Siri: Your wish is its command

If you grew up in the eighties and nineties like me, almost all your science fiction is a reality now. Information from far and wide, real-time updates, gadgets in diverse form-factors, and voice and touch interaction with these gadgets. 
2011 is the next step as you control your Smartphones

with your voice.One of the biggest advancements in mobile phone software over the past few months has been in voice control. Yes, your wish is the command. Give those twiddling thumbs some rest!

Sirion Apple iPhone 4S is clearly the flag bearer of that next leap. Siriis the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. Currently in beta, Siriunderstands and 

Siri, the all-understanding-sometimes-reprimanding personal digital

 assistant is definitely the star performer and the major reason for 

any sale of the iPhone 4S.

can speak English, French, and German. Although, Siri can be enabled in any country and you can choose to speak to it in English, French, or German, it is designed to recognize the specific accents and dialects of the supported countries only. Siri works right out of the box, without any work on your part. And the more you use Siri, the better it will understand you. It does this by learning about your accent and other characteristics of your voice.

Apart from the technology progression, Siriallows you to use the paradigm of real conversations to control your iPhone4S, unlike the traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands. It lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more just by talking the way you talk. Siri not only understands what you say, but is also smart enough to know what you mean.

Apple illustrates it through this example:
When you ask “Any good burger joints around here?”Siri will reply, “I found a number of burger restaurants near you.” Then you can say “Hmm. How about tacos?” Siri remembers that you just asked about restaurants, so it will look for Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood.

Siri also integrates with other services and uses almost all the built-in apps on iPhone 4S. It finds answers for you from the web through sources like Yelp and WolframAlpha and using location services, it looks up where you live, where you work, and where you are.Siri also uses information from your contacts, music library, calendars, and reminders to better understand what you say.

Siri does face competition from other mobile platforms - Windows Phone and Android.Both have their own voice command tools – Tellme and Voice Actions. Tellme voice command feature was released as part of the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango upgrade in late 2011 (Microsoft had acquired Tellme in 2007). These voice enhancements add some particularly useful features to the platform which pre-date both Siri and Voice Actions for Android, although restricted to communications and search since the text to speech functionality is only available in text messaging.

Interestingly, competing with the platform owners is a cross-platform app, Vlingo, which provides voice to text functionality to iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, and the older Windows Mobile devices.

Siri stands apart with the ability to interact with natural speaking and only Voice Actions come close in terms of features. However, Tellme is a strong technology platform and it is anybody’s guess that Microsoft would include Siri-like functionality in the upcoming Windows Phone releases.

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Kindle Fire, a Grown-Up E-Reader With Tablet Spark

Walt Mossberg takes a look at Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet. How does it stack up against the iPad and the new Nook Color?

It's often said that there isn't really a tablet market, just an Apple iPad market with a bunch of other contenders fighting over the remnants. But, starting this week, that is likely to change, because Amazon is adding a multifunction color tablet to its popular Kindle line that costs less than half as much as an iPad 2.

This new $199 device is called the Kindle Fire, and after testing it for a week, I think it's a good—though not a great—product and a very good value. It doesn't just add color to the Kindle, it adds a robust ability to store and stream music, TV shows and movies—and a weaker ability to store and display color photos. And it offers about 8,500 apps at launch, including Netflix, Angry Birds and QuickOffice.

Amazon

Amazon's Kindle Fire, pictured, has a more developed content ecosystem than Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet.

A Guide to Tablets and E-Readers

See specs for some e-readers and tablets on the market.

View Interactive

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

The new Nook Tablet

• More photos and interactive graphics

To be clear, the Kindle Fire is much less capable and versatile than the entry-level $499 iPad 2. It has a fraction of the apps, a smaller screen, much weaker battery life, a slower Web browser, half the internal storage and no cameras or microphone. It also has a rigid and somewhat frustrating user interface far less fluid than Apple's.

But the Fire has some big things going for it. First, the $199 price, though the Fire's seven-inch screen is less than half the surface area of the iPad's display. Second, the Amazon and Kindle brands, already known and loved for e-readers and more. Third, Amazon is the only major tablet maker other than Apple with a large, famous, easy-to-use content ecosystem that sells music, video, books and periodicals. The Fire can be thought of as a hardware front end to all that cloud content.

More

• Digital Solution: How a Basic Kindle Fares
• Mossberg's Mailbox
• B&N Nook Takes on Fire (11/8/2011)
• Amazon Bets Apps Light Up 'Fire' Sales(11/15/2011)
• B&N Unveils New Nook (5/25/2011)
• Video: First Look at Nook E-Book Reader

Finally, while the Fire, like many other tablets, is based on Google's Android operating system, Amazon has taken the bold step of hiding Android. It shuns its user interface and nearly all of Google's apps and services, including Google's app store. The Fire's software is all about the content and apps Amazon has sold you and the easy purchase of more.

When compared to the iPad 2, I suspect the Fire will appeal to people on a budget and to those who envision using the iPad mainly to consume content, as opposed to those who see the larger tablet as a partial laptop replacement. For instance, while the Fire has a decent Web browser and a rudimentary email program, it lacks basic built-in apps, such as a calendar, notepad or maps. However, for people primarily interested in reading books and periodicals, the Fire may seem too heavy and costly when compared with a low-end Kindle or Nook.

Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet

The Fire isn't only competing with the iPad and other general-purpose tablets. It has to contend with a new, low-price, similar-size color tablet out this week from e-reader rival, Barnes & Noble. This device, the Nook Tablet, is B&N's second-generation color slate and costs $249, still less than an iPad. I've also been trying it out for a few days and found it has some pluses and minuses compared with the Fire.

The Nook Tablet boasts double the internal storage and a slot to expand it. It has better battery life and a more interactive approach to children's books. But beyond books and magazines, it lacks either Amazon's or Apple's large, simple, built-in ecosystem for other kinds of content, such as music, movies and TV shows.

Instead, Barnes & Noble boasts it offers choice, by including video apps like Netflix and music apps like Pandora. However, these same apps also appear on the Fire and the iPad, along with the Amazon and Apple stores.

Amazon has finally released three new models of its popular Kindle e-reader: the $199 Kindle Fire, the $99 Kindle Touch and the $79 basic Kindle. WSJ's Katherine Boehret put the Kindle Touch in a head-to-head comparison with Barnes And Noble's Nook.

And it appears to offer even fewer apps than Amazon does (Barnes & Noble doesn't provide a number.) Also, while its screen is the same size as the Fire's, the Nook is larger overall, though a bit lighter.

Hardware

The Fire's hardware is plain and clunky. It's a thick black box with zero style. There isn't even a volume control or a physical home button, and the on/off button is a small thing hidden inconveniently on the bottom edge.

In the quest to meet the $199 price point, Amazon omitted many features common on other tablets. There are no cameras or microphone, no GPS for determining your location, no Bluetooth for headsets or wireless speakers and no included earbuds. The Fire is Wi-Fi only—it has no built-in cellular connectivity.There isn't even an included cable for connecting to a computer, something you may want to do to get photos into the Fire, since Amazon lacks an online photo service.

There is just 8 gigabytes of memory, half the total of the base iPad or the Nook Tablet, and only about 6 gigabytes of that is available to store content. If you want to download movies, you won't be able to fit many into the Fire.

User Interface

When I first saw it, I really liked the Fire's user interface. Instead of screens full of icons or folders, it presents virtual shelves filled with the books, magazines, music, TV shows, movies, apps and websites you've used. A large one has the most recent items, with smaller shelves below it. These are for your favorite items. Across the top is a search bar and a list of categories, like Books, Music, Videos, Apps.

These electronic books are worth reading.

But I became frustrated with the interface. There's something off with the touch calibration on the top shelf, or Carousel, which scrolls through a seemingly endless stream of items. It can be difficult to get it to stop on the item you want and it takes more pressure than it should to open the selection.

Also, you can't configure the main screen much. You can't reorder the top shelf, and while you can place items on the favorites shelves, they are in the order you added them, not how you like them.

On the Nook Tablet, the user interface is a jumble of different approaches, which I consider confusing. There's a main screen where you can place favorite icons but also see a scrolling row of items, a drop-down list of other items and a bottom row of tiny icons representing categories. But there's also a separate interface called the library, with categories and shelves.

Browser

A big selling point for the Fire is a supposedly speedy Web browser called Silk, which splits the task of fetching Web pages between the tablet and Amazon's super-fast cloud computers. The latter can cache common, static page elements and learn which sites and pages people most often use, so they are pre-fetched and ready to go when needed.

However, in my tests, the Fire's Silk browser was noticeably slower than the iPad 2's browser.

Amazon.com is expected to post another period of strong sales growth with pressure on the bottom line when it reports third-quarter results today. MarketWatch's Dan Gallagher discusses on Digits.

This pattern was consistent over scores of Web pages, and on four Wi-Fi networks and two different Fire devices. Amazon's explanation is that its split-browser system requires lots of user data to achieve its speed advantages, and only a small number of people are using it, so it will get faster over time.

Content

I found it easy to buy, stream, download and use content on the Fire. Reading books was a pleasure, as on any Kindle. Movies and TV shows looked good, and music played quickly and well, despite weak speakers. In general, I found magazines and newspapers looked better on the iPad, mostly due to the larger screen.

Recognizing this, Amazon offers a "text view" of magazines, which makes them easier to read but loses the original formatting.

Screen

After years of suggesting the gray-scale, E-Ink screen on the Kindle was better for reading than a color LCD screen, Amazon now has a Kindle with the latter display. If anything, it struck me as glossier than the iPad screen. It's vivid and sharp, but not high definition. When I asked an Amazon executive about the reading issue and the company's past position, he suggested people who prefer E-Ink buy one of each Kindle and use the older style for reading, pointing out the pair would cost less than an iPad. I said, while that was true, such people would be carrying two devices, not one.

Battery Life

In my standard tablet battery test, playing back to back videos with the wireless turned on and the screen at 75% brightness, the Fire lasted 5 hours, 47 minutes, or less than 60% of the iPad 2's performance on the same test, and about an hour less than the Nook Tablet's performance. In more general use, I didn't find myself worrying about the battery. But the Fire requires charging much more often than the traditional Kindle.

Bottom Line

At $199, and with Amazon's content ecosystem behind it, the Fire is an attractive alternative for many people who might otherwise have bought an iPad or another Android device, especially if their principal interest is content consumption.

The Nook Tablet also is worth considering, though it lacks a music and video ecosystem.

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NEWS: Amazon kindles a Fire (just don't call it a "tablet")

Week in tech: Amazon kindles a Fire (just don't call it a "tablet")

With the holidays approaching, tech news has been heating up. This week, we reviewed the Kindle Fire from Amazon and covered the important Stop Online Piracy Act hearings in Congress. But because this is Ars, we also ripped out a personal Web server and replaced it with something faster.

Here's the week's top tech news:

Don't call it a tablet: the Kindle Fire reviewed: The Kindle Fire has landed, and several of Amazon's promises have gone unfulfilled. But it's not bad so long as you keep repeating this mantra: the Kindle Fire is not a tablet.

A faster Web server: ripping out Apache for Nginx: Sometimes Apache can be overkill. Here's one man's tale of replacing his Apache install with a lightweight speed demon of a Web server called Nginx.

Kindle Fire first impressions: The Amazon Kindle Fire has arrived at the Ars Orbiting HQ, and so begins our intense media browsing, downloading, and consuming journey.

At Web censorship hearing, Congress guns for "pro-pirate" Google: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) had its first House hearing today, one arranged around a key goal: whacking Google and anyone else who objects to "common sense" Internet censorship.

Google releases Android 4 source code, but true openness still elusive: Google has announced that it is publishing the source code of Android 4.0, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. The code drop will also include the Honeycomb source history.

4chan hit by DDoS attack, struggling to get back online: The website 4chan was taken offline Sunday by a distributed denial-of-service attack, and the team behind 4chan is still struggling to get back online. 4chan was also hit by DDoS attacks almost a year ago.

It's official: America a land of young, casual pirates: 70 percent of young Americans have pirated content, but many are changing their ways in response to better legal offerings, and almost none are hardcore infringers.

Clickjack attacks plaguing Facebook with 4chan-like porn, violent imagery: A social engineering attack is spreading offensive images—including photoshopped images of Justin Beiber in compromising positions.

RIAA wants ReDigi out of the business of selling "used" iTunes tracks: A company that bills itself as "the world's first online marketplace for used digital music" just got a cease-and-desist letter from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Google opens music download store, welcomes artists to upload directly: Google Music is now open to the public and its streaming features will remain free. But that's not all: Google has also decided to begin selling music downloads directly to customers, and will even let artists upload their own content, bypassing music labels.

Photograph by Casey Johnston

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NEWS : iPhone 4S starts at Rs 44,500

NEW DELHI: The prices for Apple iPhone 4Sare reportedly out. According to a news report on thenextweb website, Airtel stores in the country have revealed the following prices:
iPhone 4S 16GB: Rs 44,500 ($865)
iPhone 4S 32GB: Rs 50,900 ($990)
iPhone 4S 64GB: Rs 57,500 ($1,120)
iPhone 4 8GB: Rs 37,900 ($740)
iPhone 3GS 8GB: Rs 20,900 ($405)

Bharti Airtel has reportedly started taking preorders for the 16 and 32GB variants of the iPhone 4S on its online store at the above mentioned prices.



Apple iPhone 4S is launching on November 25 in India. At midnight on November 24, 2011 (12am, Nov 25), select stores in major cities will reportedly be open to sell the first units of the iPhone 4S to waiting customers. Anticipating a rush, both Aircel and Airtel announced that they will be offering a pre-order on their website from November 18 onwards. However, till 3PM Aircel has not started taking preorders.

Apple had started selling iPhone 4S on October 14 in the US. While it is similar to iPhone 4 in its design and screen size (3.5 inches), the hardware inside it has seen a significant upgrade.

iPhone 4S is powered by a dual-core processor, has a superior graphics chip and sports an 8 mega-pixel camera. It also has a unique feature called Siri, a virtual assistant, which allows users to carry out functions like setting an alarm through voice commands.


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CryEngine 3-powered Enemy Front

City Interactive has announced 'Enemy Front', a World War II shooter from Stuart Black, the designer of explosive shooter Black and director of Codemasters' recently released Bodycount.

The PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shooter is being developed by City's Poland and UK studios, which will be using Crytek's powerful CryEngine 3.

According to City Interactive's official description Enemy Front is "the realistic tale of a hardened soldier dropped behind Nazi lines to engage in dynamic, diversified missions ranging from quick skirmishes, espionage assignments, and sabotage activities."

The official blurb describes: "The epic scope of Enemy Front spans several years and key battles as it progresses from the trenches of a desolate France right on through to Berlin and a secret weapons base. Once there, the player must thwart the plans for a terrifying weapon that will all but assure a global Nazis victory.

"Enemy Front also features a complex plot that explores the notable historical threads of WWII to include the events that occurred in the Wolf's Lair and the activities that surrounded the deciphering of the Enigma code."

As a veteran first-person shooter designer Stuart Black will be serving as chief designer on Enemy Front. Black left Codemasters before the release of Bodycount this year.

Have a look at the screens below and let us know what you think. Are we ready for a new WWII FPS?

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