To be clear, we’re only looking at sets that are at least 46 inches (117cm) — go big or go home. And though there are some nice 720p plasmas out there for amazing prices, the majority of TVs we’re concerned with are 1080p — it’s the standard now, even in cheap HDTVs, and probably the only resolution you’ll see next year.

We focus on LCDs quite a bit here, not because we prefer them, but because there are key enhancements that can be put in LCD technology to make them look better. With plasma, the problems — energy consumption, weight, thickness — are more of an evolutionary, year-to-year thing. A cheaper plasma often is one that’s just using older technology.

Also, we’re using Amazon as our pricing base line, since it’s on average a good standard for low but legitimate street prices, and we use Samsung examples a lot because they have a ton of different models on the market, so it was easier to isolate individual features and to gauge subtle differences in pricing.

Size Matters

The first and most obvious thing that’ll cost you is more screen real estate. There’s not an absolute inches to dollars ratio, but generally speaking, the first step up is the cheapest, and somewhere in the middle there’s a sweet spot, after which you basically lose money by upgrading. The funny thing is, each maker seems to have a different idea of where the sweet spot is, which you could play to your advantage:

Take for instance, Panasonic’s plasma G10 series. It’s $US200 to go from the 42-inch model to 50 inches, and then $US400 to go up to 54 inches. So the sweet spot is at 50 inches. Similar thing happening with Vizio’s XVT line: Going from 42 inches to 47 inches is just $US250, though going up to 55 inches from 47 inches costs about a grand. Hence 47 inches makes the most dollar-per-inch sense if you like that TV.

With Sony and Samsung, though, it pays to keep going up. In Sony’s top-of-the-line Bravia XBR9 series, the hop from 40 inches to 46 inches is $US360, but going from 46 inches to 52 inches is just $US250. Samsung’s LED-backlit TV costs $US350 to go from 40 inches to 46 inches, and just $US500 to go from there to 55 inches. (There’s a limit, of course, Samsung’s 65-inch LN65B650 doesn’t have many of the frills discussed below, but still lists for $US6000.)

The real lesson here: Don’t think of size as a foregone conclusion. When you’ve narrowed down your options using all the criteria, go back and check the sizes and relative prices. There may be a surprise, hopefully good but possibly bad.

Vroom, Vroom

Everything after size you can roughly sweep everything you’d pay more for into the category of performance. The grand trick of buying TVs though, according to our friend Gary Merson of HD Guru, is that “the TV industry is set up like the car industry”. Just like buying a Corvette to battle your mid-life crisis because it vrooms real good, when you pay extra money for extra horsepower, you’re also going to get leather bucket seats and the in-dash GPS. It’s hard to buy a stripped-down car that just delivers better performance, and the same goes when you’re trying to scrimp on a TV without compromising picture. In the case of TVs, a higher performer might come with a million HDMI jacks or integrated Wi-Fi and video on demand, and you never know exactly what you’re paying for.

Fortunately, we can break performance into two major categories so it’s slightly easier to interpret those price differentials: Backlight (for LCDs) and panel quality.

Fancy Backlighting

The single most expensive upgrade for LCD TVs right now is LED backlighting. As we explain here, there are a bunch of advantages to LED over conventional CCFL backlighting for LCD TVs. Which particular advantages you pick up depends on the kind of LED backlighting in the set. While both offer instant on and power savings, edge-lit models mainly deliver serious thinness, while backlit sets can offer local dimming, which delivers noticeably better black levels and contrast.

How much will it cost you? Well, comparing two Samsung sets with fairly equivalent panels, the price difference is about $US500. The CCFL-backlit LN46B650 is $US1360, while the UN46B6000 is $US1850. Because it’s got LED edge lighting, the B6000 is only 3cm thick, compared to the B650’s 7.8cm. When you step up and compare Samsung’s edge-lit to back-lit, the difference isn’t as great: A 46-inch 8000 series edge-lit model goes for $US2300, while the 8500 series with local-dimming is $US2600. (If you’re already paying for LED technology, you definitely want to step up.)

So yes, backlit LED sets with local dimming tend to cost more. Sony’s year-old Bravia XBR8 uses tri-colour LEDs to improve colour accuracy over the most LED sets, which use white ones. Though its production is discontinued, it’s still nearly $US2200 at 46 inches. However, Toshiba consistently delivers cheaper sets than most of its fellow “name” brands, and their 46-inch LED backlit set with local dimming is just $US1700.

Panels and Oh, It Hertz

The panel is the other major thing that determines how good an HDTV actually is, and it applies to both LCDs and plasmas. Typically, as you move up in price, you get a better panel. Cheaper sets generally use older panels with previous-generation tech that Merson says have a poorer viewing angle, so there’s a smaller area you can actually stare at on your TV to get a good picture. The problem is that no TV manufacturer actually declares its panel attributes on the box, so you’re often on your own to figure it out. The best way is to go to the store and check out the viewing angles.

Hertz, for the uninitiated, is simply the number of times per second that LCD TVs refresh their picture. (Plasma isn’t part of this discussion because phosphor pixels work differently than liquid crystal ones, and plasma’s “refresh rate” would be way higher — to the point of irrelevance.) A 60Hz LCD refreshes the picture 60 times a second, 120Hz is 120 times a second, and so on, up to 240Hz in the top-priced LCD sets. A higher refresh rate is supposed to increase the ability to see fast-moving video at its highest intended resolution, and it works well in theory, though there are issues with 240Hz execution. At this point, a minimum of 120Hz is a given on all premium LCDs, says Merson. There isn’t one LED-backlit set that doesn’t have it.

Here’s how the refresh-rate step-ups look: The 46-inch Samsung B550 is a standard 1080p CCFL-backlit set for $US1020. Moving up to the same size B650 for $US1360 — $US300 more — gets you 120Hz (plus a higher contrast ratio). Going up again, to the B750 for $US1630, another $US300, you get 240Hz, and again even better contrast ratio. That’s about the top of Samsung’s CCFL-backlit line.

You can see the same thing with their LED sets: The 46-inch B6000 is a 120Hz LED edge-lit set for $US1850. The 46-inch LED edgel-lit B8000 goes to 240Hz and it costs $US2300, about $US450 more.

What About Plasma?

As we mentioned, plasmas are a little less complicated, since there’s nothing like refresh rates to deal with. On the other hand, the situation may be more obtuse, since you don’t always know what the real differences are. Merson says there are a few basic levels of plasma performance. Stepping up to the 50-inch 1080p plasmas will generally cost $US300 to $US400 more.

There are more issues, however. Panasonic has a new panel called NeoPDP that’s more energy efficient, but it’s sometimes hard to tell which models have it and which don’t. (Hint: Look for the Energy Rating sticker.) Finally, you have THX-certified panels that offer nearly perfect calibration right out of the box. Beyond that, contrast ratios do tend to get better over time, but it’s relative: At the low end of the HDTV price spectrum, plasma sets have generally delivered better picture than LCD anyway.

Frills and Other Stuff

The funny thing about TVs nowadays is that there’s more to them than the screen. Like inputs. Until recently, one thing you got more of by paying more money were more holes to stick things into. That’s not really the case once you get up into 46-inch sets — you’re gonna get four HDMI slots in a set that big no matter what. But there are other things nowadays. Like video services that come in through other holes, or maybe without wires at all.

An example, to use our old friends at Samsung: The B6000 looks a lot like the B7000, but with the B7000, for $US180 more you get online video services via Yahoo’s widget engine, like YouTube.

Or, let’s look at the upcoming crop of LED TVs that aren’t even out yet, or are in limited distribution for now. LG’s 55LHX and Sony’s Bravia XBR10 both have wireless HDMI and 240Hz, but with Bravia Internet Widgets and Slacker radio, the Bravia is $US5000, $US200 more than 55LHX. Wireless HDMI itself is a pretty pricey feature. Same Sony, compared to Samsung’s 8500. The 8500 has built-in video services, but no wireless HDMI, and it’s $US500 cheaper, at $US4500. Oh, and did I mention that the Sony is even 7cm smaller than the Samsung and LG?

Wireless is still in the gimmick phase, but next year, we assume we’ll be able to track its price premium as well as we can track size, refresh rate, backlighting and other factors today, $US300 to $US400 at a time. How do you get from $US600 to a $US6000? You just add, add some more and then keep adding.

So Wait, What Is Android, Exactly?

In Google’s words, it’s “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”. That doesn’t mean much, so here’s a breakdown: It’s a Linux-based, open-source mobile OS, complete with a custom window manager, modified Linux 2.6 kernel, WebKit-based browser and built-in camera, calendar, messaging, dialler, calculator, media player and album apps. If that sounds a little sparse, that’s because it is: Android on its own doesn’t amount to a whole lot; in fact, a phone with plain vanilla Android wouldn’t feel like a smartphone at all. Thankfully, these phones don’t exist.

Android is Linux insofar as its core components are open-source and free, and Google must publish their source code with every release. But the real heart of the Android phone experience — the Google apps like Maps, GChat, Gmail, Android Market, Google Voice, Places and YouTube are closed-source, meaning Google owns them outright. Every Google phone comes with these apps in one form or another so to the user this distinction isn’t that important. That said, it occasionally rears its head, like when Android modder Cyanogen had to strip the apps out of his custom Android builds to avoid getting sued by Google:

The issue that’s raised is the redistribution of Google’s proprietary applications like Maps, GTalk, Market and YouTube. They are Google’s intellectual property and I intend to respect that. I will no longer be distributing these applications as part of CyanogenMod.

This can lead to more mainstream (and confusing) issues, like with the, erm, touchy (sorry!) multitouch issue: Android OS supports multitouch in that it can recognise multiple simultaneous input points on its screen. But Google’s Android apps don’t. So when a company like HTC comes along and decides to properly add multitiouch to the OS, they can only add it to the open-source parts like the browser (or their own closed-source apps), not Google’s proprietary apps. That’s why the Hero has pinch-zoom in its browser and photo albums but not in Google Maps where it’s just as at home.

The issue gets even less trivial as the apps grow more central to the Android experience. You know how Google Maps Navigation was like the banner feature for Android 2.0? Well it was, but technically speaking, it’s not a part of Android. It’s just part of an app made by Google for Android that’ll ship with most Android handsets. Except for in countries where Google doesn’t have their mapping data quite together enough, where it won’t. That’s what’s happening with the Euro Droid, which, by the way, does have multitouch in its browser like the Hero. That’s why the distinction matters.

So why take so much care to set up and protect this open source component when surely Google could just slap together a closed-source mobile operating system and give it away for free? It would deprive handset manufacturers of their ability to freely modify certain core components of the OS, sure, but the real reasoning, oddly enough, has less to do with phones and more to do with, well, everything else.

How We Got Here

Flash back to November 7, 2007, when the Open Handset Alliance, a massive coalition of mobile industry companies, held hands to announce to the world their new child. His name was Android, and we were told very little about him. What we were told though, was delivered almost entirely in frustratingly vague platitudes:

Handset manufacturers and wireless operators will be free to customise Android in order to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. Developers will have complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and user-friendly services, bringing the Internet developer model to the mobile space.

We were a little disappointed that the GPhone wasn’t strictly a phone, but like most people, this sounded exciting to us. Vague, but exciting.

And so we waited, patiently. And waited. Then nearly a year later, we got our hands on the first hardware to actually use Android. It was called the T-Mobile G1 and It Was Good. Then six months later, we got another phone — the Magic (or MyTouch) which was more or less exactly like the first one, minus a keyboard. It wasn’t until two full years since Android’s first appearance — when not just HTC but Motorola, Samsung and Sony started showing off fresh wares — that Android began to feel like more than an experiment. And more important than getting fresh hardware, Android’s OS had changed too. A lot.

The T-Mobile G1 shipped with Android 1.0, which wasn’t exactly missing much, but still felt a bit barebones. We had to wait until February of 2009 for paid apps to show up in the Android Market, after which April saw the first major update, Android 1.5 “Cupcake”. (Updates each have alphabetical, pastry-themed codenames.) This was followed by 1.6 “Donut”, which most new handsets are shipping with now, then 2.0 (yes, “Eclair”), which throws in social networking integration, an interface lift, support for new device resolutions, a fresh developer SDK and support for the optional Google Maps Navigation. This version is currently only found on the Motorola Droid, but should start showing up elsewhere within a few months. And so here we are. And that’s just half of it.

Android Isn’t Just a Phone OS

That announcement I showed you earlier? That was from the Open Handset alliance, a consortium of phone folks — handsets manufacturers, mobile chip makers and the like. But let’s look back at another announcement, this time from the Android project leads, back in early 2008:

Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications…Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.

Almost all the talk about Android over the last two years has been about Android the phone OS, not Android the lightweight Linux distribution. While Google was busy pumping out high-profile phone-centric updates, Android was starting to creep into other industries like a disease. A good disease, that everyone likes! Yes, one of those. This is where things get weird.

Remember all those not-quite-there Android netbooks? Part of the plan. The Android-powered Barnes & Noble Nook? Shouldn’t have been a surprise. Android navigators? Why not? PMPs? Creative’s got one. Photo frames and set-top boxes? Already in the works.

Most of these devices won’t look like Android hardware to us, because our strongest Android associations with the OS are all visual and phone-specific, like the homescreen, app drawer and dialler. Nonetheless, this is as much a part of the Android vision as phones are — it just won’t be as obvious.

Your Android-powered DVR won’t have an app drawer, but it will share the kernel and an unusually good widget system. Your Android-powered PMP may run a custom interface, but it’ll have access to thousands of apps, like an open-source iPod Touch. Your Android-powered photo frame might look just like any other photo frame, but when it drops your wireless connection, it’ll have a decent, full-featured settings screen to help you pick it back up. And over-the-air updates. And it might actually cost a few dollars less that it would have otherwise, because remember, Android is free. This is our Android future, and it sounds awesome.

What Happens Next

But the first step in the Android takeover is necessarily the phones. Android 2.0 means the handsets aren’t just interesting anymore; they’re truly buyable. As Matt said this week:

In time, Android very well could be the internet phone, hands down, in terms of raw capabilities … Android 2.0’s potential finally feels as enormous as the iPhone’s, and I get kinda tingly thinking about it.

What problems the phones still have — among them, poor media playback and the lack of a bundled desktop client to manage media — are not with Android but with Google, which is really just a major supporter of Android. Either Google will solve them hands-on, or the dream of the open source and app developer communities rising up to fill in all the gaps will become a reality. What’s certain is that Google — or someone — needs to address them if future legions of Google-branded phones are to succeed to their full potential.

Speaking of potential, it’s massive. In addition to everything else Android has going on, timing is on its side. Windows Mobile is limping along with two broken legs, and its hardware partners took (or maybe gave) notice: Motorola, lately a pariah in its own right, doesn’t want anything more to do with Microsoft; HTC is stating continued support while quietly phasing out the WinMo ranks; Sony Ericsson, which hasn’t seen a true hit come from one of their Microsoft-branded phones in years, is dabbling in Androidery. And as far as most consumers are concerned, anything Windows Mobile can do, Android can do better.

It doesn’t stop with Microsoft either. Symbian, whose boss called Android “just another Linux platform“, is losing ground, and losing some of Sony Ericsson’s business doesn’t help. The Palm Pre, polished and beautiful as it is, can’t keep up with Android’s exploding app inventory, multiplying hardware partners and rock-star ability to draw talent. RIM’s BlackBerry isn’t generally seen as a direct Android competitor, but Android 2.0, along with Palm’s WebOS and Apple’s iPhone OS, is the main reason the BlackBerry OS feels so clunky and old. That matters. From here, the outlook is clear: Android and the iPhone are the next consumer smartphone superpowers.

And even if it takes Google 10 years to iron out Android’s faults and push this kind of adoption, you can expect Android, or its unofficial pseudonym “Google Phone”, to become a household name. Besides, Android will start creeping into our lives in places we might not expect it. It’ll power our set-top boxes, ebook readers, PMPs and who knows what else. It’s not just going to be the next great smartphone OS, it’ll be the quiet, invisible software layer that sits between all our portable gadgets and our fingers.

Source photo courtesy of NASA.

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Sydney, you won’t be able to use it when your flight lands in Paris. If you buy a three-pronged adaptor for le portable in France, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adaptor to tap into the grid there. But that’s cool! You can take the same adaptor to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn’t support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardisation of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I’d hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country’s culture, because they’re plugs — they don’t really mean anything. But in the sense that they’re probably not going to change until they’re forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it’s kind of what they are.

What’s Out There

Click for larger.

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we’re going to stick with US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing — they don’t actually mandate anything. They’re not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120V fellas, like the the ones in North America, and the 220-240V plugs, like most countries use, including Australia. It’s not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they’re attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you’ve probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison’s early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison’s technology, which happened to be 110V. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realise that 240V power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardisation started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla’s patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz and 110V. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It’s an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house’s wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell’s “Separable Attachment Plug“—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to…do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it’s pretty much the type we use now.

Here’s the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell’s plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalised, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two, which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardise the plug by organisations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it’s a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it — one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who’s had a chance to use one. But it isn’t Britain’s first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies — copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuse board somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how all the way into the 1940s and ’50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That’s how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adaptors’ voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, 90 years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for post-colonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of Communications for the IEC, which is still doing their thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn’t great. “There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed, the problem is, really, everyone’s invested in their own system. It’s difficult to get away from that.”

When Holland’s International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee’s spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realised that there were “limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe)”. It’d be expensive to tear out everyone’s sockets, and the need didn’t feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can’t force anyone to do anything — they’re sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means that they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn’t the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn’t quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late ’80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240V countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120V countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one already used in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there’s that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you’ll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40W light bulb. So yeah, we’ll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let’s say, 2050?

She took care to emphasise that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we’ll have at least two standards to deal with — a 110-120V flat plug and the 240-250V round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: “We have to move forward into plugs we can really control,” Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone’ll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your K-Mart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adaptor, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the EIC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi’s illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

There’s all kinds of new hotness in Snow Leopard and Windows 7, but what’s old and busted is when stuff crashes, even on the newest OSes. This is how that happens, and why it’s thankfully happening less and less.

There are about a bajllion ways for a computer to crash, from hardware to software, so we’re going to stick to some of the most common. Let’s start from the top: Simply put, when you reach a Blue Screen of Death, you’ve hit an error that’s so bad your whole computer has no choice but to restart. A kernel panic’s the same kind of bad mojo for any Unix or BSD based system, like Mac OS X.

Application Crashes

Broadly speaking, the two most common causes of crashes, according to Microsoft’s Chris Flores, a director on the Windows team, are programs not following the rules, and programmers not anticipating a certain condition (so the program flips out). The most obvious example of the former is a memory error. Basically, an operating system gives a program a certain amount of memory to use, and it’s up to the program to stay inside the boundaries. If a program makes a grab for memory that doesn’t belong to it, it’s corrupting another program’s—or even the OS’s—memory. So the OS makes the program crash, to protect everything else.

In the other case, unexpected conditions can make a program crash if it wasn’t designed with good exception handling. Flores’ “oversimplified” example is this: Suppose you have a data field, like for a credit card number. A good programmer would make sure you type just numbers, or provide a way for the program to deal with you typing symbols or letters. But if the program expects one type of data and gets another, and it’s not designed to handle something it doesn’t expect, it can crash.

A completely frozen application is one that has crashed, even though it stays on your screen, staring at you. It’s just up to you to reach for the Force Quit and tell the computer to put it out of its misery. Sometimes, obviously, the computer kills it for you.

Crashes, as you probably experience almost daily, are limited to programs. Firefox probably crashes on you all the time. Or iTunes (oh God, iTunes). But with today’s operating systems, if you hit an omega-level, take-down-your-whole-system crashes, something’s likely gone funky down at the kernel level.

System Crashes

The kernel is the gooey core of the operating system. If you think of an operating system as a Tootsie pop with layers of sugary shell, it’s down at the lowest level managing the basic things that the OS needs to work, and takes more than a few licks to get to.

More than likely, your computer completely crashes out way less than it used to — or at least, way less than Windows 95. There’s a few reasons for that. A major reason, says Maximum PC Editor Maximus Will Smith, is that Apple and Microsoft have spent a lot of time moving stuff that used to run at really low level, deep in the guts of the OS, up a few layers into the user space, so an application error that would’ve crashed a whole system by borking something at the kernel level just results in an annoying program-level hang up. More simply put, OSes have been getting better as isolating and containing problems, so a bad app commits suicide, rather than suicide bombing your whole computer.

This is part of the reason drivers—the software that lets a piece of hardware, like a video card talk to your OS and other programs—are a bigger source of full-on crashes than standard apps when it comes to modern operating systems. By their nature, drivers have pretty deep access, and the kernel sits smack in the middle of that, says Flores. So if something goes wrong with a driver, it can result in some bigtime ka-blooey. Theoretically, signed (i.e. vetted) drivers help avoid some of the problems, but take graphics drivers, which were a huge problem with Vista crashes at launch: Flores says that “some of the most complex programming in the world is done by graphics device driver software writers”, and when Microsoft changed to a new driver model with Vista, it was a whole new set of rules to play by. (Obviously, stuff got screwed up.)

Another reason things crash less now is that Apple and Microsoft have metric tons of data about what causes crashes with more advanced telemetry—information the OS sends home, like system configurations, what a program was doing, the state of memory and other in-depth details about a crash—than ever. With that information, they can do more to prevent crashes, obviously, so don’t be afraid to click “send” on that error message.

In Windows 7, for instance, there’s a new fault tolerance heap—basically, a special area of memory that’s fairly low-level—which could get corrupted easily in past versions of Windows. In Windows 7, it can tell when a crash in the heap is about to happen and take steps to isolate an application from everything else.

Future Crashes

Of course, there are other reasons stuff can crash: Actual hardware problems, like a memory failure, or motherboard component failures. Hard drive issues. Hell, Will Smith tells us that a new problem with high-performance super-computing are crashes caused by cosmic rays. A few alpha particles fly through a machine and boom.

Granted, you don’t have to worry about that too much. What you might worry about in the future, says Smith, with the explosion of processor cores and multi-threaded programs trying to take advantage of them, are the classic problems of parallel processing, like race conditions, where two processes are trying to do something with the same piece of data, and the order of events gets screwed up, ending in a crash. Obviously, developers would very much prefer if the next five years of computing didn’t result the Windows 95 days, and programming techniques are always growing more sophisticated, so there’s probably not a huge danger there. But as long as humans, who make mistakes, write programs, there will be crashes, so they’re not going away, either.

Thanks to Maxim PC’s Will Smith!

Chips, Chipsets and Damned Chipsets

OK, so the first thing to understand is that an Intel brand, like Core 2 or Core i7, actually refers to a whole bunch of different processors. Although they generally have the same basic microarchitecture (in other words, chip design), the brand envelopes both desktop and mobile chips, chips with radically different clock speeds, that use different motherboard sockets, etc.

Because of these differences, each particular chip is given a codename, chosen for obscure geographical locations (seriously, plug just about any codename into Google Maps). For instance, the original mobile Core 2 Duo processor was Merom, and it was replaced after about two years by Penryn, which was manufactured using a new 45-nanometre process to be more efficient. Quite different, these two, but Intel pimped both as Core 2 Duos nonetheless.

View Intel in a larger map

Although Intel doesn’t market chips according to their codenames, the individual chip gets a model number that gives you an idea of how it compares, spec-wise (clock speed, cache size, etc.), to other chips in the same group. So, a Core i7-950 is gonna be faster than a Core i7-920, and a Core 2 Duo P8600 isn’t going to quite stack up to a Core 2 Duo P9600. The difference between a P8400 and P8600 is obviously less than the difference between a P8600 and a P9600. To match a particular chip codename to a particular model number though, you probably have to do some Googlin’ (or Bingin’).

In some cases, Intel pushes chips with a ULV designator for “ultra-low voltage”, which doesn’t mean anything in particular in terms of chip design, since it includes several brands of chips, from Core 2 to Celeron. The point is that these chips power notebooks that are almost as portable at netbooks, but are more expensive, so computer makers (and Intel) make more money.

While we’re at it, I might as well explain what the hell Centrino is. It’s not a single chip, it’s a platform. That is, it’s a combo meal for notebooks with a mobile processor, a chipset (essentially the silicon that lets the processor talk to the rest of the computer) and a wireless networking adaptor. Typically, Intel releases a new combo meal every year, though they’ve all been called Centrino, with the most recent making the leap to being called Centrino 2.

The reason we decided to tell you all this stuff now is that Intel is gradually phasing out the Core 2 family, like Pentiums before that, and is moving Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3 up to take its place. This is how all the families relate to each other…

Nehalem Rising: Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3

Core i7 systems use a totally new microarchitecture called Nehalem, and it’s badass.

The first set of Core i7 chips, codenamed Bloomfield, launched in November 2008 for high-end desktops. They’re the most outrageously fast Core i7 chips, with triple-channel memory (meaning they’re able to use memory sticks in triplets rather than pairs) and other blazing accoutrements.

The new Core i7 chips, launched last month, are for desktop and mobile. The desktop variant is codenamed Lynnfield, and it more closely resembles its mobile equivalent, codenamed Clarksfield, than it does the Bloomfield monster — dual-channel memory, not triple, for instance.

You’ll be seeing a lot more Clarksfield in the next couple weeks, like in the HP Envy 15, since most computer makers were holding off for Windows 7 to drop their new laptops. All of the Core i7 processors are quad-core, even the mobile Clarksfield, so you’re not gonna see it in anything like Dell’s skinny Adamo.

Core i5 is going to be Intel’s more mainstream Nehalem-microarchitecture chip brand, and as a broader brand, the chip differentiation gets a little more confusing. Core i5 actually includes some (but not all) of the desktop Lynnfield processors. For now, the only Core i5 chip is quad-core, but you’re going to start seeing dual-core Core i5 chips, and soon enough they will make up the bulk of Intel’s mainstream processors. In English: Unless you’re looking for a crazyfast new computer, your next machine will probably run an Intel Core i5 CPU.

Eventually, dual-core Core i3 chips will come out, and as you can guess by the number, they won’t be quite as fast—or expensive—as the Core i5 or i7 chips.

Netbook’s Best Friend: Atom N and Z

Atom is probably the Intel chip you hear about second only to Core 2 Duo: It’s essentially the CPU that goes inside of netbooks. There are a couple of different variations out now, the N series (codename Diamondville) and the Z series (codename Silverthorne). The Diamondville chips are for nettops and netbooks, and can handle full versions of Windows Vista and 7. Silverthrone is used in netbooks but was designed for smaller connected devices like UMPCs and MIDs. (This is why Sony shoving an underpowered Atom Z in the Vaio P, and trying to run Windows Vista on top of it, was retarded.)

The next generation of Atom is more interesting, and more confusing, in a way. The CPU is codenamed Pineview, and it’s actually got the graphics processor integrated right onto the same chip, precluding the need for a separate GPU tucked into the netbook’s overall chipset. The benefit is longer battery life, since it’ll take less energy to crunch the same visuals. We’ll start seeing Pineview netbooks sometime early next year, most likely.

Oldies But Goodies: Core 2 Duo, Quad and Extreme

Intel’s Core 2 chips have been out three years now, an eternity in computer years. Because of this, and because they’re the main ones used in most personal desktop and laptop systems, there is a metric shitton of different Core 2 chips.

It’s also more confusing because there are way more codenames to wade through. Let’s start from the top: Core 2 Solo has one core, Core 2 Duo two, and Quad has four (as does Extreme). From there, you have two distinct generations of chips within the Core 2 family.

In the first generation of Core 2 Duos, the main desktop chip was Conroe (with a cheaper variant called Allendale), while the main mobile one was called Merom. There was also a branch of Core 2 Quads called Kentsfield.

The next generation (that is, the current generation, unless you’re already on the Core i7 bandwagon) arrived with a new process for making chips with even smaller transistors. Among other more technical differences, they were more energy efficient than their predecessors. With this generation of Core 2s, the mainstream desktop chips are Wolfdale, the desktop quad-cores are called Yorkfield, and the mobile chips are Penryn — if you’ve bought a decent notebook in the last two years, it’s probably got a Penryn Core 2 inside of it.

Ancient History: Pentium and Celeron Pentium is dead, except it’s not, living on as a zombie brand for chips that aren’t as good as Core chips, but aren’t as crappy as Intel’s low-end Celeron processors. If you see a machine with a sticker for Pentium or Celeron, run.

OK, I hope that helps, at least a little — you should probably thank me for staying away from clock speeds and other small variations, like individual permutations of Core i7 Bloomfield processors, to hopefully give you a broader overview of what all’s going on. Intel told me it’ll all make more sense once their entire road map for the year is out on the market, but I have a feeling it’s not gonna help my mum understand this crap one bit better.

Top image via soleiletoile/Flickr

Thanks to Intel for helping us sort all this out!

Avid photographers, you already know the score, and this isn’t a guide for you. Nor is it for the dude with the brand-new 5D Mk II with an external flash gun, or the weekend strobist. This is a reference to be passed around as a public service; a quick guide for the aquarium-flashing, face-flushing, baby-blinding friends and family you all know and tolerate love.

When You Shouldn’t

At Large Events
Every time I go to a night time sporting event or concert, I see hundreds of starry flickers coming from the stands. When I see them, I die a little inside. For your average point-and-shoot, the effective range of your built-in flash is about 4.5 metres. You might stretch this to six metres if you jack up your camera’s ISO settings to 800 (or God forbid 1600), but under no circumstances will your camera’s flash reach down to the field or stage.

Every little flash you see in the photo above represent a failed photo, unless the intention was to get a well-lit out-of-focus shot of the dude sitting two rows forward. Shooting artificially lit events may be hard, but letting your camera’s automatic flash have its way won’t help. Shut it down.

Through Glass
Walk into any aquarium for a classic flash infraction: Shooting through glass. People press their cameras up to the fish and everybody goes blind. This almost never works — ever notice that giant white explosion where the fish was supposed to be? We don’t have an aquarium in our office, so I put Kyle, our new intern, in a glass conference room for a similar effect. He now has a glowing orb for an eye. Thanks, flash.

Shooting Gadgets, or Anything With a Screen
This one may be a bit of a tech blogger pet peeve, but please, turn off the flash before taking pictures of your gear, especially if it has a screen. Even the brightest, matte-est screens act as flash mirrors, as do all manner of plastic and metal finishes. It’s nearly impossible to take a good photo of a gadget with your flash on, and there’s rarely a reason to: Gadgets generally won’t move unless you tell them to, so find a way to stabilise your camera and treat your subject to a nice, loooong exposure. On point-and-shoots,this usually requires nothing more than manually turning off your flash and staying in auto mode — the camera will figure out the rest.

On Anything That Isn’t Moving
Know what I said about shooting gadgets? Honestly, it applies to all inanimate objects, and even animate objects, assuming you get get them to sit still enough. Set your camera on the table, prop yourself against a tree, make an improvised monopod out of a lamp — if your subject is still, the only person to blame for not turning off your flash is yourself.

On Humans
It’s not a hard rule, but it’s a good guideline: built-in flash units emit whiteish xenon light, and generally make your subject look like a malnourished villager from medieval Europe. If you can help it, avoid the flash. (If you can’t, we’ve got some tips below for making your shots look less ghostly.) Photo by Flickr user busbeytheelder

In a Baby’s Face

Because as adorable as this overdramatic baby is, flashing blindingly bright light into your newborn’s pupils seems like bad parenting. (Previously)

When You Should

In Daylight

Counterintuitively, one of the only times your camera’s built-in flash is genuinely useful is when it’s bright and sunny out, and you’ve got a shadow problem. Ideally you should try to illuminate a subject with natural light, but in the event that your photo is lit from behind or above, like this here cat, knocking out a few shadows is a reasonable excuse for using flash. Why? Because the mix of ambient and flash-bulb light is much less harsh than straight flash. Photo by Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags.

When It’s Totally Dark

Because you have no other choice.

How to Avoid It

Keeping your camera still isn’t always easy. If carrying a tripod or Joby-style stabiliser isn’t an option, you can always do it yourself. From our piece on hacking together camera accessories on the cheap:

Shooting long exposures without something to prop your camera on is a pain in the arse, not to mention a blurry mess. So is carrying a tripod. This video shows how to build a pretty effective foot-looping camera stabilizer out of some string, a bolt and a washer. The results are surprisingly good.

And another! Here’s what I call the David Pogue Special, and it’s great: Many lampshade mounts share a diameter and thread size with the tripod mount screw on the bottom of your camcorder, point-and-shoot or DSLR, providing quick and dirty stabilisation in a bind.

If You Absolutely Have To…

…there are a few ways to make your flash-ified photos less harsh.

Change the flash intensity
Many cameras will have a setting for flash intensity. Find it. This will essentially just turn down the brightness of your flash, which will avoid overexposing your subjects’ faces, albeit at the expense of range.

Improvise a Diffuser
External flash units turn out better photos because they have bigger, better bulbs, mostly, but also because they’re often fitted with a diffuser. These accessories soften your flash’s harsh glow, but they’re both expensive and generally impossible to fit onto your mum’s point-and-shoot. Luckily, you can fashion them yourself, sometimes in a matter of seconds. Again, from the DIY camera accessory roundup:

A coffee filter held in front of a flash, a translucent film canister with a notch cut into it, a simple piece of A4 paper or even a piece of matte Scotch tape over the flash lens will measurably improve your drunk party photography.

Tricks like this tend to take a little trial and error, but you’ll love the results.

We’re gonna be talking in-ear earbuds—canalphones, really, or in-ear monitors, if you’re snooty—since all the good stuff goes deep into your precious earholes. We aren’t talking about headphones because great headphones aren’t the most discrete things around — can’t defeat physics, children. Unless you derive some sick pleasure from jogging with a pair of giant cans bolted to your head, earbuds are the way to go.

It’s All About the Drivers — No, Not Those Kind

Whether you’re talking about headphones or earbuds, they work a lot like loudspeakers, just miniaturised. The key element in both are drivers, though earphone drivers are a lot smaller, and do a lot less work to make the same music.

There are two main types of drivers: The a dynamic driver works just like a traditional one in big ol’ speaker. The benefit of the dynamic driver is that it produces a nice bass response, though it can be hard to miniaturise.

A balanced armature driver is pretty common in serious in-ear monitors, since it’s easy to shrink down. Originally found in hearing aids, it houses a magnetic armature that moves when an electric current runs through the coil, putting pressure on the diaphragm, creating sound. It can be, and often is, paired with a dynamic driver.

Most earbuds just have the one driver, though more and more have multiple drivers. That costs more ’cause it’s harder to cram more than one into a tiny casing meant to rest gravity-free in your ear. With multiple drivers also comes a “crossover network”, circuitry meant to divide music into different frequencies and route them to the appropriate drivers, an additional payload to stuff into that tight space. Once all that is crammed in, however, multi-driver earbuds typically sound better than single-driver ones, because the woofer, tweeter and mid-range horn are more innately equipped to handle their own domains of sound — from boomy bass to sizzly treble.

Among the least expensive multiple-driver earbuds are Apple’s fancier AU$119 in-ear earbuds, which use two drivers, a tweeter for highs, and another for everything else. It gets more expensive as you creep up. Shure’s three-driver SE530 lists for $US500 (but can be found for much less). Ultimate Ears’ UE-11 Pro, which will run you a ridiculous $US1150, come with a correspondingly ridiculous four drivers. That’s one for mid-range and one for highs and two for bass.

Some companies opt for a single driver because they think it’s better, since there aren’t complications with crossover networks, trying to get all the drivers to work together to produce seamless sound. On the other hand, with a single driver, you’re asking one driver to do everything: highs, lows and mid-range, says Stereophile senior contributing editor Michael Fremer Fremer. (Yes, that Michael Fremer.) That’s why , FutureSonics, for instance, makers of pro monitoring gear, charges so much for their single-driver earbuds. “A really good single-driver can sound really good,” says Fremer.

What It’s Made Of, How It’s Made

Besides more drivers, what you get in pricier earbuds is (surprise, surprise) better materials, finer build quality and a more focused design. Michael Johns, headphones manager for Shure—known for earbuds with MSRP ranging from $US100 to $US500 but rarely double digits—told me that most of the really cheap ($US20) headphones on the market are basically rebranded crap from no-name factories, and that when you buy those with suggested retail pricing between $US50 and $US100, you’re mostly paying for style, not sound. The top-tier brands, of which there are many, tend to design and engineer their own headphones. The expense of that is, unfortunately, passed on to you.

The cost of raw ingredients is also passed to you — the cable material, the magnet behind the diaphragm, the diaphragm material itself, the overall quality of the driver, and the enclosure. (Again, all of the stuff that jacks up the price of higher quality loudspeakers too.) None of that stuff, when it’s well made, is cheap. Fremer says, for instance, that better headphones actually use stronger magnets than cheaper headphones. As you might guess, the more powerful the magnet, the higher the cost.

The Fit

With legit in-ear buds, fit matters a lot, because the seal is critical. Not only does a good seal mean less ambient noise infiltrates your ears—allowing you to keep your volume low while still catching the full dynamic range—but an airtight seal is how you get decent bass response. And you want something shoved deep down inside your ear to be comfortable, as well as fit, so there’s a lot of different kinds of tips earbud makers have come up with. Besides the standard rubber bulb, there’s squishy foam, and the Christmas tree-lookin’ triple-flange sleeves. What works best often comes down to your own ears and personal preference, which is why better earbuds come with a ton of tips.

What Do I Buy?

So, uh, what’s the sweet spot price for great headphones? If Shure and Fremer had their way, everybody would spend upwards of $US200 on their earbuds, but if you twist their arm, they’ll agree that $US100 is where buds start getting decent. The real trick, according to Fremer, is just getting people to “spend that first hundred bucks”.

The law of diminishing returns tends to kick in above that point: The difference between $US300 set of buds and a $US400 pair is nowhere near the jump from $US20 to $US100. Even smaller is the difference in models between generations. Although the best value on the market might be a previous-gen version of Shure’s 500 series buds at a cut rate ($290), but if you can find $US100 earbuds for $US70, it’s even better.

Whatever you do, for christ’s sake—and yours—ditch the iPod earbuds.

The first problem is, nearly all electronics are lumped together, despite differences in their innards and the services they perform. The second problem is this constant generic request to turn them “off”. Until airlines can speak coherently about eBooks, smartphones, tablets and other traveller-friendly gadgets—and address the various states of rest between “on” and “off”—the system remains in a sphere of stupidity. Whether this is mildly annoying or potentially deadly remains to be seen.

The last time I flew, I had in my carry-on bag three cameras, three laptops, a smartphone and a classic iPod. Judging from the long security lines, I wasn’t the only one trucking plentiful gadgetry.

When I got on the plane, the flight attendant asked everyone to turn “off” phones and other portable electronics. She appeared at my side as I was switching my iPhone to aeroplane mode and repeated, “It’s time to turn off your portable electronics.” I replied, “That’s what I’m doing.” She sneered like a 1930s copper who’d just collared the dumbest guy in the bootlegging operation: “So flipping through screens is how you turn it off? There’s no on-off switch on the side?” She thought she’d caught me in a lie. I just looked back in disbelief, made the screen magically go dark, and put my supposedly “off” phone back in my pocket, satisfying whatever interpretation of the rules was in this poor misinformed woman’s head.

On another leg of our journey, just before takeoff, a flight attendant pointed to the eBook reader my wife was using and said in a stern voice, “Please turn off all portable electronics”. She did not ask the gentleman seated next to us to turn off his digital watch, though it may well have been drawing more power at the time.

Worst of all, she did not check every single mobile phone and laptop to make sure they were in a state where they could not emit a hefty dose of RF. Most of the smartphones on board were probably in standby (with some kind of radio emission still happening) and most laptops were probably closed but not powered down — hopefully sleeping.

The only command we’re given is to turn stuff “off” — a command increasingly ignored for its incoherence. What does it mean for a phone or iPod to be “off”? Most people don’t even know. If the command is this easy to ignore with no consequences, the likely conclusion is that the gear really isn’t a threat. But if it is, the airlines may not discover their own boneheadedness until the danger reaches some lethal saturation point.

Here’s the actual FAA regulation:

§ 121.306   Portable electronic devices.
(a) Except as provided in paragraph (b) of this section, no person may operate, nor may any operator or pilot in command of an aircraft allow the operation of, any portable electronic device on any U.S.-registered civil aircraft operating under this part.
(b) Paragraph (a) of this section does not apply to—
(1) Portable voice recorders;
(2) Hearing aids;
(3) Heart pacemakers;
(4) Electric shavers; or
(5) Any other portable electronic device that the [airline] has determined will not cause interference with the navigation or communication system of the aircraft on which it is to be used.
(c) The determination required by paragraph (b)(5) of this section shall be made by that [airline] operating the particular device to be used.
[Doc. No. FAA–1998–4954, 64 FR 1080, Jan. 7, 1999]

You will have noticed the date, 1999, but still, that preamble speaks volumes: “no person may operate…any portable electronic device on any US-registered civil aircraft…” followed by exception after exception. The mentality of that is old school, to put it politely. You will also note that the discretion is left up to the airline (with heavy support from the aircraft maker), layering on confusion in sugary heaps.

What is the issue? This suggests it is “interference with navigation or communication systems”, and in that case, it’s understandable that such potential for jamming is minimised during the most dangerous parts of the flight, take off and landing. All electronics give off a bit of radiation; communications devices like phones and laptops give off considerably more. Minimise the amount of RF emissions (including unpredictable radio “harmonics”) and you will reduce the chances—however unlikely in the first place—that portable electronics will threaten the safety of the flight.

That was Boeing’s recommendation to the feds 10 years ago, when mobile phones were starting to boom, and it makes sense. Unfortunately, what’s going on now is a mere pantomime true RF security. Here’s why:

Smartphones
How many people actually know how to turn off their smartphone? When I carried a BlackBerry, I never turned it off, because it took like 5 minutes to power back on. At the same time, I was always finding it fully awake in my bag or pocket, long after I thought I’d secured it. You CrackBerry addicts are making fun of me right now, and that’s fine, but the fact is, I can’t possibly be alone. How many people know about aeroplane mode on iPhones or other phones? For flight attendants, turning off the screen is all that apparently matters, but there’s no way that is truly compliant.

Laptops
When was the last time you shut off your laptop during the boarding process? When I run out of the house, I just slam the thing shut and shove it in my bag. When I am at the airport, I pop it open to do some work. So when I’m finally at an altitude where it is safe to use portable electronics, I pop it open and then remember to turn off Wi-Fi. And not so we don’t plummet out of the air—more so I can save at least some battery life. My guess is that most people who carry laptops on board just let them sleep, with Wi-Fi engaged. And on certain Vista notebooks I’ve carried, just closing the lid didn’t mean squat.

Handheld Gaming Systems
Back about 14 years ago, there were a spate of reports that Game Boys were causing interference with the operation of planes. According to Boeing, there was never any actual proof of this, though it did inspire one of the funniest Simpsons moments ever. The real joke is, back then, portable gaming systems didn’t all come with embedded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth like they do now. My guess is that many a properly stowed Nintendo DS can still sniff around the plane for cute Nintendogs or whatever, even with the lid closed.

eBook Readers
This one is going to need special attention. I often get quite a bit of quality reading done at take-off and landing, precisely because I can’t pop open a device and watch a movie or a TV show. But when I carry a Kindle or some other reader, I can’t use it during that happy time. The question is, why can’t I? With the 3G radio turned off—a very easy manoeuvre—an eBook reader uses less battery life than the Bluetooth earbud on standby that you may have forgotten to take off your ear. There is no power needed to hold a picture on e-ink, so the battery is only taxed when the page is turned. How’s this for irony? If you are looking at a page of words, your reader actually is off.

Noise-Cancelling Headphones
Here’s where most airlines get it right. Anything that takes 35 hours to drain a single AAA battery and has no inherent telecommunication function probably isn’t going to cause the plane to go into an “uncommanded roll”. Armies of Bose addicts fly friendly and unfriendly skies every day, and are generally allowed to use their own big ole cans during take-off and landing, provided they’re attached to the airlines’ audio system and not their own iPod. This kind of common sense needs to be applied to other devices.

In the end, what we’ve really got is an increasing array of devices that are replacing the books and crosswords of yore, and almost none of them have an “on-off switch” on the side. They’re powered up and doing their thing, often while still nestled inside our pockets or our bags. Some are perfectly harmless beyond a shadow of a doubt, some could easily join together to form a cloud of harmless or harmful electromagnetic radiation. So why are airlines so confused? Hell, they’ve made special dispensations permitting knitting needles, even metre-long metal suckers. Is it too much to ask that they give equal consideration to our many cherished gadgets?

Microsoft obviously has a more complicated relationship with “industry” standards, because anything it decides is its standard—even proprietary ones—becomes a kind of de facto standard for everybody else, simply because of Microsoft’s overwhelming marketshare. This was more true in the past than today, with Microsoft playing ball with everybody else more often.

Microsoft’s AV Club
Let’s start with Windows Media Audio—most commonly, it’s known as Microsoft’s proprietary audio codec that at one point fought the good fight again MP3, but is now much more, having grown into a sprawling family of various codecs with multiple versions. To name a few of the current ones, there’s WMA 9, WMA 9 Lossless and WMA 10 Pro. Microsoft says it offers superior quality/compression over MP3, with “CD quality at data rates from 64 to 192 kilobits per second.” Needless to say, while it’s baked into Windows Media Player for ripping CDs and is supported by a fairly wide range of PMPs and phones, it obviously never displaced MP3, nor is it ascendant as the “new” standard like AAC (the official successor of MP3), basically since it isn’t supported by the iPod, which owns over 70% of the MP3 player market. WMA Pro, despite being an even better codec than WMA, has more limited support still, mostly with Microsoft’s own hardware, like the Xbox 360 and Zune.

WMA’s more ignoble legacy, undoubtedly, is PlaysForSure, Microsoft’s grand attempt to standardise the entire digital music industry (except Apple, or rather, against Apple) by getting everybody on the same page. PlaysForSure was technically a certification for players and services with a variety of requirements, but support for WMA, WMV and Windows Media DRM is what it amounted to in practice. Microsoft succeeded, for a time: Pretty much every PMP maker and services from Walmart, Rhapsody, MSN Music, Yahoo, Napster and others were all aboard PlaysForSure. Then it imploded. As every real music service went to DRM-free MP3, Microsoft re-branded it to Certified for Windows Vista. Which, incidentally, was a badge they slapped on the Zune, Microsoft’s own audio player that didn’t actually support PlaysForSure. When Microsoft ditched its own standard for its premiere player, everybody knew PlaysForSure was dead.

Windows Media has been more successful on the video front, with WMV. Like WMA, it’s gone through multiple versions: At one point (WMV 7) merely Microsoft’s take on the MPEG-2 standard, Microsoft actually succeeded in making it a genuine industry standard, with WMV 9 becoming the basis for the VC-1 codec that’s backed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. VC-1 is part of the spec for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, though at this point it’s really just an alternative to H.264, which is becoming the dominant modern video codec. WMV saw some success as the codec of choice for some services during the heyday or PlaysForSure (since WMV support was part of the certification), but now it sees a lot of action as the video codec for Silverlight, Microsoft’s Adobe Flash competitor.

Internet Exploder
Silverlight itself actually isn’t doing so bad, considering it’s fighting Flash, which is installed on the vast majority of internet-connected computers. But like Flash, it’s proprietary, which is obviously a bit disconcerting for people who want an open web. Which brings us to Internet Explorer. The early history of IE and Netscape is grossly complicated, but suffice it to say, being included with Windows eventually gave IE over 90% of browser marketshare. In other words, Microsoft defined how an overwhelming majority of people looked at the internet for years—meaning it essentially defined what the internet looked like. Microsoft essentially stopped moving forward with IE6, sitting on its arse for years, which is a problem since it’s totally non-compliant with what most people would call modern web standards. (Short version: Web developers hate IE6.) With IE8, which entered a new world with Firefox having devoured a huge chunk of its marketshare, Microsoft supports actual real web standards (mostly—it still fails the Acid3 test miserably). And, they’re actually serious about HTML5, even though they’re not planning to implement the controversial video aspect at all.

Do You Trust Me?
Obviously, Microsoft’s in an odd spot in part because the constant spectre of antitrust allegations hang over its head—it’s had to de-couple Internet Explorer from Windows in Europe, and it’s moved to separate other stuff from the core OS, like even its mail, video and photo applications, making it harder to achieve the kind of de facto standards through sheer force of market like before.

Which might be part of the reason it’s moving to make tech legit industry standards—besides VC-1 above, for instance, its HD Photo has become the basis for the successor to JPEG, now dubbed JPEG XR. Also, it’s simply that standards matter more now than ever as people do more and more of their computing on the web, on multiple platforms from Windows desktops to Android phones, so industry-wide standards are way preferable to proprietary formats, even if most people still are on Windows.

Increasingly, if Microsoft wants people to use their tech, they’re going to have to open it up in the same quasi-way Apple has (it’ll also go a long way with the whole trust/control issues people have with Microsoft). So don’t surprised if you see Microsoft continue to “open up” and “standardise”. Just don’t be surprised if the standards they embrace have Microsoft tech at the core.

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Why Analogue Audio Cables Really Aren’t All the Same
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Why Lenses Are the Real Key to Stunning Photos
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Why More Megapixels Isn’t Always More Better
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GPGPU Computing: How Your Graphics Card Is Gonna Make Your Computer Fly
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How to Choose the Right Graphics Card
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How Cell Towers Work
Until Wilson explained how cell towers work, I always thought Stormtrooper fairies carried the signals from my phone to the Death Star and then to my mom’s mobile phone.

Why Mobile Phone Reception Still Sucks Speaking of cell towers, why does mobile phone reception still suck so hard sometimes?

How Apple Affects Your Tech World Through Standards (Even You, Windows Guy)
The easy way to have power over technology and people outside of your own little domain: Create tech standards. Here’s a few Apple’s been instrumental in getting out there.