Category: Technology

I was reading Eddie Shin’s blog post about the HDTV window and though about how this technology makes use of other available consumer goods.  I realize that was hardly the point of the original post that Eddie wrote, but the post got me thinking about how this HDTV window relies on other technology.

To quickly summarize the video, the window is simply 2 HDTV screens (or I suppose it could work with 1 or a billion of them) that are rigged to show footage from various locations asides from what is normally outside your house.  This means a change of scenery whenever you feel like it, you can look at the mountains when you wake up or the slums of downtown, it doesn’t really matter.  The magic of the device comes from head tracking technology that looks at where your head is in relation to the window to project a different image at any point in time.  This means that the screens will behave more like a window, where if you move from side to side, you get a different “view”, maybe seeing further left, or seeing a little less of the scenery.  An ordinary TV on the other hand just displays a flat image, much like a poster on a wall.  No matter what angle you look at it, it is the same image.

I was reading Nelson Chan’s post about the HP Slate 500 that was released in late October and how it compares with the iPad.  In his post, he pointed out that the HP Slate 500 should be, according to the specifications, superior to the iPad, and yet it is doomed to fail in comparison to Apple’s infinitely more successful iPad.  He states that this is because of the affective attitude towards Apple as well as the HP Slate’s target market.

The Nook Color was announced a short while ago.  As some of you may or may not know, the Nook is Barnes and Noble’s eReader device and it is currently one of the bigger market share holders.

The original Nook had an advantage over other readers with a small color touchpad at the bottom for navigation.  I suppose with the Nook Color, they decided to go all the way with their idea.

The eReader market is still in the introduction or growth stage of the product life cycle as it is only recently starting to pick up speed with the Kindle 3 leading the way.  The entire eReader market is based around their innovative screen using eInk technology which has no glare, no backlight, and mimics pages in a paperback book.  Amazon, being the pioneer of the industry with the original Kindle has slowly positioned these products to be solely for reading despite its ability to pull up pictures, listen to music and even browse the web.  It differentiates itself from the tablet or handheld device market by heavily marketing the advantages of eInk for reading.  You can read pages in direct sunlight without any glare, the screen is extremely crisp, etc.  However, there are several key problems with eInk technology.

Over the last week I made a lot of purchases on my iPod Touch that I would never have made in any store.  I can’t help but blame the twitchy finger over a simplified checkout process.  The App Store for the iPod is probably the best example of impulse purchases.  We have fairly low prices for things that are convenient and probably not worth a lot, and the checkout procedure has been dumbed down to a single yes or no prompt.  After that it connects straight through your credit card, it activates immediately and you have your application sitting there on your device.

The worst part is that it doesn’t even stop there!  You open your app and it is filled with ads, with one additional payment of maybe fifty cents, the device is unlocked to be ad free.  Two months later, they may scrap the project and start again.  I suppose it comes fairly cheap as most apps will total under $5, but it adds up surprisingly fast.  With everything streamlined in such a fashion, customers such as myself don’t focus on the decision making process and skip straight to checkout, only post purchase do I regret buying.

It’s actually quite interesting to see that a lot of digital download services are taking this route.  We have the app store for the iPod, Playstation Network for the PSP or PS3, even dedicated eReader devices will let you purchase a book at a click of a button.  However, one has to wonder how this affects the quality of the goods.  This tactic will only work for cheap items, which makes it significantly harder to fill the catalog with pricier premium items later on.