Wii U unofficial price drop
It’s been a rough couple of months for Nintendo’s Wii U. First Nintendo cut its sales predictions for its next-gen console, then last month Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata announced that Nintendo wouldn’t be dropping the Wii U’s recommended retail price.
It seems, however, some UK retail outlets don’t share Nintendo’s confidence when it comes to sticking to their sales strategy and have slashed their asking price for the Wii U. CNET has reported that both Asda and Amazon UK have knocked £50 off the price of both the premium and basic Wii U packs, meaning that they’re now selling for £249 and £199 respectively. ShopTo has also slashed the price of the basic Wii U sales package by £60 to £190.
It’s believed, in very good curso de oratoria, that Nintendo has not lowered its trade price for the Wii U. According to CVG, the trade price still stands at £205, which means that the retailers are selling the console at a loss.
The news indicates the console is in trouble sales-wise and the Wii U has certainly had its problems since launch. Shortly after its launch last year, reports emerged that users were battling to get online with certain service providers. They then had to a couple of hours while 5GB of firmware downloaded to the machine, with some machines ‘bricking’ if users shut them off before the update had finished.
Samsung Galaxy S4: Hands on
The Galaxy S 4 has what you’d expect from a new smartphone a bigger screen and a faster processor. But Samsung didn’t want to stop there when it presented the successor to its hit Galaxy S III. It loaded the new phone with a grab-bag of features that don’t come together as a pleasing whole. The new additions could confuse users.
The Korean company revealed the S 4 for the first time Thursday at an event in New York, and provided reporters with some hands-on time with pre-production units. The final phones will be on sale in April to June period from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, US Cellular and Cricket, the company says. If history is any guide, even smaller phone companies will get it, if not right away. The phone companies will set the prices; expect this phone to start at $200 with a two-year contract.
Samsung has competent engineers, and hardware-wise the S4 is a solid successor to the III. The screen is slightly larger, at 5 inches on the diagonal compared to 4.8 inches for the III and 4 inches for the iPhone 5. It sports a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, as much as you’d find on a high-definition TV set. This should mean that the resolution chase is over in the smartphone area: the eyes just can’t discern any more pixels on these small screens. Competing top-line Android phones already have the same resolution, so Samsung isn’t breaking new ground here.
The bigger screen is crammed into a chassis that’s actually a hair narrower and thinner than the S III’s. This is quite a feat. Samsung shrank the frame surrounding the screen to make room. Shrinking other internal components allowed it to make the battery 20 percent larger than III’s, but Samsung isn’t saying whether that translates into longer battery life – the added battery power could be eaten up by software and hardware changes.
The body is still dominated by softly molded plastic, and the S4 doesn’t really advance the aesthetics of its predecessor the way competitors Apple, Sony and HTC have done with their latest phones. Apple and HTC, in particular, have put a lot of sweat into machining metal into jewel-like enclosures; Samsung doesn’t seem to care all that much about looks.
Samsung does care about trying to push the envelope on what the phone does, but it may have poked through the envelope, tearing a hole or two in it. It’s probably not a disaster, because most of its features can be turned off, but first-time users could be confused.
For one thing, Samsung is taking the whole “touch screen” thing further by now sensing when the user’s finger is hovering over the screen. In other words, you don’t even need to touch the phone to make it react. Hovering over a thumbnail of a picture in the Gallery will reveal a bigger thumbnail, and hovering over one email in a list will show a preview of its first lines.
The idea is similar to the “mouse hover” feature on a PC, which sometimes reveals things before the mouse is clicked. Implementing it on a smartphone is trickier, though. On the PC, you have to use the mouse, so you’ll discover the hover functions in the normal course of use. But since the feature is new in a smartphone and there’s normally no reason to have your finger hovering over the screen, users are likely to discover this feature by chance. That wouldn’t be so bad if all applications responded to hovering in a consistent manner, but very few applications react to it all. On the S4, the “Email” app will show previews, but the “Gmail” app won’t. The built-in “Gallery” app will show picture previews, but other photo apps won’t. I suspect users will get tired of trying to hover with their fingers and give up on the whole thing.
The hovering feature also sets the phone up for another problem. In my testing, I found that the phone sometimes registered a close hover as a touch. In other words, the screen was overly sensitive, thinking I was touching it when I wasn’t. This may be fixed by the time the phone is in production, but it’s potentially an annoying issue.
The S 4 tries to divine your intentions in two additional ways. It has an infra-red sensor that looks for hand movements up to about 4 inches away from the phone, and it uses the front-side camera to figure out if it’s front of the user’s face. Thanks to the IR sensor, the phone’s browser responds to an “up swipe” in the air above it with by scrolling up, and to a “side” swipe by jumping to another tab. This could be pretty useful when the smartphone is the lunchtime companion and you don’t want to grease it up with foody fingers, but again, the “air swipe to scroll” shows up in only a few applications.
The camera is supposed to engage when you’re watching a video, pausing playback if it thinks you’re looking away. This didn’t work in the preproduction unit I tested, but it’s hard to imagine that this is a feature to die for.
The list of user interface innovations goes on, but they don’t amount to a coherent new way of interacting with the phone. Nor do they turn the phone into something that’s intelligently aware of what goes on around it. It’s more like Samsung is throwing a bunch of technologies into the phone to see what sticks. Sometimes, that’s how progress works, but consumers might not appreciate being guinea pigs.
The S4 presents an interesting contrast to the BlackBerry Z10, which is coming out in a few weeks. Research In Motion Ltd. jettisoned the old BlackBerry software and rebuilt it from the ground up. The phone’s hardware isn’t as impressive as Samsung’s, but the software is easy to use, and it’s based on a strong idea: taking the pain out of communicating across email, text messaging and social networks. The S4, unfortunately, doesn’t have the same clarity of purpose.
Google Chromebooks hitting new countries
I am not quite sure about you, but have you actually taken a Chromebook out for a ride before? And by that, I do not mean a ride in your car or motorbike, but rather, whether you have used it before, doing some work as well as surfing mindless sites for images of kittens in weird poses. You know, nothing heavy duty, as the Chromebook was not meant to be a high powered computing device in the first place. Well, as we all jolly well know, the mid-range tier of products and its intended market tend to be the largest segment in most bell curves, and hence the Google Chromebook would fall under this category nicely. It is nice to know that if you happen to live in places like Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands, you should be able to pick up a Google Chromebook.
Better late than never, or so the saying goes, and for folks living in the US, you might have noticed that the Samsung Chromebook has remained at the top of Amazon’s best-selling laptop list for 149 days ever since it was launched, and for folks who live across the pond, Dixons claims that Chromebooks comprise of over 10% of laptop sales in Currys and PC World stores.
From today onwards, you will be able to pick up Chromebooks from the likes of Acer, HP and Samsung, especially if you happen to stay in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Not only that, Google wants to do their bit to improve computing for organizations, as the Internet search giant is rolling out its fair share of Chromebooks to businesses and schools alike, too.
Folks living in the US have something else to look forward to – the Chromebooks will be introduced to more than 1,000 Best Buy stores nationwide, which virtually doubles the number of stores Chromebooks are presently sold in, although this is set to happen within the coming fortnight and not immediately. Any potential Chromebook owners reading this?