GITweekly

You know, it really is getting way too complicated when it comes to choosing a pair of headphones. Just like some sort of turf war you’ve got the purists on one side bearing witness with impressively spec’d faux aluminium cans by Bose and Beyerdynamic. Over the back fence, spitting, are the boys from Beats and Sennheiser. They are the ASBOs. The nair do wells. Full of colour and one bearing the three stripes of a footwear company. Then there’s House of Marley.

Whereas their opposition spruik street cred or frequency response curves, House of Marley has chosen to create something unique. Their push appears to have been to make a range of audio equipment that stirs both your creative side but also your social sensibilities. Read the rest of this entry →

With my life careering out of control like a chicken riding a skateboard, I’ve tried to wrangle back control without harming said chicken. Enter the iPhone and its menagerie of apps for organising your life.

First I tried the super comprehensive Awesome Note. I envisioned myself creating an epic tome of organisation with maps and pictures, syncing to Google Docs, and shielding all of this highly classified data with pass codes. It didn’t happen. The thought of adding images to a task called “get some milk” just seemed a little absurd and tinged with a little over kill.

Keeping it truly simple. Seriously.

Enter GoTasks.

This free – yes free – app does exactly what it advertises and it does it well. Instead of aiming to be the be all and end all of task management and life organisation, GoTasks simply organises your tasks.

GoTasks lets you do all of the usual:

• Set due dates
• Categorise tasks
• See how many tasks are due just by looking at the iPhone badge
• Sync with Google Tasks – accessing multiple accounts
• Uses HTTPS to sync securely

But overall the killer feature is its elegant simplicity. This app has simply organised my daily work-flow. Its integration with Google has meant that any tasks added by iPhone appear on the iPad and online. Just beautiful.

I say forget the milk. Say no to making awesome notes for yourself and grab the app that dares to keep it simple stupid.

In the world of plasma, black is king. We don’t mean Martin Luther King, we mean the regal kind, although some would argue the aforementioned are one and the same. Politics and reverence aside, when your average plasma-ite (as they are wont to be known) is researching a new TV, they will run around asking about the ‘black level’ until they black out. Everything’s black, then. What are we on about? We’re talking about how black your telly looks when the lights are out and the screen goes dark. The purists will say it’s meant to disappear entirely, although unlike a David Copperfield show, it’s meant to still be there once the lights go on again. The black levels question is a bit like fuel economy for hybrid car drivers, or wheat content for coeliacs. Ok, the coeliac comparison is a bit of a stretch, but the point we’re making is that it’s the question that is ALWAYS on people’s minds when they’re looking at buying a plasma. Is the question really meaningful? How long is a piece of string? What IS the meaning of life? Ok, we’re heading off on a bit of a tangent here, what we’re trying to say is that in our opinion, many hairs are cleft in twain over the issue of black levels. This telly produces blacks that look pretty black to us. Granted, our eyes haven’t been calibrated by an ISF-certified professional, but we’re guessing yours haven’t been either. Having said that, we’d love to have THX certified eyeballs. That would be cool. We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves a bit here, but we feel the digression is justified. In light of the near-religious fervour that is generated over the issue of black levels, we felt it was important to preface this review with a discussion about how important we feel it really is. In short, we think it’s secondary to all else the TV has to offer. So, without further ado, let us review.

Our sample measures 147cm, or 58″ in the old money. That’s a diagonal measurement, and Pythagoras himself would agree that it’s really big. It’s big enough that if you try and play your old Super Nintendo on it, you might just have to watch it through binoculars in reverse, just so it looks a little less ridiculous. No, TVs this size are not for playing your old-school, kilopixel resolution 8-bit games on. But that’s not why we buy them is it? We buy them because we’re a.) Irresponsibly wealthy, and/or b.) We seriously get off on technology and watching movies or playing games in high-definition. My bank balance has lots of zeroes in it. It unfortunately has no other digits, so that puts me squarely in the second category. Put simply, watching a good movie (action flicks baby!) in full high definition, on a good TV with the sound turned right up gets my juices flowing. Ok, that’s a bit creepy. Size isn’t everything however, and there are a raft of genuine reasons why we simply love this set. Natural yet vibrant colours, white whites and black blacks, paper-thin chassis, loads of inputs and more features than the Cannes film festival. If you live in a shoebox or simply aren’t satisfied with anything but a preposterously large TV, then you can be assured that both the 50″ and 63″ (yes, 63 inch) versions will come just as well stocked with technological goodness. The tech-goodies extend to Internet connectivity via Samsung’s Internet@TV service, which is simply their version of Panasonic’s Viera Cast service. In short, Samsung makes a bunch of widgets available that you can install onto your telly if you connect it to the internet. The widget roll-call includes a YouTube player, CNN news ticker, Weather report and others. It’s fun, but we personally don’t find it a major selling point. What’s very handy however is the ability to stream video, music and pictures over your home network using the DNLA feature. If you have a media server running anywhere in the house, then it’s trivial to play all that content on your telly without having to fire up another DNLA device like your PS3 to do the work. Add to that the ability to play movie files off a USB stick plus record TV once you connect a hard drive, and this TV seems well placed to feature at the centre of your modern digital media savvy household. Another feature worthy of a mention includes the ability to tweak the more arcane aspects of the set’s functioning. Gamma, Colour Space and RGB Offset may make good hard rock band names, but they also represent settings that, when tweaked appropriately, enable a TV to produce the most accurate colours possible. The menu system works well, overlaying whatever’s currently showing on the panel with adjustable transparency. The many and varied picture, sound and connectivity functions and options are all easily accessible by no more than a few clicks of the stylish remote’s keypad. A feature popping up on alot of network-enabled TVs is the ability to control the set with your mobile phone. Samsung have ensured that the C7000 doesn’t miss out, and there are apps for both the iPhone and Android-powered phones such as the Galaxy S that give you full control over the TV. Controlling the TV via the phone was surprisingly snappy, and we actually found that we preferred to use the phone over the remote! One big plus is that you have access to a QWERTY keyboard on the phone; text input via the remote is tedious at best.

We’ve blathered on about the picture quality, tweakability, transparency and QWERTY, but we haven’t made mention of the small matter of 3D. Oh yeah, we forgot this is a 3D TV!!

What can we say – forget about Avatar, if you have a 3D TV and don’t already own a PS3, head out right now and get one, buy as many 3D games as you can and go nuts. 3D movies are nice and all, but gaming is where it’s at right now. WipeoutHD in 3D is awesome, and we’re actually drooling at the thought of Gran Turismo 5 in 3D later this year. The glasses are cumbersome, but that’s by design – they need to fit over your coke-bottle specs! The 3D effect is impressive and suffers only occasionally from little glitches that don’t necessarily intrude on the effect nor do they detract from the enjoyment of it all. Basically, it’s a hoot playing games in 3D and arguably well worth the expense of buying a 3D telly. When Avatar 3D comes out later this year on Blu-ray, that’ll be just a bit of icing on the cake.

All in all, we think this TV is a storming effort by Samsung. Solid 2D and 3D picture quality, all the geeky goodies you could want and then some. Oh and it looks the business too.
———————————————-
The Good:
Excellent picture quality, up there with the best of them
Fully widget-laden, for the widget-conscious
Lovely finish, with a brushed-metal bezel
Good value 3D telly

The Bad:
It does buzz a bit more loudly than your average plasma, but in practice (as in, at normal volumes) we didn’t notice it at all.

Are the robots taking over the world? Not yet, but Google is having a good crack at it. In a twist worthy of a William Gibson novel, the search behemoth’s operating system Android is penetrating the mobile phone market faster than cheap cocaine on the streets of London. That Google has built themselves yet another killer piece of software is one fact slowly becoming obvious to the masses. It remains to be seen however, what the phone makers will do with it. Are they putting Ferrari motors into Lada Niva chassis?

Samsung, the Sony of South Korea, has recently released an Android phone they hope will be seen as more Ferrari than failure. Does the new Galaxy S live up to their dreams of being a sexy, slick, iPhone killing objet d′art?

We’ve taken the opportunity to check this for ourselves, and we’re pleased to report that Samsung might be onto something with this little beauty. For starters, they’ve done what any sensible manufacturer would do with a relatively ‘novel’ tool like Android. They’ve slotted it into an immediately marketable package with bags of designer flair, an iPhone case. Well, it’s not quite an iPhone case, but it’s close enough that the Apple fanboys won’t notice you don’t have one. At least not until they realise that while they’re off to the local aftermarket phone addons supplier to get a booster battery, you’re still busy texting and surfing the web. Uh-oh, the gig’s up. “What do you mean, this isn’t an iPhone? It looks like one, it feels like.. no wait, it’s lighter than an iPhone, and dude, what’s with this screen? It’s craaaaazy!”. Yes, the similarities end with the near-identical packaging.

We’re not kidding about the craaaaazy screen by the way. Samsung have taken the sensible decision of sliding an uber-cool “Super AMOLED” screen into this phone, and all we can say is ‘holy direct-sunlight readability, batman!’. What’s all this AMOLED tomfoolery about you say? Well, without resorting to quoting Wikipedia, let’s just say it kills iPhone screen technology. Even the iPhone 4 doesn’t have the goods in the screen department; Apple has spent what is presumably millions of dollars developing their ‘retina display’, which we feel is little like flogging a dead horse; it’s simply based on inferior, fundamentally outdated hardware. What’s the difference you ask? It’s like comparing your old bedside telly to a new plasma display. The screen on this thing rocks. The brightness, contrast, and colour depth are outstanding. It has a slightly lower resolution compared to the iPhone 4, but in practice this won’t make a difference to anyone except the myopic amongst us who’ve gone out and purchased the latest nosetip phone holders.

So we’ve wibbled on about the outstanding screen. What else is there to this orange in apple’s clothing? Well, you can change the battery without needing a set of tools that instantly labels you as a massive nerd. Need we say more? Just go out and get it! Seriously though, this is one of our pet hates about the iPhone, that you have to resort to discovering your alarming lack of surgical skill to change the battery. A deft thumbnail twist (watch the polish, ladies!) and the Samsung Galaxy S’ rear case pops off to reveal a battery that can be swapped out with ease. Big points gained here in our book. Hang on, what’s this funny little slot next to the battery? Oh wait, it says ‘microSD’. You can add memory to this phone? Surely not! Surely yes! For those of us who like to store our entire DVD collection on the phone for those long-haul flights to nowhere-in-particular, adding some extra space is a doddle. Just slip a 32Gb card in there, and your phone suddenly becomes a data store sizeable enough to hold the entire internet. Well, maybe not the entire internet, but at least the contents of Apple’s complaints forums. Oh hang on, they deleted most of that.

Ok, so we’ve made it clear we think Apple are stooging us all with their deliberately under-done but cruelly cool gadgetry. Rejoice though, because now we have an alternative. It looks cool just like an iPhone, it runs Google’s rapidly rising and simply rapid Android operating system, and it does so on hardware that ticks all the boxes for both nerds and the herds alike.

You might think we’ve been hoodwinked, and that somehow our review phone was dusted with powdered love potion. No, we have our quibbles with this phone, but they’re not quibbles that make us think twice about having bought it. Not ever. We can’t say the same thing about the iPhone. Ok, that’s the last time we say anything negative about the iPhone. It looks lovely, really.

———————————–
The Good:
- Bright, colourful, craaaaazy good screen
- Relatively long battery life for a fully-featured smartphone
- Expandable storage (microSD)
- User replaceable battery
- Open-source, increasingly well supported operating system (Android)
- Some may disagree, but we love the plastic rear case. If it scratches or cracks, just replace it. It won’t cost you a fortune and you can do it yourself.
- Native tethering support

The bad:
We struggled to think of anything, but…
- Wifi reception seems a bit on the average side
- Samsung Kies software is slow, but also unnecessary. In our opinion, you don’t need it anyway.

This is the first post by our newest commentator extraordinaire, the prodigious Aikenthumb.