Samsung Tab: Good Reviews (with disclosures)
In The Rack on September 2, 2010
While you were asleep this morning, Samsung officially launched Tab, its 7″ Android 2.2 tablet at the IFA show in Berlin. There’s lot of coverage from the likes of Endgadget, PC World, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc. Some are calling it a bigger version of the Samsung Galaxy S, which to my mind is a compliment.
Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone. We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar. It seems to me that the Tab will also be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8, HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy. Supporting both 2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, the Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.
The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted. What struck me was that many of the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.” More …
Here I’ve been getting excited about new user interface niceties such as voice rec in Windows Phone 7 and Android, while completely missing the bigger picture. The National Science Foundation has announced it will be funding a NeuroPhone, “the first Brain-Mobile Interface (BMI).” This “high risk, exploratory research,” to be conducted at Dartmouth College, involves developing a consumer-level wireless EEG (electroencephalography) headset to interface with a mobile device. From what I can decipher from the proposal abstract, they will study ways to digitize and interpret brain wave activity.
For Skype customers and just about anyone else who’s every typed phone numbers into a virtual dial pad, Gmail video and voice chat, even with its new ability to make free calls to cell and landlines, may warrant a big whoop. I had the dubious pleasure of retrieving voice mail through my email at some point in the late 1990s, so some of this telephony novelty has worn thin.
Another weekend, another hackathon. But the one that was just held in Seatle concerned itself with Gov 2.0 projects. And Technoverse favorite Tropo was there, along with open data service provider Socrata.
