CrunchGear |  |
- Windows 8 Is Retina-Ready
- RIM Officializes Stance Against Jailbreaking
- Fly Or Die: The New iPad
- HP Combines Printers And PC Divisions Into The Printing and Personal Systems Group
| Posted: 21 Mar 2012 07:51 PM PDT  All the talk these days is of the new iPad and its magical screen. Apple isn’t the only one who can do that, you know. In fact, most display makers are looking forward to post-HD resolutions as one of the big selling points of the next generation of displays. Other tablets are already approaching iPad levels of pixel density and it would be foolish of the likes of Google and Microsoft not to be planning for it. Fortunately, Microsoft is well aware of the trend and has plans in place for dealing with pixel-dense displays (or “Retina” to the vulgar). The specifics are laid out with no quarter given to laymen in this post at Building Windows 8. The gist is that they have analyzed the expected range of display sizes and resolutions, and have identified a sort of “Goldilocks Zone” for the three general classes of resolutions: standard, HD, and quad-XGA (2560×1440). Inside this zone, text and UI elements aren’t blown up to cartoonish proportions or shrunk down to a size that’s frustrating to touch. In the first case, buttons and text will be shown with no scaling. In the second case, they’ll be 140% normal size (i.e. elements 100 pixels wide will become 140), and in the third, 180%. Fifty and 100 percent increases apparently were not convenient to the Windows 8 team, though whether they decided on these numbers because of, say, certain sub-pixel scaling methods, or because 50 and 100 were too big, it is not known. The alternative is a resolution-independent continual resize that would render every button and character the same size regardless of the size or resolution of the display. Unfortunately, the infrastructure is simply not in place for that: the way text is stored and rendered, the size and restrictions of web content, and much more prevent this more advanced solution. It’s on the way, but for now these scaling milestones will have to do. The author of the post, Microsoft UX team member David Washington, admits that high-density screens make many familiar UI elements, such as pulldown menus and small close boxes, “increasingly burdensome.” A new ecosystem of gestures and visual elements will succeed them, presumably — Metro, for instance. Lastly, Windows 8 thoughtfully includes native support for the SVG filetype as a development asset, so you can build good-looking scaling into your app more easily than with multiple or high-resolution bitmap images. How easy it will actually be to build for what is certain to be an incredibly diverse hardware ecosystem, we’ll soon find out. The iPad (which gets a mention in the post as well) currently has the best screen on the market, but that’s an advantage that likely won’t last out the year. Whether Windows 8 and its apps will utilize equally well the promise of high pixel-density screens is yet to be determined, but it’s good to see the future of personal displays and devices being planned for and executed on by the majors.
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| RIM Officializes Stance Against Jailbreaking Posted: 21 Mar 2012 02:30 PM PDT  Jailbreaking, a term that has come to encompass several practices but generally refers to a user obtaining root access on their device, is controversial in a strange way. Companies like Apple and Nintendo hate it, and most users don’t care about it. Yet it’s constantly in the news because it is, in fact, a philosophical conflict. RIM has posted an official response to the habit of jailbreaking BlackBerry devices, particularly PlayBooks, though the post doesn’t mention the product by name. Probably because it would be hard to argue against users creating functionality for the device that should have existed there in the first place. It’s really not a bad or hostile post; penned by BlackBerry Security Incident Response Team Director Adrian Stone (his business cards are extra-large), it’s really more of an assurance that RIM is aware of and responding to the fact that root access is being sought and acquired. As much as users would like to say that a company should be embracing jailbreakers (Microsoft is probably the closest big company to this ideal right now with WP7 and Kinect), it does make sense for a company like RIM, which prides itself on its ostensibly impregnable communications infrastructure, to assure its customers that it’s not going to let a few code monkeys destabilize the whole platform. Yet considering the painfully incomplete state in which the PlayBook shipped, RIM might do well to consider the early adopters and hackers as their most loyal and dedicated customers. Apple doesn’t have that dubious luxury, so it can take an adversarial stance, but RIM should be patting these guys on the back — if for no other reason than that many of them paid full price for a device that they have since had to offload at bargain-bin prices. It’s a prickly position they’re in, but embracing hackers could be perceived as the security-savvy thing to do. As it is, they’re essentially acknowledging that they will constantly be playing catch-up, when they could be saying they’re proactively addressing the security concerns, the way Google does with Chrome’s exploit bounty.
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| Posted: 21 Mar 2012 11:00 AM PDT  iPad, iPad, iPad. What else is there to say? You already know the Retina display is amazing. You know the camera’s been improved and that that little A5X chip is super snappy. You know that the latest version of iOS supports Japanese Siri and voice transcription. You know three million iPads were sold in the first three days they were available, and that Apple is expected to sell 66 million before the end of 2012. What you don’t know, however, is what John and I think of the new iPad. The decision left us torn, to be quite honest. I think this may be the first ever circumstantial Fly or Die, because whether or not you should get the new iPad all depends on who you are and what you own. We both landed on the idea that if you have an iPad 2, wait for the next model. If you’re still tablet free, the new iPad is exactly what you want.
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| HP Combines Printers And PC Divisions Into The Printing and Personal Systems Group Posted: 21 Mar 2012 06:43 AM PDT  HP announced today that the two of the company’s largest divisions will be combined into one, if you will, super division. The Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) and Personal Systems Group (PSG) are joining together to be called The Printing and Personal Systems Group. This is a long time coming. As the press release mentions, the driving force behind the change is to improve performance and increase profits. Both groups are suffering from the move to the post-PC era. HP almost spun off the PSG in the middle of 2011 and printer and ink sales are dipping down. The two groups are separately vulnerable, but together, they can pool resources and hopefully survive in this brave new world. The new group will be lead by Todd Bradley, the former executive vice president of PSG. Vyomesh Joshi, the executive vice president of IPG, is retiring from a 31-year stay at HP. "This combination will bring together two businesses where HP has established global leadership," said Meg Whitman, CEO of HP in a released statement today. "By providing the best in customer-focused innovation and operational efficiency, we believe we will create a winning scenario for customers, partners and shareholders." The streamlining strategy will no doubt cost some people their jobs. Both former groups within HP were massive entities, each employing engineers to support staff. There are probably a good amount of redundant positions in the new group. The two teams will likely employ each other’s best practices and designs. Hopefully that doesn’t mean selling massively-overpriced proprietary PC parts in the same fashion as printer ink — because, you know, printer ink is big business.
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