What do all those numbers on lenses mean? What’s a “CMOS” sensor? Does the ever-increasing number of megapixels really matter?

In this column, I’ll attempt to answer these questions and more.

Sensors



One area that digital camera makers have been focusing on is sensors. Image sensors are basically chips, ranging in size from your pinky nail to a postage stamp to a poker chip, that capture light and convert it into electrical signals to create a digital image. 


The larger the sensor, the more light it is able to capture, thus allowing for better photos in low light. Think of it as the difference between using a Dixie Cup or a bucket to collect rainwater — the rain, or in this case, the available light, has a better chance of hitting a larger surface. 


Many smartphones have tiny sensors, which is why, even as they boast higher megapixels (more on that below) they still don’t take great photos in low light. A basic point-and-shoot might have a 1/2.3-inch or 1/2.5-inch sensor, while a high-end professional camera will have a full-frame, or giant, sensor.

But there’s a growing, in-between category of advanced compact cameras, ranging from around $300 to $600, that’s getting a boost from better sensor technology. 

For example, Canon’s PowerShot G1 X has a large 1.5-inch sensor –- the largest that’s ever been in a Canon PowerShot model. The popular Sony RX100, which is also a point-and-shoot, has a one-inch sensor. Fujifilm’s new X20 compact camera has a ⅔-inch sensor that’s comparable to the sensors in Fujifilm’s higher-end cameras.


All of these cameras cost around $600 or more, compared with the less expensive Canon G12, Canon S95, Panasonic Lumix LX5 or Nikon Coolpix P7000, which cost between $300 and $400.

The former not only have slightly larger sensors, but also have “CMOS” sensors (pronounced “see moss”). So … what does CMOS mean, you ask?

CMOS stands for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, and over the past few years this type of sensor has been emerging in digital cameras. Another type of sensor you might see in cameras is CCD, or charged-couple device.



One simple way of distinguishing the two is to look at CCD as analog and CMOS as digital. With both, light hits the sensor and the light is converted to electrons. With a CCD sensor, that process is transferred to another part of the camera. But with CMOS, the process happens in the sensor itself. Some camera makers say CMOS sensors allow for speedier functions in other parts of the camera. But each has strengths and weaknesses in different applications.

It’s not just the sensor that determines the overall quality of photos. Aspiring photogs will also want to consider the lens and the camera’s processing power. One camera maker I spoke to used a car analogy to explain this: You can have a great transmission but it’s not going to do much for you if you’ve got a weak engine.



Megapixels

Do megapixels matter? The way some camera (and smartphone) makers talk about megapixels, one might assume that an eight-megapixel compact camera is better than a five-megapixel, a 16-megapixel compact camera is better than the eight-megapixel, and so on. But that’s not necessarily the case.


A new camera that boasts more megapixels may equate to higher-resolution images, but if everything else about the camera — lens, sensor, processor — isn’t as advanced, the addition of more pixels into the same sensor space can actually add noise, or graininess, to photos.



A few professional photographers I consulted agreed that more is not always better when it comes to megapixels. They also said that megapixels really only matter if you plan to print out big, poster-sized images, or if you plan to do a lot of cropping later on.

For many consumers, anywhere from five megapixels to 10 megapixels is plenty. 


Optical Zoom Versus Digital Zoom

One of the most obvious features that compact cameras can lord over smartphones is optical zoom. Smartphones use digital zoom, which digitally magnifies the image on your phone’s screen, resulting in grainy photos. Compact cameras usually use an optical zoom lens that will mechanically zoom to capture a clear, sharp image, even if the subject is a good distance away. 


Camera makers like Nikon, Canon and Samsung have been introducing more “super-zoom” compact cameras, meaning they zoom extra-long distances, ranging from 18x up to 30x. I like to call these neighbor-stalker zooms.

Why? Most experts I spoke with say that a 10x optical zoom is plenty for casual photography. If you’re going to take photos of your kid from way across the soccer field, or you fancy yourself a bird photographer, then you might want a little more zoom.

Lenses



Lenses are probably worthy of an entire column, but for the sake of space, I’ll boil it down to two key things.

When you look at a compact camera with a lot of bells and whistles, you might see different sets of numbers on or around the front of the lens.

One might say something like 6.4 – 25.6 mm or 25 – 100 mm, and the other might say F 1.8 – 4.9. 

The first set of numbers refers to the focal length, or, the camera’s ability to capture subjects, both near and far, in an image. In other words, it tells you how much of the subject you’ll see. The example above is a pretty standard range.



The other set of numbers is the starting aperture, also referred to as the “f-stop.” This indicates how much light is allowed to pass through the lens. This can get even more complicated when you start to look at f-stop as a ratio to focal length. To make it simple: With f-stop, a lower number means brighter pictures. A lens with a higher f-stop means the image will be darker. Many standard point-and-shoots have a starting f-stop of 3.1. But some more advanced cameras might boast a starting point of 2.4 or 1.8.


Manual Controls


With advanced compact cameras, even amateurs who love auto mode might find themselves becoming control freaks. These souped-up cameras offer everything from white balance to shutter speed to ISO control settings.



One feature that has been creeping its way into more consumer cameras is the ability to shoot “raw” photo files — something that pro photographers demand with their cameras, but consumers have had less use for. Raw file options mean that in addition to capturing a standard JPEG image with a scene setting attached — say, “portrait,” or “nighttime” — the camera will capture an unprocessed, uncompressed image at the same time. Be aware: Raw photos are much bigger than JPEGs.

It’s a brave new world in digital photography. For many people, I’m willing to bet that a smartphone camera is still the only camera they need. But for those who want to make the leap to a camera they can grow into, or for DSLR owners looking for a smaller device, there are plenty of good compacts out there with advanced features. A little research — and a little patience — is key.

http://allthingsd.com/20130128/lettrs-tackles-letter-sending-in-the-digital-age/ http://allthingsd.com/20130128/lettrs-tackles-letter-sending-in-the-digital-age/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:00:11 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=289025 I’ve always loved letters, both sending and receiving them. And in the age of email overload, I appreciate letters even more. It just feels more personal when someone takes the time to handwrite a note and find a mailbox to drop it into.

So a new website called Lettrs immediately intrigued me. Lettrs, which officially launched last month, tries to mimic the analog letter-sending process. It lets you send personalized, digital notes on artful stationery to recipients via their email or social networks. You can tag the letters with keywords so they’re searchable later on, and Lettrs will send you an email notification when a letter has been delivered.

Like physical letter correspondence, each digital letter can go to only one person at a time, and the recipient can’t hit “Reply” to write back to you. Instead, he or she has to start a new “lettr” to respond. Lettrs also lets you preserve digital copies of actual letters in an online “shoebox.”

The concept of Lettrs is intriguing. And right now, its services are free. But just as you might not use Evite to send a wedding invitation, I wouldn’t use Lettrs to send, say, a sympathy note to someone.

I also wouldn’t use it to make plans for the near future. I tried planning a group dinner using Lettrs, and no one responded, though friends did respond to emails about the same dinner outing.

There’s also something that feels distinctly low-tech about Lettrs. Currently, there aren’t any mobile apps, which made letter-preserving more complicated. And I encountered some errors in key parts of the letter-sending process.

The main page of the site is littered with interesting public-facing letters that members of the Lettrs community have written.

For example, there were letters addressed to President Obama on Inauguration Day. Someone wrote a letter to the flu, personifying the illness and saying she didn’t like it very much. Another person wrote a letter to Apple, Inc. These Lettrs can be tagged and made searchable.

In the upper-right-hand corner of the page, there are options to write a letter, preserve a letter and explore various virtual places in your own account, whether it’s your kitchen counter (where you receive letters), your shoebox (where you store private letters), or your fridge (where you post letters to the public).

Lettr-writing was easy. I had the option to choose from 21 different Lettr designs, which ranged from modern to classic to playful to romantic. The text styles vary, too. Some look more like natural handwriting, others look like calligraphy.

I wrote a thank-you note to an editor, a letter to my mom telling her I had a great time at the Broadway play we went to last week, and a note to a co-worker, asking about her training for an upcoming road race. After I finished my letters, I selected “Deliver It Now.”

You can deliver a Lettr using a person’s email, Facebook or Twitter name, or you can just post a public letter to the Lettrs website.

Lettrs also plans to introduce physical letter-sending as an option in the spring. This might bring to mind apps like Postagram and Apple’s Cards service, which allow mobile phone users to send physical cards from an app on their smartphones. These range from $3 to $5 per card; Lettrs plans to charge anywhere from $1 to $1,000 for its service.

In total, I delivered more than a dozen digital Lettrs this week. I never got a response from anyone.

It’s entirely possible that some friends and colleagues just don’t like me, but I’m pretty certain that’s not the case here. I believe the lack of response was due to the fact that many ignored the Lettrs notification in their inboxes, or they didn’t understand that they had to sign up to read my Lettr first. Some of them saw the notifications, but balked at signing up.

Also, if a recipient signed up for a Lettrs account using a different email address than the one I sent the Lettr to, they couldn’t see the Lettr. So when I sent notes to co-workers using their work email addresses, if they opted to log in using their personal emails, they wouldn’t get my Lettr.

Lettrs creator Drew Bartkiewicz says the company is working on creating an identity for each user, like a digital P.O. box, that includes all of their email addresses to ensure that users get their Lettrs.

Also, I experienced some bugs when I tried sending a Lettr via social networks. Even after I connected Lettrs to my Facebook account, it kept telling me I wasn’t connected. When I tried to send a Lettr to my co-worker using his Twitter handle, I encountered an error there, too. Bartkiewicz says the company’s tech team is currently looking into the glitch.

Then there was the service’s letter-preservation process. Over the years, I’ve held on to dozens of physical letters and cards from friends and family members, some of whom are no longer alive, so this feature was particularly appealing to me. (Some family-history websites, like Ancestry.com, also have sections for uploading and storing old letters.)

But, due to Lettrs’s lack of a mobile app, I couldn’t scan or snap photos of physical letters and send them directly to Lettrs. I had to take photos of the letters with my camera or phone, transfer the files over to my desktop and then upload them.

The image-editing options could be better, too. Once I uploaded a letter sideways, for example, I couldn’t rotate it. I accidentally dated a Christmas card from my parents as “2012,” and later on couldn’t change it to the correct year without uploading the file all over again.

However, once I shared my preserved love letters, Christmas cards and Broadway Playbills with the Lettrs community, I began to get comments and feedback from other users, which was a nice touch.

The whole Lettrs experience would be much better with mobile applications. That way, users could read and write letters from mobile, in addition to preserving physical letters more easily. Fortunately, Lettrs says a mobile app is coming in the spring, along with more template designs and virtual fridge magnets. I wouldn’t write off Lettrs, and I enjoyed using it for the most part, but for now, it’s still a website in progress.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130128/lettrs-tackles-letter-sending-in-the-digital-age/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20130121/netflix-redbox-and-more-what-you-need-to-know/ http://allthingsd.com/20130121/netflix-redbox-and-more-what-you-need-to-know/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:00:42 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=287046 Thousands of titles available, for just $8 a month! Content from major movie studios! If you listen to the marketing behind most subscription video services on the Web, you might think you’d never run out of interesting things to watch.

But before you commit to a subscription, you might want to consider whether the titles available are actually new and relevant, and how you’ll be able to access them.

I’ve had the enviable task of testing four of these streaming video services: Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, Netflix, and the newly announced Redbox Instant by Verizon, which is still in beta mode and is expected to launch sometime in the next couple months.

Other Web video services might come to mind — including Apple’s iTunes and Google Play — but I focused on these four because they’re all subscription models.

Below is a guide to how they stack up against one another in the U.S., but, in short: Netflix is still my go-to streaming service for newer TV shows, some new movies and a bunch of old movies (despite company stumbles and lapsed content deals that made me pause my subscription for a while last year).

Hulu Plus is better for TV shows than movies, although Hulu Plus runs ads, and newer TV shows tend to be only from ABC, Fox and NBC. Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service can be less compelling than it’s a la carte service, Amazon Instant Video; its biggest benefit is that if you’re already an Amazon Prime shipping subscriber, you can stream the Prime video for free. And Redbox Instant is the newest entrant, with the smallest number of titles. It doesn’t currently offer any TV content.

Pricing

Netflix charges $8 a month for unlimited movies and TV shows streamed through the Web. You can also get DVD mail-in service (one rental at a time) for an additional $8 a month.

Hulu Plus, the subscription-based version of Hulu, charges $8 a month for unlimited streaming.

Amazon and Redbox Instant offer both subscription video services and individual purchase options. Amazon’s subscription-based streaming video service is tied to Amazon Prime, the company’s two-day shipping service, which costs $79 a year.

So, if you’re a Prime member, you have unlimited access to the Prime Instant Video catalog at no additional cost. If you’re not a member, and you want to rent or buy one digital download, you do that through the Amazon Instant Video Store. Rentals are usually $4 or $5, and most movie purchases range from $8 (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” for instance) to $15 (“Snow White and the Huntsman”).

Redbox Instant offers unlimited streaming for $8 per month. That also includes four DVD rental credits to redeem at any of the 42,000 Redbox kiosks across the U.S. Additionally, some of the titles can be digitally purchased and stored in your Redbox account. For example, I purchased “Eat Pray Love” for $12 through Redbox Instant.

Popular TV Shows, Available Through Instant Streaming

	Netflix	Amazon Prime Video	Hulu Plus	Redbox Instant
“Modern Family”	No	No	Yes	No
“30 Rock”	Yes	No	Yes	No
“Homeland”	No	No	No	No
“Breaking Bad”	Yes	No	No	No
“Glee”	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
“Downton Abbey”	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

New (And Old) Movies, Available Through Instant Streaming

	Netflix	Amazon Prime Video	Hulu Plus	Redbox Instant
“The Hunger Games”	No	No	No	No
“Bridesmaids”	No	No	No	No
“Moneyball”	No	No	No	No
“Lost in Translation”	Yes	No	No	No
“Titanic”	No	No	No	No
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest	No	No	No	No

Titles

Netflix won’t specify exactly how many movies and TV episodes can be streamed, except to say that it has “hundreds of thousands” of titles available through both DVDs and instant streaming. Hulu Plus subscribers can stream more than 63,000 TV episodes and 3,700 movie titles. Amazon Prime members can access around 33,000 movies and TV episodes through the subscription, with 140,000 episodes available through the entire Instant Video service. Right now, Redbox Instant only streams around 8,000 movie titles and, again, it doesn’t offer TV episodes.

Often you’ll hear things from these services like, “We carry Epix movie titles,” or “The streaming content will be available 28 days after the DVD is available.” That’s great. But what does this mean?

Some of the Netflix titles I’ve watched or browsed through recently include: “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” and “The West Wing” and, on the movie side, “Tiny Furniture,” “Lost in Translation,” “Louis C.K.: Chewed Up,” and “Blue Valentine.” Netflix’s assortment of romantic comedies is probably enough to satisfy any Nora Ephron fan.

On Hulu Plus, you can currently watch episodes of “Modern Family,” “The Daily Show,” “Downton Abbey,” “Glee,” and many more TV shows. But Hulu Plus’s movie selection is lacking. When I clicked on the Drama genre, a bunch of skin-filled movie covers came up, like “The Wild Reporter,” which didn’t look like it was about investigative reporting.

Amazon Prime’s movie offerings were so-so. I’ve already seen “Morning Glory” and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” more times than I should admit. Amazon Prime’s appealing TV offerings were mostly early seasons of newer shows, like “Downton Abbey,” “Arrested Development,” “The Closer” and “Parks and Recreation.” I also saw a fair amount of kids’ titles.

But Amazon’s non-Prime, or a la carte, offerings seemed much more inclusive than its Prime subscription service (“Men in Black 3,” “The Bourne Legacy” and “The Hunger Games” were a few newer titles).

At this early stage, Redbox Instant isn’t up to par. Again, there was “Morning Glory.” There were also a few award winners from last year, like “True Grit” and “Winter’s Bone.” Frankly, there were a lot of movies I liked 10 or 15 years ago, like “Steel Magnolias,” “Snatch” and “Flatliners.”

Quality

When it comes to online video, 1080p HD isn’t a priority for me. I’ll gladly watch old standard-definition episodes of “The West Wing” on Netflix. But, for some consumers — especially those who have spent good money on fancy TVs — the quality matters.

Netflix and Hulu Plus stream full HD (1080p) content when it’s available, whereas Redbox Instant and Amazon Prime Instant Video top off at 720p.

Mobile Apps and Devices

Streaming video is no longer just about the PC. Some of the devices you can access these services from include new “smart” TVs and Blu-ray players, Roku boxes, Apple TV, Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360, to name a bunch.

Redbox Instant will be available on LG Electronics Blu-ray players and smart TVs, as well as Google TV devices, but the company hasn’t confirmed yet whether it will be on gaming consoles, Apple TV or Roku.

All of these services have iOS and Android apps optimized for mobile video watching — with the exception of Prime Instant Video, which has an iOS app but not an Android version. (You can, however, watch Amazon’s instant video offerings on the Kindle Fire tablet, technically an Android tablet.)

Most of my mobile streaming experiences have been good. I’ve watched several episodes of “30 Rock” through Netflix mobile, and parts of “Into the Wild” through Amazon Prime on mobile, without interruption. In fact, I like the look and feel of the Amazon video mobile app (as well as the TV app) a lot more than I like the desktop experience.

All four services also offer the ability to stop and start videos from one device to another. So, for example, I started watching “Stand By Me” through Redbox Instant on my PC, then picked it up where I left off on my iPhone, then went back to watching on my PC.

It’s important to keep in mind that these offerings are constantly changing, too, as content deals are made (or lapse), and as more platforms, like new mobile devices and “smart” TV set-ups, become available.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130121/netflix-redbox-and-more-what-you-need-to-know/feed/ 17 http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-activity-tracking-race-larklife-band-comes-up-short/ http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-activity-tracking-race-larklife-band-comes-up-short/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:00:26 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=284980 A friend recently said something to me that stuck: You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

That’s the basic premise behind all of these new activity trackers you might be hearing about. And I’ve tested quite a few of them throughout the past year.

I didn’t love the Nike+ Fuelband, primarily because I thought its arbitrary currency system, “fuel,” was not an ideal way to measure exertion. And I left the Fitbit clipped to sports bras too often, which meant the thing ended up sitting in my laundry pile.

I do like the Jawbone Up, however, for both its physical form factor and its app. In general, I’m very intrigued by this new category in tech, and I think there could be real value in it for consumers.

Now there’s another entrant into the market: Larklife, from Lark. Last year, the Bay Area-based startup came out with a wearable sleep tracker and vibrating alarm clock. It’s newest product is a $149 wristband that measures both daytime and nighttime activity.

Initially, you would think Larklife works just like all of the other bands. It measures steps. It measures sleep. It connects via Bluetooth to an iOS app that catalogs your progress and offers suggestions for leading a more healthful lifestyle.

But Larklife didn’t make me feel like I was measuring or managing anything very well. It actually made me feel sort of dumb, or that I must be doing something wrong if I couldn’t “get” how this activity band was supposed to work. The band itself was clunky. And there are two of them: One for day and one for nighttime wearing.

The Larklife day band is a rubbery rectangular wristband. It’s skinny on the bottom and fatter on the top and sides, reminding me more of a bangle bracelet or, worse, a house-arrest anklet, than the latest wave of slim activity-tracking bands. Currently it only comes in bright blue. More than a few people noticed it on my wrist this week.

The Larklife’s activity-tracking tech — an accelerometer — is nested in a chunk of the band that’s removable. In order to charge the band, you must remove this portion and plug a proprietary charging wire into the band.

This same small chunk of the band is what you’re supposed to snap into the nighttime Larklife, a more comfortable cloth band, for sleep monitoring. So, to be clear, you don’t really need the second Larklife band, because you can just wear the rubbery one to bed, but it’s a more comfortable option for sleep.

There’s a strip of small blue lights on the band, along with a skinny button that you use to sync the Larklife with its free companion app.

Larklife syncs with the app using low-energy Bluetooth. You could, theoretically, just activate Bluetooth on your iPhone whenever you want to sync your data, but Larklife is really supposed to be talking to the app throughout the day, which means leaving Bluetooth turned on all the time.

I tested Larklife during CES in Las Vegas last week, while I was out and about and often not near a power outlet, and some days I didn’t want to risk draining my iPhone’s battery even the slightest bit by leaving Bluetooth on. I much prefer the Jawbone Up method of syncing, which requires that you physically plug the band into your iPhone’s audio jack a few times a day. This is not only low-maintenance, but satisfying, because you’re very aware of when you’re uploading fresh data.

With these activity-tracking bands, the software component is just as important as the hardware. Larklife takes a different approach from others by focusing on simplicity and positive encouragement. Days are displayed as big circles, with a spattering of activity points and achievements within each circle.

After a few days of using the Larklife band, I was getting notifications from the app like, “It’s 4:00 pm. If you’re feeling sluggish, have a glass of water or a piece of fruit.” The app would cheer me on if I hit a milestone of 10,000 steps in a day.

And Larklife is supposed to automatically recognizes when your activity gets more intense, so it would know when I was running a few miles on the treadmill instead of walking around a convention center. I would check the app and see a “running man” figure that marked my activity in that day’s bubble, or a star for my step milestone.

But the app’s food tracking is incredibly limited compared with other apps. Fitbit lets you set weight goals, track food items and measure calories consumed. Jawbone Up also offers caloric estimates for logged foods, and has a cool cloud graph that made me painfully aware of how much coffee and sugar I’ve been consuming.

Larklife’s app doesn’t come with a data set for calories. After I would manually log that I was having a meal, I could edit that meal name to say “Caesar salad,” for example, and then I could select from the food categories: Protein, Vegetable, Fruit, Grain and Water. That’s it.

Lark says it’s really focused on getting people to live a more healthy lifestyle in general, without making things too complicated. So, even if a Larklife user simply starts to realize that he or she isn’t entering in vegetables often enough, that’s one step in the right direction, Lark says. But if I’m going to log my food, I want more specific data.

Lastly, I couldn’t figure out how to track my sleep with the Larklife band. As it turns out, you’re supposed to go into the app, tap the “plus” icon, select sleep, set your alarm and then, while the band is synced to your iPhone, press the skinny button on the band until the app tells you the syncing has been a success. Either I didn’t set this correctly or inadvertently pressed the button again in my sleep, because I could never get a solid reading on my sleep data.

In terms of battery life, Larklife says that each band should last around two full days. I actually got more use out of mine. I charged it fully on Monday of last week, and the battery died early Thursday. But I also wasn’t constantly connecting the band to my iPhone via Bluetooth.

In the activity-tracking race, Lark puts in good effort but doesn’t quite measure up to the competition.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-activity-tracking-race-larklife-band-comes-up-short/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20130110/ces-lost-and-found-a-hot-spot-for-hotspots-and-lost-teeth/ http://allthingsd.com/20130110/ces-lost-and-found-a-hot-spot-for-hotspots-and-lost-teeth/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:54:49 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=284039 There was no real reason for me to stop by the CES Lost and Found this year: No lost chargers, laptops, jewelry — nothing. My smartphone was stuck to me all week like another appendage, my heavy DSLR hung in front of me like a baby in a Snugli.

But after last year’s necessity-driven visit to the Lost and Found turned up more than just tech, I had to go back to see what this year would bring.

It did not disappoint.

The Lost and Found was a hot spot for Wi-Fi hotspots this year, said Jerri Gray, the control center supervisor at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Also: Phones. “Lots of iPhones have been turned in. Lots of phones, period,” Gray told me. “And one iPad, so far.”

And then Gray disappeared for a minute behind the glass bank-teller panel she spoke to me through. When she returned, she had a small manila envelope in her hand. She shook it out onto the tray in front of me.

“Someone lost their teeth again,” she said.

Gray went on to tell me that the LVCVA Lost and Found has more than a 50 percent success rate when it comes to returning items to conference-goers.

She and a few others staff the booth 24/7 year-round, with extra workers on hand during CES. When it’s possible to identify the owner of an item, they’ll send letters in the weeks after the conference to try to track him or her down.

The best lost item of CES 2013 is straight out of “The Hangover”: $2,000 in a satchel, along with a foreign license that made it difficult for Gray and her team to contact the owner.

She assigned a staffer the overnight shift over at South Hall, where the satchel had been found, in case the man came back for it. He did, and reclaimed his $2,000.

He was very happy, Gray said.

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• Yeah, Don’t Expect Samsung Mobile’s “Next Big Thing” at CES

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130110/ces-lost-and-found-a-hot-spot-for-hotspots-and-lost-teeth/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130107/two-new-news-apps-designed-for-mobile-phones/ http://allthingsd.com/20130107/two-new-news-apps-designed-for-mobile-phones/#comments Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:00:28 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=282643 If you’ve ever read news articles on your smartphone, at some point you’ve probably hit a pay wall, pinched and squeezed your way around a tiny-type font, or gotten frustrated with the overall experience on a mobile browser. And yet mobile devices are rapidly changing the way we consume news.

So, for this week’s column, I took a look at two new mobile apps that present snippets of news tailored to fit a smartphone screen. I tried to view these through the eyes of an average news consumer, rather than as a journalist working in the fast-changing news industry.

The first is Summly, an app that has received as much attention for its “human-free” news-gathering technology as it has for its 17-year-old creator, Nick D’Aloisio. It scans longer articles from established news sources, and picks a few sentences to create a summary.

The second is Circa, which is trying to build its own mini newsroom. About a dozen editors generate stories across a variety of topics, which are then broken into short bits. Some of these stories are written by Circa’s own staff, based on original reporting, but many of them borrow from other people’s reporting and cite other news outlets.

Both apps are free, and available on iPhone only, with Android and tablet versions in the works.

It’s too early to say whether mobile apps like these — or apps like Zite and Flipboard, which aggregate content on mobile — are the future of news. Both Summly and Circa do a good job of presenting news bits in a mobile-friendly format — but those news bits could still use some work.

The fact that Summly’s algorithm can assemble three-sentence news stories without a human editor is impressive. The app also lets you create news topics — for example, I created one called “basketball” and another one called “health and fitness” — that within a few seconds were filled with related “summlies,” or summaries, of stories from around the Web.

But the bot-produced summaries don’t always flow well, and sometimes contain grammatical errors.

Circa produces mostly well-crafted news stories that follow a basic narrative. And readers can “follow” favorite news stories and get updates on them. At best, the writing is a little bland. At worst, it’s hard to know whether to trust the reporting of such a news outlet.

Neither Summly nor Circa show writer bylines — again, I’m trying not to approach this as a writer — which could be a detriment to some readers who do trust or enjoy following their favorite writers. Then again, the Economist magazine still doesn’t use bylines.

Summly officially launched Nov. 1. Its teenage founder has received funding from several high-profile backers, and on the tech side, Summly has been working with SRI International to develop the language-recognition technology it uses to generate stories.

The app goes through an irritatingly long animated video the first time you fire it up. From there, the app directs you to a cover page and then a tile page, where about a dozen news topics are listed, including sports, science, entertainment and arts, politics and world news.

At the top of each short story is a feature photo that takes up about a third of the iPhone screen, along with a headline and the original news source. Some of the outlets I saw credited were the Associated Press, CBS News, USA Today, CNN Money, Engadget, Golfweek and Design News.

The swipe gestures in Summly are pretty nifty. Tapping twice on a Summly summary will bring you to an extended version of the same story. Swiping down brings you to the original news source’s Web page. Swiping up brings you back to the tile page.

But the “summlies” can be a little disjointed, and some lack proper punctuation. A summly from the Los Angeles Times included the one-off sentence, “Use of torture by authorities has risen in Mexico, groups say” — no period, no further information about which groups are alleging this. In a sports story, the sentence “Northern Illinois players are greeted by Orange bowl committee members” appeared in the middle of the summarized story — which was obviously a photo caption.

Summly says that it is constantly improving the technology to refine the summaries.

Circa, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to suffer from the same grammatical errors or story-flow issues. It breaks stories up into short “points,” often with good-looking art, photos, maps or graphs sprinkled throughout the story. Light-gray bullet points on the right-hand side of the screen act as a scrollbar as you swipe through the story, to let you know where how far you’ve read.

When you first open the app, it sends you directly to a list of story headlines, rather than topic pages. There are, however, topic pages in another part of the app where you can find top stories, United States, politics and world news, if you prefer to browse that way.

The Circa stories I read included headlines like, “$1.4 million of ivory seized in Hong Kong,” “Meteorite challenges timeline of water on Mars,” and “Many seats still in question in Obama’s second-term cabinet.”

Again, the biggest difference between Circa and Summly is that Circa has actual writers creating these stories, although it’s impossible to know who these writers are. Sometimes credit is given to another source — in the case of the Hong Kong ivory story mentioned above, the source was originally ABC News.

Circa also gives you the ability to follow, or favorite, stories. Then, if you allow for push notifications in the app, you’ll get updates every time that Circa story is updated. I wanted to follow the New Delhi rape case, for which Circa quoted four different news outlets, and Circa updated me as new news came in.

Both apps will show stories that might be behind pay walls at other news outlets, though Summly only summarizes these before dragging you to a pay wall, and Circa says it attempts to do its own reporting for these stories. Summly also has an arrangement with News Corp., which is the parent company of AllThingsD, to show some Wall Street Journal content through its own topic tile on the app.

Will apps like Summly and Circa fare better than, say, the ill-fated Daily iPad newspaper, or do a better job of serving up the news than aggregator apps? It’s tough to say, especially in the case of Circa, which is trying to create new content. Despite their differences, both apps, have at least found new ways of making mobile news reading a bit easier on the eyes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130107/two-new-news-apps-designed-for-mobile-phones/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20121224/logitech-packs-sweet-sound-into-bluetooth-boombox/ http://allthingsd.com/20121224/logitech-packs-sweet-sound-into-bluetooth-boombox/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2012 14:00:45 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=280227 
It’s hard not to love the Jawbone Jambox, a small, $150 speaker that wirelessly plays music from mobile devices or computers via Bluetooth. I’ve used other portable Bluetooth speakers, and have found them lacking compared with the stylish, best-selling Jambox. 


Until I came across Logitech’s newest mobile speaker, that is.



This $100 speaker, part of Logitech’s Ultimate Ears product line, hit the Apple store in late August. It recently became more widely available at retailers like Amazon and Best Buy.



Like the Jambox, the Logitech UE Mobile Boombox is surprisingly lightweight and portable, despite its name, which conjures up images of hefty speakers you hoist up on your shoulder. It uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly play music stored on your devices, or music that’s streamed from apps like Spotify or Pandora. It can also be used to amplify phone calls or the audio on Web videos.

Even though the Logitech is $50 cheaper than the Jambox, it doesn’t scrimp on style or sound. I like its rounded compact body, and its rubbery exterior gives the impression it can take a few hits or drops and survive.



Most importantly, I found the sound quality to be impressive for such a small speaker. Music played through it sounded full, and the calls I patched through it sounded remarkably clear. 


This is particularly notable for a company that started out making computer mice, back in 1981. More recently, Logitech has expanded to accessories for mobile devices like iPhones and iPads, signaling a shift in strategy due to the slowdown in the PC market.

Logitech is still regaining its footing, but it got a jolt of momentum last year, when former Apple employee Guerrino De Luca took over as CEO again, and the company began focusing on simple, elegant design in its products. The company’s UE Mobile Boombox, TV Cam HD and Ultrathin iPad Keyboard are a few examples of this.

The Logitech UE Mobile Boombox measures 4.4 inches by 2.4 inches, and is 2.6 inches thick. It’s actually fatter than the Jambox, like a hearty sandwich roll, but also light, at 10.5 ounces. It’s available in five snazzy colors, including white, red and solid black.

The one I got my hands on is a combination of light gray and royal blue. I didn’t love the gray; it reminded me of old, putty-colored computer speakers. But the speaker is still hip-looking –- not annoyingly hip, like skinny jeans, but effortlessly hip, like it would work just as well in a minimalist’s office as it would in a trendy apartment.

Its rounded edges made it easy to grip, as did the rubber coating that wraps around the top, bottom and sides. Metal grills make up the meat of the speaker. I found it easier to pack in my luggage and throw in my bag than I did the narrow but angular Jambox.



The Logitech will work with pretty much any Bluetooth-capable device, including iPhones and iPads, Android smartphones and tablets, and desktop computers and laptops. You can also toggle between two devices at the same time, so you and a friend could take turns playing music from your phones without having to reconnect each time; the speaker will remember up to eight devices. 


I tested the Logitech using the iPhone and iPad, as well as a couple laptops. I also hooked my laptop up to a TV and used the speaker while watching Web video on a large screen. I listened mostly to compressed files that I’ve downloaded through Apple’s iTunes store or Amazon’s MP3 store.


Connecting the Logitech to my iPhone was a pretty standard, painless process: I activated Bluetooth on my phone and then pressed the Bluetooth button on the top of the speaker, which is just a slight indentation in the rubber coating. The speaker emits the sound of a guitar strum when it powers on, or is ready to pair –- a nice effect, although I missed the Jambox’s polite lady voice that delivers alerts.

Music sounded remarkably well-balanced on the speaker, with a fullness of sound that belies its small size. Midrange sound and vocals sounded solid and clear, with only the occasional high note or snare drum sounding harsh or tinny.



The speaker also has a sound hole in the back that’s meant to compensate for its size by enhancing low-frequency sounds. While cranking a few bass-heavy songs up to top volume (with a maximum output of 78 decibels) didn’t do anything flattering for this “boombox,” songs played at 65 percent to 75 percent of volume capacity sounded full and rarely distorted.



Some Web videos on YouTube, patched through my laptop, didn’t sound as great. And I found that it was a lot quicker and easier to dial someone up and talk through the speaker than it was to accept an interrupting call. First the music would stop playing. Then I would see a call coming through on my phone, press speakerphone, select the Logitech as the audio source, and still have to wait a second or two before I could hear the caller.

When it came to battery life, the little Logitech fulfilled its promise of 10 hours. I tested the battery by playing music nonstop at about 75 percent of volume capacity, with intermittent phone calls coming through, until the speaker died.

However, unlike the 10-hour Jambox, the Logitech speaker doesn’t tell you when the battery is running low.

Otherwise, I can vouch for the Logitech UE Mobile Boombox as a solid speaker with good sound that gives the more expensive Jambox a run for the money.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121224/logitech-packs-sweet-sound-into-bluetooth-boombox/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20121126/the-galaxy-camera-a-better-android-based-camera-but-a-big-commitment-%e2%80%a8/ http://allthingsd.com/20121126/the-galaxy-camera-a-better-android-based-camera-but-a-big-commitment-%e2%80%a8/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:00:46 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=272182 Would you pay $500 dollars for a high-quality digital camera that’s always connected to the Internet? What if it meant paying another wireless bill or monthly fee?

With its new Android-based Galaxy Camera, Samsung is gambling that Web-crazed consumers will want to take on these commitments for the chance to share photos whenever they want.

The idea of marrying a Google Android mobile operating system with a digital camera is not entirely new. Nikon has done it, Polaroid plans to do it, and now Samsung has introduced this camera.

The Samsung Galaxy Camera has some distinct advantages over its main competitor, the $300 Nikon Coolpix S800c. It has better hardware and is running the newest Android OS, Jelly Bean. And the Nikon is Wi-Fi-only. While testing it (here’s my review of that camera), I wasn’t able to share many photos on the spot. Most times, I’d wait until I was back home or at a hotel before I would share the photos via Gmail, or to Instagram or Facebook.



While testing the Galaxy, I’ve been able to share my photos at any time — even when I didn’t have access to Wi-Fi. And the camera shares photos quickly when it connects to AT&T’s 4G network (which is HSPA+, not LTE).   



But there are three key things to consider with this camera. For one, it’s relatively big. Another detractor is price: It sells for $499.99, although AT&T is currently offering the camera for $399.99 if you also buy any Samsung Galaxy smartphone — yes, a second device — with a two-year contract.



If you want the constant connectivity, you’ll have to sign up for an AT&T data plan, or add another line to your existing AT&T plan. You can pay an additional $10 a month on top of your AT&T mobile plan to share between one gigabyte and 20GB of data, or you can opt in to a separate “data connect” plan that can range from $15 to $50 to share between 250 megabytes and 5GB of data.

And in case you’re wondering: The camera does not act as a phone.

There’s also a plan activation fee of $35.

 So, unless you’re already an AT&T customer on a mobile share plan, you can expect to pay at least a $15 monthly fee to use this camera, plus a fee just to get it connected. While consumers are pretty accustomed to these costs when it comes to smartphones, they’re new to cameras. 


Some consumers might even wonder why they’d need such a high-priced Android camera when some newer smartphones, like the iPhone 5, the HTC Evo 4G, the Samsung Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, have pretty good eight-megapixel cameras.



With all that said, if you’re still interested in buying the Galaxy Camera — it’s an impressive camera, one that does take better photos than a lot of smartphone cameras.



It measures 5.07 x 2.79 x .75 of an inch, and weighs 11 ounces. Its all-white body has a curve on the right side that’s covered with etched plastic for a better grip, and it feels solid.



It’s also chunky, due in part to the large lens pocket on the front of the camera. It felt heavy in my purse and in my coat pocket. It didn’t fit in some smaller clutch purses, and it definitely wasn’t fitting in the pocket of my jeans. Samsung explains it size by saying that the camera basically crams two high-end gadgets into one. 



The Galaxy Camera has a powerful, quad-core processor, a large 16-megapixel image sensor and a 23-millimeter wide-angle lens. It has an attractive, 4.8-inch HD touchscreen display. On the top, there’s a dial for controlling the 21x zoom — which also doubles as a volume control button. Otherwise, there are no dials on the camera, keeping it refreshingly simple. 




Its home screen looks just like the home screen of an Android smartphone — including icons for apps like email, Google Maps, a Web browser and the Google Play store. I was able to easily download apps for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

When you tap the camera icon, you can opt to shoot pictures in Auto mode, Smart mode or Expert mode, the latter of which offers some manual settings (like ISO, shutter speed or aperture priority). Auto mode includes a variety of fun photo filters. There’s also a one-tap video-recording button for capturing HD video.

In most situations, excluding some low-light settings or scenes with a lot of movement, the camera took amazingly crisp and vibrant photos. 

And the option to share those photos right away was admittedly pretty convenient.

When I was out in Boston one night, I was able to take a good picture in the dark of the exterior of Fenway Park, and quickly post it online for my boss (who happens to be a rabid Red Sox fan). Over Thanksgiving dinner, I took pictures of a couple and their dog for a potential Christmas-card cover, and sent them the ones they liked on the spot. I shared photos via Instagram.

A photo taken with the Samsung Galaxy Camera



I also used the camera to check email, browse Twitter and navigate an unfamiliar area using Google Maps. 

It was almost enough to make me ditch my smartphone some nights — except, of course, I couldn’t receive or send text messages or make phone calls with the camera. So I still carried around both devices, and mainly pulled the camera out when I wanted to capture a really good-quality photo. 


In my experience, battery life on the Galaxy Camera wasn’t great. I had to charge it once every couple days, and I was using it intermittently. Samsung doesn’t have an official claim for battery life. The battery life of standard point-and-shoots is usually measured by how many shots you can take per charge. When you add a full mobile OS to the camera and allow for apps and Web browsing, it gets a bit tricky.



Fortunately, as with Android smartphones, you can see which apps are running in the background, or put the camera into either “Airplane” or “smart network” mode to conserve power. 


The Samsung Galaxy Camera is the best Android-based camera that’s currently available, but consumers should weigh the cost commitment that comes with being always connected.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121126/the-galaxy-camera-a-better-android-based-camera-but-a-big-commitment-%e2%80%a8/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20121119/food-for-thought-apps-that-indulge-your-inner-top-chef/ http://allthingsd.com/20121119/food-for-thought-apps-that-indulge-your-inner-top-chef/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:00:54 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=270410 This week, Thanksgiving kicks off the holiday season. It’s time to eat, drink and be merry.

Okay, who are we kidding: It’s time to frantically cook, worry about what drinks to serve, and feel utterly stressed out, whether you’re a top chef or clueless in the kitchen.

Fortunately, some helpful tools lie right in your pocket. There are literally thousands of food and wine apps available for both iOS and Google Android devices. Many are free, though some cost 99 cents or more.

I’ve been testing about a half dozen notable drink and recipe apps for the past week — and I’m not even in charge of cooking a turkey. These range from an app that pairs wine with food to an app that collects your favorite recipes on Pinterest to one that turns your iPad into a virtual beaker for kitchen measurements.

I started with wine apps. Blush by ShopTouch is ideal for those who might not know a ton about selecting wines. It’s free, and is currently available only on iPhone. It aggregates review and ratings data for each bottle, and points consumers in the direction of the nearest wine store.

After asking whether I was looking for a wine for dining, a gift, or a social occasion, Blush guided me through a five-step question process about what I’d be eating, whether I preferred spicy or mild foods, and even how I like my coffee. Then it asked for my price range. From there, it suggested a few wines.

The app also has a bar-code scanner for scanning wine labels. For me Blush’s scanner worked best in a well-lit wine shop. It didn’t work at all when I scanned a bottle of wine in a dark restaurant.

Blush tells you which wines work best with certain meals and social occasions.

Occasionally, the scanned or searched results brought up the correct winemaker, but not necessarily the correct grape varietal or year. And Blush’s suggestion tool can be rigid. For example, when I indicated I was eating fish, the app only recommend white wines and didn’t offer a few reds as an alternative.

But ShopTouch says it will be making some improvements to the app in the next few weeks, and will add more holiday wine recommendations.

For more advanced wine connoisseurs, Wine Spectator’s subscription-based WineRatings+ is an excellent app. It lists 275,000 wine ratings, compared with Blush’s database of 56,000 wines. It’s iPhone-specific, though there is a mobile-friendly version WineSpectator.com that can be viewed on smartphone browsers.

My Recipe Book lets you import recipes from other food Web sites.

The app is a free download, and some of the content is free, but people who want access to the full features of the app will have to pay $3 a month.

WineRatings+ has an education tab that includes helpful videos on how to pull a cork or how to taste red wines, so you don’t look like a poor imitator of “Sideways.” Its WS360 tab lists relevant wine articles, such as holiday pairing tips and the recent news story about Amazon launching Amazon Wine.

WineRatings+ was helpful in that it provided in-depth, trustworthy information about specific wines, but it wasn’t the app that was going to quickly answer, “Which wine should I serve with the cheese plate?” And this content-focused app doesn’t tell you where to buy the wines.

When it comes to finding and compiling recipes, few people rely on just one book or Web site (sorry, Julia Child). So I checked out My Recipe Book, a new, $1.99 app for iPad that lets you collect multiple recipes from around the Web. It’s made by a company called Cross Forward Consulting.

Kitchen Aid Kit Pro comes with a virtual beaker.

At the top of the app, there’s a “Sites” button that will let you view a dozen different Web portals, like Martha Stewart, Allrecipes and Epicurious, all from within the app, so you don’t have to leave the app and view these in a separate Web browser. From there, you can either “Easy Import” or “Custom Import” recipes.

I was able to easily import Libby’s Pumpkin Pie recipe directly into the app’s recipe book. I could also custom import a toffee bar recipe from Pinterest, although in that case there wasn’t a lot of text data available for the recipe. Photo-happy foodies can add their own pictures to My Recipe Book.

And My Recipe Book will let you save and view recipes offline, so when I took my Wi-Fi-only iPad mini to the grocery story, I still had access to the saved recipes.

I used My Recipe Book alongside Kitchen Aid’s Kit Pro, also available on iPad. This $1.99 app has a virtual beaker that can help you turn any glass into a measuring cup. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher at first, but there are helpful how-tos placed throughout the app.

Following instructions, I placed one of my kitchen glasses next to the iPad mini and, using my fingers, stretched the on-screen beaker to match the size of my physical glass. (Since you can’t really adjust the circumference of the virtual beaker, you’re sort of eyeballing the glass size.)

Food on the Table adds leftover recipes to its Cookbook around the holidays.

It told me how large the glass was, based on cups, ounces, or another metric of my choice. At the top of the app there is a variety of recipe items, like cranberries, cream or flour, along with the corresponding calories per unit.

The app is beautifully designed, but I think it’s probably easier to just use a physical measuring cup. Plus, holding up a glass filled with liquids and other foods next to the iPad just felt like a recipe for disaster.

For all those post-holiday casseroles and turkey slivers that make up the artful, Tupperware-and-Saran-Wrap sculpture inside your fridge, there’s an app that suggests recipes for leftovers.

Food on the Table, a free iPhone and Android app, is well-known for its meal planning assistance. Around the holidays, the app adds leftover recipes to its Cookbook database. I was able to easily find — and share via email — a bow-tie pasta recipe that uses chunks of leftover turkey. Food on the Table says that up to seven additional recipes will be listed this week.

I was late to discover this app, which has been around for a couple years, but it also made grocery list making so easy that I’d likely continue using it.

With a little help from apps like these, you might feel like the next Food Network star instead of a frazzled host this holiday season.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121119/food-for-thought-apps-that-indulge-your-inner-top-chef/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20121112/fujifilms-xf1-camera-blends-old-school-style-with-advanced-control-%e2%80%a8%e2%80%a8/ http://allthingsd.com/20121112/fujifilms-xf1-camera-blends-old-school-style-with-advanced-control-%e2%80%a8%e2%80%a8/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:00:20 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=268308 We all know a few camera snobs. Maybe you’re one of them — and prefer to call yourself a camera “enthusiast.” For these people, simple point-and-shoots or smartphone cameras just don’t do the trick.



With this customer in mind, Fujifilm has introduced the XF1, a $499 digital camera that’s more compact than a big-bodied DSLR with interchangeable lenses, but has some of the manual controls and capabilities of its higher-end cousins. Its funky retro design will catch the eyes of vintage camera lovers.



Most notably, the camera has a manual control 4x optical zoom that also acts as its power function. Twist the lens a bit, and the camera is in standby mode. Fully extend the lens, and the camera turns on and is ready to shoot. To power off, you rotate and press the lens back into the camera body.

This hands-on, manual zoom may feel more familiar for consumers who have experience with DSLRs. During testing, it allowed for more precision when I was taking pictures, and the lack of electronic zoom means the camera can get more than 300 shots per battery charge. I’ve been using the XF1 for over a week now, and I’m pretty pleased with it.



But beyond its bells and whistles, the XF1 lacks a couple of features that are becoming standard in digital cameras.

With its blend of auto and manual settings and its $499 price point, the XF1 joins the ranks of cameras like Canon’s $449 PowerShot S110 (an updated version of the popular PowerShot S100) and the Sony RX100, which retails for a whopping $649. But the XF1 lacks a touchscreen display and Wi-Fi capabilities, two features of the Canon S110. The XF1 doesn’t have built-in GPS, either.

And while it’s smaller than top-of-the-line DSLRs, the XF1 is still just a bit bigger than some of its compact competitors. The zoom/power function requires two hands to shoot, whereas the Canon and Sony are small enough to use with one hand.

The XF1 measures 4.2 inches by 2.4 by 1.2 inches, and weighs just under half a pound. It has a solid aluminum body with a dimpled synthetic leather covering that comes in red, black or tan. It has a three-inch LCD display.

On the top edge of the camera, you’ll find the shooting button, the setting wheel and a little pop-up flash. On the back, there are two more command dials, a playback button and “E-fn,” a customizable shortcut button.

I was able to customize the E-fn button so that white balance and ISO control, as well as raw image capture, were just a couple taps away.



The camera has a 12 megapixel, 2/3-inch image sensor that allows for better image quality than photos captured with a basic point-and-shoot. For more advanced users, there are a multitude of settings that allow for manual fine-tuning.

But the XF1 can make less-skilled photogs look good, too: Even in auto mode, the camera captured sharp, professional-looking images with just the right amount of blur in areas outside of the focal point.



Photo taken with Fujifilm XF1. Advanced mode, Toy camera filter.

The Fujifilm XF1 also has an EXR mode, basically a high-powered auto mode. I found myself shooting in this mode the most.

With EXR, the camera looks for faces to focus on and continually adjusts the focus. It also employs scene recognition. So, on a bright sunny day, the camera would automatically go to a high-resolution mode, while in low light it would reduce the overall resolution of the image to prevent it from looking too noisy.


The downside of EXR mode is that it can drain the camera’s battery more quickly. Also, when I was taking pictures of moving subjects — whether taxicabs on the street or falling snowflakes — both auto and EXR were apt to capture blurry images, so a manual setting that allows for shutter speed adjustment is best for these scenarios.

These days, a digital camera would not be complete without plenty of filters to slap on your pics. The XF1, like the Canon S110 and Sony RX100, has a variety of filters that can be previewed in the display screen.

Photo taken with Fujifilm XF1. EXR mode in low light.

These are buried in Advanced mode, and include a “toy camera” effect with darkened edges, a “color pop” mode, and a handful of partial color settings that create monochrome images with a single color standing out. I spent a day playing hipster, taking pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge with various filters, and I have to say I really liked the results.



The XF1 records video in full 1080p HD. My video clips looked crisp, and the camera captured good sound — although, it doesn’t have an input for an external microphone. The red designated video button on the back is pretty handy, and the wheel on top of the camera doesn’t have to be turned to any kind of “TV” mode first, so you can just point and record.

The XF1’s complexity at times veered toward confusing. The camera can show as many as 31 different indicators on the display, meant to be helpful hints or warnings, and I couldn’t seem to shake one blur warning.

Photo taken with Fujifilm XF1. Advanced mode, monochrome filter with red color pop.

Fujifilm suggested it was because I was shooting in low-light areas, but this happened even in decent light. (And one of the claims with this camera is that it’s supposed to be excellent in low light.)

Another example? For video clips there’s a “YouTube” option, which apparently does nothing except mark your clips, since the camera isn’t equipped with Wi-Fi.

And, because I had to refer to the instruction manual quite a bit, I also found a couple instances in which the manual was misleading.

Overall, the XF1 is a solid camera for photo hobbyists and “prosumers” looking for a little style and a lot of control. Those who aren’t sold on the manual zoom might want to try other midrange cameras, such as the Canon S110, before committing to the $499 Fujifilm XF1.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121112/fujifilms-xf1-camera-blends-old-school-style-with-advanced-control-%e2%80%a8%e2%80%a8/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121029/dear-samsungs-galaxy-note-ii-its-not-you-its-me/ http://allthingsd.com/20121029/dear-samsungs-galaxy-note-ii-its-not-you-its-me/#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:00:27 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=264283 When Samsung first introduced a sandwich-sized smartphone called the Galaxy Note in February, it was received with skepticism from people who prefer thinner, smaller phones.

Now, with 10 million Galaxy Notes sold worldwide, Samsung has taken the next step with the Samsung Galaxy Note II. This 4G LTE-compatible smartphone has an even larger screen than the first Note, but also has a slimmer, narrower body and a brand-new Android operating system.

It’s still too big for a smartphone.

I say this while acknowledging that it’s a well-made device, and that other consumers may be more comfortable with a large phone. I admittedly was sucked in by the brilliant, 5.5-inch display for shopping online, checking emails and reading articles.

I enjoyed using Samsung’s redesigned “S Pen” stylus for writing what Samsung calls “S Notes” and clipping Web images. The Note II also has a new feature called Air View, which shows an enlarged view of an email, photo or video when you hover the tip of the stylus just over the content you’re trying to see.

And the battery, which offers 24 percent more juice than the first Note, lasted me a full day and into the next morning, which is more than I can say for my iPhone.

But, after testing it over the past week and a half, the awkwardness that came with carrying such a large, “notice me” phone outweighed the benefits of it, for me.

The Note II officially launched in the U.S. last week, and is available through all four major U.S. carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless — plus U.S. Cellular. Almost all of the carriers are charging $300 for the device with a two-year contract. T-Mobile is doing something a little different: It’s selling the Note II for $250 with 20 consecutive months of $20 payments, or for $370 after a $50 mail-in rebate, also with a two-year agreement.

The Note II runs on a speedy quad-core processor. It has two gigabytes of internal RAM, and comes with 16GB of built-in storage, plus a microSD card slot for up to 64GB of additional storage.

The phone builds upon the features that were already in the first Note, and borrows some features from Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone. The cameras, for example, are the same eight-megapixel rear camera and 1.9-megapixel front camera as the Galaxy S III, but on the Note II, there are some advanced photo settings and more ways to view and organize your photos.

The Note II, which comes in white and titanium gray, measures about six inches by three inches, and is .37-inch thick. It weighs just over six ounces. Its rounded edges add to its overall sleek look.

Samsung has opted to use a combination of physical and touch-friendly buttons on the bottom of the Note II, which I liked, for the most part, though it’s hard not to accidentally hit the “back” button when dislodging the stylus.

The large HD display shows pictures, videos and Web sites with amazing color, detail and clarity. At times I got so caught up looking at Facebook photos, or scrolling Twitter or ordering items through the Amazon app, that I stopped paying attention to what was going on around me, even when I was out in public.

The phone runs on the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, 4.1 Jelly Bean. This includes Google Now, a Siri-like personal-assistant function, and more colorful, comprehensive calendar notifications, which were so big on the Note II’s display that it would be impossible to miss a meeting reminder.

There are two home-screen modes users can choose from. Basic mode shows the conventional Android layout, littered with apps and widgets, which I think can be confusing for non-Android users. Easy mode shows a simplified home screen, with favorite apps and settings.

The browser includes a welcome “pop-up” option. This allows you to click on a Web link, whether from an email or another app, and view the new Web page in a small, separate window that appears beside the app you’re in.

The Note II is technically a 4G LTE-compatible device, but whether you can access that 4G or LTE depends on the wireless carrier. I tested the Note II on T-Mobile’s and Sprint’s wireless networks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my hands on Note II phones that run on Verizon’s or AT&T’s LTE networks.

In the dozens of speed tests I conducted in midtown and downtown Manhattan, I got an average download speed of .8 megabits per second and an upload speed of .67 megabits per second on Sprint’s 3G network. T-Mobile’s high-speed HSPA+ network performed much better, with an average download speed of 5.6 megabits per second and an average upload speed of 1.2 megabits per second. (For a little context: The average Internet speed of U.S. households is 6.7 megabits per second, according to Akamai.)

Call quality on the phone was very good, even when I was wearing headphones. Speakerphone worked especially well. The biggest drawback with calling on this phone isn’t the sound; it’s the size.

The Note II felt uncomfortably large pressed against my ear and face, with my hand stretched just to grip it. And here’s the thing: It’s not just during calls that the phone feels like it’s meant for people the size of LeBron James, who is 6’8″ (and part of Samsung’s marketing for the phone).

With the Note, Samsung has been trying to offer a hybrid device, a “phablet” if you will, that lets you carry just one gadget instead of a phone and a tablet. But for me it just didn’t split the difference well.

When I was heading out for a night and slipping it into my jacket pocket or purse I wished it was smaller. When I was sitting in bed watching videos on it, I wanted a tablet or laptop after awhile.

When I listened to music on it at the gym — something I do regularly with my iPhone — the Note II started to feel like a responsibility instead of a running accessory.

Using the excellent Google Maps app on such a large screen was great. But one afternoon, while stopped at a street corner as I navigated downtown Manhattan, two people pointed at the phone. My friends gawked at it when I pulled the phone out of my bag after dinner one night.

Those who like the idea of a larger phone won’t be displeased with the Samsung Galaxy Note II, a fine specimen of a smartphone. For me, it felt like I was trying to jam fine art into a tiny apartment. It’s beautiful, but it just didn’t fit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121029/dear-samsungs-galaxy-note-ii-its-not-you-its-me/feed/ 58 http://allthingsd.com/20121022/rokus-new-streaming-stick-for-tvs-lets-you-ditch-the-set-top-box/ http://allthingsd.com/20121022/rokus-new-streaming-stick-for-tvs-lets-you-ditch-the-set-top-box/#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:00:46 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=261985 According to Forrester Research, more than 32 million U.S. consumers are now using an assortment of devices to watch Web video on their TV sets, from gaming consoles to set-top boxes like Apple TV, Roku and Google TV. These are often considered interim devices, while “smart” TVs –- ones that are always Internet-connected –- ease their way onto the market and into living rooms.

But adding these boxes to your TV setup means factoring in more wires and easy-to-lose remote controls. And finding the right input for the device through the TV remote can leave even the smartest people feeling dumbfounded.

Roku, the California-based company that makes set-top boxes of the same name, has come up with a new solution to this: A wireless stick, not much bigger than a thumb drive, that plugs directly into the back of your TV to stream HD video from the Web — turning your “dumb” TV into a smart one, with minimal gadgetry.

The $100 Roku Streaming Stick, available through Roku.com or Amazon.com, offers the same Web apps and the same powerful processor as Roku’s top-of-the-line set-top box, the Roku XS 2 (also $100). This means that all of that streaming goodness is packed into a small stick.

The Roku Streaming Stick also responds to the same remote used for your TV, as well as to a remote control app for iPhone and Android smartphones — eliminating the need for at least one extra remote.

But there’s one major catch with the Roku Streaming Stick: It only works with a certain type of TV set, one that includes an MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) port.

While Roku’s CEO Anthony Wood says that the company expects to see more of these TVs on the market within the next year, there are currently around 50 sets and displays sold in the U.S. that are MHL-equipped. And, of those, Roku has certified only a few brands that work really well with the device: Insignia, Apex and Hitachi.

In order to test the stick, I had to shift my regular TV set to the floor and set up a television that Roku delivered to me: A 55-inch, HD Insignia TV that costs $900. Normally, I wouldn’t replace my existing TV with another one just because I wanted to attach a $100 gadget to it, and I’m guessing a lot of consumers would feel the same.

But the plug-and-play stick is convenient. It’s a few inches long and weighs just three ounces. It’s bright purple, and plugs directly into a color-coded MHL port on the backside of MHL TV sets.

It has no wires, and one of the benefits of this technology is that the MHL port actually charges the product while it’s plugged in, so there’s no need to charge the stick at any point. The set-up took all of 10 minutes: I plugged the stick into the TV, authenticated the device and registered with Roku on the Web.

Roku says it has more than 500 apps, which it calls “channels,” on its platform, including popular apps like Netflix, MLB.tv, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Vudu and Facebook. Both the Roku XS 2 box and the stick come with Angry Birds, which can be played using Roku’s motion-sensor remote.

Over the past week, I’ve watched a lot of shows and movies through the Roku Streaming Stick, mostly through Netflix, Amazon and Vudu (the last two charge per movie rental or download, unlike Netflix’s monthly subscription). I also listened to NPR radio, streamed music through Pandora and logged into Roku’s bare-bones Facebook app, which lets users view photos and videos, but doesn’t allow for status updates.

The media-streaming quality was very good. Occasionally, HD movies would pause to buffer, but never for longer than a few seconds. Only one movie channel I checked out, Sony’s Crackle channel, paused consistently, to play short ads. This was annoying, but then again, the Crackle movies were free.

One app missing from Roku’s offerings is YouTube. I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit using Apple TV to watch YouTube videos with friends. Roku also doesn’t have a Web browser. And this might seem obvious, but you can’t watch media you’ve purchased through iTunes or the Google app store on Roku’s device, either.

Lastly, cable-authentication apps that require a user to have a cable subscrition — like HBOGo or Epix — will only work on Roku with some cable providers. For example, DirectTV and Comcast do not support HBOGo on Roku. Time Warner Cable, however, does.

As with other set-top boxes, text input is clumsy: You use the arrow keys on the remote to select individual letters of the alphabet. But you don’t actually need the Roku Streaming Stick’s own remote unless you want to play Angry Birds or other games that use motion control. The Stick is compatible with the MHL TV’s remote, so I could access and navigate Roku by pressing the “Home” button on the Insignia TV’s remote and using those arrow buttons.

Being able to just press “Home” to get to the Roku stick was joyfully simple compared to the usual process of searching my TV inputs for different devices I’ve connected to it.

Roku also offers new iOS and Android apps that control the Roku Streaming Stick. Much like Apple’s AirPlay feature, I could use the Roku mobile app to stream the many photos stored on my iPhone directly to the TV set, provided that both devices were connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

The Roku Streaming Stick successfully compresses the experience of a Web video box into a tiny, convenient device, but it comes with a lot of “ifs.” Even Roku says that its Stick may eventually be sold as a bundle rather than as a singular gadget. If you prefer Roku’s channel offerings over other set-top boxes, if you have an MHL-compatible television set and if you’re not planning on upgrading to a high-end smart TV with built-in Internet capabilities anytime soon, it’s a great device. Otherwise, right now it’s a niche product.

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