May 05, 2006, 4:18 PM PDT
More music like this, please
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Start-ups have been trying to crack the music "discovery" problem for years. The problem is this: you know what music you like, and you have plenty of it, but it's usually very difficult to find new music in a similar vein that you'll also like. Pandora has one solution, but it's not the only game in town. There's the new MusicIP, for example, which is a lot more fun to explore because of its fluid, open-ended interface. It doesn't play complete tracks, so it's not a direct competitor, but if you're looking for new tunes, it's worth a spin.

MusicIP also has a local music player that looks a lot like iTunes. It does much the same thing as the Web site, but does so against the music on your hard drive. For people who have thousands of music tracks in their library, this is great, since it helps you find music you like that you might not even know you have. It's like closet shopping in your own archives.

While I encourage people to try this service (it's free and fast, what do you have to lose?), I should set expectations: The MusicIP library is still being built, and some of the recommendations are amusingly off-base, at least to my tin ears. Trying to find a match to Tom Waits' gravely "Clap Hands," for example, MusicIP came up with Fleetwood Mac's treacly "Sara." I don't think so.

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• See product information for Pandora
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May 05, 2006, 4:14 PM PDT
ScanR makes your camera phone useful
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

People don't often think about digital cameras and camera phones as business tools, but they are. They can photograph business documents for later reference. I use my digital camera all the time to capture whiteboards, for example. The problem is figuring out what to do with the pictures. A relatively new service, ScanR, processes these images for you and makes them highly useful.

To use ScanR, e-mail your picture to the service (wb@scanr.com for whiteboards or doc@scanr.com for other documents). A few moments later, you get back a PDF version of your picture. The image is cleaned up; the contrast is adjusted to make text readable, and skewed text is straightened out. The service also does an OCR (optical character recognition) run on your document and embeds that data in the PDF. The OCR isn't nearly good enough to paste into a text document, but it is good enough for a desktop search engine to reliably index your file. So once you park the PDF in a corner of your hard disk, you'll be able to find it again.

I tried the service using images from my digital camera, but the best way to use this is with a camera phone: Take a picture of a whiteboard, send it immediately to ScanR, and later when you get back to your computer, you'll have a nice clean, OCR'd version of it waiting for you. (You could even set up an e-mail filter to have the attachment automatically stored on your hard disk, I suppose.) I can imagine this application also being very useful for students, for recording whiteboards or chalkboards (do they still use chalkboards?).

A business card application is coming in the summer. This will be, theoretically, better than one of those dedicated business card scanners, since it won't require you maintain yet another piece of hardware. You'll be able to photograph just one card, or a bunch laid out on a table, and the ScanR service will parse them into vCard contact records.

By doing the heavy image processing and computing in its server farm and not in the puny brains of cell phones, ScanR makes camera phones appear much smarter than they really are. The service is free for now, but there will eventually be a premium, paid component for people who use the service more than occasionally.

The one downside: ScanR requires a 1.3-megapixel camera to record whiteboards and 2-megapixel resolution for printed documents. Geeks with Treo 650s are out of luck.

Related: ScanBuy (column), which reads bar codes. See also this article on MobileCrunch.

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May 05, 2006, 2:08 PM PDT
PhysX hands-on
Posted by: Rich Brown

We finally got our hands on a PC physics accelerator card, thanks to Ageia, the inventor of the PhysX chip. The chip goes on sale for roughly $300 on Monday, May 9, in cards from partners Asus and BFG. Ageia sent us the Asus card, along with a demo of a game called CellFactor. This game was developed specifically to show off the PhysX chip's capabilities, and it's the first title we've laid hands on that was designed from the start to support physics acceleration.

CellFactor requires a PhysX accelerator card to play it at all, and it quickly becomes apparent why when you play. It's a futuristic shooter whose one demo map is chock-full of boxes, pipes, and other objects that all behave like their real-life counterparts. Boxes scatter and explode when they're hit by a grenade, heavy rolling pipes will kill you, and so on. The designers even went as far as to let you hurl yourself and the plentiful objects around the map, thanks to your character's telekinetic powers. But perhaps more impressive than the objects' realistic behavior is their sheer number. It's obvious that with the PhysX card and the appropriate programming, game designers have a lot more room for interactivity.

Keep in mind that we don't expect to see an immediate revolution right away. CellFactor aside, only a handful of currently available games offers any kind of support for the PhysX cards, and these first-gen effects are less than earth-shattering. Tom Clancy's latest, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, is a good example. In-game explosions look more realistic, with bricks falling off buildings, than when you turn the physics acceleration off, but the designers didn't use the PhysX cards in a way that fundamentally changes the gameplay. If you turn the physics acceleration off, the explosions look a little tamer; that's really the only change.

We expect that the ramp up to physics acceleration, either via PhysX cards or Nvidia's new integrated Havok physics support, will be gradual. When Windows Vista hits, it brings with it DirectX 10, and with that a new multimedia programming spec called DirectPhysics. This gives us hope that the industry at large is serious about expanding games' immersiveness. Until we start to see more games built from the ground up to use the PhysX to good effect, we have a hard time recommending a $300 PhysX card--unless you really want to see the few examples of accelerated physics firsthand. There's simply not enough game-changing content to make it worthwhile, at least, not yet.

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• See product information for Asus Ageia PhysX Accelerator
• Read also: Components, gaming
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May 05, 2006, 1:33 PM PDT
Symantec updates its consumer AV products
Posted by: Robert Vamosi

Symantec has released its second incremental software update for Norton Internet Security 2006, Norton SystemWorks 2006, and Norton Antivirus 2006. Existing customers of these products were notified of the updates and are now able to update their software via Symantec's LiveUpdate service. In December, 2005, Symantec updated its antivirus product line to auto-protect users against the installation of medium-to-high risk adware and spyware apps, and to seek out and remove spyware hidden through stealth technology. This latest LiveUpdate program change won't help its existing users much, however; this time Symantec has added the ability for its products to scan and remove high-risk spyware prior to installation on new systems.

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May 05, 2006, 1:16 PM PDT
Grand Theft Auto, with a laptop
Posted by: Wayne Cunningham

Stories have been going around the Web recently about a Czech car thief using a laptop to steal cars with keyless, push-button starters. My colleague Robert Vamosi, who sits in the office next to mine, wrote an excellent column describing various hacks of vehicle keyless start systems and how they were accomplished. He also goes into depth on the 40-bit codes that make the systems vulnerable and what automakers could do to stop them. Click here to read the column, "Gone in 60 seconds--the high-tech version."

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May 05, 2006, 11:16 AM PDT
T-Mobile awarded number one customer service ranking
Posted by: Kent German

For the third year in a row, including a 2005 tie, T-Mobile ranked number one in overall customer satisfaction among wireless carriers, according to J.D. Power and Associates. The country's smallest major service provider ranked highest in all customer-satisfaction categories, including sales staff, store display, store facility, and price/promotion. Verizon Wireless fell into the number two spot, followed by Sprint Nextel and Alltel. Cingular Wireless brought up the rear. T-Mobile was a winner in call quality as well; the J.D. Power study said the company had the best call quality in the West and Southwest regions and tied in the Northeast region.

So what's the secret behind T-Mobile's success? Is it German efficiency, or could it be the influence of Catherine Zeta-Jones? Let me know if you agree with the study.

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May 05, 2006, 10:46 AM PDT
Land Rover's nav unit goes above and beyond
Posted by: Kevin Massy

Those perennial overachievers at Land Rover are just about to start blitzing the U.S. airwaves with a commercial that shows how last month, they used the navigation system in a Land Rover LR3 to navigate from Nice in southern France to the island of Corsica. And when we say "in a Land Rover LR3," that's precisely what we mean--the automaker commandeered a Hercules C130 airplane onto which they drove the car, which was then used as a navigation center for the flight.

According to the documentary that shows the story behind the journey (complete with the obligatory uplifting music and British-accent marketing-jargon voice-overs), the greatest perceived challenge for the unit was the plane's speed. Apparently, the LR3's navigation system was designed to work at speeds of up to 200mph--presumably on the assumption that Ferrari would one day want to outsource its navigation installs--whereas the plane would require the unit to work at speeds of up to 400mph. As well as increased speed, the unit had to deal with the challenge of working at 9,000 feet over the Mediterranean. In a particularly fatuous comment, Land Rover's chief designer admits that "major oceans are not part of our design brief."

Nevertheless, according to Land Rover, the LR3's unit performed admirably, guiding the plane and "tracking beautifully" to land on Corsica, 100 miles southwest of the French Riviera--an impressive feat.

So, the gauntlet has been thrown down for other automakers. What's next? A transatlantic crossing in a Chevy?

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• See product information for 2006 Land Rover LR3 SE 4dr SUV 4WD (4.4L 8cyl 6A)
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May 05, 2006, 7:48 AM PDT
Samsung's LED DLP available for preorder
Posted by: David Katzmaier

We chose the Samsung HL-S5679W as the Best of CES winner in the television category because of its LED-based light engine, the first of its kind in a DLP television. We frankly didn't expect the company to deliver the set this close to its CES announce-date of April, but lo and behold, the 56-inch HDTV is available for preorder on a few sites across the Web and will supposedly be in stock May 22. A month late is pretty good for Samsung.

The three LEDs, which take the place of the bulb-and-color-wheel arrangement used in traditional DLP televisions, promise to address many of the technology's current downsides. Samsung says the LEDs will help reduce or eliminate rainbows, will last significantly longer than bulbs, and should deliver better color reproduction. For more information, check out our full write-up. We hope to have one in for review soon.

Source: HDBeat

More resources:

Samsung's product page

Rear-projection technologies explained

Mitsubishi to lose DLP lamps for lasers

Editors' top rear-projection HDTVs

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• See product information for Samsung HL-S5679W
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