Print industry news seems to be a bit bland and unexciting this week, but with two major shows kicking off next week it might be worth anticipating something interesting coming along very soon! IFRA Expo, the European newspaper event, starts October 4 in Hamburg, Germany; whilst Graph Expo begins the day before, October 3 in Chicago, USA. You can also see a Graph Expo show preview on your PC the day before the show starts. Nice idea! Watch this space for show announcements!Interesting posting spotted just last night regarding Google’s focus on photographs for the web. It suggests that the days of dominant JPEG images could be numbered. Check out the story for details of the WebP alternative; not greater images, but smaller files.
Tablets are very much in the tech news this week, with (as mentioned in issue 23) the first official airing of the Blackberry PlayBook [see video at the top of this Mashable link]. The media was keen to tell us about what it describes as iPad competition, but your PIND editor remains somewhat unconvinced. Let’s start positive: nice looking kit, nice ad video, multitasking (very good!), tethering to Blackberry phone for a network on the move, and an actual real product to show. A few questions and queries, however, starting with: what’s the price?; another new OS?; where are the apps?; a business machine with the name PlayBook?; it’s still only seven inches (though the video cleverly avoids showing that!).Another seven inch device is also getting close to official release according to the good folk of Dell. Engadget advises that this Android OS device will be with us in “the next few weeks”. I have to say that overall the seven inch format just misses the mark for me: if I want “pocket-sized-portable” I have a smart-phone; if I actually want to see more detail and do some mobile computing I want a 9 or 10 inch screen, whether that be in tablet or netbook format. If that format, or screen size, is not large enough for the task in hand then I need to be using a notebook or proper portable/laptop machine, or even a desktop computer. That’s how I am seeing things: your alternative views welcome to PIND.editor@gmail.com
With the above Dell machine in mind, as well as many other products in the pipeline, could I echo the sentiments recently expressed on an Engadget page highlighting the fact that Android was not developed for the tablet market. It is a smart-phone operating system that, as yet, has not been optimised to work on any tablet, seven inch or otherwise.Other new machine news from this last week: Avaya shows an office/business style tablet; AlessiTab talking November; more seven inch Android from Spice Mi700; whilst Sharp talks about e-readers.
Still on the tablet topic, the Daily Telegraph carried an article this week regarding a survey, conducted by YouGov, on what users are actually doing with their iPad. Around three quarters of iPad owners said that they used the device for browsing the web and a similar proportion use the tablet for reading and answering e-mails. Wow! Reading newspapers and magazines was also a pretty popular activity. Was this intended to surprise anybody?Mashable’s rumour mill is suggesting that iOS 4.2 just might contain a tethering feature for iPad; the key word here is might!
Back to basics, and browser technology: could you ever switch to Internet Explorer? So ask the team at Lifehacker with the latest beta release of IE9. Whilst IE might be the most “popular” browser on the planet, this is largely because the product was standard issue in the PC box for so many years, and many of these users don’t really have the technical nous or knowledge to be able to move to something safer, more efficient and more effective, such as Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Would you go back to IE? Tell us at PIND.editor@gmail.com
For those more adventurous souls that have moved into the wonderful world of Firefox for their browsing, the good folk of Mashable offered a very interesting 10 point tips, tricks and shortcuts posting. I have to confess that although I am a seasoned Firefox user of some 15 years standing, there were a couple of bits in this listing that were new (or forgotten!) to me. It is worth noting, however, that Chrome is now overtaking Firefox amongst “Power Users”; so say the team at Lifehacker. We still prefer FF here!PIND024
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