couple of new products that proved interesting to Android and Apple
adherents alike. These included the revamped Nexus 7, Android 4.3, and
the Chromecast, a tiny dongle for your TV's HDMI port that pushes
music, photos, and videos from Android and iOS devices and laptops to
the...um...medium screen.
Ars sat down to run some benchmarks on the Nexus 7 as soon as we got
our hands on it, and Andrew Cunningham wrote up the results in The
2013 Nexus 7 performance preview: a huge speed upgrade in every way.
The benchmarks showed the newest tablet vastly outperforming the
original Nexus 7 as well as the Nexus 4, and coming close in
performance to the larger Nexus 10.
Storage, incidentally, was the most controversial part of the new
tablet. daneren2005 wrote, "I think the better storage performance is
the only thing I really care about in an upgrade. The Nexus 7
deteriorated so fast it was ridiculous and got extremely laggy when
approaching full. I'm hoping this version doesn't have these issues,
or at least not at the same level." charleski agreed: "Hmm. I was
planning to keep my old N7 since I mostly use it for reading. But
storage speed is the one thing that really bugs me about the original
model, and these improvements are quite enticing."
Digitali missed the old ways. "Still no SDCard storage? I love my
original one, but the lack of additional storage options is insane."
Chronoreverse didn't want to hear it, "You're never going to see
MicroSD storage in a Nexus device." But greenmky stepped in to offer a
more thorough response:
I'd prefer an SD card slot too, but considering the bang/buck that
Google offers with Nexus devices I've been willing to overlook it. I
don't keep that much music on hand, and on a tablet, the only reason I
use the space is for disc images for DOSBox or something. I don't
watch movies or TV on a tablet (would rather wait and watch on the
plasma/HT setup).
I really like SD cards (for media storage, Titanium Backup,
Photos, etc), but somehow I've ended up with a Nexus 7 / Nexus 4 combo
anyway.
My wife grouses about not having enough room for her music all of
the time on her Nexus 4. She's talked about getting another Android
device with MicroSD just for playing music. So far, it's just talk.
For my kids (age 7 and 5), however, an SD card slot is critical. I
load it up with episodes of My Little Pony: FIM and whatever else they
want to watch for trips, camping, etc. They load up the internal
storage with terrible insipid games and such :p
Devil's in the details
Verizon also announced it's Motorola Droid lineup this week, and while
the phones sounded awfully impressive, the specifics of the "Motorola
8X" chip that powers the lineup revealed decidedly average hardware.
Again, Andrew Cunningham took down the details in Motorola's "8-core"
X8 chip gives us a lesson in marketing-speak.
The deception made Doctor Hoot mad. "So your new 'flagship phone' has
a lower-resolution screen, a similar processor, and the same RAM as
the GSIII? Way to produce a flagship last year's flagship phone and
sell it for $199, Motorola. No wonder your market share is dropping."
ounkeo already hit the acceptance stage:
This is just the general problem with companies and manufacturers
in general. Nearly everyone inflates. The goal is to bedazzle ignorant
users. The fact that it works and you have users going on and on about
yet more pointless cores means it will continue to be done.
This has been happening in the PC market for a long time though
not quite as blatant as Motorola, Google, and Verizon. We had the
almighty Jiggahertz warz, the megapixie wars, the core warz. And
ignorant people lap it up.
Outside of Ars, pretty much any other blog comment section is
filled with "it doesnt haz 16corez...it is bad and useless."
Others joked about the offending 8 core chip. "Reminds me of the time
I went to a 'computer blowout' sale and saw vendors selling MP5, MP6,
and MP7 players," wrote RolandKSP.
And TerribleTony told us of his incredibly intriguing product: "I'm
working on a 36-core SoC design. 16 of the cores are 6510's, 10 ten
are Z80's, two are Hercules Graphics Adapters, two are FM synthesizers
I pulled off of old SoundBlaster Pro or Adlib cards (whatever I could
find at Goodwill), three are 8088s, and the remaining three are
actually people doing jobs it offloads to Amazon's Mechanical Turk."
Chrome...um...castic?
At Google's Wednesday event, a tiny little device called the
Chromecast. In her article, New "Chromecast," a $35 HDMI dongle to get
video streams to your TV, Casey Johnston took a look at Google's pitch
to get one of these things in every TV in every home. Ultimately, Ars
readers were enthusiastic, but some were skeptical that it would
really be a great at Google promised.
"Looks nifty, but no 5GHz Wi-Fi will be awful in any area with
congested 2.4GHz operation," Bob Loblaw posted. DOOManiac had another
idea: "I wish the thing had an IR port on it so you could
pause/play/rewind/ffwd using your remote instead of digging your
phone/tablet out again."
Ars of Ares thought the dongle's ultimate usefulness would come down to content:
I'm cautiously excited about this. I really dig connecting my PS3
to my phone via YouTube, so I'm fairly aware of the potential.
I do wonder about dev support though. It's great that they got
Netflix right out the gates, but that's kind of a given these days; I
already have five separate options to watch Netflix on one TV, how
many more do I need? HBO Go, on the other hand...
I hope they have some way of syncing the audio, but I sort of
doubt it. It would be awesome to have Google Music or Pandora playing
the same stream on multiple receivers and/or TVs throughout the
house—like the Nexus Q—but this little stick doesn't seem to be meant
for that. Hopeful, there...
They hit the pricing right out of the park. $35 is deep into
impulse territory!
outlaw2005 had no such reservations though. "I just ordered one for
each TV in the house. This is exactly what I was looking for."
You are where you eat
Towards the end of the week, Nathan Mattise brought us the story of a
programmer who kept being thwarted in his attempts to get a table at a
swanky San Francisco restaurant. To realize that fine dining dream,
the programmer built a bot to make online reservations—only to realize
that others were using superior bots for the same task. In Engineer
can't get decent dinner reservations, creates Urbanspoon-dominating
bot you can get the whole story of the eatery arms race.
psd sort of missed the point, but had a good DIY sentiment. "I'll tell
you where you can easily get a reservation—your own kitchen table!
Ditch the laziness, get off the keyboard and finally learn how to cook
gourmet meals for yourself! Start being self-sufficient for a change."
Happysin saw the future in this particular story: "This seems like the
natural beginning of agent-based life management. We've seen it in
Sci-Fi for years, but it would be great to tell your personal agent
that you want reservations as X place, and make sure to notify Y
person of the date when it's finalized. Then also manage things like
dentist and doctor scheduling, etc. Having an agent manage calendar
for things like that would be pretty great. You lose direct control
over parts of your schedule, but if it's set up properly, it shouldn't
be a problem."
But surely the restaurant would see something strange afoot. Right?
"'How come our only patrons are IT geeks?'" Stone joked as the
restaurant owners.
But FoneFreak spoke the voice of the common man (and woman): "I'll be
eating my Stouffer's Lean Cuisine and watching 'Rin-Tin-Tin' reruns on
antenna TV while these startup guys feast on braised peacock tongue
and in vivo monkey brains while they furiously blog about it in
real-time on invisible, holo-keyboards projected from a Google Glass
add-on dongle. *sigh*"
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