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A year and 5 months after releasing iWork '08, Apple finally updated its productivity suite to version '09. Keynote 5.0, Pages 4.0, and Numbers 2.0 all sport some refinements, but this time around iWork isn't joined by a new family member. Apple touts an enhanced template chooser and more ways to share for all three applications. Apart from that, Pages gains a full screen view, dynamic outlines, mail merge with Numbers, and MathType and Endnote for including mathematical equations and bibliographies. For Numbers, it's easy formulas, formula list view, table categories, and advanced charts. Keynote gains magic move, more transitions, chart animations, and Keynote remote. Finally, there is iwork.com.
In this review, I'll be looking primarily at what's new in this latest version vs. iWork '08. So if you're unfamiliar with iWork, please read our Work '08 review first for background information that isn't replicated here. And although Microsoft Office is popular among Mac users, this review compares iWork mainly against its former self. Hopefully by the end of the review you'll know whether you should upgrade to iWork '09.
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This may seem like somewhat of a stretch, but I'm going to go ahead with the analogy anyway: GarageBand is the multi-function printer in the third-floor office that is iLife '09. With the addition of yet another feature, the '09 iteration of Apple's music-making app has become the ugly, multi-purpose mess that is today's printing, scanning, copying, and faxing behemoth. While such devices are handy and save space, they all suffer from the same inherent problem: they are all, at best, average at every one of their functions.
So it is with GarageBand: it's unwieldy, ugly, and lacking the functionality that any serious user needs or wants. It tries to be a combination of Apple's own Logic, Sibelius or Finale music notation software, Practic Musica, and Band-in-a-Box in one cheap package—and in one unified interface.
Some may say I'm being too critical of the application: "It's meant for consumers, and meant to be easy to use. It's not supposed to have the same features as pro apps." That may be the case, but does that preclude it from critical analysis? Let's take a look.
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Resident Evil 5 is the first current-generation Resident Evil title to be released—unless you count the Wii light-gun game that took players through past games, and I don't—and it labors under the pressure of following up Resident Evil 4, which was one of the most-loved games of the past ten years. Capcom seems more than willing to shake up the foundation of their beloved franchise, and if you thought the demo for this game was controversial, wait until the fans get their hands on the game. There will be fallout.
I'm not saying the game is bad, and I'll explain in a moment why I think it's good, but Capcom has a major PR issue with Resident Evil 5—not with the racism issue, although we'll address that later—but because fans of action games may not give any game with "Resident Evil" in the title a shot. On the other hand, Resident Evil fans may not be willing to take this particular ride because it's an action game. Even more dizzying is that the game is designed to be played as a co-op experience.
This is not a good start for fans of the long-running series.
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There is no way Wheelman will be good. It's impossible.
The game is being developed by the bankrupt Midway, which hasn't released
an exciting game since Mortal Kombat II in 1993. It's a Grand
Theft Auto knock-off, which usually means you can't expect much. To make matters worse, it's based on a delayed movie by the same name
staring Vin Diesel, and games based on movies are hardly a good thing.
The negative associations are all here, and from the sound of it, you'd be wise to keep this one well off your gaming radar.
And yet here I am. Playing the latest preview build of Wheelman to the very end—at
will, even. It's hard to put the controller down. "Is this possible?
Could it be? Are you sure this game isn't made by someone other than
Midway?" I ask myself.
Yes and no.
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Now that we all have our beta copies of Windows 7 to play with, Ars thought it was time to take Vista's successor for a spin on the Apple side of the street. After all, it isn't every day that recent switchers and established users get to (legitimately) try out a copy of Windows for free, so we burned a couple of ISOs and got to work.
We covered all the major bases for our experiment, and just to keep things interesting, we worked on a unibody MacBook with those multi-touch trackpads that don't even play well with Vista yet. We installed both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 natively in Boot Camp, then moved on to virtualization with VMware Fusion 2 and Parallels Desktop 4 just for good measure.
Overall, things went well, but since this is a beta OS that is supported by exactly zero parties involved, there were naturally some drawbacks and a few dead-ends. We'll run through installation procedures and best practices, and share some general tips on what to look out for. Ultimately, we found that Windows 7 is definitely doable—even usable—on a Mac under the right circumstances, but "beta" definitely means beta for now.
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iWeb occupies a strange place among its iLife brethren. As a truly WYSIWYG, theme-based web design tool, iWeb enables the creation of gorgeous sites in record time, and it is the go-to, well-integrated app for presenting your iLife to the internet. But iWeb has suffered a fair share of criticism since its introduction in 2006 for being too handicapped and limiting. It offers virtually no access to the actual HTML it creates and, in previous versions, was really only useful for publishing to Apple's MobileMe (previously known as .Mac) web service.
iWeb '09 brings a handful of new features and improvements, but it clearly received much less of Apple's attention than the other members of the iLife '09 suite (except for, of course, iDVD, which Apple has pretty much stopped updating). Unlike iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand, iWeb got neither keynote stage time nor banner space at Macworld Expo 2009, and some of iWeb's worst drawbacks and basic annoyances persist in what is now technically a 3.0 offering. Still, can Apple—a hardware and software company—tackle the Web any better with this latest update?
Note: This article is the second in our iLife '09 review series. The first installment was published last week, and covered iMovie and iPhoto. The next installment will cover GarageBand, and will debut a week from today.
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Since its introduction in 2003, the iLife suite has become an integral part of the Apple's sales pitch for the Mac platform. And as the Mac has evolved, the suite's makeup has also changed with the times. iTunes has more or less been made a permanent part of Mac OS X, and so is no longer in the collection. iWeb was added in iLife '06 for creating simple, template-based websites. And iDVD has been relegated to a quaint anachronism as more and more video is shared and streamed online. (Indeed, because iDVD hasn't received any significant updates since iLife '06—and none at all since iLife '08—we have not reviewed it here.)
In the suite's 2009 incarnation, all of the iLife apps add numerous small interface tweaks (except for, again, iLife's appendix, iDVD). And while the apps continue to integrate with Apple's MobileMe (née .Mac) service, there is also added integration with other online services, such as Facebook and Flickr. All told, the individual apps in iLife continue to make some rather amazing capabilities—sorting and editing thousands of digital images, editing digital video into watchable form, creating and editing great looking websites, or creating (or learning to create) music—accessible to mere mortals. This series of reviews will walk you through the suite, starting with latest versions of iPhoto and iMovie, and tell you what improved, what stayed the same, and whether you should upgrade.
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Creating an RTS title and setting it in the world of Halo may seem like a cheap way to make some cash, but the Halo series has long enjoyed a deeper backstory than many realize. If you've read the enjoyable—if pulpy—novels and noticed how many recognizable units and vehicles the past Halo games have contained, creating an RTS experience starts to make sense. Plus, when you see your first Spartan in the game, accompanied by the series' music, it's hard not to get pulled back into the experience. In short, Halo has the depth to mine for a game of this kind.
Besides, why not try to create a real-time strategy game for the consoles, built from the ground up to use the Xbox 360's controller? While nothing will ever beat the mouse and the keyboard for granular control of your units and base, Ensemble did a bang-up job with the controller. With a little practice and a tutorial, you'll be able to jump around the battlefield, select your units, and send specific commands with ease. So why does it feel like Halo Wars is barely half the game it could have been?
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When it launched in early January, Phenom II's sole purpose, its raison d'être, was to rejuvenate AMD's ability to compete against Intel with something other than price cuts. Viewed in aggregate, benchmarks of the new CPUs prove that Sunnyvale succeeded; the X4 940 and 920 are tough opponents in the mainstream quad-core market. I don't want to downplay this achievement; a strong Deneb launch was vital if AMD is to continue as a going concern.
The problem is that Sunnyvale's future competition is locked, loaded, and launched. In the past, the question of whether AMD or Intel would hold a performance advantage "next time" was fueled by speculation and odd bits of data. In this case, Intel's "next-gen" design is already on the market and has been for several months. Nehalem is no paper tiger—it's here right now, and it'll hit the 940's current price point within 2009 (barring a major roadmap change).
So can AMD scale Phenom II to match Nehalem? We wanted to find out, because the answer will tell us how the AMD vs. Intel battle will shape up in 2009. So, we took one Phenom II 940, added coolant, overclocked it to 4.2GHz, and ran the benchmarks listed below.
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Life doesn't present many opportunities to watch the entire Star Trek canon and call it "research," and when it does so, you'd be a fool to pass up the chance.
Brian Briggs is no fool, and when Citadel Press offered the BBSpot editor a contract to write The BBook of Geek, Briggs used the book as an excuse to burnish his geek cred. He watched every original Star Trek episode and set his phasers to stun. He watched X-Files episodes and wanted to believe. He watched Babylon 5 and, err... admired the Amiga-produced CG effects.
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While perusing the Samsung booth for something fresh and fun we happened upon this, the Samsung SCH-M830. The M830 is a WiBro (mobile WiMax) and HSPA set, WiFI, Bluetooth, 3 megapixel camera, a 3.3-inch LCD, memory expansion with microSD, and runs Windows Mobile 6.1. The interface and all the UI elements were in Korean (see that Anycall branding? That's the hint) so if there were any special goodies in there we definitely didn't catch them. Impressions? It felt great and was really solid, but as to performance we can't add much there -- though just that big display had us smiling. Lovely gallery and a quick video flip-through follow the break.
Continue reading Samsung SCH-M830 hands-on Filed under: Cellphones Samsung SCH-M830 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments
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We had a brief peek at yest another pico projecting set at MWC, this time an NTT docomo Samsung affair without a name, price, or even a release date. Specs are as sketchy as these are usable in a brightly lit room, but the hopes are this device will be used for services like mobile TV, home theater (yeah, right), document editing, presentations, and video calling. We were enthused to see the mock ups (pictured above) of where the design of this device could go -- and we're hoping that by next year the bricks we've seen lately will be gone and sleek design will become the norm. We filmed a bit of it in action and honestly, we've seen TI's pico projector before and it doesn't seem to have changed significantly. Follow the link to see the media.
Continue reading NTT docomo and Sharp show projector phone at MWC Filed under: Cellphones, Displays, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Portable Video NTT docomo and Sharp show projector phone at MWC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Never mind the Magic -- we've run across another Android device lurking in the midst at MWC, and if you squint, you might just see some HTC influence in this one, too. We'd heard General Mobile's dual-SIM DSTL1 would launch here, granted, but given its reasonably high-end look and the fact that we'd only seen renders ahead of the show, you have to appreciate our skepticism. Of course, we're delighted to be proven wrong in these sorts of situations, and we had a chance to play around with a DSTL1 today; WQVGA feels weak and there might be just a little too much Touch Diamond influence, but you have to respect the 5 megapixel AF cam, 4GB of internal storage plus microSD expansion, dual SIM slots, and on-board FM radio. Ultimately, the fact that this thing'll only be available in two tri-band EDGE flavors kills the dream, but goodness, these guys are getting close, aren't they? Follow the break for video!
Continue reading General Mobile's DSTL1 Android phone eyes-on Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds General Mobile's DSTL1 Android phone eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments
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We just played around with Viliv's latest MIDs, the stylish S5 and X70. Both devices use haptic feedback for onscreen keyboard input, and despite the resistive screen we found them both to offer some of the best touchscreen interaction we've seen on devices like this. They were both running Windows Vista, and seemed rather responsive and usable, even with Atom under the hood. What's really impressive is the X70 (pictured), which is thinner than the S5, and also can be mounted to an optional leather case that brings a keyboard and foldability to the device, and turns the unit into a laptop of sorts. Neither device is particularly thin or light, but there's a lot of quality going on here, and for folks sold on this sort of functionality and form factor, it would be hard to do much better than these at the moment -- of course, you'll have to swim to Korea to do it. Video of the S5 is after the break. Continue reading Viliv S5 and X70 MIDs hands-on with video! Filed under: Tablet PCs Viliv S5 and X70 MIDs hands-on with video! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments
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The Engadget Spanish team just got their hands on the Samsung Show (the European, i7410 model) projector phone that we first caught a sneak peek of a CES. The Show's projector is powered by Texas Instruments' DLP pico technology, and though the fact that it packs a projector does increase the bulkiness of the phone as far as looks are concerned, the phone is still rather small and light. The Show can project an image of anywhere from five to fifty inches, with a 480 x 320 resolution . It's got a 3.2-inch WQVGA touchscreen, the TouchWiz U
and also boasts a 5 megapixel camera. There are plans for this bad dude to hit Asia and Europe (but no word on if it'll ever make its way to North America), but we still haven't heard when, nor how much it'll cost when it arrives. Check the video after the break. [Via Engadget Spanish] Continue reading Samsung Show hands-on and video at MWC Filed under: Cellphones, Displays Samsung Show hands-on and video at MWC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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