The sun is well past the yardarm and the day is drawing to a close, but before you rush out the door you might want to cast your eye over this afternoon's top tech stories.
First, amuse yourself through the power of hindsight by reading our look at the worst tech predictions ever, the times when the so-called experts go it wrong. So very, very wrong.
Sidescrolling platformers are a rich little sub-genre among iPhone games and make up a solid little section of our best iPhone apps library. Canbalt and Monster Dash have long been our two favourite but now we’ve completed a trio of awesome sidescrollers with the appropriately-titled Dalton – The Awesome.
The game which has an intriguing scribbled graphics style features a baseball cap wearing stickman running through a roughly-drawn world pursued by zombies and picking up power-ups on the way. It’s a simple game but great fun and like many iPhone games, surprisingly addictive. See Dalton – The Awesome in action after the break…
Android Honeycomb has had a beat down from one analyst who reckons it has little chance of mass adoption. Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research has said Google's first tablet-specific version of Android is "by the geeks, for the geeks, and of the geeks".
Chowdhry also railed against the Motorola Xoom, the flahship Android Honeycomb tablet, and complained that the Xoom crashes, has bad battery life, and that the auto-wrap of text on the screen is wonky.
Ouch!
Is Chowdhry right about Android Honeycomb? Click through and shout out in the comments!
Here’s this week’s lowdown on what’s been going on over at our sister site BizGene.com. The team have been looking at getting the best out of cloud software and just how badly a poor online presence can affect your business. Read on.
There’s also tips on how to leverage your BlackBerry for business, and on using Twitter for customer services. If you're a small or big business, it's essential reading, minus all that business jargon. You can follow the team on Twitter for quick fire business factoids or head to LinkedIn for more in depth info and discussion.
We look at some handy hints and tips to help you get more from your BlackBerry, from simple time savers like re-arranging your apps menu to speeding up your phone and encrypting your data.
Twitter is not just a means to communicate your brand message, you can also use it to enhance your customer support, and to turn customer complaints into customer compliments.
Businesses are looking more and more to the cloud and collaborative software. An Egnyte survey revealed that 78% of respondents believe cloud storage solutions are viable replacements for the traditional standalone server in small businesses.
Seventy percent of people claim they would not buy from a company with a badly designed website, according to new research. This makes it even more vital that a company's website gives the right impression of the business.
In our digital age, predicting what’s going to sink and swim is a dodgy business: you’re at the mercy of a connected community who change their minds at the drop of a hat. Folks have been making bad tech predictions for more than a century, and still don’t learn that going out on a limb can often backfire. In celebration of those who sacrificed said metaphorical limbs, we’ve gathered together some of the worst, most off the mark tech predictions ever, from the failure of the telephone to wonky iPad predictions and the definite flop of the Huffington Post. Read on!
1. TV will flop One particularly terrible tech prediction came from Daryl Zanuck, a movie producer for 20th Century Fox who grossly underestimated our tolerance for staring at screens when he said:"Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." Little did he know that we would all be in throes to the various gods of programming, and that nations would gather to watch fame hungry IT workers from Milton Keynes embarrass themselves in front of a bitter man with a horrible hairdo.
Step back a couple of decades and try to recall those phones with cables we called landlines. Remember? British physicist Dennis Gabor thought the telephone a ridiculous contraption, and condemned it as something we'd now refer to as vaporware, saying: "Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition." Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer at the British Post Office said: “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
3. The revolution will not be tweeted Last October there was a hoo-ha about an article written by Malcolm Gladwell for the New Yorker, with the subhead “Why the revolution will not be tweeted”. Six months down the line and there’s been more than one revolution. Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Three revolutions, and guess what? They were tweeted. One user even made a video of the Egyptian revolution via Twitter. The data shown represents only around 10% of retweets.
4. The Huffington Post is DOA This mis-fire has now been credited with getting the Huffington Post on the map, and one step along on the ladder that's lead to the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315m. Journalist Nikki Finke, (LA Weekly columnist, Deadline.com editor and once named in Elle's 25 most influential women in Hollywood) said: "Judging from Monday's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself." Ouch. Not just that, Finke also said: "This website venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable."
5. Nobody wants to work it out on a computer As you sit there, with five different spreadsheets strewn across a plethora of tabs, trying to export it into a table and display it in a PowerPoint presentation, think back to the words of one previous editor of business books for major publishing house Prentice Hall, who in 1957 said: "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year." Although we hear the abacus could be making a comeback…
6. iPad Sales It is the job of an analyst to make accurate predictions. In 2010, not one Apple analyst predicted iPad sales figures correctly. Not one even got close. Apple sold almost 15m iPads in 2010, but the highest prediction from Wall Street sat at 7m. Even the bloggers were way off, with John Gruber predicting 8m, and Clayton Morris shooting for 9m. The real sales figure was three times the average prediction. That’s an epic misfire.
7. World of Warcraft will flop Games analyst Michael Pachter's WoW predictions were mindblowingly off the mark. In the New York Times in the autumn of 2005 he said: “I don’t think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month…I frankly think it’s the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers.
“It may continue to grow in China, but not in Europe or the U.S. We don’t need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn’t work in the U.S. It just doesn’t make any sense.” As of October 2010, WoW had 12million subscribers.
Along with these whopping great tech prediction fails, there are a clutch of urban myths, that have been morphed by Chinese whispers or that were never spoken in the first place. Here’s two of the biggest falsies:
- Bill Gates saying we’d only ever need 640KB The story goes that in 1981 Bill Gates said: “No one will need more than 640 kilobytes of memory for a personal computer.” Gates has denied that he ever uttered such a thing, and there’s no reliable source for the info.
- The president of IBM on the demand for personal computers In 1943 it is alleged that the then president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Nobody knows where it originated, but it’s thought it might have been a misattribution of a warped version of something said by Cambridge mathematician Douglas Hartree.
Got a bad tech prediction we’ve not included? Shout out in the comments!
O2 sounds like it will be getting behind tablets. Simon Devonshire, GM of Small and Medium Business for O2 predicts that tablets will be squaring up to laptops a few years down the line. Devonshire said: “Tablets are the future. I’m convinced that, in a couple of years time, they will be as important as laptops. Quite how that will happen is hard to predict. The technology will fundamentally change over the next 24 months. If that pace continues, the capabilities of future generations will be amazing.”
Around a month ago, TVonics asked us for help designing their next PVR. We threw it open to you, our readers, and asked you to decide what you wanted to see on the next TVonics PVR. You answered, and now TVonics has come out with a software upgrade for the TVonics DTR-HD500 in response. You spoke, TVonics listened, and are also chucking early access into the deal! Read on for more info.
TVonics says: “As a result of your reader’s feedback from the question posted online regarding the new features for the next TVonics box, TVonics has developed a software upgrade to allow multiple recordings to be deleted…and we are making it exclusively available to Electric Pig readers from Monday 14 March until Monday 28 March.”
That means that as an Electricpig reader you’ll have access to the software a week before anyone else. To get your mitts on the DTR-HD500 TVonics PVR software upgrade, head over here on Monday. Better bookmark that bad boy!
The Wii and PS3 support catchup TV services, but the Xbox 360 is lagging behind – it has Sky Player, but users have to pay for the privilege of feasting their eyes on that. This could all be set to change, however: if rumours are to be believed, Microsoft will be adding a full fat IPTV streaming service to its console soon.
Codenamed Project Orapa, it will allow Xbox 360 owners to access a service similar to Microsoft's existing Mediaroom IPTV, but also use their avatars to interact socially with others and the console's motion-sensing Kinect skills for as a remote control.
The rumours suggest Microsoft is aiming to launch the Xbox 360 streaming service by "Holiday 2011", so if it's accurate we'll be hearing much more over the coming months.
It’s just about time for lunch here at Electricpig towers, and we’re serving up a feast of the morning’s tech news to get you through the rest of the day. Power down and tune in to the round up of Thursday morning’s top tech titbits and some Electricpig recommendations.
We got an eyeful of the Nokia E6 today. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last, but head over here if you want ta glimpse of Symbian’s last stand.
The PS3 got a firmware update that adds cloud control: grab the PS3 v3.60 update, and so long as you’ve got a PlayStation Plus subscription you'll be able to kick your saved games up into the cloud.
Flipboard got an update in preparation for the release of the iPad 2 later this month, and we saw yet another Kinect hack, this time to control your house. Google is also experimenting with more ways to sort an overrun inbox, this tie with a Google Labs feature called Gmail Smart Labels.
We’re also giving the overwrought telly buyer a helping hand, and published our list of the best LCD TVs out right now, from budget £500 sets to a whopping £4k stellar screen, if you’re thinking about buying a new telly, this is essential reading.
LCD has become the most popular technology for TVs, with its support of LED backlighting delivering both better contrast and incredible slimness. Thinking of buying one? There are literally hundreds of models out there to choose from, so if you're scratching your head about which one to shell out for, take a look at this little lot: we reckon they're quite simply the best LCD TVs on the market.
Samsung UE55D8000 £2,499 | Samsung Samsung's new 55-inch flagship model elevates 3D performance to new levels, with TrustedReviews lauding its reduced crosstalk for having "a massively positive impact on the 3D experience, allowing you to watch 3D for longer without feeling tired, and finally making it possible to see without distraction just how detailed and crisp Samsung's 3D engine can make full HD 3D material (from Blu-ray) look." The review also highlights the retention of colour and brightness during 3D. 2D images, audio, design and Smart TV features also come in for serious praise, making this one of the best LCD TVs money can buy.
Philips Cinema 21:9 Platinum 3D £4,000 | Philips While most flatscreens have a 16:9 aspect ratio, the Cinema 21:9 has, well, a 21:9 aspect ratio – a match for most ultra-widescreen films. CNET UK says the 2D performance "shines like a star" making this the ideal screen for those with a huge Blu-ray movie collection and a hatred of letterbox bars during films. Its 3D performance doesn't fare so well due to crosstalk and a large reduction in brightness and colour, but CNET does give the TV's speakers a big thumbs-up and calls the sound something "very few mass-market TV manufacturers" can come close to matching.
Sony KDL-40NX713 £899 | Sony This 3D-capable, LED backlit 40-incher is a network whizz with built-in Wi-Fi and Sony's excellent Bravia Internet Video service, which includes Qriocity, LOVEFiLM, YouTube and BBC iPlayer. TechRadar loves its performance too, citing "outstanding" motion resolution, "exceptionally smooth" panning, "above average" black levels and contrast, and "wonderful detail" with both Blu-ray movies and the built-in HD tuner. One note of caution is sounded for the backlight, which the review calls uneven – a possible problem when watching movies in letterbox format.
Sharp LC46LE821E £1000 | Sharp The Sharp's 46-inch LED backlit screen supplements the usual red, green and blue pixels with a fourth yellow sub-pixel, designed to help the other colours blend more effectively and deliver a brighter, more vibrant image. AVReview says the screen produces "remarkably natural and subtle colours, helping pictures look more believable, punchy and immersive. At first the enhanced yellow in the image takes some getting used to, but this is just because it's new, not because it's wrong". There are no online features, but there is a built-in 8GB recorder and Freeview HD tuner.
Panasonic TX-L32D25 £550 | Panasonic What Hi-Fi? loved this affordable 32-inch LED model for its "finely honed and masterfully handled" Blu-ray images, "natural and believable" skin tones and strong black levels, not to mention the "rock solid" dual HD tuners (Freesat and Freeview), four HDMI inputs and Viera Cast internet features. Its speakers produce sound that is "perfectly inoffensive and well behaved" – not always a given on an affordable flatscreen.
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