The hype of the 3-D movie age is only getting larger and larger with new technologies like Digital 3-D and stereoscopic 3-D which requires no glasses, but is this hype really worth it?

3-D movies have never really seemed to amaze me. I mean, I just can’t seem to find two blurred images that make an illusion like they’re popping out of the screen interesting. The movie industry is really focusing on making 3-D movies now that they really can’t seem to make a decent 2-D movie. It’s like having a nice-looking video game that fails when it comes to playability. What’s the point? Also, movie theaters have to invest in new projectors to display some newer movies. Is this really fair?

3-D movies have always seemed to annoy me because they make me dizzy and I can never seemed to focus on the whole picture because the foreground object always seems to be standing out too much. Isn’t the whole point of a movie to enjoy it in its entirety, not to just focus on the frontmost object.

I think that with this 3-D age, the movie industry can’t focus on other technologies that could be cool like 360-degree movies or movies which make the viewer feel like he/she is in the environment using elements such as wind and temperature. I think that 3-D is just an on-going fad that’s taking away from the good part of the movie industry; the movies, and  I hope it gets out-dated soon.

David – Senior Editor

Even though HP recently bought Palm, there hasn’t really been much hints of them trying to develop a device that uses Palm’s WebOS operating system. HP has just recently registered the “Palmpad” trademark. This is a possible hint that HP is developing a new tablet that uses Palm’s WebOS. After seeing the Windows 7 tablet HP had been working on, I think that this will have a similar design, but at the same time much lower specs. I’d probably expect it to have a 1GHz Snapdragon and 256MB RAM, but we’ll have to see what HP has in store.

David – Senior Editor

We’ve reviewed the Boxee HTPC application, but news just came in yesterday that the Boxee Box is now being produced and should be available in November. The Boxee Box is a little box that runs the Boxee application without any need for a computer. The hardware is being produced by D-Link, a networking company that has never seemed to satisfy me with their routers (that’s just me of course). It was first announced at CES 2010, and the box has gone through much changes since then. Some of the differences include weight changes, nicer plastic, and a smudge-free surface. I think that this is starting to look very promising and I’m waiting to get some video of the actual performance of the thing. If I’m going to consider getting it, it must perform faster than my netbook when in the application. It doesn’t necessarily have to have better specifications since it’s actually going to be running the Boxee software natively and it should run well. Here’s a video that explains the Boxee Box in full detail:

The first Boxee Box arrived from the D-Link Factory from Zach Klein on Vimeo.

David – Senior Editor

Earlier today, Steve Jobs stepped on stage and made three announcements about the iPhone 4 and some of its problems.

The first of which was about the phone’s antenna problem. Jobs explained that Apple isn’t going to change the design, explaining that it’s even “better than the 3GS.” Instead of doing a recall, Apple will be giving away free bumpers and a selection of other cases until September 30 to iPhone owners. We’re expecting that Apple will have a solution to the problem by then anyways.

Next up was the discussion about the long-awaited white iPhone 4. Jobs said that it will be available soon with limited quantities.

The final announcement was about the iPhone’s proximity sensor problems. Unlike the case of the antenna, the proximity sensor will be fixed by a soon-to-be released iOS update.

We would still like to mention that you can return the iPhone 4 until your 30 day return policy is up, if you feel like a bumper/case or software update wont fix the problems.

Lev – Lead Writer

Sources: AppleInsider Live Blog; Gizmodo Live Blog

Image Credit: Kotaku

The dashboard (home screen) of the Xbox 360 has only been redesigned once, but that one redesign was very significant. The NXE (New Xbox 360 Experience) was a big change in terms of interface though in terms of displaying content, it wasn’t so great. The original dashboard featured a series of controls on a page, which is owned by a tab that the user can flip through with their controller. It was very clean and efficient and you can get what you want to quickly. The next image shows the issues with the new NXE dashboard.

The red lines show the alignment of the elements, the faded white color shows wasted whitespace and the blue shows elements hidden behind other elements. This is a very inefficient way of displaying content. It is very clear that you can only get complete information out of elements 1 and 2. The rest are hidden behind other elements, hiding a lot of the content. Though it does look appealing, the perspective of which the elements are viewed at just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and it just makes it harder to get to the content you want.

The new rumored dashboard, on the other hand, takes a similar approach on displaying content to the original Xbox 360 dashboard. It doesn’t look much like it, but it is just the original design but with tabs sorted vertically and content displayed horizontally. I hope Microsoft releases this new dashboard because it looks very promising.

David – Senior Editor

We’ve reviewed Apple’s new Mac Mini before and we included some information about what kind of performance we are getting out of this machine, in terms of gaming, but I thought that instead of telling our readers what gaming is like on this computer, we should show them.

I then found my World of Warcraft discs (sitting in a closet) and installed them on the Mac Mini. The video shown below was recorded using the in-game recorder on the Mac version of World of Warcraft and I must say that using the recorder didn’t exactly add to the game’s performance. It did drop the framerate by about 15fps, but the video will give you a basic idea of what you should be expecting out of this computer. The game was played with all the settings on Ultra and at 1920×1080. The reason the video is only 720p is because the in-game recorder sacrifices a lot of game performance, so I had to use these settings: 720p, medium quality, H.264 recording. The actual compression only took about 2 minutes on the 40 second clip. I did not stop the recording, the recorder actually stopped itself, probably because the video file was getting too large.

David – Senior Editor

The Pandigital Novel is an Android-powered e-reader. It features a 7″ screen, ARM 11 processor, 1GB of internal storage (expandable up to 32GB), and WiFi, all for the low price of $200. The iPad features a 9.7″ screen, Apple A4 processor, 16GB of storage (non-expandable, but also in 32GB and 64GB), and WiFi (and 3G on some models), but it costs $500 (or higher for 3G and/or higher storage). Now, here’s when the real deal comes in; the iPad runs iOS 3.2 and the Novel runs Android. Novel’s version of Android is device-specific and limited, but reports of some hacking have just surface and it appears as though the Novel has been fully rooted and running the stock version of Android 2.1. Though I can’t really say much about performance, judging from the processor, this is still a major breakthrough.

I truly believe that if this is in fact, 100% working and fast, for that matter, this could really stir up some competition with the iPad. It’s $300 cheaper, so you really are going to be paying a lot less for it anyway.

David – Senior Editor

Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector (often referred to as OSC) has been long known to let you connect your Outlook contacts with social networks such as LinkedIn and MySpace. They have just added Windows Live and Facebook support. Just recently, Microsoft teamed up with Facebook to allow people with contacts on Outlook connect them to their Facebook profiles. And it works pretty well. By selecting an email, I was able to click on a contact in Outlook 2010 to connect to a social network. It the only social network available on the wizard should be “My Site” until you download some from here. On the site, you can download social network connectors, which now include Facebook and Windows Live. Then, on the wizard, all you have to do is enter your credentials and look the person up in the social network of your choice. Though I haven’t really played with it much, I did notice that the email you are trying to add has to already have a Facebook account to add them, so if the person has multiple emails, you may have to ask which one they use for their Facebook, which isn’t always the most comfortable thing to do. I know that Outlook itself is a very solid email client, and this just adds to its already socially-connected features.

David – Senior Editor

Late yesterday, George Hotz (@geohot) announced on his Twitter acount that people are taking his iPhone hacking too seriously and it isn’t fun for him anymore. George Hotz is the creator of the original iPhone jailbreak. A few days back, George Hotz made a post on his blog featuring an iPhone 4 running Cydia. His blog is no longer accessible to the public, this is most likely because of controversy from the post. He claims that iPhone hacking is just something he did when he was bored and that people are making a bigger deal about his accomplishments than him. In order to find more updates regarding future jailbreaks, George says to follow his friend, @mikecohenn.

David – Senior Editor

If you haven’t heard of the amazing HTPC application called Boxee, you really are missing out on a lot. It is an awesome application, that is connected to web services, but still works as expected at accessing your locally stored media. I really recommend this for HTPCs. Boxee features an “App Library” where you can pick from apps you want to use and put them on a screen of your favorite apps. The “App Library” features services such as YouTube, BREAK, Revision3, Netflix (with a subscription), FailBlog, Pandora Radio, and many more. For the most part, these all work as promised, though I have noticed that YouTube is just a blown-up Flash version and BREAK doesn’t show all the videos on the site. The Netflix app is absolutely amazing, it’s better than most of the console versions and other ports because you don’t have to add movies and shows to your Instant Queue to make them show up. You can browse through the whole Netflix Instant Play library and the quality is actually surprisingly good. Some of the other features are the ability to tune into your Facebook and Twitter feeds and see videos that people have linked. I wish that the Facebook and Twitter feeds had more functionality, but I’m sure there are some third-party apps that are capable of doing this. Another thing that I really like about Boxee is that it’s open-source and multi-platform. I have Ubuntu, WIndows 7, and Mac OS X and it works perfectly on all three.
I do feel, however, that for an application which is most likely an application that you always want to keep open on an HTPC, it is missing some functionality. I think that if they want to keep the user from switching to other applications, they should add some more things, such as: e-mail, Google Reader sync (though there is a built-in RSS reader, I like to keep all my devices in sync), ability to actually browse through Facebook and Twitter feeds without third-party plugins, and YouTube via H.264 or other native formats. Otherwise, this application mostly fulfills all my needs for HTPC use.

Click here to get Boxee.

David – Senior Editor