Category: Technology

Vizio ventures into the PC market with new “Thin and Lights” and “All-in-ones”

Vizio, known for its HDTVs and LCD displays, has decided to manufacture some computers. And from the looks of it, it does not take a seasoned computer brand to make a beautiful machine.

The company had the chance to tease us at CES this year with a look at some of its creations and true to their word, they are going on sale. In America at least. Up for grabs are two “Thin and Lights” 14 and 15 inch versions packed with Ivy Bridge, USB 3.0 probably a lot of battery life.

Brings back memories of the old Vaios

The company do have a 15″ “regular” laptop too. It is packing some sort of nvidia Kepler graphics, although it is unknown which particular one but one can make a guess and say it is likely going to be the same GT 650m seen in the new MacBook Pros.

Vizio is also releasing some all-in-one PCs and the design is truly one to behold.

Clean...so clean.

With sleek metallic finishes and what looks like edge-to-edge glass displays, I think we have just witnessed just how much thought America’s #1 LCD HDTV Company has put into these products. The question remains, how soon can folk this side of the Atlantic expect to even just admire one in person let alone own one? Oh, and how much will any of them cost?

Bank Cards a Thing of the Past?

Yes, I know that we can just use phone banking or internet banking to get things done, but you can’t withdraw cash into your hand like that. The only way to do that is to go to an ATM/branch and use a bank card. But now banks are attempting to move away from plastic and on to something more electronic. The answer? Smartphones.

Smartphone

New technology has been unveiled that will allow people to use a banking app to withdraw cash from their smartphones. At the moment this service is only available to those who bank with NatWest or Royal Bank of Scotland, but if it all goes well then expect more banks to take the initiative and implement these banking apps for all of their customers.

This is simple to use as all it requires is a password and a withdrawal code. In an attempt to prevent thieves looking over somebody’s shoulder the withdrawal code will remain hidden until the user taps the screen. The inspiration for this is from an emergency cash service. This emergency cash service enables users to withdraw a certain amount of cash from an ATM without using their bank cards.

As we can all see, the number of new initiatives designed to cut down on plastic and paper are all working to turn money into a digital commodity. Is this a bad thing though? Probably not. If we take a look at physical money then it can easily be lost. All it takes is a stumble and some coins can fly down a drain. For the banks it’s even better as they don’t have to deal with getting lots of plastic to their customers. It also means that it’s not an issue if the card isn’t brought in as the phone can be used instead. And people always seem to remember their phones as they are eternally texting or making pointless calls on it.

On the other hand, it could be argued that it will increase the chances of theft and fraud. It takes a lot of bravery to go out and hold up someone for their wallet, and that’s exactly why most people won’t do it. But if it can be done through a bit of watching or from computers then more people are going to do it. Furthermore, if this can be done from a computer, which online transactions are already at risk of, then how can we stop fraudsters if they are abroad? Simply put, we can’t. It might be more convenient but the risk of fraud does increase slightly.

Do I think it makes any difference though?

Not at all. Digital money is the future and it’s something that people have predicted many times before. If I had to make a prediction then I would estimate that it should take about 20 years for us to see the complete elimination of plastic bank cards, and that’s a generous amount of time.

Money

Another Year and Another WWDC

Every year at the beginning of the summer, Apple shows off to the world what it has been working on. This year has been no different with hardware refreshes, software updates and product launches.

iOS 6

WWDC kicked off with an introduction to an update to the iOS mobile operating system. iOS 6 promises a host of new features for iDevice users such as Guided Access. Like Parental Control, Guided Access allows the users to lock down some of the UI elements on their devices such as Mail or Contacts to prevent accidental deletion in the hands of children, babies or cats (maybe). A new feature that improves organisation is “Passbook”. We are in the second decade of the 21st century and all tickets, cards and passes have gone digital, it is hard to keep track of all of them and this is where Passbook comes to play. It is essentially your all-in-one breast pocket; an app where you can store and retrieve digital e-tickets for movies, football games and also reminds you of your flight time. It seems an incredibly simple solution and it is amazing that no one thought of it earlier. However, like Newsstand, it is targeted towards a specific group of people and for those that won’t use such features, it is just another useless icon.

In terms of the cloud and social networking, iOS 6 allows users to utilise the iCloud service and synchronise their photos across all their Apple devices. Photos Streams can be shared with friends and also be commented on. Beyond that, one of the most common reasons why iPhone users would “jailbreak” their devices was to install a third party plugin allowing FaceTime over 3G and not be limited to WiFi; with iOS 6, FaceTime is now fully supported over 3G. iOS 5 brought Twitter integration and iOS 6 brings…you guessed it, Facebook integration. This time Apple has gone all out with extremely deep integration linking Facebook to all aspects of your iPhone from the simple Notification Centre to Maps, Photos and even the App Store. Users and Friends now can see, share and “like” apps with each other.

Siri has now also been updated to support new languages as well as being pushed to the third generation iPad (the retina one). Apple has stated that it will be getting other features such as sports updates in the coming months. With the included Facebook integration, Siri now also has support for Facebook allowing voice commands for status updates etc.

Finally, probably the biggest iOS news this year is Apple’s decision to drop Google Maps in favour of its own Maps APIs. Apple claims its new Maps app is its own creation however some of the data is provided by third party sources. Apple recently acquired C3, the company behind Nokia’s 3D maps and it is likely that they help provide Flyover mode – which allows users to view buildings and landscapes in 3D similar to what we saw when Google demonstrated its own 3D maps just prior to WWDC. Over 100 million business listings are already included should a user wish to search for one. The most prominent feature of Apple Maps is turn-by-turn navigation with traffic and accident updates also present. This data is being supplied by partnering with TomTom. Naturally, the app will intelligently calculate the best route depending on traffic. And of course there is Siri integration including the ability to ask Siri “Are we there yet?” to which it will reply with a fairly witty comment plus an estimate of how long your journey will take. Google recently also released similar services on its own mobile operating system however it pales in comparison to Nokia Maps which offered the first turn-by-turn navigation of any kind on a phone and also has offline support, something that Google Maps is severely lacking. How will Apple Maps stack up against the competition? Time will tell.

The removal of Google Maps means that the only Google features left in Cupertino’s mobile operating systems are the YouTube app and Google Search in Safari; the latter can also be changed to something like Bing, not that anyone would, would they? However bold the move is, the question still remains whether it was the right decision to make. Is the new iOS that innovative or is it wrapping other company’s ideas into its own shell? Several features of Windows Phone 7 are mirrored in iOS such as lock screen camera and Facebook integration. Apple Maps is in its infancy and how will it compare to Nokia Maps with features such as offline use and fairly robust turn-by-turn navigation? It can be argued that the smartphone market is headed in the same direction hence innovations are converging and the only way to stand out is to take the same idea and execute it your own way. Will Apple’s new Maps app be able to rival Google’s? Maybe. Will the turn-by-turn navigation cause untold misery? Probably not, but it is still too early to tell.

The MacBooks

Apple presented some refreshes to its MacBook line the same evening. With Intel’s third generation Ivy Bridge CPUs having been released a month ago, it makes sense that Apple would refresh its line-up with these. The MacBook Air range can now be configured with i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge processors. The new models now come with USB 3.0, up from 2.0 (and still backwards compatible), a better FaceTime camera capable of HD 720p, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of flash storage. The MacBook Pro models have also been refreshed with Intel’s newest silicon. Apple has also decided to move back to Nvidia to provide its notebook graphics. The graphics have been changed to Nvidia’s GT 650m Kepler GPU. Despite being Kepler, this GPU is a mid-range performer and cannot rival some of the other notebook graphics cards on the market. More capable GPUs such as the GTX 660m come as standard on machines from Alienware and MSI, both of which are cheaper than a similarly configured MacBook Pro. One consideration though, is that the laptops from the aforementioned companies are also much thicker and bulkier than any current notebook from Apple.

Along with the hardware refreshes on existing notebooks, Apple was proud to present its flagship MacBook – the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. This new model, although having only a 15 inch screen, will replace the 17 inch MacBook Pro of yester-gen and sit on Apple’s notebook throne. The laptop is much slimmer than the other MacBook Pros, being only a few millimetres thicker than the thickest end of the MacBook Air. The 15 inch display is made up of 2880 x 1800 pixels – more than in Apple’s 27 inch Cinema Display and 27 inch iMac, both of which have 2560 x 1440 displays. The highest HDTV resolution is “only” 1920 x 1080. The internals of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display are similar to the other MacBook Pros such as Ivy Bridge CPUs and the same GT 650m Kepler graphics. On the outside, things are very different – like the Airs and iPads, most of this new MacBook Pro is made up of battery and to achieve this, Apple has done away with the optical drive. That’s right, no DVD or Blu-Ray on this machine, all data now comes from external drives or plucked from the sky. There are now two thunderbolt connections, USB 3.0 on either side, HDMI out, SD card reader, headphone jack and a redesigned MagSafe jack (because the older one was too thick to fit). The main question is whether there is enough horsepower under the hood to be able to drive that super high definition screen (disclaimer: super high definition is not an official term) especially in games where many high-end desktop graphics cards struggle to cope with similar resolutions. One thing is for sure: there is no other laptop out there like it at the moment, but can users looking for a larger screen as opposed to higher resolution forgive Apple for axing the 17 incher?

OS X Mountain Lion

The folks at Cupertino have also been extremely busy with their newest operating system. Now at version 10.8, Mountain Lion follows the same trend of Apple naming every operating system iteration after a very large feline. Recently, it seemed that Apple has decided that when the name is a change in feline species, it highlights a very large operating system overhaul; this was seen in the move from “Tiger” to “Leopard” and “Snow Leopard” to “Lion”. However, if there is no change in species but more of a change in habitat such as “Leopard” to “Snow Leopard” and, as of WWDC, “Lion” has now become “Mountain Lion”, it means more subtle changes and more optimisations. This new version of OS X contains some updated features such as iCloud integration and a brand new Safari which is not only faster but also has some interesting features such as iCloud Tabs, allowing users to synchronise their web usage across all their iDevices, and Tab View, which allows the exact same tabs a user was browsing through on their laptops, to be transferred to their iPad so they can carry on immediately, smells a bit like Sync for Firefox, oh wait this is Apple so it is innovative and original. The address bar is now also the search bar similar to the Chrome browser. Like Windows 8 with Xbox Live integration, Apple has also taken its Game Centre system found in iOS and stuck it into the new OS in an attempt to promote cross platform game development as users can now compete across a range of iDevices. Seeing a trend here?

One of the new features in Mountain Lion is “Power Nap” – it is essentially a background scheduler that fetches email, performs software updates, iCloud syncing and Time Machine backups when you aren’t using the computer. And finally, Siri comes to the Mac in the form of Dictation where users can have their speech transcribed to text in almost any app. Although not on the same “personal assistant” level as Siri is in iOS, it is definitely a start. There are some interesting new features added to Apple’s operating system but perhaps not enough to warrant a change in feline species hence “Mountain Lion”. The whole world is wondering what Apple will chose for its last “X” operating system (10.9) with the last big cats Lynx and Ocelot having been used for other tech products. Favourite at the moment seems to be Sabertooth Tiger, although it is extinct. Maybe if Apple decides to stop Mac OS completely, it could name its very final version that as an allegory.

Wrap-up

There have been some new and exciting things on show at WWDC with some new concepts and some things that seem to have been copied but executed by Apple, which according to Apple means they came up with it. Some updates did not make it to the stage such as Apple’s new AirPort Express now with dual-band WiFi and a new form factor as well as some new processors for the Mac Pro. There has been no news on any iMac refresh and of course anyone’s guess on anything to do with the new iPhone is as good as mine.

Microsoft Kills Zune, Promoted Xbox to Entertainment Hub

In yet another rebranding, Microsoft has officially killed Zune, the music and video player in Windows 7. Yusuf Mehdi, Chief Marketing Officer of Interactive Entertainment Division at Microsoft, has stated that the Xbox will become the entertainment hub and will be delivering new services in the near future with Windows 8.

This year, Xbox becomes the premium entertainment service for Microsoft. Whether on your PC, tablet, TV or phone, Xbox will be a gateway to the best in music and video, your favorite games and instant access to your friends. With the launch of Windows 8, we’ll bring Xbox entertainment to everyone. With Xbox on Windows 8 devices, we rapidly accelerate the reach of Xbox entertainment from more than 60 million people to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

We understand that entertainment has become a multi-screen experience where you and your friends are watching TV, listening to music, and playing games while interacting with your tablets and phones in new ways. We’ve got ideas for making all the entertainment you love more personal, interactive and social across the devices you love—and on the phenomenal Windows 8 devices that are to come.

His comments are true, but will the death of Zune have a negative impact? It’s probably true to say that relatively few people had much to do with Zune – those with Zune players or Windows Phone would have had it, but many more people would have been reliant on Windows Media Player or iTunes. Nonetheless, in the media department at least, Microsoft seems to be suffering from a lack of decisiveness when it comes to branding, as it has been doing a lot of renaming. The Zune players were meant to be Microsoft’s answer to the iPod, and despite being critically well received they were short lived, with Microsoft killing the line off. Recently we have also seen Windows Live being given its retirement package, as it simply becomes Microsoft services – which begs the question of why Xbox is immune to this and doesn’t become Microsoft Entertainment or some such. Actually, the Xbox was so successful probably because it lacked the Microsoft/Windows branding.

The problem isn’t so much dropping Zune, but was there actually a need to? With Microsoft changing names at a speed that can make heads spin, the biggest problem it may face is alienating potential consumers that simply find too much confusion in Microsoft’s offerings.

Will We Soon be Booking Doctor Appointments and Accessing Medical Records Online?

The Coalition government has today unveiled plans for patients that allow them to book appointments with their GPs online, as well as check test results on the Internet too. Apps for smartphones are to be developed and patients will have access to all their medical records online as well. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said these plans will give patients more power.

Personally, I welcome this move because I tend to use technology every day. I use a smartphone and actually prefer to have most aspects of my life online, from banking to shopping. This move would really hone in the advances in technology and would allow the NHS to become a more accessible part of people’s lives.

I understand the dilemma a lot of patients face on a Monday morning when they have to book an appointment with their GP, often having to spend a considerable amount of time on the telephone trying to get in to see their doctor. In many cases, when individuals do finally get through they are offered an appointment much later in the week, or in some dire cases the following week. My elderly grandmother faces this dilemma each time she has to book an appointment, and to be honest it really isn’t fair. Much like it isn’t fair for people with children to spend so much time out of their day telephoning their local surgery when they really need to be doing much more important things in their lives. In that respect, you’d think that most people would welcome this plan, wouldn’t you?

There are critics of these new plans for the NHS. As ever, we need to look at the positives and negatives of the changes. We might be keen to see the NHS adapt to the 21st century advances in technology, but many patients may not be ready to put their phone down and pick up a laptop. A lot of elderly patients will feel left behind, out of the loop and quite frankly angered by the new plans. In the technologically advanced generation we find ourselves in, are our older generations being left out or should they in fact embrace any future advances in technology?

The government needs to tread carefully when these plans are turned into reality so that users who don’t have Internet access or don’t use smartphones are included and can still easily access their local NHS branches.

It’s not only about being able to book appointments online. Patients will eventually have access to their medical records online, as well as test results being made available online too. This will raise questions about the issue of security for the proposed plans. Is allowing patients’ medical records to be accessed online a good thing, or will it be only a matter of time before hackers make their own plans to sabotage this information?

However, the government plan to enhance the system of booking appointments, they obviously need to take into account people’s views on security and sensitivity about their private information online.

But, to the vast majority of Internet users, who use online banking and enter their bank details online on a daily basis, is it any different accessing your medical records online and having test results sent through cyberspace?

Microsoft Gets Motorola Android Phones Banned in USA

The International Trade Commission has ruled that Motorola’s Android devices are banned from the USA until the mobile company agrees patent infringement with Microsoft.

There’s something of an industry joke that Microsoft earns more money from Android than it does Windows Phone – and, indeed, more than Google earns from Android. Almost all of the Android OEMs have agreed a settlement with Microsoft whereby they pay a royalty fee for each handset sold, but Motorola has refused to do so. The end result was a patent infringement claim by Microsoft that has resulted in Motorola’s Android devices being banned. What’s particularly intriguing about this is that the Droid series has been successful in America, combining a marketable name (Droid) with a range of devices that made it a good comeback for Motorola.

A few short years ago Motorola had all but slipped into obscurity, so the Android lifeline it received it will no doubt want to keep. That leaves it with two choices: amend the software so it no longer uses Microsoft’s patents, or pay to licence it from Microsoft to keep selling the phones as they are.

The ITC ruled that the Motorola Atrix, Xoom and Droid infringed a Microsoft patent relating to Exchange ActiveSync technology, and the order prohibits “the unlicensed entry for consumption of mobile devices, associated software and components thereof covered by claims 1, 2, 5, or 6 of the United States Patent No. 6,370,566 and that are manufactured abroad by or on behalf of, or imported by or on behalf of, Motorola”. So while the devices themselves have not received banishment, the ruling places into effect a ban on the devices until amendments to the software or an agreement with Microsoft is made.

With Barnes & Noble recently settling with Microsoft for its Android-powered Nook, Motorola is the only major Android maker without a patent licensing deal with Microsoft, and Microsoft itself estimates that its licenses cover more than 70% of all Android devices (phones and tablets) in the USA.

Despite the ruling, Motorola doesn’t seem too concerned, as Jennifer Erickson, a spokesperson for the company, has said that “Although we are disappointed by the Commission’s ruling…Motorola Mobility will not experience any impact in the near term, as the Commission’s ruling is subject to a $0.33/per unit bond during the 60 day Presidential review period.” What this means is that the ruling is not yet final, President Obama has to review it within 60 days who can, if he so chooses, overturn it on the grounds of public policy. Beyond that, Motorola has said it is considering appealing.

While this battle may go on a little longer, it isn’t one-sided when it comes to the two tech giants. Another ITC judge ruled in favour of Motorola in another case, that Microsoft is infringing four of Motorola’s patents. The result of that was a ban on Windows 7 PCs and the Xbox 360 gaming console in Germany. Predictably, Microsoft is appealing the decision.