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- Hardware Start-Ups: Join Us In Hardware Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt NY
- HTC One S Review: I Give It A Fly
- Cyberpunks Rejoice: Kickstarter Project Aims To Resurrect Shadowrun
- Book Excerpt: Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks
| Hardware Start-Ups: Join Us In Hardware Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt NY Posted: 28 Apr 2012 05:30 PM PDT  TechCrunch Disrupt is all about start-ups but we often give short shrift to hardware-based companies. Well, that’s about to change because we’re now running Hardware Alley, a one day exhibition of some of the coolest hardware start-ups in NY and beyond. Running a Kickstarter project? Building a better mousetrap? Creating something cool out of scrap metal and wires? Register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get admission on the last day of Disrupt, May 23, a table to show off your goods, and access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you. Email Matt Burns (matt@techcrunch.com) with the subject of “I Want To Be In Hardware Alley” for more pricing and more information. He also likes cats gifs. There is a limited amount of space so hit him up quickly.
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| HTC One S Review: I Give It A Fly Posted: 28 Apr 2012 02:30 PM PDT  Short VersionDespite the fact that there’s no real wow factor here, it would be entirely unfair to say that HTC’s One S isn’t a great phone. It is. The hardware is some of the best I’ve seen in a long time, Sense 4 is quite nice albeit a touch heavy for my taste, and the specs are right in line with what we’re seeing on the market today. Truth be told, anyone at T-Mobile would be lucky to have one. S. (Lawl.) Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Long VersionHardware/Design: As I’ve said twice already, I’m truly impressed with this hardware. It sports an aluminum unibody frame, with a soft-touch finish. The back fades from a lighter to a darker grey, and when all is said and done, it’s a stunning device. Android phones these days are so plastic-y, too light to feel premium, and seem to be thrown together. However, it’s clear with the One S that HTC spent time on design and build quality. The phone is super thin with a .37-inch waistline and weighs in at just 4.22 ounces. I usually don’t spend a lot of time talking about weight and dimensions because most phones are actually quite similar in that respect, but HTC hit the nail right on the head with the One S. Here’s why: if a phone is too thin, and thus too light, it begins to feel cheap — especially when it’s made entirely from plastic. Since the One S is made of aluminum, it’s able to maintain a thin profile while still having a balanced, solid heft to it. This allows the phone to feel way more high-end than most of its competition. The phone is relatively flat on both the front and back, though all the corners and edges are slightly rounded. As I said, it has a beautiful design and solid hardware. The camera sits square on the back of the phone and sports a nice little blue trim to add a little style to a rather grey device. If you like a pop of color, you’ll surely appreciate the detail. Along the left edge you’ll find an MHL-style micro-USB port, which also doubles as HDMI out, and on the right edge you’ll find the volume rocker. A 3.5mm headphone jack and the lock button share space on the top edge of the phone. Software: The HTC One S runs Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich, though you’d be hard-pressed to recognize it. Sense is one of the heaviest OEM skins on the market, and it completely dominates the phone. That said, Sense is actually a pretty beautiful UI. Sense 3 and all of its iterations was way too much. 3D animations abounded, frills and flourishes were everywhere, and most of it was entirely arbitrary. Much of that has been cleaned up to actually serve a purpose. See, as John and I mentioned in our Fly or Die episode with the One S, Android has become a platform that pumps out phones from hundreds of vendors that ultimately look like “just another Android phone.” The skins become critical to manufacturers in terms of differentiation, but they also have to be careful to leave Android alone in many respects. Android fans love Android, not Sense or TouchWiz or whatever else. Still, I think HTC did a good job of reigning in all the creativity and letting Sense be useful rather than overly beautiful. The camera app is quite wonderful, which I’ll discuss more in a second, and the widgets provided make it easy to customize the One S to suit you specifically. I’m using a pretty bad ass analog clock right now on my main homescreen that I’m quite proud to show off. Camera: The One S camera is quite capable. In fact, you’ll probably really like the images you capture with it. At the same time, I wouldn’t say the camera is all that good at keepin’ it real, if you know what I mean. Colors seem to be saturated and brightened to make images more beautiful, especially yellows and reds. If you take a look at the comparison shot below, you’ll notice that the iPhone 4S makes my food look a little bland. (It’s delicious, in case you’re wondering.) But when I hold both phones up next to the food, the iPhone 4S clearly captured reality way better than the One S. In terms of software, the Sense camera app may be my favorite of all the Android phone makers’ camera software variations. It has a variety of filters that are built right in to the app, and I’d say some of them (like Vintage) rival those of Instagram. There are also plenty of settings for ISO, White Balance, etc. Comparison shot between the One S (left) and the iPhone 4S (right): Display: I have very few complaints when it comes to the One S display. At 4.3-inches, it’s absolutely the perfect size to be comfortable in the hand while maintaining a nice pixel density. qHD — or 960xb540 — is perfectly acceptable on a 4.3-inch display. And the Super AMOLED quality only adds to that. You really don’t notice any pixel-to-pixel differentiation, and images and videos look great. I did notice that when the phone fires up, there’s a small, rectangular block on the top right of the phone where the screen displays that the software is loading up. It looks like any other progress bar you’ve seen before, but when the progress bar disappears that little block of pixels is much whiter than the rest of the start-up screen. This is a minimal, if not entirely unimportant, issue. It makes no difference whatsoever, as that same block doesn’t show any weird coloration or pixelation when the phone is turned on and working. Performance: Wow! The One S has tested better than the Note, the Droid 4 and the LG Spectrum in both Browsermark and Quadrant. Quadrant tests everything from the CPU to the memory to the graphics, and while all three of the aforementioned Android phones stayed well below the 3,000 mark, the One S scored an impressive 4,371. Same story applies in the browser-based Browsermark test. The Spectrum, Droid 4, and the Note all scored below 60,000, while the One S hit 100,662. I’m totally impressed, but not by the numbers. True, there’s a general lag that comes along with Android, especially in the browser. Pinch-to-zoom and scrolling simply aren’t as smooth as they are on iOS, or even on Windows Phone for that matter, even if it’s minimally. But the One S felt more frictionless than I’m used to on Android, and I never experienced a freeze of any kind. It’s a nice change from most Android reviews. Speed test was a bit of a different story. Of course, in different parts of the city, I had my highs and lows in terms of a speedy network. But during testing Speedtest only saw an average of 2.11Mbps down and .73Mbps up. Battery: I’m pretty impressed with the One S battery. Around the mid-way point of testing I had a bad feeling. The phone displayed about a quarter of juice in the little battery icon, but it lasted another two hours or so. I’m thinking the icon itself is off, to be honest with you. Our testing includes a program that keeps the phone’s display on at all times, while Google is constantly performing an image search, one after the other. It’s an intense test, and at any point I can hop in and play a game, browse the web, send a text, make a call, etc. All in all, the One S lasted 4 hours and 51 minutes. T-Mobile 4G was on the entire time. To be honest, the phone got a bit warm during the battery test, but it didn’t slow things down or create a lag by any means. Plus, you’re probably not as much of a power user as our battery test is. In real world scenarios, the One S should surely stick with you all day. To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes. Head-To-Head With The One X And iPhone 4S:
Hands-On Video: Fly or DieConclusionAs I expressed during Fly or Die, I think the One S will owe a lot of its success to its carrier. T-Mobile is a fine operator and I applaud the company for trying to rebrand and build up its selection. But without any competition from the iPhone, the One S gets a bit of a freebie. It’s a fine handset, but it has no real wow factor, as I’ve mentioned over and over. The Samsung Galaxy Note has its massive screen and an S-Pen (and might actually compete with the One S on T-Mo shelves), the Droid 4 has its superior physical keyboard, and the Lumia 900 (which also might be T-Mobile-bound) has Windows Phone. The One S has none of that — it’s just another Android phone. But that’s ok, because it’s an excellent Android phone. It has all the right dimensions, a comfortable weight, a premium feel in the hand, and a stunning design. It’s rather quick for an Android phone, and comes loaded with tons of fun software. I give it a fly. Check out all of our One S review posts here.
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| Cyberpunks Rejoice: Kickstarter Project Aims To Resurrect Shadowrun Posted: 28 Apr 2012 10:46 AM PDT  If you spent any time in high school thinking about ley lines and bio-implants, you were probably a Shadowrun player. The game, which petered out after a disastrous run as a PC/Xbox game in 2007, brought the high-tech of William Gibson to the magical realms of Mr. Gygax. It was, in short, pretty cool. A Kickstarter project aims to bring back all that fun in video game form, adding lots of what you missed about Shadowrun back to the PC. This new version will be a RPG involving the Shadowrun world complete with various character types – elves, samurai, humans – and, although this is discouraged, deals with dragons. $15 gets you a copy of the game while $60 gets you a t-shirt and some in-game perks. Pledge $10,000 and the real magic happens: Previous rewards + Mike Mulvihill, who led Shadowrun game development at FASA Corp., will COME TO YOUR TOWN TO RUN A TABLETOP GAME OF SHADOWRUN FOR YOU AND FIVE OF YOUR FRIENDS. (He’ll even buy some snacks.) You can read about the game here or fund it over at Kickstarter. The game has already gained pledges of $2 million on a $400,000 goal, so there’s a good chance it will get made.
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| Book Excerpt: Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks Posted: 28 Apr 2012 06:45 AM PDT  This is an excerpt from Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks, a blueprint for getting healthy in a connected world. In this section, he outlines the typical day for someone who wants to get healthy without gym memberships, expensive diet plans, and odd tactics. And Now for Something Completely Different It was a good sleep; you went to bed just after nine o'clock after having a snack consisting of coconut milk blended with blueberries and a little whey powder. You're already savvy about getting enough REM sleep, but now you aim to bump up your deep sleep, or restorative NREM. You might even check out the wave chart your Zeo produced. The first thing you do is pour a cup of black tea or coffee and go outside to this pool of sunlight you've noticed out your window. You bask and reflect in it for a minute, perhaps followed by a few Tai Chi moves, push-ups on the lawn, or pull-ups on the jungle gym across the street from your apartment. You sip a bit more coffee and return to your living space to get ready for the commute. Technically speaking, as you gazed up into the sky and basked in that sun, the light rays touched your retinas and were transduced by the hypothalamus and pineal gland in your brain, which has now helped set your circadian rhythms for the day. Mindfulness The sun you got wasn't much, not like spending the morning on the beach in the British Virgin Islands (gotta do that someday…), but it had the effect of lightening your mood, clearing your head, and kick-starting the day. You've sent the message to your body and your brain, "It's morning and I'm well rested and ready to go." Every other day you stop at an intervening fitness facility to lift a few weights or do a 300-yard swim interspersed with a handful of 25-yard sprints—nothing too much, but today you're biking to the train station, where they've thoughtfully included a place to lock your rig. The train ride into the center of the city (Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal; Zurich, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, London, Sydney, Wellington, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto…) takes 35 minutes, and you stand for most of it, just because it feels better. Geek Gear Gathering data is not useless when you act upon it. The tool for adding up your daily motion mileage works with an odd "tail wagging the dog" effect; you seem to move more when you're wearing it. Further, you never really knew that ordinary movement could equate to that much mileage during the day. More than six miles sometimes, even though your walks were broken up into several smallish ones. Plodding along on a treadmill just isn't necessary anymore. You love looking at the stats at the end of the day. Just keep moving, you say to yourself. Seek the sun. Hard-Boiled Eggs to Go You've got a little plastic bag in your backpack containing the rest of the salmon, a mixture of almonds and walnuts, an apple, and a square of 85% high-cacao chocolate. In a pinch, there's a good salad place near work. It only took a couple of weeks not to miss that bagel anymore, and especially all that crappy margarine (you go for really yellow butter now)—the sluggishness and lack of satiety it seemed to leave you with, and the way it seemed to take half the morning to digest it and the donut and scone you piled on top of it. Hopping off the train, you walk about 30 minutes the rest of the way to work, on the sunny side of the street, even though you could have dipped into the subway or hopped on a bus. Dude, Take the Stairs You take the stairs two at a time, simply because the heft in your upper leg feels good. Your heart rate gets going, but not that much; you've noticed that improvement over the months. OCD About Health About every hour or 90 minutes during the day, you head down those stairs again and back outside into the sun. When you get blocked on a sticky piece of code or logical problem, this brisk walk helps almost every time. Often, you experience casual moments outside that you always will remember and never would have experienced if you'd stayed in your cubicle all day, like that majestic hawk that hovered in the blue sky before it alighted on the ledge of a distant building. You tried to estimate its wingspan as it hung frozen in the cerulean blue. Hey, He Likes Me! You take longer walks sometimes in the city, until you find yourself drifting around with a relaxed aimlessness, kind of like Owen Wilson in the movie Midnight in Paris. You have the usual "meetings" (the quotation marks question their purposefulness) in the mid-morning and afternoon. You stand during both, and it seems to have a contagious effect. Two other people stood up during the second meeting, and you could have sworn both confabs went a little faster. You're beginning to get a rep as "that healthy guy" around the office. Knock Off Some Bench Presses Your workouts almost never exceed that length of time. When they do, horsing around would be a better way to describe them than workouts or training sessions: playing catch using a winged Nerf football with your son or a friend, or gliding along a country road on a mountain bike. It All Adds Up to Something Good The intent of the last assemblage of paragraphs wasn't to get all vainglorious and virtuous about healthy lifestyles—although it was fun to write—as much as to paint a narrative about surviving the Digital Age and emerging from your days mostly unscathed (maybe an occasional bruised ego, but it comes with the territory, right?). This chapter has introduced some basic fitness concepts that the rest of the book will cover in sometimes extensive detail: • Living in the Digital Age, where culture, data, and networks never sleep, but still incorporating the sun, lots of walking, and outdoor experiences— living closer to the imperatives of our preloaded software (our very deep past). • The benefits of whole, non-processed, real food—and even a bit of "intermittent" fasting every week. • The advantages of incorporating ordinary exercise regimes like stair climbing, lengthy, aimless walking (no matter how cold it is!), sprints, jumps, and hill-climbing extemporaneously, when you can. • Using useful tracking tools and personal metrics to augment your fitness, share your progress with friends, help others work through some physical glitches or sleep issues, or for just plain time-wasting fun (when you have that time, that is). • The importance of sleep and de-stressing; they could save your life. • The advantages of other lifestyle tactics like freezing swims, saunas, and fasting, not to mention moderate exercise and a good drink now and then. These are examples of "hormesis," or good stress (see Chapter 11). Unlike many faddish weight-loss and fitness schemes, the changes just described do not involve any expensive program or club fees, or drastic dietary changes (like "zero carb or fat"), except for the optional purchase of a few fun and useful gadgets or tools when you have a little extra change.
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:09:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 4/29/2012 05:10:00 AM
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