Haibane.info

Month: January 2010

  • Will the Apple tablet be a Kindle killer?

    Apple’s announcement today of it’s new iPad tablet system (alas, not named Newton 2), running iPhone OS and featuring a 10″ multi-touch screen – doesn’t strike me as the Kindle killer that everyone is making it out to be. Yes, it will definitely be an ebook reader and will have licensing agreements with textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and the behemoth book chain Barnes and Noble. But at a price probably around $1000, it will be four times as expensive as the Kindle, and despite the glorious full color multi-touch screen, will still not be as easy to read as elecctronic ink technology.

    The price point matters – iPhone and iPod dominate their respective segments, but only because they provide tremendous functionality and design at the same price point as their competitors. Meanwhile, Mac computers remain relegated to niche market share, because they are such a poor value. The Mac OS operating system is innovative but for fundamental computing tasks – office work and online – most users are OS agnostic at best (Word is Word; Gmail is Gmail) and biased towards what they know (ie, Windows).

    For the iPad to compete against Kindle – which has a huge marketshare lead and truly is to books what the iPod was to music, despite e-readers from Sony being around for years – it needs to compete on price and functionality. And there’s no way that the average person is going to be willing to read a 400-page book on an LCD screen.

    I think Apple knows this, which is why it is courting the textbook market, the gaming market, and also putting iPhone OS on the device to keep it compatible with the universe of apps from the App Store. These add value to the device in the sense that they keep it a general-task device and not a single-purpose one. But in doing so they are competing against their own products – I bought an iPod Touch myself for less than $200 and I can run any app on it that the iPad will, and most are designed for a small screen so what’s the advantage of 10 inches? And why pay 4x the cost? Conversely why spend $1000 for a iSlate when you can drop a few hundred more and get a full-featured macbook? Or spend the same amount of money and buy a full-featured Windows laptop? Or spend half and get a netbook running Chrome OS, or a new Pine Trail netbook which can play real games like Warcraft?

    Textbooks and other digital documents can certainly be made more innovative and hyperlinked and interactive on the iPad, but that media revolution will not be confined to Apple’s garden. And it’s a guarantee that Kindle v3.0 is going to incorporate color e-ink and a touch interface (though probably not multi-touch). Any new innovations in content delivery and integrating media and text will be just as exploitable by laptops and netbooks in particular.

    And there are amazing new display technologies coming out – including color e-ink and hybrid CD screens, which will let other manufacturers build devices for ebook reading and media consumption at a fraction of the cost of what Apple can. I think that Apple has learned the wrong lesson from it’s success with iPod and iPhone and will end up doing everything poorly rather than a few things well.

    UPDATE: Steve jobs dismisses netbooks, saying a netbook is “not better at anything! It’s just cheaper. But it’s not better at anything.” Shows how little he understands about netbooks. And he claims the iPad’s on-screen virtual keyboard is a “dream to type on” – yeah, right.

  • Does the Ring turn Sauron invisible?

    One Ring to Rule Them All
    The Ring
    On Facebook, one of my friends posed an innocent question:

    How come the ring doesn’t make Sauron invisible?

    Indeed! Out of the mists of Facebook, a truly awesome discussion ensued. I found this reply the most intriguing and erudite:

    The Ring doesn’t actually make someone invisible in the sense we understand the term. It shifts its bearer into the world of the Unseen (which is why it can’t hide Frodo from the Nazgul on Weathertop–they already dwell in the World of the Unseen). As a former Maia, Sauron simultaneously dwells in Middle-earth and the realm of the Unseen–so the Ring would not make him invisible.

    Surely we haibane can contribute to this critical topic. What say you all? Agree or disagree with the theory above?

  • Spider Man 4 dies so that Warcraft may live

    I don’t really care about the news that the Spider Man franchise under Sam Raimi’s hand is over, except for the much more important fact that it frees Raimi to work on the Warcraft movie instead. As Harry says at AICN,

    I feel confident in saying that the next film we’ll see from Raimi is going to be WARCRAFT… which after AVATAR, the concept of world building that particular universe could be astonishing – especially in 3D – especially after what Cameron just unleashed upon the globe. World creating Science Fiction & Fantasy… done by visionary filmmakers … well, it is a premium. We got THE HOBBIT coming, looks like an AVATAR 2… but the word I hear is that today – the phone lines were burning between a certain legendary locale and Raimi’s folks about firing up the furnaces to forge the weapons of war.

    Some time in the next few months, I expect progress. I’ve heard that Robert Rodat (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, THE PATRIOT) has put together one helluva script.

    A movie technology arms race between Jackson, Cameron and Raimi with the Hobbit, Avatar and Warcraft franchises is going to be one fun hell of a ride.

    Just look at this again – click on it, zoom in, and really look at it – and imagine it on the big screen, alive:

    WarCraftArtSmall.jpg

  • Cowboy Bebop

    Just started Cowboy Bebop via Netflix. It’s amazing. It’s clear how Firefly was inspired by this in so many ways. Theres not much to say at this point but it’s just spectacular on every axis – animation, story, characters. It’s really rare to see a science fiction treatment based in the Solar System and the terraformed moons and planets provide a huge canvas for the story. And yet you still have those 2001: Space Odyssey moments in the blackness and emptiness of space as well. The last episode I just watched even had a taste of Alien. It’s not all knockoffs but a really fresh take on these kinds of stories. Absolutely brilliant.

  • Does Pixar have a gender problem?

    This argument by blogger Caitlin says yes. But I find it unconvincing, because frankly if you zoom out to animated storytelling as a whole, you realize that there’s acually a shortage of normal male characters, not female. Disney is the perfect counterexample – apart from Aladdin, there isn’t a single boy character that is worthy of role model or morality model status. You just have a succession of generic princes and eye candy. Beauty and the Beast was just the inversion of Aladdin, with Belle playing Aladdin’s role and the Beast equivalent to Jasmine (in terms of plot relevance and narrative focus).

    In fact Pixar explicitly set out to rectify that imbalance and I think that there’s a diversity on the types of male characters that we’ve seen in their films. Caitlin’s list is very helpful in summarizing them, and I think it’s clear that the male characters in these stories are all of different types. But more to the point, Pixar movies aren’t just about individuals, but their relationships, in a way that Disney movies never were. Toy Story and Monsters, Inc were about male friendship, Bug’s Life about a man and his role in society, Finding Nemo about a father and son, UP about youth and ageing, The Incredibles simultaneously about a man and his family, and a man and his wife (and I think Caitlin gives Helen really short-shrift here). Cars is really a paean to a lifestyle, and the NASCAR life is just a metaphor for our fast-paced existence whereas life in Radiator Springs represents that essence that gets left behind; in that context it was reasonable for McQueen to be male and Sally to be female because these are symbolic roles. I hated Ratatouille. As for WALL-E, it was a simple love story, beauty and the beast (or geek, rather) all over again and again the gender roles were absolutely appropriate here.

    I’ll also note that the one glaring omission on the Pixar male relationship lineup was a story about brothers, but Disney’s Brother Bear nailed that so perfectly that I don’t think we ever need to see another movie on that topic again.

    The bottom line is that there’s a body of work here that does indeed have a gender focus, but that’s valuable. It doesnt take away from the enjoyment of these movies by little girls – of which I have two. As a male myself I feel that in general, female relationships are always the focus far more than make ones – usually its female characters who are better defined and have the more interesting issues and relatonships.

    My advice to Caitlin is that if you want to go looking for strong female characters, then look at anime, particularly Miyazaki. I cant really think of a memorable male anime character at all. Well, maybe a few – Spike from Cowboy Bebop, the brothers from Fullmetal Alchemist, and Light from Death Note. But these are exceptions to teh rule – mahou shoujo rules. Haibane, Dreamers, Sugar, anyone? Again, I have two girls of my own 🙂

  • Netflix coming to Wii

    This was expected, and welcome news indeed: Netflix streaming is coming to the Wii in March.

    Screw the Roku or popbox, man, between my DVD player and Wii I’ve got 95% of my bases covered now. And the Wii’s lack of HD support isn’t a big deal – for streaming, standard-def is actually better anyway, and most TV is still standard def anyway.

    I think the console makers need to realize that they could basically swallow the market share of devices like Roku, Boxee, popbox, etc whole just by adding software support for video formats, a USB port, and WiFi to their next generation consoles.

    I just logged into my netflix acct and reserved my Netflix Wii disc which unlocks the streaming. Ships automatically to my address! one click.

  • a solution to the Leno vs Conan problem

    as regards to the arcane conflict over at NBC about where to stick Leno and how to stiff Conan, ably summarized by the latter in his own words here (hey Conan, apology accepted, btw), I offer a humble solution in all earnestness that should preserve egos, reputations, and ratings alike. May it be so.

    (disclosure – I dont really watch late-night TV. Warcraft, anime, etc…)

  • anime version of Dante’s Inferno

    AICN has some trailers of the anime version of Dante’s Inferno coming out in a couple of weeks. They provide some minimal detail, but its enough to raise my interest:

    On February 9th, Anchor Bay will be releasing Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic on Blu-ray and DVD. The anthology, with work from and Production IG (Kill Bill animated sequence), Dongwoo (Batman: Gotham Knight), Manglobe (Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo), JM Animation (“Avatar: The Last Airbender”), tie-ins to EA’s upcoming Divine Comedy inspired action-adventure game.

    Interesting lineage. The Batmanime was in my opinion pretty uneven (I hated the Tekkon Kinkreet animation style used in part of it). But I *loved* Samurai Champloo‘s style (even though I never got around to doing a full review after I finished it).

  • Boxee and Popbox gunning for Roku

    I’ve prevously mentioned the Roku digital player as a game changer for home entertainment, but haven’t actually bought one yet. It looks now like there’s some serious competition to Roku, which is of course a good thing. The first is Boxee, which has a software-only variant you download to yor PC and also actual hardware slated for release this year. Like Roku, the Boxee box has simple connections for your TV, has built-in wifi, and USB for external drives. Boxee also has an SD card slot and intriguingly, a full QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote. It isn’t clear if Boxee supports Netflix or the Amazon video store, but unfortunately Boxee was forced to yank Hulu support recently. Boxee is expected to cost about $200, which about twice what Roku costs.

    The other challenger to Roku is popbox, which is an evolution of the Popcorn Hour box which Nick has been using (and promising to blog about for ages! *nudge* *nudge*). The popbox looks to be a simpler deice than Popcorn Hour’s flagship model the C-200, and promises support for pretty much every file format out there (including MKV, which doesn’t seem to be supported by Roku). Popbox will support netflix, and also crunchy roll which pretty much screams “otaku buy me!” – and its price is more comparable to Roku at $129 (available in March). The only downside is that it doesn’t come with wifi included, you have to shell out a little for that.

    So, whats a prospective consumer like me to do? The ideal device for me would be to support every possible format (like popbox), built-in wifi (like boxee and roku), and be priced no higher than $150. And of course netflix support is the key. Its worth noting that both popbox and boxee also will have app development platforms so presumably someone could add support for other services. I also imagine that Roku isn’t going to sit back withouut any competitive response; if Roku could add MKV support then I’d probably still favor it over these other more featured, but more complicated and expensive, options. That has to be a simple firmware or software update, I imagine.

    Regardless, it’s great to see how this market is coming along. With the death of disc imminent, it’s where the future is. You can easily imagine someone taking a BD player and adding a Roku to it and making a complete convergence device. In fact, what if Nintendo were to do that with Wii v2.0 – have it be a BD player like the PS3 and also support all these features in software? Given all the hype about mobile device convergence (camera+phone+PDA+apps) it makes sense that we would see a trend towards convergence in our living rooms. Theres no reason I should have to have a separate device for DVDs, games, and digital entertainment. The PS3 is closest to this now, in fact – but its expense still sets it apart. A fully converged device as I describe above, my hypothetical Wii 2.0, shoudl be priced no higher than $300 to really make inroads.

    Related: article on Popbox at Electronista