Apple iPad

Palm Pre (updated)

Given the devices’ UK launch today I’ve republished and updated this JtBP review for your perusal…

For once the hottest smartphone on the planet isn’t made by Apple. Even more incredibly it’s made by Palm, the comeback kid so far of 2009.  On TrustedReviews I have already guided you through the wonderful plus points of this handset but could there be any good reasons not to be buy it?

Read the Rules if you aren’t familiar with my already seemingly cult and contentious reviews’ system. In short, with JtBP I save the gushing praise for every other review you’ll read and bring you the bullet points on any potential deal breakers with something before you commit to the long winded waffle on your favourite sites/publications. It’s a time saver.

After I managed to grab more than an hour with this stunner here’s the JtBP review:

Just the Bad Points Review: Palm Pre

• It may be superbly innovative but at 138g the Palm Pre isn’t light
• The 3MP camera has above average image processing, but it hardly competes with dedicated camera phones
• The Palm Pre ‘App Catalog’ has made a slow start to life with very few apps and teething problems launching paid apps.
• The Pre is not compatible with previous Palm third party apps
• Lacking business support (office document compatibility, editing, etc) though Microsoft Exchange is there
• Battery life is poor with heavy use requiring two charges per day
• Build quality isn’t great with a cheap plastic finish and wobbling sliding mechanism
• The keyboard is neat, but the keys too compact if you have large fingers.
• No microSD/SDHC slot limiting you to 8GB of onboard memory. Why oh why?
• Video recording functionality is not ready in time for launch

Antichrist

Tagline: When nature turns evil, true terror awaits

Plot: A grieving couple retreats to their cabin in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse

In short: There’s a powerful movie in there, but you’ll need a strong constitution to make it through

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in an offering before you commit to buy or read lengthy reviews on your favourites sites/magazines. For a more detailed description please read: THE RULES

Just the Bad Points Review: Antichrist

• Explicit sex scenes (depending on your perspective)
• Extreme violence and self mutilation
• Scenes of (faked) animal suffering
• Intense emotional confrontation
• Child loss
• Focus on the nature of depression & relationship collapse

Moon

Tagline: The last place you’d ever expect to find yourself

Plot: Astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is about to finish a three year stint on the Moon. He works alone supervising the robotic extraction of helium-3 from lunar soil, a compound which has single handily solved the Earth’s energy problems. He only companion is GERTY, his computer, but as the days tick down Sam makes a life changing discovery.

In short: The best film I have seen so far this year

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in an offering before you commit to buy or read lengthy reviews on your favourites sites/magazines. For a more detailed description please read: THE RULES

 

Just the Bad Points Review: Moon

• Fans of action flicks will find this heavy going
• This isn’t about aliens, gun fights or spaceships
• As it sounds: one man, alone in space, on the moon
• Not light entertainment
• An emotional roller coaster ride
• Don’t see it and you’ll miss out on the best movie of the year so far

Samsung i8910 HD

Yes, it’s easily Samsung’s best attempt at an iPhone killer to date. The i8910 HD is featured packed with a 3.7in 16:9 AMOLED 360 x 640 capacitive touchscreen, eight megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash, Face Detection, Smile Shot, Blink Shot and Panorama Shot. HD 720p video recording, HSUPA, WiFi, aGPS, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, 8GB of native flash memory, a 32GB compatible microSD card slot, an FM tuner, digital compass, accelerometer, proximity sensor and light sensor.

There’s DivX /Xvid, H.264, WMV, Mpeg4 and Real video playback, MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC, WMA and Real Audio playback, dual stereo speakers with DNSe 2.0 and a Symbian S60 5.0 backbone with Document Viewer, E-Dictionary, Biz Card Recognition, Podcasting, 3D Games, app downloads, Push Email (MS Exchange) and Smart Search. Finally we find a whopping 1500 mAh battery. So really what’s NOT to like? I’ll tell you…

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: THE RULES

Just the Bad Points Review: Samsung i8910 HD

• It’s BIG. Dimensions of 123 x 58 x 12.9mm give it the largest touchscreen handset footprint to date
• It’s heavy. 144g it roughly 10% more than an iPhone, which itself is normally the limit people are happy with
• There’s no multi-touch. Despite the introduction of a capacitive screen (which is what the iPhone has) Samsung still hasn’t done it
• No App Store. Samsung (Jet aside) uses third party platforms and hasn’t got together its own third party applications store
• The UI still isn’t as smooth or finger friendly as Palm’s WebOS, Google Android or, yes, iPhone OS
• It’s expensive on contract. Not iPhone 3gS expensive of course, but certainly it reflects its flagship status

Apple iPhone 3GS

Here we go again. The Apple ‘iPhone 3GS’ is now on sale and it is already shaping up to be even more controversial than both its predecessors. On the hardware side it brings a slightly improved camera (3 megapixels with autofocus, compared to 2MP fixed focus), video recording, marginally better battery life and up to 3x faster performance. It sounds good, but more importantly what’s NOT to like…?

Flaws still present from before:

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha, WolframAlpha, Wolfram|Alpha – however you want to say it – has the Internet very excited. It chooses to avoid the term ’search engine’ in favour of “computational knowledge engine” and works very differently from Google by providing actual answers to questions rather than links to potential answers. Questions can be as simple as How tall in the Eiffel Tower? to real time mathematical calculation of satellite positions across the sky. If this sounds impressive, that’s because it is and while I’ve written an extensive and enthusiastic piece about Wolfram Alpha on TrustedReviews the fact is it isn’t perfect. So what are the bad points?

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: the Rules

Just the Bad Points Review: Wolfram Alpha

• It takes time and practice to learn the correct terminology to get good results from Wolfram Alpha
• Natural language interpretation is poor, more than 25% of queries trigger the response: “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”
• It potentially damages traffic to traditional websites which spend time answering queries in greater detail
• Topics such as mathematics, science, medicine and currency help academics but real world public usefulness is much lower at present
• Many answers have little context
• Answers take longer to load than the results from traditional search engines
• Answers can be very dry. A search for Shakespeare, for example, could do with more than just his date/place of birth and a rather cold ‘timeline’
• We know little of the financial security behind the project other than “Infrastructure for this computation provided by Wolfram|Alpha launch partner Dell, Inc”
• Google is working on something similar with its Google Squared search project and its huge resources may outgun Wolfram Alpha

HTC Magic Android Smartphone

The T-Mobile G1 has been left on its own as the sole Google Android handset for seven long months, but now it finally has some company and competition in form of the ‘Magic’. Like the G1, the Magic is made by Taiwanese manufacturing giant HTC but has been sold to different networks around the globe. On the surface, the HTC Magic is a far more sophisticated handset than the G1 and is an easy sell, so most importantly what’s not to like…

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: the Rules

Just the Bad Points Review: HTC Magic Android Smartphone

• 3.2in capacitive touchscreen is large, but physically smaller than the HTC Touch HD & iPhone
• The screen’s 320 x 480 resolution matches the iPhone but is less than some VGA (480 x 640) Windows Mobile smartphones
• No physical Qwerty keyboard or number pad
• 3.2 megapixel camera is mediocre and lacks autofocus
• Native storage is minimal at 512MB though there is a microSD expansion slot
• No multi-touch support exists in Android at present
• No 3.5mm headphone jack means an adaptor must be used for third party earphones
• No DivX/AVI video support
• No support for lossless music
• Android requires users to have a Gmail account (though enforced, in itself not a bad thing)

Apple iPod shuffle (3rd Generation)

Apple’s smallest ever MP3 player is also possibly its most controversial – and this is why…

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: the Rules

Just the Bad Points Review: iPod shuffle (3rd Generation)

• Removal of on-player controls renders your existing third party earphones/headphones useless without cost of a separate adaptor
• Positioning of inline controls on the new earphones is just below the chin, not ideal during exercise
• Positioning of inline controls on adaptor too low with existing third party earphones
• Clip and on-player controls of its predecessor meant you could position them wherever convenient
• Reduced battery life (10 hours compared to 12 hours on 2nd generation shuffle)
• No display unlike all major rivals in its price range
• No track selection functionlity
• No FM tuner as on rivals
• No voice recorder as on rivals
• VoiceOver text-to-speech prone to mispronunciation
• Heralded minimalist design is surely just an aluminium coated memory key
• Improved 4GB storage still only half that available on some rivals
• Requires new iTunes download
• Were adding 5mm to its height, dropping 10mm in width, 2mm in depth and 5 grams in weight from shuffle 2G worth all this?
• Price (£59) is a lot more than an 8GB Sansa Clip (£39) which also has a display, FM tuner, voice recorder, track, album, artist and playlist selection, 15 hours of battery life and drag and drop content

Philips 21:9 Cinema HDTV

It’s perhaps the most radical development in home television since High Definition and Widescreen, Philips’ ground breaking 21:9 ‘Cinema’ promises to bring true cinema aspect ratios to our living rooms. Yet amongst all this excitement what are the reasons to be cautious?

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: the Rules

Just the Bad Points Review: Philips 21:9 Cinema

• While pixel mapping does support 16:9, 4:3 content inevitably has very thick vertical bars
• 21:9 name is mathematical approximation which may just further confuse public
• Will the industry support it? Currently only 60 per cent of DVDs and Blu-rays have a 21:9 mode
• At 20cm deep it’s not particularly slim
• Not LED backlit, it’s limited to CCFL
• 56in is only size on offer for now
• Ambilight Spectra implementation is sadly only three sided, not four
• Asking Price (4,000 euros)
• Launch not until June (time to save up?!)
• Rivals are expected to follow suit with 21:9 models of their own, so is it better to wait?
• Is it rarely wise to buy the first generation of anything…

Looking for more? My Philips 21:9 Cinema preview can be found at my usual TrustedReviews stomping ground.

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