My first viewing of the Boxee Box came from this video demonstration. Ever since, I’ve been intrigued by the ideas presented by D-Link, the developers of Boxee Box. I’ve been reading articles, scouring through Boxee forums, and ultimately downloaded the Boxee service to try on my own.

Before going further, I should go into greater detail the difference between Boxee, and the Boxee Box. Boxee itself is a program which is utilized on a computer, which acts as an aggregator for all kinds of content on the internet. Along with internet content, it also provides an option for playing local media files. What makes Boxee stand out from programs of the like is the service is designed for televisions.

The Boxee Box is a device which is specifically designed for the program, providing a different option than connecting a PC or notebook to a television. The Boxee Box is scheduled to release Q2 2010.

Trying to explain Boxee is a monumental task, because it’s capable of so many things. Here’s a list of all the features provided by the Boxee service, and I’ll dive into each one specifically:

Photos
Music
Movies
TV Shows
Apps
Files

Photos and music are handled how you think they would be. The Boxee service searches your system or specific folders, and allows you to view photos and listen to music. What’s great about Boxee, is that video settings can be customized to fit large HDTV’s. So if you have pictures taken with an expensive, suped up camera, you can enjoy these in big screen HD glory.

Movies are handled in the same way photos and music are, only with a few key twists. Your system is searched for movie files, and recognized titles are given cover art which looks great with a large collection.

Along with local files, Boxee will scour the internet looking for free, legal sources of movies. This is where Boxee really starts to shine as an aggregator service. My experience so far has led me to realize how many options there actually are out there on the internet for movie watching.

TV Shows provide a better demonstration of the capabilities Boxee has to find watch-able content online. Let’s say you’re looking for past episodes for your favorite show. Let’s use The Simpsons for an example. Boxee will find all the episodes made available online, from multiple locations where the content is being hosted. It should be noted that Boxee was wrong on some of the content I searched for, with certain episodes being named wrong. This problem occurred multiple times, however it was right more times than not.

During my Boxee experience, Apps is what really sold me on the service. If Boxee takes off and gets a high adoption rate, then I think Apps will be the major reason for it. Think of apps on Boxee as how you view channels through your cable service. Specific internet content is divided into these apps, which are of high variety. They range from news, news aggregators, video content, streamed content. There’s content you’ll recognize: CNN.com, MLB.tv, YouTube, Pandora. There are some other cool, less known apps to keep an eye on as well. The White House even has a Boxee app.

Finally, there’s the all encompassing ‘Files’ option. Here you can browse content on your computer, and perhaps find files that Boxee missed when searching your system. I noticed a few quirks with Boxee, and there were instances of it missing video content.

Boxee is in beta form right now, and being so means there are still a few bugs to work out. As of now, the Boxee browser, which theoretically allows you to browse the internet is broken. There are some apps here and there which have extremely limited functionality, though I place the blame on the app makers more so than Boxee.

A wonderful boon for the Boxee is that it’s completely open source. This means the sky is the limit for potential apps.

“The future of television is about watching anything you want, any time you want, on demand” said Zach Klein, Chief Product Officer of Boxee. I can think of no better way to encapsulate what Boxee is all about. If you’d like to try out the beta, you can find more information here.

The latest generation are a huge improvement with their increased thickness and extraordinary vivid color retention. They can be cut into extremely accurate forms and custom fit whatever device you have. With iPhones, they wrap around the back of the phone and include cut-outs for the camera lens and an irregular edge that neatly extends the sticker without covering up any of the controls.

But are they worth it? Should you rush out and drop $15-20 to emblazon your favorite band, artist or comic book hero on the back of your iPhone?

To find out, I was given sample skins from the two main players in this market: GelaSkins and MusicSkins. Both use the exact same 3M film, and both seem to use the same die to cut their stickers to fit the iPhone, so the difference is primarily in the graphic itself. But there’s more to it than that, as you’ll see…

Since both use the same sort of film, let’s get that experience out of the way first, because both had the same problem and gave me a very similar result on my Apple iPhone 3GS, one that was cool, but not perfect.

The problem I faced was that neither of them actually went on perfectly and both had tiny little folds and bubbles along the edges, even as I exerted rather a lot of pressure trying to smooth them down.

Let’s start with the imagery, though: The GelaSkins skin was from a graffiti artist and was quite striking to see, as you can see below, while the MusicSkins skin was based on the terrific Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover from The Beatles.

Here are both of them:

The first thing that’ll strike you when you look at these is that the left side image that suggests there’s an included wallpaper for your phone screen? There isn’t. It’s just part of the printing, but not anything you can actually use. Kinda weird and wasteful, actually.

They peel off from a corner, giving you a sense of the thickness: these feel just about impossible to tear:

Next step is to carefully line things up and put the skin on your iPhone/device. Here you can see the Discoteca skin partially affixed:

Try as I might, though, I could never get rid of every single imperfection on my phone. In fact, both skins had exactly the same imperfections, which makes sense when you remember that they’re the same product, just different print jobs. Here’s a close up:

Can you see those spots I’ve circled? Yeah, maybe I want perfection, but it is annoying when you want something to be smooth and it’s not.

If the only difference between the two companies was the printed image on the skin, that’d be the end of the review, but Gelaskins goes further and has matching wallpaper images you can install on your iPhone too, which makes for a nice unified appearance. Better yet, it’s a free download from the App store so you can just grab Wallpapers by GelaSkins [iTunes link] and explore the many different artists they’re working with on this app and the skins.

Go through their app and you’ll see lots of cool images:

Pick the one that matches (or one that looks cool) and save it, which puts it in your photo album. Now go find it there, and tap on the Use As Wallpaper button:

This might seem unrelated to the iPhone skin review, but a quick glance shows that the two companies aren’t offering up the same product after all, even if they’re using the same sticky material. MusicSkins is all about the imagery they’ve licensed, while GelaSkins is looking at the entire experience of customizing your iPhone or other device. If all you want is a sticker on the back of your phone, both will work fine, but if you want something consistent on both sides of the device, GelaSkins is a superior choice.

Me? I tried both, enjoyed them (though was bugged by them not being a perfect fit) and ultimately went back to my hard case because I figured my iPhone just needs a bit more protection than they offered.

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This process is significant, because depending on what video card is being used it can use up a lot of battery power. If the system is smart enough to detect which processor to use, it could drastically save on energy.

The trick to getting the system to work, is being able to identify the profile an app is using. This is basically the source of information provided to Optimus when deciding how to process the graphical output.

Sasha Ostojic, a developer of Optimus explains the function, “We introduced profiles with Nvidia SLI technology so the system would know how to handle the work associated with graphics.”

Nvidia is able to accomplish this multi-processor solution by using SLI (scalable link interface). This video card format allows two cards to link together for greatly increasing graphical horsepower. When the GPU isn’t in power, it automatically powers down and will turn on again when needed.

For Mac users, Optimus is theoretically compatible but there’s nothing concrete to report on in terms of actual integration. ASUS on the other will be using Optimus almost immediately, as theASUS N61Jv-X2 can be pre-ordered on Amazon for $899.

Asus spokesperson Gary Ke, is excited about the partnership, “With Nvidia’s Optimus technology, you get the best of both worlds, as general application and multimedia duties are handled by Intel’s HD graphics for improved battery life, and demanding applications like gaming and video transcoding can be handled by Nvidia’s GT2xxM and GT3xxM discrete graphics processors on the fly.”

VentureBeat has all the details on their survey and other fun things they learned.

OK, nothing really shocking there, but I did sit down for an interview with CEO Jeff Haynie this afternoon.

In the interview Haynie explains why his developer platform is a lot faster to develop on than building apps in Objective-C (developers use standard web technologies, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, along with its own API, named Appcelerator Titanium, that is easy to call from JavaScript to do a variety of functions. You can watch a video where they explain more about how this works.

Basically Appcelerator is a competitor for Adobe’s AIR framework/app system but one that delivers onto the iPhone (and, within a few days, on the Apple Tablet, or whatever it’ll be called).

Yes Haynie is taking advantage of the Apple news, even before it happens, but I gotta appreciate that in a CEO.

Finally, in his survey they found that most of their developers see lots of opportunities for the Apple Tablet outside of the kinds of scenarios already discussed. We talk about these at length in the interview, but while gaming will be hot they see opportunities to develop new apps in entertainment, productivity/business, social networking, and education.

Ahh, Apple Tablet Hype Week continues…

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Unfortunately for the companies exhibiting, I was too busy gorging myself on grilled cheese sandwiches made with white chocolate orange bread and brie to remember where I put my Sam Adams. I didn’t get to see every company there because:

1. I didn’t want to.
2. It’s kind of tiresome talking to booth vendors after awhile.
3. I had to pry myself away from the grilled cheese.

But I did get a good taste of things. Below are my gut reactions from the various gadgets and tech toys I tried there. You can find all of their press kits online from Showstoppers, you can view more of my photos from the event on Flickr, and I have a handful of videos on YouTube.

Technology I started using right away: Seesmic for Droid

Seesmic is best known for its desktop Twitter client. I’ve tried it but I always wind up either using Twitter.com or a mobile app. On the Droid, the gold standard has been Twidroid, but I think they just went silver. When I met Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur, he showed me how Seesmic for Droid had integrated Twitter Lists, and any of its features I’ve tried out so far either mirror or surpass anything from Twidroid.

Gadget I don’t understand why anyone would ever buy unless they’re a board member’s mother: Plastic Logic’s Que

One of the hot product categories at CES were e-readers… no big surprise there. There was a pretty, glassy, thin one that debuted from Paper Logic called Que, which is designed to format newspapers and magazines in a more natural way while also making it easy to review and even annotate Microsoft Office docs like presentations. I fell over when I heard the price - $649 (4GB wifi) or $799 (8GB wifi and 3G).

So let’s see – you can get a netbook for a few hundred, or a tablet somewhere close to $1000. If tablets go big, they will kill the market for this device because tablets have web browsers, color, and really any features you’d expect from your laptop without the physical keyboard. When I saw another demo of the Que they were very quick to say you shouldn’t spend much time typing – it was only for brief notes. When I appeared skeptical, on more than one occasion, different reps would say, “But it’s for business!” It’s reminiscent of the “You know, for kids!” tagline from Hudsucker Proxy. But at least in Hudsucker Tim Robbins was selling the hula hoop, a gadget that filled a need in the market.

By the way one reader that looks far more compelling is the Skiff, but pricing hasn’t been announced. Here are some views of the Que:

This wasn’t an easy award to give out – so many contenders… but Sensawaft lets you control computing devices just by breathing. The guy below was blowing into a mic and controlling flicking a website up and down. I got to do this too, and it took a little getting used to, but yes, the direction of the air blown can make a difference.

I can see it being used in some kind if My Left Foot scenario – I mean, imagine if the guy played by Daniel Day Lewis had this. Or if he had the Internet. The movie would have probably been a little less depressing.

There are some things I like about it. One big one is that they’re opening up the platform, and they created the Be A Mind Blower competition to get people to submit ideas.

I have seen other applications of breath blowing digital tech. GE’s Plug Into the Smart Grid augmented reality showcase allowed you to blow into the computer mic and turn the wind turbines. I’m sure this Sensawaft stuff is more sophisticated and perhaps more useful, but I think if your cubicle mate hears you blowing into your computer all day, they’re going to report you for running a 900 hotline.

Most creative use of an iPhone application: Yurbuds by Yurtopia

Yurbuds hooked me on a great use of both cool and practical, and it offered a fun demo of how digital tools can improve retail for physical goods.

The basic premise: custom-fitting earbuds. They have a much longer explanation for how these earbud covers fit better around your optic nerves and improve the sound and maybe improve your balance (I could use that last feature but I’m making that up). Go to their site for the specs. Ultimately, they’re these rubbery covers that make your earbuds fit better in your ear, even when running, or as I tried, waving your head back and forth like an idiot. They didn’t fall out.

What upped the cool factor tremendously though is that they’re sized with an iPhone app. You hold a quarter up to your earlobe, take a picture, and they use that to determine your ear size. It worked for me. On their site they also do it with a photo submission process. The price is $20 for the covers or $30 for the covers with the earphones, and their earphones look EXACTLY like iPod earphones. Full disclosure: I got a free pair of the earbuds and the earphones, and I used them on the plane ride home. The sound was about as good as you can expect to get from watching a Jets game on a Jetblue flight.

Best musical instrument for someone who can’t even figure out Guitar Hero: Beamz

If your kid can’t play any of these real musical instruments or even video games based on them, get them Beamz – a way to make noise just by running your hand across laser beams. They even advertise this on their site, calling it “an approachable instrument that anyone may play.” In other words, if your musical talents include banging a rock on the ground and almost kind of being able to whistle, you’ll love this.

It’s weird. I tried it out and, not being among the most rhythmically gifted, didn’t really let loose there. If you’re of drinking age, I highly recommend doing a few shots before trying this. But please note this blog does not advocate giving liquor to minors – they will enjoy it just fine as they are.

Apparently some real artists use it. I can’t remember who but they sounded famous. And you can program the Beamz to play any kind of instrument. They also have a new game Shadowbeamz. So yes, people who are talented can probably have even more fun with this than people who aren’t. But it is “approachable.” That’s one of those words often used as a backhanded compliment, but for those who like toys that make a lot of noise, I think “approachable” is a huge upside here.

Technology with most promise that’s not delivering (for me): PlayOn

I couldn’t love the idea of PlayOn more: you download software (free trial, then $40 flat fee), use your gaming console to connect to the Internet, and watch video from Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and elsewhere on your TV. I thought this was the most impactful technology at all of Showstoppers.

Then I tried to use it.

It didn’t take too long to set up on my PC and then my Wii. A nice touch is that you can add your accounts for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube so you can quickly access your content.

I tried going to Hulu first to watch some TV shows, only to get a recurring ‘error loading video’ message. Then I went to YouTube to load one of my own, a brief clip from CES. It took a couple minutes to load, and then it was choppy – and this was just a 20-second clip.

My PC passes all the connection tests in the PlayOn software, but maybe if I had a newer laptop it would run better. I really wish this would work so I could easily watch Hulu on my HD TV without even needing a box. Great idea, and maybe it works better for others. It’s a free trial so I’d still recommend giving it a shot to see if it works for you.

If it does though, I might be coming over to your place to watch it.

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Dave’s Answer:
This doesn’t arise too often for GarageBand users, from what I have been able to research, but there are definitely many discussions about this particular error message, the “disk is too slow” error, that you can find online.
Unfortunately I haven’t found any definitive answer about why you might suddenly see this after working for days, weeks or even months on your computer with the very same type of projects.

In fact, search for that error message in the GarageBand built-in help, and there are zero matches. Not so useful!
So first, here’s the error I bet you’re seeing:

Familiar error window? Ayup, “Core Audio: Disk is too slow (Write): (-10002)”.
Generally, you can fix this by restarting your system, but there are also some tips I found to help avoid this message in the future:
1. Quit as many other programs as you possibly can. Freeing up system resources can often help with disk swapping problems, too little RAM, and so on.
2. Make sure you’re plugged in and that you don’t have any strange Energy Saver settings (go into System Preferences to check it out). The one to avoid? “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.”
3. Don’t work with source material that’s directly on an audio CD or DVD: copy it onto your computer drive before you go further.
4. Make sure you don’t have FileVault running. Don’t know what that is? It’s a built-in disk security system that keeps your data encrypted but slows down reads and writes because everything has to be encrypted/decrypted on the fly.
Here’s how to check if you have that running: Go to System Preferences and look for the “Security” icon on the Personal row:

Choose it, then click on the “FileVault” tab:

On mine you can see “Turn On FileVault”. If yours says “Turn Off…” well, then you should seriously consider turning it off as it will speed up disk writes on your computer.
If those don’t do it, you might well have a problem with your disk or computer. For most people, however, these should take care of the problem so you can get back to mixing and producing your material in GarageBand.

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Since then, technology and gadget bloggers have been in a frenzy not seen by me since the iPhone was first announced. I’m not about to get into the many details of Google’s Nexus One phone–I’m going to take a different angle, below–but you can read all about the unlocked Android phone, here, here, and here. Oh, and here’s what it looks like:

So, what’s my take on this?

The media frenzy!

OMG! I don’t know how much Motorola and Verizon spent trying to hype up the launch of the recent Droid phone, but that publicity doesn’t compare to what Google has accomplished over the weekend.

How smart was Google? It handed out free phones to Google employees, either didn’t tell them to keep quiet about it, or actively encouraged the discussions, and let the details slowly leak out. All weekend long, I’ve seen post, after article, after post hit the web. Right about now, everyone that doesn’t own an iPhone is currently drooling over becoming a Google Nexus owner–and there are probably a few iPhone owners feeling the same way too!

Perhaps Google has realized that it’s just not that good at artificially creating excitement with its own advertising. The company became the world’s #1 search engine via word of mouth. Could it own the world’s #1 cell phone the same way?

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Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

The Singularity and Hardwired Brains

Okay, this crosses all kinds of boundaries of “creepy”, but if we stop to seriously consider this, it’s not as outlandish as it seems. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting just this for over two decades now..the merging of computing power and human thought, an event he calls the Singularity. Kurzweil even set the date: 2045 (by the way, the target date for the Intel implant is 2020, giving us 25 years to “get it right” after the first implant). Kurzweil’s predictions seem somehow apocalyptic, or, at the least, scary, but his logic is compelling. Computers can, even today, do some types of mental tasks far faster and more efficiently than the human brain. The brain excels at computations that tie into the intuition and experience of our lives - the softer, less rational types of mental activity. It the brain was simply a huge data cruncher, computers would already be kicking our butts. But there are leaps of insight and intuition that we regularly take as humans that have never been replicated in a digital circuit yet. Kurzweil predicts that, with the exponential increase of computing power, it will only be a matter of time until computers match and exceed the capabilities of human intuition.


Google’s Brain Wave

But Intel’s efforts bring up another possibility, the one posited by Google’s Sergey Brin - what if a chip can connect our human needs, intuitions and hunches with the data and processing power available through the grid of the Internet? What if we don’t have to go through the messy and wasteful effort of formulating all those neuronal flashes into language that then can be typed into a query box because there’s a direct pipeline that takes our thoughts and ports them directly to Google? What if the universe of data was “always on”, plugged directly into our brains? Now, that’s a fascinating, if somewhat scary, concept to contemplate.

Let’s explore this a little further. John Battelle, in a series of posts some time ago, asked why conversations were so much more helpful than web searching.  Battelle said that it’s because conversations are simply a much bigger communication pipeline and that’s essential if we’re talking about complex decisions.

What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?



Well the answer is at once simple and maddeningly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is.

Talking (or Better Yet - Thinking) to a Search Engine

As Battelle said, conversations are a deceptively rich communication medium. And it’s because they evolve on both sides to allow the conversant to quickly veer and refine the dialogue to keep up with our own mental processes. Conversations come closer to keeping up with our brains. And, if those conversations are held face-to-face, not only do we have our highly evolved language abilities, we also have the full power of body language. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Robert Eccles said in their book Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action:

In contrast to interactions that are largely sequential, face-to-face interaction makes it possible for two people to be sending nod delivering messages simultaneously. The cycle of interruption, feed-back and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous. As (sociologist Erving) Goffman notes, “a speaker can see how others are responding to her message even before it is done and alter it midstream to elicit a different response’.”

The idea of a conversation as a digital assistance medium is interesting. It allows us to shape our queries and speak more intuitively and less literally. It allows us to interface and communicate the way we were intended to. In his post, Battelle despaired of an engine ever being this smart and suggested instead that the engine act as a matchmaker with a knowledgeable human on the other site, the Wikia/Mahalo approach. I can’t see this as a viable solution, because it lacks the scale necessary.

This is not about finding one piece of information, like a phone number or an address, but helping us through buying a house or a car. Search still fall far short here, something I touched on in my last Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. In those situations, we need more than a tool that relies on us feeding it a few words at a time and then doing its best to guess what we need. We need something similar to a conversation, in a form that can instantly scale to meet demand. Google, for all it’s limitations in a complex scenario, still has build the expectation of getting information just in time. And the bottle neck in these complex situations is the language interface and the communication process. Even if we’re talking to another person, with all the richness of communication that brings, we still have to transfer the ideas that sit in our head to their head.

So, back to Intel’s brain chip. What if our thoughts, in their entirety, could instantly be communicated to Google, or Bing, or what ever flavor of search assistant you want to imagine? What if refining all the  information that was presented was a split second closing of a synapse, rather than a laborious application of filters that sit on the interface?  Faster and far more efficiently than talking to another human, we could quickly sift through all the information and functionality available to mankind to tailor it specifically to what we needed at that time. That starts to boggle the imagination. But, is it feasible?

I believe so. Look again at the brain activity charts generated by the UCLA - Irvine research team that tracked people using a Google like web search interface, particularly the image in the lower right.

Let’s dig a little deeper into what is actually happening in the brain when we Google something. The image below is from the Internet Savvy group in the UC study (sorry about the fuzziness).

The front section of the brain (A) shows the engagement of the frontal lobes, indicating decision making and reasoning. This is where we render judgment and make decisions in a rational, conscious way. The section along the left side of the brain (B) is our language centers, where we translate thought to words and vice versa. The structures in the centre part of the brain, hidden beneath the cortex are the sub-cortical structures (C), the autopilot of the brain, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus and hypothalamus. I touched on how these structures dictate what much of our online activity looks like in a post last week. Finally, the area right at the back of the brain indicates activation of the visual cortex, used both to translate input from our eyes and also to visualize something “in our mind’s eye”.  As shown by the strong activation of the language center, much of the heavy lifting of our brains when we’re Googling involves translation of thoughts to words.

Knowing that these are the parts of the brain activated, would it be possible to provide some neural short cuts? From example, what if you could take memories being drawn forward (activating both the hippocampus and the frontal lobes) and translate this directly into directives to retrieve information, without trying to translate into words? This “brain on Google” approach could be efficient at a degree several magnitudes greater than anything we can imagine currently.

By the way, this interface can work both ways. Not only could it feed our thoughts to the online grid. It can also take the results and information and receives and pipe it directly to the relevant parts of our brains. Images could be rendered instantly in our visual cortex, sounds in our audio cortex, facts and figures could pass directly to the prefrontal cortex. Call it the Matrix, call it virtual reality, call it what you want. The fact is, somewhere in an Intel research lab, they’re already working on it!

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It’s my first Android phone. It replaces the Samsung Omnia I had running Windows Mobile, a touchscreen-only phone with too many design flaws to name. I still have my iPhone for work, which I love as an email and gaming device but never used as a phone.

As for the Droid…

Google services: I’m an avid user of many things Google, from Gmail to Picasa to Maps. For me that’s a huge plus to access these personal accounts. I easily went to Picasa, picked a recent photo from my trip to Egypt, and made it my phone’s background.

Writing email: The option of a keyboard’s great, though I found the touch screen easy to use, rivaling the iPhone, and perhaps even easier, though I’m not sure why as the keyboard’s no bigger. It was very easy to set up.my work account too.

Interface: I really like the four default buttons of Back, Menu, Home, and Search. I had no clue how often I’d use the back button until I tried it here.

Screen: The size is similar to the iPhone, but the picture’s especially beautiful. Transitions and animations add some X factor of elegance to the device.

Battery life: Nothing special here. But it is removable so you can get a spare or replacement if it totally fails you.

Maps: I haven’t yet explored all of the features here, but the basic directions - for me, via public transport in NYC - are easy. I know there are major competitive advantages over the iPhone here, but I’ll get to those later. 

Sound quality: Maybe there’s some halo effect and this is imagined, but I’m convinced the sound is clearer on this device than any other I owned. When I called grandmom (and of course I call grandmom), it sounded like she was right next to me. Just great, I’ll get Androidish guilt.

Applications: A lot of my favorites from the iPhone app store seem to be available, and I’m learning (often via Twitter) about comparable ones, like Twidroid for Twitter. The app store’s easy to use, but some of the paid apps are in foreign currency like British pounds and I wish it all defaulted to dollars (or your local currency of choice). Many apps, like Twitter and Google Talk, can run in the background without slowing down the phone. Payments are synced to Google Accounts; updating Google Checkout information can be done on the phone but is especially easy from the Web.

Room for Improvement:

• I haven’t figured out copy and paste yet. I even watched a video demo (videos are easy to view on the phone), but it seemed to pull up different menus than my phone did.
• Multi-touch is missing. The zooming in is easy though.
• A longer lasting battery would be nice. But wouldn’t it always?
• Is there even desktop software to manage my phone? Could come in handy.
• Can I take screenshots on the phone as easily as on the iPhone? That’s been very helpful for client presentations for the iPhone. There are lots of things I just don’t know if I can do yet.

I welcome hearing about your favorite features and apps as I learn what it can do.

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SE is banking on their UX platform which has a heavy graphical UI. The platform will work along with Open OS and will feature many applications, with heavy emphasis on social media. SE has stated, “The XPERIA™ X10 is the first mobile phone to truly humanize the way people interact with their phones.”

The XPERIA X10 is a showcase of SE looking to go with an open approach. They’ve listed PlayNow and the Android Market as an example of providing consumers with choice when using XPERIA X10.

Bert Nordberg, President of Sony Ericson boasts about the device, “The XPERIA™ X10 is a fantastic example of our make.believe philosophy because we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible and demonstrating that anything consumers can imagine, we can make possible. With the X10, we are raising the bar we have set ourselves with entertainment-rich phones like Aino and Satio by making communication more fun and playful, multiplying and enriching opportunities to connect.”

The new device will also showcase two applications with strong potential, Timescape and Mediascape. The TimeScape app provides a cluster of options when socializing with friends, family, and anyone else in your phone. Timescape will list your contacts, and provide you with the latest updates, and changes. Twitter, Facebook, calls, emails, SMS messages, and voicemails are all seamlessly presented and allows for faster communication.

Mediascape is a mirror image of Timescape but is more media extensive. Options for photos, audio, and video will be presented and is divided between offline and online content. One interesting feature is the ‘Infinity icon’. When browsing through artists you can click this button, and content found online will be presented for whomever you’ve selected. As of now, YouTube and Playnow are the the two major options for this feature.

Here’s an expanded list of specs for the XPERIA X10

8.1 megapixel camera
Bluetooth
Wi-Fi Support
480 x 854 resolution
4 inch screen
8 GB microSD support