iTV killed the cable box

After moving to Norway I finally broke down and bought an AppleTV. I’m loving it. While I rent a couple of movies a moth, I mainly use it for TV Shows: The West Wing, South Park, The Big Bang Theory, Psych, Mad Men, etc. And although I have converted some “alternative method” downloads to play on it, I’m mostly buying them from iTunes store.

Still two Media Players and an App have caught my attention recently:

SlingCatcher:

Goes for $299. Being a Slingthingy, it streams from other slingboxes, which I really don’t care for. It also streams video from your Mac or PC, so you can be watching Lost on abc.com, SNL on hulu.com or even videos on netflix.com and you can see it on your tv. Quality appears to be great. You can play any content you put on a USB drive, which makes a very useful when you get most of your content from bittorrent and other alternative sources.

WD TV HD Media PLayer:

Goes for $129 (but you can find it at BestBuy for $99)

It only plays content from a USD Drive, but that makes it pretty straight forward. The UI doesn’t seem that elegant compared to the SlingCatcher though.

Boxee:

Free software, invite only now.

Boxee is an media center software for Win/Mac/Linux and AppleTV ¹ . Boxee fixes most of these issues in a easy way, you can play content from Hulu, CBS, etc. It also allows you to stream Divx, and other formats from your pc, mac that live on the same network. Boxee also adds a SocialNetwork layer on top of all this, don’t know how useful or cool it is. But it has the buzzword compliant feature.

You can always just connect your computer to the TV. But that would be uncivilized, wouldn’t it?

HTC Dream seems like a Snooze

After looking at some leaked shots of the HTC Dream running Android, I’m going to venture and say that this device is going to be as successful as the Moto ROKR E1. While I’m excited about the possibilities of the Android platform, the pics flying around from the device are pretty boring. Especially if you compare it to other phones from the HTC Touch family.

I think HTC is delivering on Google’s practical-yet-unsurprising spec sheet. And they are learning a whole lot doing it. The breakthrough device will come in a couple of months when HTC delivers their own branded handset, and reap the full benefits of its sales.

Notify Me

I’m loving the iPhone 2.1 update. Finally the OS, the apps and even mobileme are all working as expected. Sadly, the mobileme push mail issues have been so unreliable that I have defaulted to using the free Mail2web exchange service as my primary mobile email. The calendar sync features are still worth the investment imho, especially since I just upgraded my dad’s account a family plan for $50.

So, now that I have everything just working, am I satisfied? of course not. Now I want more features! But seriously, there one big thing missing to make the iPhone push mail really useful: a notification screen.

Right now when you get a sms or voicemail, a popup lets you know in your locked screen. But if you get an email, nothing. Not even an icon in the top bar. Hence, if miss the new email sound (which is not modifiable btw) or the vibration that comes with it, you won’t now until you check the email. This, in a ways, beats the whole idea of a push email.

There is a jailbreak application called IntelliScreen that provides a solution for this. But I felt it slowed down the iPhone a bit (no scientific tests where done). But there could be an Apple solution in the horizon. According to some patent documents:

The iPhone team’s filing instead proposes a more properly formatted notification panel — in one of approximately a half dozen potential layouts — that would not only remain visible once the phone is unlocked, but actually provide direct links or buttons to the missed communications. from Appleinsider

This will probably come when the notification service feature is made available to developers. Which hopefully will be sooner rather than later. And once available, the iPhone would be able to provide a push email experience that my crackberry friends expect.

Mobile Friday

Smartphone Is Expected via Google - NYTimes.com

Apple’s iPhone has shaken the cellphone industry, partly because of its design, but mostly because AT&T and Apple have allowed owners to download any number of applications to their phones. That freedom to individualize a phone’s functions has helped increase the popularity of the iPhone.

Bull. The iPhone is one of the least configurable devices out there. It is the best thought out design and OS. But the apps, while great, are so limited in its interaction with the OS that to talk about freedom is kinda ridiculous.

BlackBerry Bold: the DEFINITIVE hands-on review

Yep, we’re pretty impressed with the Bold, and we hope the final software updates which will be released prior to launch will iron out a few of the wrinkles noted during our testing.

Speaking of iPhone competitors, the Bold is turning out to be a very nice looking phone. Both in design and interface.

Palm Treo Pro: Palm Treo Pro Revealed (Lookin’ Good)

Wow, check out the Treo Pro, previously thought to be the Treo 850. It’s safe to say Palm is plunging ahead with the Centro’s industrial design, but the stark (glossy?) black and white color scheme with the phone/end orbs make it slick, rather than kiddie cool. Unfortunately, the Palm OS (new or othewise) for is nowhere in sight, just Windows Mobile.

Last but not, actually yes, least. Palm seems to be about to launch their I’m not dead yet Treo. Good enough design, but Windows Mobile?, I’ll spare you the rant.

Here we go

Today I start at Opera Software in Oslo, Norway. I’m really very excited about this. I was planning to write something deep and philosophical about it. But really, all I have to do is show up and work hard in what I believe in.

Easy enough no? We’ll see

We are never satisfied with the current version

Did Steve Jobs demo a Flash-enabled iPhone 3G? - iPhone Atlas

Hmmmm. This does look peculiar.

On current iPhones running OS 1.1.4, and in the iPhone Simulator included with the iPhone SDK, nationalgeographic.com renders with a picture of a cheetah and the message “This presentation requires Flash. Download free Flash player.” On the keynote-demonstrated iPhone 3G, however, the site renders the same cheetah image without the “This presentation requires Flash” message. Interesting.

Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft - Mozilla Links

While the concept looks kinda nice, I’m still not convinced that this is a useful approach. I do think that Mozilla’s mobile concept of “infinite space” is much more useful as we continue to open more tabs simultaneously.

Visual tab switching and tab searching/filtering were both tried for Firefox 3, abandoned for other more critical features, and are being considered for 3.1. Ctrl+Tab, a extension developed by Dao Gottwald implements both of them displaying a thumbnail of the opened tabs when pressing Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs.