Wired Articles

Wired.com is a recognized name in gadget news reporting for the technologically advancing society we live in today. Here, I've collected three articles involving emerging technologies that Wired has recently published and some thoughts on them.

Toshiba Makes A Tablet
On July 19, 2011, Wired reported on a handheld tablet device manufactured by the Japan-based electronics giant, Toshiba. The device runs the mobile operating system developed by Google called Android, which is also used by many other handheld devices including smartphones. Unfortunately, Toshiba's handheld was experiencing issues early in its life after release, involving the power saving features. In my opinion, these issues should've been easy to catch in testing before release. I blame the laxed testing on the fact that Toshiba doesn't make handheld devices! They specialize in TV, disk data storage systems, and more recently laptops. Each company should stick to what they're provenly good at instead of jumping into industry races.

In An MMO Far, Far Away...
BioWare recently released a new entry in the massively multiplayer online role-playing genre focusing on the Star Wars universe. The Old Republic allows players to travel the galaxy as a customizable character, fighting alongside friends of equally customized stature. This specific article was interesting to me because it works to discredit the marketed genre of the game. BioWare themselves admit that the game can be fun with other people, but doesn't focus as much on the massive gathering of people to complete objectives like other similar games do. If the player so chooses, there is a lot to be done solo. So, does that make this game a singleplayer RPG with massively multiplayer options, or a massively multiplayer RPG with singleplayer playability? The side the developer chooses may have major repercussions since it basically sets up who the target market is.

Why Wi-Fi?
A new trend amongst television manufacturers is to encorporate Wi-Fi connectivity into their giant, crisp, ridiculously slender devices. Sony is no exception. Back in 2008, Wired reported that Sony was developing the world's skinniest (at the time) TV, measuring 9.9 millimeters thick. It's very likely that this TV was what broke the mold for plasma screens and began a new industry struggle for "who can make the first TV thats thinner than paper?" The issue I have with this move by Sony isn't that they started a new fad of skinny-screened devices for years to come, but that they just had to put Wi-Fi functionality into it. It's a nice convenience to be able to communicate wirelessly between PCs and TVs, but seriously, why would you want to? Why not just make the TV a computer and save the money on having to get both? Or better yet, do what everyone else does and get a big flatscreen monitor for your PC and forget about the TV! We have to consider, at what point are we ceasing to provide functional convenience and starting to jack up the price tag just for some extra bells and whistles no one really needs?