Quick question: As of today, which company is the top-selling flat panel HDTV brand in the US? Sony? Nope — your Bravia may be nice, but it’s not number one. Panasonic? Nah. And nope, it’s not Sharp, LG, Samsung, or Philips either. The answer: Vizio. A company that didn’t exist 4 years ago and, unlike all of the companies above, is actually based in the United States. → Read More
The fact that Google is trying to take a bite of the Apple pie–that is, prepping a launch of its own mobile phone–is perhaps Silcon Valley’s worst-kept secret. As the rumors currently stand, the “Gphone” will come to America sometime next Spring, likely riding on back T-Mobile’s network, and, according to some reports, costing the Gguys several hundred million… → Read More
Over the course of a couple of years, Bluetooth on cell phones went from a foreign fantasy to a crippled luxury to a standard (if still often crippled) feature on virtually every new cell phone. Putting aside the fashion merits of wearing a headset in public (an accessory that seems to be favored by an odd combination of middle manager-type office workers and guys’ whose raison d’etre… → Read More
I believe in the Wii, I really do. I don’t care that it’s basically a GameCube with a white case and fancy controller. I don’t care that the graphics made the original Xbox look l33t. I just wish they would put out some decent games. And believe me, I’ve played most of them. And here’s what I think so far. And if, after reading this, it seems like there’s… → Read More
We love gadgets. And, like everything we love, gadgets piss us off. So many times, I’ve held a product and thought to myself: “This would be perfect, if only…” The fact is, even with countless generations and web forums full of fuming fans, companies still repeat numerous mistakes. Mistakes that feel like a slap to the face of hard-working gadgeteers everywhere. For this… → Read More
The new E3 Lite is rocking LA. And with it, the Big 3 gaming houses have given us key glimpses into what the next year holds for them. Last year, Nintendo and their warehouse-long Wii lines stole the show. This year, expectations and standards were low enough that all it took was a couple of pieces of molded plastic to get fanboys in a tizzy. Meanwhile, Sony’s major announcement — a… → Read More
Awhile back, I read a story in The New Yorker about luxury ketchup. If the idea of “luxury ketchup” makes you guffaw, you aren’t alone. While customers have been knife-fed high-end mustard products for years, even the fanciest restaurants still stock Heinz. The fact is, while some products are increasingly being defined by their high-end premium offerings, there are still a few… → Read More
On Friday, as the entire literate world knows, Apple will release the iPhone to much hoopla. And when the mix of the unemployed and the wealthy who could wait in line on a workday to finally get their hands on their $600 box of hype, they’ll find that, for the first time, “iPod” no longer merely refers to their pocket-sized MP3 player, but also to a software program within… → Read More
I’ve spent the past few weeks as the resident naysayer of the infallibility of the iPhone. And while there’s certainly a lot to be skeptical about here, there are a lot of things about the iPhone that won’t just be really neat, but could change our standards for mobile devices from here on out. Read on to see… → Read More
To follow-up on last week’s maelstrom of anti-Appledom, my opinions regarding the iPhone have not changed: the device will eventually be pretty awesome, but paying $600 (the effective cost is closer to a solid grand when you factor in the value of the two-year contract you’ll be signing and the fact that many early adopters will likely be also fronting the bill from terminating their… → Read More
Hey, Seth, angry much about technology that EVERYONE LOVES AND YOU ARE TOTALLY WRONG ABOUT? Sorry. Just kidding. Seth was on G4TV on Tuesday and he kicked that Dummies book guy in the pooper. Hi-res version → Read More
Until June 29, it’s hard to tell too much about the iPhone, but I can tell you with near-certainty one thing: the product was almost certainly rushed to market before Apple’s engineers would have liked. At MacWorld, Jobs said: “We’re shipping them in June”. Had the phone release date been set in July or August, the entire tech world’s collective red flag would… → Read More
With the launch of every new search engine or cell phone, there is inevitably a torrent of exclamation mark-filled press releases and boasts proclaiming the new release to be REVOLUTIONARY!!! and LIFE-CHANGING!!! The truth, of course, is that they almost never are. Still, such pleas might have been at least a tad bit convincing only a few years ago, when certain aspects of the technology world, or… → Read More
Much of a phone’s form factor is a result of the need for the device to, above all else, work as a phone. That is, it must be held against your face. Of course, this is changing. The past few years have seen Bluetooth headsets spread from middle managers to nightclubs. In a few years, the idea of actually talking directly into your phone will be as archaic as a rotary dial. That’s not… → Read More
Thanks to the Copyright Royalty Board, beginning in mid-July, all Internet radio stations will see substantially higher royalty fees. Fees so high, that it isn’t difficult to imagine vast swaths of the musical Internet becoming dead air overnight. Most frightening of all is the prospect of losing Pandora — one of the truly great things to come from the entire Interweb. I had the… → Read More
There’s an old episode of The Simpsons where the designers of Barbie stand-in Malibu Stacy are gathered in their smoky room trying to come up with a killer app to take on a new competitor on the block. Their idea: stick a hat on the old doll. The ever-wise Lisa, who sees through such marketing shenanigans, says something along the lines of: “It’s still the same old doll, they just… → Read More
As a general rule, journalists (particularly us of the tech stripe) go gonzo when trying to proclaim something a new “trend.” We take one example of a hit YouTube video and proclaim it to be the death of TV. The stories are usually the same: Lead with an example of a internet video that became part of the geek cultural canon (take the anti-Hillary Clinton/Apple “1984” mash-up video, or… → Read More
Cell phones — everybody’s got them. Even your 12-year-old nephew whose parents keep tabs on him via the inboard GPS carries a RAZR. So what’s next in this omnipresent device? In this week’s column, we take a look at what the future of the iPhone, and what we can learn about Apple’s upcoming Macbooks by looking at it, as well as why we can expect to see the Blackberry… → Read More
It wasn’t so long ago that the only way you could talk to your friend down the block was over a landline. In a flash, nearly the entire world became blessed with the gift of wireless, and cell phones became standard procedure. Today, if one so desires, they can eschew their rotary phone altogether, and go VoIP (if having just a mobile doesn’t cut it.) Such diversity and choice is great… → Read More
Back when our country was new, kids were given big wooden wheels and rolling sticks and expected to have a good time. More than likely, our little Ezekiels and Wilberforces probably had a ball rolling those wheels down the grassy hills. Of course, it goes without saying that if you gave a Wii-addicted kid such simple pleasures and they’d wonder where the USB hook-up was. Toys have come a… → Read More
Mark this down in the “Obvious” bin: more and more cell phones are using real names in recent years. It was only a few years ago that virtually every cell phone was identified by a serial number-esque stream of numbers and letters that, while I’m sure they made plenty of sense to a company’s on-hand staff of engineers and marketing pros, were more likely to leave consumers… → Read More
If your house is anything like the CrunchGear Mansion, it’s filled to the brim with gadgetry and electronica. And with all this newfangled convenience comes an equal dose of frustration. Like when your cell phone clock goes dead the second the A train pops underground. It’s almost enough to make you strap on your old Mickey Mouse wristwatch. So this got us to thinking — what are… → Read More
If Sony is to be believed, the verdict is already in: HD-DVD is a non-starter, and their cross-Japanese Toshibian rivals are toast. They may very well be right: Blu-ray is certainly outperforming HD-DVD in terms of sales and support, and may be headed for the victory stand when it’s all said and done. But in order to get there, Sony may be setting themselves up not only for only a glimmer of… → Read More
So I’m here in Scotland with Audiofile Mike. It turns out that this home of The Highlander and hooliganism not only takes credit for bringing the world television, penicillin, and cloned sheep, but is now a steaming hotbed of new nanotechnology research. We spent the past week checking out bleeding edge nano, including ways of using OLED lights to smooth out skin cancer, microscopic machines… → Read More
Being a sometimes-media critic (in years past, I wrote for the media magazine Editor & Publisher), the effects of news aggregation sites like Digg on news organizations is a topic of constant interest. Not so long ago, the vast majority of our news diet came from a single channel — reading (or listening or watching) a chosen news source. Whether it was our habit to pick up the Times… → Read More
For the most part, the attention gadget designers give to women doesn’t go much deeper than a thin coat of pink paint. Dip it in fuchsia, slap a label like “Rose” on it, and CE companies take it for granted that the fairer sex will claw at each other to grab their products off store shelves. But what does it take to make a truly female-friendly product? Could it be that the needs of our… → Read More
Woah. So XM and Sirius are looking to form a more perfect union. And, at long last, Howard Stern and Oprah fans will have something in common other than being married to each other. Of course, there are lots of regulatory hurdles that could keep the ink from drying on the deal (a failed merger by satellite TV providers EchoStar and DirecTV immediately comes to mind), but lets assume, for… → Read More
We live in an ergonomically-challenged world. It really is amazing how much our appliances and gadgets rely on archaic designs that are almost senselessly stress-inducing So we got to thinking—what are some simple ways we could improve the appliances around us to be more people-friendly? So I called up the best product design expert I know: human factors design consultant Eric Porges, who also… → Read More
Biggs and I were talking shop awhile back and I mentioned that it was as if, sometime in the past decade, LG and RCA had a Freaky Friday-like switcheroo. As anybody over the age of 10 likely recalls, RCA used to be an omnipresent CE brand—especially in TVs. And LG? Let’s just say those letters didn’t always stand for “Life’s Good.” Rather, the company-formerly-known-as… → Read More
It’s nigh impossible to open a magazine these days without finding a four-page ad spread telling you that Helio is not just a phone. Nope, its a “Friendar” too! And, even better, it gives you instant access to MySpace! Wow! These ads are the product of one of the largest technology marketing campaigns in recent memory. Unfortunately, they are nearly assuring that Helio will be a… → Read More
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