's elephant in terms of how much it might feed from our wallets, its relative value and competitiveness will vary greatly depending upon which assumptions prospective buyers have when considering the product.
Switched On: The fork, the ficus and the flandoodle
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. As sensors and crowdsourcing give us ever more granular data into the norms and deviations of the world around us, enterprising developers and hardware companies have trotted out various combinations of atoms and bits to package that awareness, sometimes paired with recommendations, into products. Back in March, Switched On discussed a number of Kickstarter projects (all of which have now shipped) that extended sensor-based monitoring and notification to remote locations (provided there was WiFi or Bluetooth connectivity). Where does it end? Three recent product announcements enable us to know more about things that we might not ever have thought to track in the past.
