NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Reverse Predictions For 2013

Playing technology forecaster is a foolish exercise. Software and hardware advances at unpredictable paces, while the players in the market and consumer tastes can shift with confusing speed.

So instead of adding to the noise of 2013 predictions, why not pick seven that seem particularly unlikely?

Apple TV

Pining away for a Web-connected Apple HDTV is understandable: Pay-TV interfaces are a mess that needlessly shut out Internet media. But there's no easy way to ship a device that could plug into any cable-TV feed without a separate box -- even CableCard-ready TiVo recorders sometimes need extra "switched digital video" adapters -- and no way at all to do that for satellite. Just making an Apple TV box that could change channels would entail an iffy customer experience I can't see Apple tolerating.

Death to Paper Books and Magazines

This prediction -- for an example of the latest version, see TechCrunch's John Biggs -- will be wrong for years to come. It's not just because some readers prefer print to pixels; it's because some design-intensive genres, such as coffee-table books, don't fit into the simple templates of Kindle, Nook and iBooks releases. And because the stubborn persistence of "digital rights management" locks turns away potential buyers like me.

Rolling Back Windows 8's Changes

I'd like to see this myself, but I think my friend Steve Wildstrom and others underestimate Microsoft's stubbornness when predicting a return of the Start menu to Windows 8 or a demotion of its new interface. The Redmond, Wash.-company has spent a little too much time telling developers to write for Windows 8's new look to retreat now. And lest you draw too many conclusions from the surprising departure of Win 8 architect Steven Sinofsky, his successor Julie Larson-Green is just as big of an advocate of these changes.

Broad-Based Sales Taxes on Internet Shopping

I think Amazon and other large Internet retailers should collect state sales taxes in the same way catalog-first operations already do. But while some states have struck individual deals -- California and Massachusetts, for example, recently signed up Amazon -- any move in Washington to mandate sales-tax collection by e-tailers seems doomed by the visceral hostility of many Republicans to anything reeking of higher taxes.

Amazon Smartphone

It made sense for Amazon to sell a tablet of its own; Apple had owned that market at the time. Why would Amazon go to the trouble of shipping its own phone when the browser on any decent model gets you to its online store, and when Android phones can also connect to its own app store?

Publishers Push Google News Around

News publishers love to complain about Google News letting some readers skip the actual story (never mind all of the traffic it also sends to a site), but in the United States, few do anything about it. And why should they now? Opting out of Google News only ensures that the zero-value readers who click elsewhere after one sentence will wander away from their own sites instead of Google's.

Humbled Apple

The idea that Apple will fall to Earth by becoming merely "ordinary" comes up strangely often. Apple gets more customers and makes more money just about every quarter, and I thought that was a pretty good definition of success for a capitalist enterprise even if you don't stun observers with the equivalent of the first iPhone every year.

Note that in handing out these reverse forecasts, I have engaged in fallible forecasting of my own. I look forward to reading your explanations of how I was wrong.

Credit: HBSS/Corbis

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Africa Has More Mobile Than U.S.: DNews Nugget

Africa Has More Mobile Phones than U.S.: In fact, the continent has more mobile phones than all of North America and Europe. Asia is the only place in the world with more mobile phones than Africa. There are currently 650 million subscribers in Africa, according to the World Bank. The market has grown 40-fold since 2000.

It shouldn't be a big surprise that they've boomed in popularity over the last decade or so. Landlines are expensive because they require a wired infrastructure; cellphones only require towers.

Having access to a cellular network seems to directly affect personal economic growth. And connectivity is leading to improvements in "telemedicine, mobile-to-mobile money-transfer services for people without bank accounts and climate adaptation measures like crop insurance and GPS mapping for anti-deforestation measures." via Quartz

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Oh, I WILL Find My iPhone!

If you've ever had your iPhone stolen, you have have erased it completely using Apple's "Find my iPhone." This feature, which can be accessed online or through another iOS device, allows you to remotely lock your missing device with a four-digit passcode. You can even go so far as to delete your personal data and restore your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac to its factory settings.

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Yesterday, Apple quietly released an update to the app that will show user's a road map to the exact location of a missing iPhone, iPad or iPod. When searching for the device's location on another iOS device, a tiny car icon will show up on the screen and when prompted, will provide directions to the lost device's whereabouts. The feature is only available on Apple device running iOS 6, so if you haven't already, bite the bullet and upgrade, if this kind of thing is important to you.

One would like to think this feature was added to serve as a memory jogger for those who may have left their phone somewhere and not as a tracker for a potential thief. Just be sure to have a cool head if you decide to hunt down your iPhone. It may be best to let the authorities handle it, or bring a big friend.

via PCMag

Credit: Rob Pegoraro / Discovery

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5 Breakthroughs For Gadgets In 2012

Innovation in the gadget business rarely comes in great leaps forward. Most of the time, somebody will take an existing idea and implement it at a cheaper cost, at a larger scale or in a new context, and that change is enough to shake up our sense of what technology can do.

And that's exactly what these five breakthroughs have done for me this year.

1. "Retina displays" grow up, and out. Two years after Apple's iPhone 4 introduced a display so sharp that you could no longer distinguish its constituent pixels, "Retina displays" started showing up in the Cupertino company's other gadgets (and many competing smartphones). On this spring's iPad, the results were amazing, instantly making the old model's screen look bad.

But on Apple's laptops, Retina displays have jacked up prices substantially. And on flat-panel TVs, ultra-high-resolution "4K" and "8K" resolution suffers from the fact that at typical couch-viewing distance, even mere HD resolution can exceed our visual acuity.

2. Cheaper smartphone service. This year, the cost of keeping a new smartphone finally started ratcheting down in a big way. The prepaid carrier Cricket Wireless slashed the monthly bill for an iPhone to $55, then its competitor Virgin Mobile beat even that with a $30 deal.

DNEWS VIDEO: Gadgets and Gizmos

Among the four major carriers, Verizon Wireless may have hiked its rates but T-Mobile has gone in the other direction with "value" plans that subtract the usual subsidy of a cheaper phone price, meaning you save more over time. And next year, that carrier will make that its standard.

3. Affordable gigabit broadband. While most Americans are stuck with the same one or two broadband Internet providers as ever, a lucky few can now sign up for breathtakingly faster connections at prices no higher than a low-end cable bill: Sonic.net charges just $70 for gigabit (1 billion bits per second) service in parts of the Bay Area, a price matched by Google's gigabit-fiber service in Kansas City.

Sure, most of us can't use those speeds. But imagine what the arrival of gigabit access for under $100 would do to your own ISP's pricing... or don't, if you'd rather not depress yourself.

4. Smarter shared transportation. Near-ubiquitous wireless-data service and cheap GPS sensors are making it easier and cheaper to get around cities without having to own your own ride. Among the most interesting such options: car2go, which broke out of its Austin test market this year with a launch in Washington this spring, followed by expansion to Miami, Portland, San Diego and Seattle. It allows you to rent a Smart fortwo at a cheap, per-minute rate and then park it on the street for free -- in effect, making it a longer-distance complement to bicycle-sharing services like D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare.

I'm equally fascinated by startups that make better use of transportation we've already paid for, such as the Uber sedan-ride service. But when these involve privately-owned conveyances -- for instance, Lyft's carpooling -- they can run into legal hangups.

5. The Internet winning in Washington. One of the tech business's most promising developments didn't involve software code or circuit boards. But the way Internet users rebelled at the offensive overreach of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have broken the Net's basic routing system and allowed copyright holders to unplug the finances of allegedly infrinting websites pretty much at will, mattered anyway.

"SOPA" had the backing of some of Washington's most entrenched interests, but individual citizens who didn't want to see technology criminalized overcame all of it. That's good news for continued innovation, both next year and over the next decade.

Credit: Corbis Image

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Galaxy Note II Is More Than A Handful

There must exist a great many people who either never use a smartphone single-handed or have much larger hands than me. And I am monstrously insensitive to every last one of them.

How else can I explain the gap between my dislike of ever-larger phones like Samsung's new Galaxy Note II and the popularity of these big-screen devices? I teed off on the first Galaxy Note here and elsewhere, yet Samsung sold 10 million copies of that enormous phone in nine months. And now this model, despite having an even larger display, has sold three million plus.

(To put those numbers in context, Apple says it sold five million iPhone 5s in that device's first weekend. But by any other standard, Samsung's phone-inflation strategy is working.)

ANALYSIS: Samsung's Galaxy Note: Large, Not in Charge

The Note II (available on AT&T, Sprint and, soon, Verizon Wireless for $299.99; T-Mobile has it for $419.99 before a $50 mail-in rebate) is built around a 5.5-in. touchscreen. A thinner bezel allows this Android phone to be slightly thinner than the original, 5.3-in. Galaxy Note, but that doesn't make it any less unwieldy.

DNEWS VIDEO: Gadgets and Gizmos

That older phone's 5.3-in. display made one-handed use uncomfortable, but landing a thumb on the far corners of the Note II's screen verges on impossible. You need to roll the phone slightly in your hand just to get the other side of that AMOLED screen close enough. Taking pictures one-handed may be even more awkward.

So if you will use this thing, you'll need both hands free. If you accept that requirement, what do you get in return?

Reading and viewing are certainly more pleasant on that larger expanse of glass; with its 1,280 by 720 pixel resolution, you can fairly describe the Note II as an HDTV in your pocket. That extra space also allows you to play videos and view Web pages in small pop-up windows.

Like the original Note, this model includes an S-Pen stylus that you can extract from a well on the side of the phone. It can function as a more precise substitute for a fingertip; if you depress a tiny button on its side, the S-Pen can also bring up shortcut menus and clip selections of the screen as screen captures.

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The Note II's bulk also accommodates an extra-large battery. An AT&T model loaned for this review lasted for 10 hours and 19 minutes of Web radio playback with the screen on--better than any other phone I've tested, much less most Android models on fast LTE connections. In a second test, it registered 85 82 percent of a charge after 24 hours left idling on a desk, almost as good as the iPhone 5.

I suppose those could be acceptable tradeoffs for losing the ability to use a phone with one hand. I have zero interest in that, but Samsung's sales numbers require me to accept that some people do.

But then there's the other issue with this phone: Samsung's inability to stop fussing with Android's interface.

Like the Galaxy S III, the Note II ditches Google's standard arrangement of menu buttons, impeding multitasking, confusing experienced users and burying Android's Google Now personal assistant. But then the Note II uses a completely different keyboard than the S III's, trading that model's irritatingly pushy auto-correct for one that doesn't fix your typos at all.

I worry about how Samsung keeps making ever-larger phones (will the Note III pack a 6-inch display?), but I worry more about how Android is getting lost in the hands of the most popular Android vendor.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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The iPad Mini: Apple's Big Little Tablet

There's a company out with a new tablet computer that poses a direct threat to the iPad. Fortunately for Apple, that company is Apple, and that tablet is the iPad mini.

Apple picked the right name for this $329-and-up, 7.9-in.-touchscreen device: Just as the iPod mini (and then the still-smaller iPod nano) relegated the "classic" iPod to the high end of the market, this smaller model looks primed to become Apple's mainstream tablet.

ANALYSIS: Things Unsaid in Apple's New iPad News

Why? It does everything a regular iPad can do at a lower price and in a smaller package that, at .68 pounds, invites single-handed use. A big iPad still makes more sense as somebody's only computer and for some specialized uses; for instance, I'd rather edit pictures on its 9.7-in. display. But for most Web-plus-apps-plus-media use, Apple users need look no further than the iPad mini.

The initial knock on smaller tablets, coming from Steve Jobs himself, was that buttons on their screens would be too small to navigate by touch. That's not the case on the mini, where pretty much every interface ingredient is easy enough to nail with a fingertip. Thumb typing seems outright easier on that smaller expanse of glass, although the sharp edge of the aluminum casing around the screen may distract you.

Text, however, looks disconcertingly small at first. I got used to that quickly, but in some cases (for instance, the Facebook app's display of comments or the iOS notifications center's listing of Twitter and Facebook updates) I hope developers switch to larger fonts.

The lack of the "Retina display" resolution I appreciated so much on this spring's new iPad also sets the iPad mini back a little. That disadvantage looks more obvious when you inspect how text looks on the mini's 1,024 by 768 pixels next to the 1280 by 800 pixels packed into the 7-inch displays of Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD, each starting at $199.

The mini, despite being no thicker than a pencil and thinner than many chocolate bars, also manages to deliver battery life exceeding any other tablet I've tested and better than Apple's "up to 10 hours" estimate. It sustained 11 hours and 53 minutes of almost uninterrupted Web-radio playback with the screen on.

Yes, you need one of Apple's new Lightning cables to recharge it. I think that's less of a hassle on a device that people don't routinely plug into car stereos or alarm clocks.

But if the case to buy an iPad mini instead of the $399 iPad 2 or the $499 Retina-display iPad looks clear -- Apple says it's "practically sold out" of the mini -- things muddy when you bring in Android-based alternatives.

ANALYSIS: New iPad Mini Eats Steve Jobs' Words

The mini is more of an all-purpose traveling companion, with some 275,000 tablet-optimized apps and a 5-megapixel back camera, absent from those competitors, that takes pretty good shots outdoors.

But the Nexus 7 (my favored Android tablet) and the Kindle Fire HD offer more pleasant web and e-book reading at a considerably lower price. Then factor in the cost of added storage: going from 16 GB to 32 GB adds $50 to each, $100 on the mini. A bigger gap exists between the $299 bill for the Nexus 7's upcoming mobile-broadband version and the $459 starting price of an cellular-data mini, although that will support faster LTE access from AT&T, Sprint or Verizon.

Then you have the inevitability that next year's mini will feature a Retina display. If that doesn't bug you, however, you might as well replace any iPad on your shopping list with an iPad mini.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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New iPad Mini Eats Steve Jobs' Words

Apple has a smaller iPad coming, and no, it won't come with a sheet of sandpaper.

Just over two years ago, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs held forth on an earnings conference call about the impossibility of making a good tablet with a screen smaller than the iPad's roughly 10-inch display.

"There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them," Jobs said, citing Apple's research. And no, a higher screen resolution wouldn't help upcoming Android-based tablets: "It is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one-quarter of their present size."

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Well, never mind. The new iPad mini sports a 7.9-inch display -- and a 1024 by 768-pixel resolution, short of the ultra-fine Retina displays on the iPhone 5 and this spring's new iPad (itself just replaced by a fourth-gen model with a processor Apple calls twice as fast).

DNEWS VIDEO: iPhone in Space Explained

Apple will start taking pre-orders for the iPad mini this Friday, with the tablet arriving in stores a week later. It starts at $329 for a model with 16 gigabytes of storage and Wi-Fi Internet access; a 32 GB edition goes for $429 and a 64 GB unit for $529. Support for LTE mobile broadband from AT&T, Sprint or Verizon Wireless will add another $130; those versions should come about two weeks later.

Those prices also break with Apple's past practices. The iPad beat the price of any name-brand Android tablet by a large margin for many months, and even today there's little daylight between most 10-inch Android models and the $499 price of an iPad, or the $399 cost of the iPad 2 Apple still sells.

But you can now buy a quality, 7-inch Android tablet -- in the form of Google's pleasant Nexus 7 or Amazon's new Kindle Fire HD, each with a slightly higher resolution than the mini--for $199.

The quality of these smaller Android tablets, especially in terms of battery life, has also advanced greatly from the first, inadequate attempts.

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Apple has had no trouble charging a premium for superior engineering in its laptop and desktop computers. (Executives didn't reveal the iPad mini at Apple's event in San Jose -- webcast online, a rarity for the company -- until after introducing a new MacBook Pro laptop with a 13-inch Retina display, an updated Mac mini and a radically thinner iMac without an optical drive.)

In this case, the Cupertino, Calif., company can point to the iPad mini's extra screen real estate (about 35 percent more space, between its slightly larger size and less-rectangular proportions), high-definition front webcam and 5-megapixel back camera. The iPad mini also lighter and thinner than competitors, at .68 pounds and just over .28 inches thick; note that it, like the iPhone 5, drops the old 30-pin dock connector for Apple's smaller Lightning cable.

The diversity and quality of iPad applications also put Apple's tablets well ahead of those running Google's operating system, on which too many apps do nothing with tablet screens' extra pixels.

If the browser on a tablet is only one app among many, those are important and maybe overwhelming considerations. But if you spend most of your time on such a device on the Web, with occasional detours to watch a movie or read an e-book, how much are a little more screen and a little less weight worth to you?

Credit: Apple PR

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iPhone 5 Can Go The Distance But Gets Lost

The iPhone 5 has me torn: With this trim and light smartphone, Apple seems to have cracked one of the more intractable problems in the smartphone world -- but it's also created a new, unnecessary one.

The single best part of this new iPhone ($199 and up on two-year contracts with AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, with a prepaid deal due from Cricket Wireless this Friday) is what's hidden inside: the electronic wizardry that lets it survive most of a day on an LTE signal.

ANALYSIS: iPhone Launch: Stories from the Fringes

Older Android devices have struggled to make it to lunch on power-hungry Long Term Evolution radios, but a purchased Verizon Wireless iPhone 5 only edged below 10 percent of a charge after 13 hours of regular Twitter, Web and e-mail use. In an overnight test of Web radio and online use with the screen kept on, this device lasted nine hours and 19 minutes -- one of the best results I've ever seen. 

But the results of later tests (7:44 of nonstop Web radio, 85% of a charge left after 24 hours idle) weren't quite as breathtaking.

That's still impressive when you consider that the iPhone 5's battery, as revealed in iFixit's dissection, falls short of the capacity of most Android phones.

And yet: Would making the phone oh-so-slightly thicker to accommodate a larger battery (and keep Apple's old dock connector and micro-SIM slot instead of replacing them with the smaller, incompatible Lightning and nano-SIM) yield a device that could survive a long workday and a late night?

ANALYSIS: iPhone 5: the Price of Thin

That endurance is more important than LTE support itself, since its velocity varies widely. At one blessed spot in San Francisco, Speedtest.net's app clocked Verizon's download speed at 28.18 million bits per second -- but near Dulles Airport, it slowed to 8.71 Mbps, faster than 3G but not mind-blowingly so.

The iPhone 5's 8-megapixel camera took some terrific shots outdoors, even in high-contrast scenes, but indoor and nighttime shots look about as grainy as other smartphones's work. Its new panoramic-picture mode only matches what competing phones offer.

Four days in, the iPhone 5's taller, 4-inch screen doesn't feel much bigger, although it does help to see an extra row or two of tweets and e-mail messages. The beveled metal edges around it no longer look as jewel-like as they did on Friday, thanks to scuff marks already picked up.

And then there's the Maps app you may have heard about. I understand why Apple needed a new navigation program; it was apparently never going to get features like turn-by-turn directions from Google.

But the software on the iPhone 5 (and on older models updated with Apple's new iOS 6) is dangerously clueless, far worse than I expected. It couldn't properly locate destinations as obvious as Dulles International Airport or Baltimore's Penn Station and provided directions on bridges that are closed or have been rebuilt in adjacent spots.

Apple can theoretically fix those flaws by throwing enough money and people at them. But Maps' clumsy handoff of transit directions to third-party apps -- sometimes separate ones for a city's bus and rail networks -- can't be cured unless somebody ships a comprehensive, worldwide database of transit systems.

You know, an app like the Google-powered software Apple evicted, or the far more capable program on such new Android phones as Samsung's Galaxy S III (warning: terrible keyboard) and HTC's One X series.

So it's not an obvious choice. If you rely on your phone for navigation, you may resent the iPhone 5 until Apple puts serious work into its mapping application or Google ships a standalone version of Google Maps.

And as Android users can attest after too many delayed updates to Google's operating system from manufacturers and carriers, pining away for a software update you desperately need can get old.

Updated 9/26 with additional battery-life tests.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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iPhone 5 Strangers Line-Up for Pay: DNews Nugget

Professional Line-Standers Wait For Your New iPhone:

Would you stand in line for days to purchase the new iPhone 5 for someone else? Turns out many people are doing just that.

The line outside of Manhattan's 5th Avenue Apple store began the day of the Apple's annoucement, and some of the line-standards aren't even there for themselves, according to CNN

One man in San Francisco, took a job from a micro-tasking service which asked him to wait in line for pay; he's been there since Monday.

The service is called TaskRabbit, and it is a way for people to make a few extra bucks by running errands for strangers. The errands are usually picking up groceries, delivering packages, or other small tasks.

If you want an iPhone5 but don't want to wait in line for a week, "professional" line-standers are waiting for anywhere from $40 to $150.

Have a few days off and want to make a quick buck? Check your local Craigslist, one poster in Los Angeles writes that they'll pay, "a reasonable amount" ... "and on top of that, I'll even buy you breakfast." via CNN

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New Panoramic Mode Not Just for iPhone 5

I was watching some of the iPhone 5 recap videos on Revision3 and among the many features available on the new phone, I was excited to see a Panoramic mode. Solider Knows Best talks about here and also has a little demo, which you can watch below.

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There are several apps already out there that offer the panoramic feature for the iPhone, but having it in the phone makes the feature all that much easier to use. And the good news for us iPhone 4S users is that this feature will be available with the new operating system, iOS 6, which will be released Sept. 19. Owners of iPhones dating back to 2009 will be able to download the new software in an over-the-air update or through iTunes.