He's much better at this.
(Credit: Jeff Bakalar/CNET)Activision invited us to check out a handful of upcoming titles last night in midtown New York City. Among all of the titles we had hands-on time with, Tony Hawk: Ride certainly stood out. Not only was it fun to play, but the fact that Mr. Tony Hawk himself sat in to tell us about the game added another dimension to the experience.
Jeff:
I thought I had heard someone say "Tony Hawk is here" as Scott and I entered the Activision demo, but I just brushed that off as "Oh, the new Tony Hawk game is here." Sure enough, the legend himself walked into our private game demo room and explained to us the process in which Tony Hawk: Ride came to be.
Hawk was honest, saying the franchise had run its course with a conventional controller. Now that game peripherals are becoming much more commonplace, it was clear that a skateboard controller needed to be introduced as an obvious evolutionary step.
After hopping on the board for the first time I was immediately transported back to 1994 when I had a brief stint with the sport. The accessory itself is simply a skateboard deck without trucks or wheels. It feels solid, though it may take a minute or two to find your balance.
The board is an impressive piece of hardware that's loaded up with motion sensing technology and four infrared sensors. When your hand breaks one of the IR beams coming out from the board, the game interprets that as a grab. When you've stopped, a drag of the foot on either side will get you moving again. The motion sensing comes into play when you want to do spins in the air to increase trick points.
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There's been some buzz this week around Pixel Qi's 3qi display technology, which integrates e-paper attributes with LCD to create a versatile and potentially very energy-efficient screen. The idea is that with a flip of a button you can go from a traditional high-resolution color LCD experience to a low-power black and white mode to an even more energy-efficient e-paper mode that allows you to easily view text in bright sunlight.
This week the technology was demonstrated at Computex in Taiwan, and it seems very impressive. If these types of displays can be produced cost-efficiently, they may revolutionize the notebook and e-reader market. We're probably at least a year away from seeing devices with Pixel Qi's 3qi displays, but at least the company has some promising prototypes to show off and John Ryan, Pixel Qi's COO and vice president of sales of marketing, claims the technology is more mature than you'd think.
Check out the video and feel free to comment on how revolutionary you think this is--or isn't.
Additional reading: PixelQi puts three displays in one
(Source: Techvideoblog.com via Engadget)
The G-Core is a GPS gadget for golfers that uses the daylight-readable Mirasol technology.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)PALM DESERT, Calif.--Qualcomm's MEMS Technologies group at Demo 09 is showing off its evolving Mirasol display technology, which is based on micro-mechanical control of a reflective material (for a real explanation, see the Mirasol site).
The pitch is that Mirasol displays take much less power than standard backlit LCDs, and are also readable in daylight. At the moment, screens on the s Mirasol-based devices look like black-and-white watch LCDs. Yes, they're visible in sunlight, but they're not very interesting. Qualcomm says faster refresh is coming, allowing video, as well as color displays.
Mirasol displays are "bi-stable," which means they retain their image with the power off. Readers may thus be forgiven for thinking Mirasol displays are a form of electronic ink, of the type found in e-book readers like the Kindle. But Qualcomm takes pains to say that the color and refresh capabilities of the technology have yet to be fully revealed, and will blow past e-ink in those areas.
PALM DESERT, Calif.--I think the most eagerly anticipated demo at Demo 09 here will be Always Innovating's Touch Book, slated for late Monday afternoon. It's yet another Netbook, granted, but it's got a cool detachable (and optional) keyboard, and a magnetic mount for sticking onto a refrigerator.
I got a quick demo video (left) with the company's CEO, Gregoire Gentil, who is French. He couldn't show me the user interface on the prototype hardware he had with him, but says it will be easy to use with big, fat American fingers (he didn't actually say that).
The product will run a Linux OS, Gentil said, and it's the first Netbook based on an ARM CPU, not the typical Atom found in most Netbooks. He says users can expect 10 to 15 hours of battery life. The product will be $299 without the keyboard, $399 with. It ships this spring, but you can preorder now.
The Always Innovating Netbook has a detachable keyboard.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)
The back of the tablet is magnetic, so you can stick it on your fridge.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)
The Vue is a unique, battery-powered Web cam.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)Avaak is launching its very attractive Vue Web cam system at the Demo 09 conference Monday. It's designed for home monitoring, like cameras from Panasonic, Logitech, and DLink. The kicker: The Vue cameras are tiny, light, and battery-powered. You don't have to screw them into a wall or run power cables to them. That changes a lot.
The mount for a Vue camera is a small metallic dome that you can screw or tape onto a surface. The cameras themselves have a curved base with a magnet inside so you can just stick them to the domes. You get two domes with each camera, which is supposed to encourage you to move the cams around as your monitoring needs change.
The internal battery (a standard lithium CR123 cell) in each camera is said to provide enough power for 1 million images, or about 10 minutes of video a day for a year.
The system includes a base station that you plug into your home router. The radio system the cameras use is a proprietary mesh protocol. It has a 300-foot range indoors, but the mesh technology lets you string together a network of cameras with a 900-foot radius around the hub. That's enough for most homes.
The cameras are tiny
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)The control and viewing system is Web-based. In the preview demo I saw, it looked easy to set up a system, view live and recorded videos, and share a cam with others. You can also upload to YouTube.
Sounds great, but there's a snag: there's no motion sensor on the system. That makes it useless as a security solution. Sure, you can use it to see what's happening at your house right now, and you can also set the system to snap an image at regular intervals, but there's no way that Vue can alert you when someone moves into a camera's field of view.
The cameras also don't pick up sound.
Avaak CEO Gioia Messinger told me that future versions of the system will have improvements, quite possibly including sound and motion sensors. Until then, the use cases for this system tend toward novelty, not utility.
The base Vue system will be sold directly and via Amazon, for $299 with two cameras (and four mounts). A service fee of $19.95 a year (reasonable) will be charged after the first year.
Livescribe's Pulse can record notes from a meeting in ink and sound, as well as perform other tasks, such as translating a handwritten word from English to Spanish.
(Credit: Jared Kohler/CNET News)It's not my beat, but digital pens are a bit of a pet interest of mine, so I like to try and keep you up-to-date on them when I get a chance.
In that vein, I thought I would let you know that Adapx, which specializes in writing software that ties digital pens to other applications, announced its latest product--one that combines the digital pen with Excel. The result is that forms can be filled out in ink and paper, but the data is captured electronically. It made the announcement at this week's Demo show in San Diego.
Seattle-based Adapx already has a product that ties in with Microsoft's OneNote. The company is one of a host of firms that are trying to make a go of digital-pen products.
One that I have spent some time with firsthand is LiveScribe's Pulse digital pen. The big thing this start-up adds to the mix is the combination of audio and ink. That makes it particularly handy for note taking.
The audio notes can be played back on a PC, but they can also be played straight from the pen. By clicking various points in one's notes, you go straight to that part of the audio. That makes it especially handy for students or journalists.
I've been playing around with it for a while now. I've been meaning to get around to a full-on review. In lieu of that (at least for now), I will just say that I find it very useful. It should get even more useful later this year, when Livescribe launches a Mac version of its desktop software and enables users to print on the special "dot" paper at home, rather than having to buy notebooks from Livescribe.
After some initial sluggishness getting to market, Livescribe has been getting particularly good play at Target. I've spotted nice displays in the stores, and it's also been featured in several weekly circulars. Livescribe won't give sales figures, but it says it continues to exceed Target's weekly forecasts. The Pulse has also been available for sale on Amazon.com since July and is in several college bookstores.
Invision.TV has created a personal recommendation engine for the Web that allows viewers to get a better selection of Web-based video content to watch.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--There's so much video content on the Web today--YouTube, ESPN, news sites, and so forth--that it can be difficult to find what you want to watch.
That's the premise behind Invision.TV, a company that has created a dashboard for aggregating and sharing Web-based video content.
The idea is based on interactive TV program guides that many of us are familiar with through our subscription TV services, for example. But instead of giving you selections of content from TV services, the video all comes from the Web.
The service embeds many Web video sources' players into its dashboard, while with others it simply links out to sites. But either way, it gives users seamless control of a wide variety of content and an easy way to find what they want to watch.
Additionally, it has a social networking element, allowing users to share video content with friends on, say, Facebook.
All told, this seems like a nice way to deal with the massive amounts of video content that's available online at any time--and to keep up with your favorite sites' videos, all without having to search sites individually.
SAN DIEGO--If you're the kind of person who runs a lot of PowerPoint presentations, you probably are very familiar with trying to connect your computer to a million different projectors.
But a Taiwanese company called Awind showed at DemoFall today a product called MobiShow which is designed to take the difficult and complex connection problem--what if you don't have the right cables--folks like this face on a regular basis.
MobiShow is a mobile-phone and Wi-Fi based projection controller.
The idea is that with MobiShow running on your mobile phone, you can use that device as what amounts to a remote control for the presentation.
You would run MobiShow--which would be connected to your computer via Wi-Fi--and then use your mobile phone to set the proper screen resolution, as well as to easily click through various slides in a PowerPoint presentation.
This would be extremely useful for the road warriors who until now have been forced to try to always remember to bring the various cables and connections they need to hook up to clients' projection systems. Instead, they can rely solely on their computer and their mobile device.
SAN DIEGO--We all have very busy lives and a big part of that is trying to manage a steady flow of new information.
Here at DemoFall today, Alerts.com unveiled its new intelligent alerts delivery dashboard.
The idea is that users can pick and choose Web sites on which to set up alerts and then aggregate them all on the Alerts.com site for delivery to whatever devices they want.
For example, if you're looking for an apartment and want to use Craigslist to find it, you can sign up for an alert directly through Alerts.com--instead of having to set it up on Craigslist itself--and then select where and how you want the alert delivered.
The same is true for dozens of other Web sites in many different categories, such as entertainment, sports, news and so on.
Once all the alerts are set up, you can use a pretty simple dashboard to organize and control them all. The dashboard shows a list of all the alerts, how the information from them is to be delivered and an easy on/off switch.
The Plastic Logic digital reader is a thin, light device that can store all kinds of digital documents.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Why would you want an Amazon Kindle, which is kind of bulky, not too attractive, and of limited scope when you could have a real digital document reader that is thin, easy to use, and very strong?
That's the business case from Plastic Logic, one of the first companies to be on stage at DemoFall this morning.
The company's plastic reader is designed to store dozens or hundreds of business documents on a very thin digital reader. It can store e-books, magazines, newspapers, PDFs and all kinds of information, the company said.
It's made with plastic, not glass, meaning that it is designed to be strong and to be able to stand up to being hit with objects or, presumably, even dropped.
It looks pretty cool, and is said to weigh only ounces, "not pounds," has a battery that lasts days and can be read in bright daylight.
The company hasn't given this product a name yet, and it's not clear when it will be available. But Plastic Logic said it is opening a Germany manufacturing plant later this month, so it shouldn't be too long.
