Google vs. Apple - The Battle for My Living Room?

GoogleTV is Google's entry into the living room. Let's see if google can dethrone apple from another area that they have..... wait a second, An area of media where apple doesn't have the upper hand already? This could get real interesting.

I am personally an apple fan. I also love technology. I think The fact that I love apple products so much is because that company seems to put more care into what they manufacture than any other company in the market. Everything is polished, and clean. The industry even holds each apple product as a comparison to what all other products strive to be like in their chosen field. For the last 12 years apple has been the leader for innovation in pretty much every division of technology that it touches.

However when apple released the AppleTV in 2007, it was being sold as a product to connect your living room to the large digital library people had been massing since the release of the iTunes store. The product didn't do so well for a lot of reasons. Mainly because it was not really all that compelling at it's price point. Plus iTunes didn't have any HD content to stream to a device that also could not display 1080P. So the device was immediately labeled as a "hobby". And apple has referred to it as such ever since. The device received an upgrade a little later boosting it's video output resolution and a view more things hardware and software wise, but the product remained mostly the same dull box.

With google releasing this new platform for their GoogleTV apple seriously needs to take those old AppleTV ideas out of storage and start realizing that in order gain control over the living room like they had hoped to do originally, they will need to seriously step their game up. The GTV platform is cool in a lot of ways. It puts the box after the cable box and by doing that allows for the device to aggregate all content available on cable and the Internet to make it all searchable and viewable. Also the fact that they are taking the extra step with it and putting it into new tv sets themselves is really cool for everyone.


I have an ATV right now in the living room. Personally I love what I can do with the device. Granted it is useless unless the owner either is loaded and can afford to purchase everything they want to watch or they steal all their content. I will not divulge which of those describes my situation. One thing they could add to the ATV would be an app store of some kind. What would be cool about this is they already have thousands of developers making thousands of apps for the iPhone and iPad. So if they opened up an app store for the ATV, I can guarantee it would be an over night success just like all of the other platforms they have. I can also see apple having some kind of video subscription service, allowing ATV owners to subscribe much like cable and be able to view all content in the store. Would be interesting, however I can just image the cow the networks would have over the slightest inclination to that idea. Plus they probably would force adds into the videos as well.

In closing since WWDC is only a week or so away, it will be very interesting to see what apple comes up with. I just really hope they update the ATV to compete with the GTV because if they do not then they are basically conceding victory over the living room to google and their new platform.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

360 down to 8?

So I'm playing the new super mario galaxy 2, and I am on a stage where I need to throw fire balls at some boxes so I can clean the area. It was a bonus stage. Anyway while I'm playing it I realized that nintendo seriously fucked up. In my left hand is the nun chuck, which is used for moving around and aiming the fireballs. I noticed that the nun chuck joystick is restricted to 8 degrees of actual movement due to the fact that the joystick is surrounded by an octagon. The reason this is frustrating should be obvious. I am going from 360 degrees of free 3 dimensional movement down to just 8. It is extremely restricting and frustrating.

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Magazine Prices?

So reading on this ipad is amazing. However the price I have to pay is not. I really want to get popular science and time. But both cost $4.99 an issue. AN ISSUE. I mean come on. Give me a years subscription for 30 or something. $4.99 is way to expensive for a magazine issue in my opinion. I was really hoping to be able to read magazines and comics on this device, but now I find myself realizing just how poor I am, lol. Even comics are around 5 dollars. I guess this is how much these things would cost in the real world so it makes sense. However most magazines like popsci have a yearly subscription service for a drastically lower price then it would cost to purchase each in the store. I really hope they bring that kind of service to the app store, because then I will actualy start buying magazines. As for comics, I really want marvel to bring their online service price of $59.99 yearly price to view thousands of comics online. Why don't they bring that to the iPad? Clearly it is because people will buy the comics regardless. Overall the whole comic and magazine trend on the iPad is disappointing to me. Hopefully things change in the future.

Update: wired came out and said today that they would be releasing a subscription service in the fall. Let's hope the rest of the magazine companies follow their example.

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Some Thoughts on MobileMe

Now that I have an iPad, iPhone, and two macs I am realizing just how difficult it is to keep all of my data synced together and accurate across all the devices. For instance if I change a calendar date on my iPhone in order to get everything synced to that change, I need to sync my iPhone to my MacBook, then sync it to my iPad and then send the info to the iMac. It might not seem like a big deal, but over time it starts to get really monotonous having to sync and re-sync all these devices manually. This is where MobileMe comes into the picture, it automatically syncs data across all of my devices. Plus the find me feature for the iPhone is really cool. Almost is reason enough to get the service alone. The only bad thing is it cost $99 per year. Kind of a ridiculous price for convenience. I did have the service a while back because I was opted in for a cheaper rate for some reason by apple. So I had it for a year, and I did like it I just really had no use for it at the time. The only real big issue I remember having was the photo sync feature in iPhoto. It almost never worked and when it did it usually resulted in corruption of my files. Now this might be because my iPhoto is continually acting up( I think I may have corrupted a library file or something). But the online viewing experience was phenomenal. I used to put my college photos on the web so my family could view them. But overall I was happy with the service.

It just seems like MobileMe is kind a simple solution to some of the issues that arise while having multiple mobile apple products. It is a good attempt but the service needs to become way more extensive in order to compete with the new droid syncing and streaming services and the new Microsoft kin project. I have hope for the service improving in the future because since apple is selling more ipads then they are selling macs, I think this service is going to become extremely vital to their product line.

Speculation part: rumors have it that apple is planning on releasing a streaming function for iTunes. Now if they add this to MobileMe then that is reason enough for me to buy the service.

Update: i am just going to wait until WWDC to see if they improve the service. i am assuming they are going to since they pretty much need to in order to stay relevant. than i might buy it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad Blogging

Being my first blog post from my brand new iPad I am still getting used to this soft keyboard. It is actually very nice to use. One of my original peeves was the non tactile feeling and sound. Well with the clicking that I have turned on it actually satisfies the sound need. The feeling though is still kind of odd, but is something I have no problem getting used to. The keyboard is very spacious and I make very little mistakes. Since I don't actually use the standered way of typing on a regular keyboard. I usually just stare at the keys anyway, with the soft keyboard I am required to stare at the keyboard. So my typing speed has transferred. Also the auto correct works rather well. More reviews to come soon. I plan on blogging a lot more often now that I have an app that makes it so much easier.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Favorite 20 Albums?

20. The Stranger - Billy Joel

19. Beautiful Lie - 30 Seconds to Mars

18. Boston - Boston

17. Heavier Things - John Mayer

16. Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

15. Beautiful Letdown - Switchfoot

14. Hybrid Theory - Linkin Park

13. A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar - Dashboard Confessional

12. So Much For the Afterglow - Everclear

11. Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine

10. The Sufferer and the Witness - Rise Against

9. Mmhmm - Relient K

8. Narrow Stairs - Death Cab for Cutie

7. The Black Parade - My Chemical Romance

6. Love - Angels & Airwaves

5. Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd

4. Don't You Fake It - Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

3. End of Silence - Red

2. The Battle of Los Angeles - Rage Against the Machine

1. We Don't Need to Whisper - Angels & Airwaves

Windows Terminal?

i am using a public terminal to type this with.

the entire purpose for getting on this windows machine at work is so that i could print off my pay stub. but they have it locked down so i cannot even save a document to the desktop to allow me to email it myself. i would try my flash drive but it is in my locker downstairs and i don't feel like walking all the way down there just so when i try it i am not able to access it. the reason i would need to email it to myself is because there is not a printer connected to either of these terminals because of the simple fact that people would destroy their ink reserves here at the hospital.

there used to be the library here that had printers, that associates could enter using their ID badges. since they renovated it, they have blocked out anyone who is not a Doctor from using the library. apparently the doc's were getting pissed they had to share their library with the other staff from the hospital. i would try and get my pay stubs at home but their website only works in IE, which is beyond stupid. i have a mac and there is not an IE for Macintosh. so i am restricted to a windows machine to check my pay stubs. they don't even allow for FireFox to access their website. what a brilliant idea Promedica web programmer.

so now i have to attempt to connect a printer to my windows partition on my mac just so i can print out a pay stub. kind of lame that the security on these terminals is so extreme. why not just allow for desktop saving of documents, but when the machine logs off it restores to the default empty desktop. this way i at least could email myself the saved HTML of the websites that contain my pay stubs.

i went to put a picture on this post and apparently i am not even allowed to open a new window. how lame is that. also i just found out i cannot create a document in google documents either. i fail to see the reason for those two things to be disallowed.

also, this keyboard fucking blows.

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