Google is certainly not new to bringing unique products to the mass market. With both web-based and desktop applications ranging from virtual environments to 3D modeling software, it’s not surprising to me that a web browser was inevitable.

Their goal is to build a fast, rock-solid browser that may not have the power of extensions like Firefox, but instead a multi-threaded core that won’t cause the entire browser to crash when one website decides to go rogue, plus the ability to run multiple processes of JavaScript at the same time. Each instance of a web page is sandboxed, in that the address bar (”omnibar”), navigation buttons, and page render area are all independent of each other. While appearing repetitive at first look, this design greatly helps the overall stability of the browser.

I gave Chrome a test run, and was very pleased with its speed, both how quickly it loaded up and how fast pages were rendered. The latter should be expected, as it runs off the lightning-quick WebKit rendering engine. The visual design of the browser (literally called a chrome in programming lingo) is minimalistic but pleasant to use and not distracting at all.

Memory usage is also handled well. Because each tab is an entirely separate process, closing down a Chrome tab destroys the whole process tree and clears up that memory instead of leaving it possibly fragmented like other browsers. I also found it interesting that you could go look at exactly how much memory and CPU power each web page used in real time through Chrome’s internal task manager.

Currently only a Windows version is available, but Mac and Linux versions are coming soon, and even a version for Android is in development, which I’m excited for. In addition, the entire project is open-source.

I’m left with a very good impression of a new web browser when I previously thought any more in the market would simply get ignored. Although I don’t think I would personally use it as a primary browser, namely due to the lack of extensions as stated above, I still find it a valuable program for testing web devleopment in the WebKit rendering engine. I also think that many of Chrome’s best features will eventually work their way into other major browsers, and Chrome itself will continue to improve in the features department.

My biggest problem with the iPhone is its price. I’m not talking about the $200 up-front cost for the device - that is very reasonable for a smartphone. What bothers me is the ridiculous monthly cost. $70 per month for the lowest available plan, and upwards of $130 for the highest? Really? I can’t fathom paying that much just to use a cell phone. Sure, it has unlimited data (a requirement, by the way), visual voicemail, and a host of other features, but are they really worth that much? I don’t think I’m being unreasonable when I say “no way”.

So unless some magical price drop happens, I’m going to look elsewhere. Next up: Android and the Open Handset Alliance. Google’s still-in-development mobile device platform has caught my eye, namely because of how open it is. Android is completely customizable and functions on a wide range of hardware, but the glaring problem is… it’s not actually available yet, and won’t be widely until next year.

The first phone to use the Android platform will be the HTC Dream, coming out later this year, but I’m not convinced it’s the phone for me. Thankfully, it’s just the first Android phone of many to come. Some of the applications in development also look very interesting.

Finally, I have been looking at other smartphones currently (or almost) on the market, namely the Samsung Blackjack II, BlackBerry Bold, and Palm Treo Pro. All of these are very nice phones, from what I’ve read about them, but the true test is if I’m able to sit down with one and play with it for a while to see if it actually works.

Ideally, my perfect smartphone would have the following qualities:

• Shell: the design of the device should be attractive, functional, lightweight, and very durable. I don’t expect it to be the thinnest thing in the world, but it shouldn’t be bulky either.
• Input/output: A physical keyboard is something I haven’t decided on, but I wouldn’t mind one, as they seem to be more reliable than virtual on-screen keyboards. I’d also expect a microphone, high-resolution camera with flash, audio input, headphone jack, external storage, and a USB connection (doubling as the charger).
• Screen: A multi-touch capable screen that has a very high resolution, excellent color and brightness, and resists scratches.
• Battery: A smartphone is meant to replace numerous other devices in someone’s pocket, but I shouldn’t have to sacrifice their respective battery life. It should get me through two or three days at minimum, under typical usage, before needing a recharge.
• Storage: 16GB at a minimum.
• Experience: I should not have to fight with the interface, it has to be attractive, and it has to be extremely responsive. The iPhone and Android are good places to start.
• Wireless: The full suite of standards, including 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
• Features: Able to play a wide range of audio and video formats, browse the Internet in a full-featured browser (including Flash and Java support), and install third-party applications.
• Phone: Lest we not forget, it’s still a phone, so I should be able to make calls with decent quality and not have them drop. Ever.

Think I’m asking for too much? What would your perfect phone include? Have any reccomendations I didn’t cover here? Share your thoughts in the comments!

As you can see, the technology is very impressive, and I can see countless applications for it in television, movies, and more. But on the other hand, video footage is one of the forms of evidence (used in courts, for example) that is difficult, but not impossible, to forge. The introduction of this technology into the mass market could have large implications on how these sorts of videos are treated, much like how Photoshop lets you modify a photo to change a detail, move an object, or even erase a person.

Imagine if a security camera caught a criminal during a robbery, but the recording was modified to erase that person and insert another before being submitted as evidence to the court.  It’s not as impossible as it may have once been.

Here’s another example: a travel video for tourists is filmed for a beach resort, then is selectively enhanced to show buildings in better condition, a less crowded shoreline, and more palm trees than there actually are. Is this false advertising? Is it wrong?

It already happens all the time in photographs, so what makes this any different? Our society is already used to the idea that photographs are often enhanced to improve color balance, remove blemishes, and so forth. But video is something else entirely. When somebody sees a video on the nightly news, they trust their eyes that what they see actually happened. But this could be changing soon, especially if this finds its way into post-production software like After Effects. And then, the camera will have to join the cake as part of things that are full of nothing but lies.

I’ve come to notice that many PC games shipped these days - not just Mass Effect - tend to require one or more patches after its retail release to get it to a respectfully stable point. But because the option of updating a game after it’s released is available to developers, it seems like they often use this as an excuse to put sloppy code out to retail. “It’s playable, yeah, but we can always perfect it later!”

Not to discredit game developers, I know how much effort it takes to develop a high-end video game, especially one as large as Mass Effect. The game literally spans dozens of individual worlds, has amazing graphics, built-in physics, advanced AI, and more. So, does that mean I should expect to run into a few bugs?

I believe the answer for most gamers is “yes” - as long as they are not game-breaking bugs. But this particular game seems to be another case entirely. On more than one occasion I suddenly found my character waist-deep in the floor unable to move, attempting to shoot at an enemy who had wound up inside a giant crate, witnessing another character lazily floating across the floor, or just experiencing some completely arbitrary bug that forced me to go out of my way to figure out a way to bypass it.

Patches, then, are the solutions to these bugs - but in many cases, they’re not just small tweaks to the game. I regularly see game patches that are hundreds of megabytes in size, or even larger. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a minor change! Shouldn’t such major problems be sorted out before a game gets published?

PC games seem to have a lot more of these problems than consoles do. Wii is currently the only game console that cannot apply a patch to a disc-based game after it is released. (Channels, Virtual Console, and WiiWare all have this capability, however.) Regular firmware updates have improved some of the core functionality of the console, but none of the actual disc game code gets changed. Yet, games released on Wii seem to have a much lower “problem rate” than PC games. In fact, I have never seen a game-breaking bug on the console.

So, why is this the case? Developers must get code correct before it’s released on Wii, there is no going back. But PC and the other two major consoles all have the capability to update their games - so this leads me to believe that developers simply aren’t as strict about the code that gets pushed to retail as they used to be, and I think that it’s an unfortunate mindset for game developers to be in.

Just off the top of my head, I can name the Wii Zapper, Steering Wheel, Balance Board, and Wireless Guitar, not to mention a dozen or so cheap plastic shells made available for the Wii Remote by third-party manufacturers. And that’s just for Wii - in the previous generation, the DK Bongos stick out especially well in my mind as a limited-use accessory for the GameCube. And for each of these accessories, I can think of one, maybe two games that use each.

The Wii Zapper came bundled with Link’s Crossbow Training, a fun but shallow target-practice pack-in, but the contraption did little more than hold the Wii Remote and Nunchuk together. The Steering Wheel can be found in any home with Mario Kart Wii, and the Balance Board is, at present, used for Wii Fit and a sports game by the name of We Ski. Finally, the Wireless Guitar has been used for all the various iterations of the Guitar Hero games.

This year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo unsurprisingly introduced even more accessories for its beloved console. The first is an attachment for the Wii Remote, named Wii MotionPlus. This attachment contains a gyroscope, which combined with the other remote data helps it figure out where it’s located in 3D space, as well as help measure things like torque data, which was impossible to do before. The second accessory is a microphone - the first official device to use one of the Wii’s USB ports - and it sits right on top of the sensor bar, allowing for voice chat in supported online games.

However, I have to step back and ask what the far-reaching effects of these new peripherals are. After all, I certainly don’t see a huge flood of games coming out to take advantage of those other accessories. Why should developers spend time including support for the microphone or more precise data from the Wii Remote when there’s not even a guarantee that gamers will have them?

Because these types of peripherals are optional, game developers would be very hard-pressed to develop a game that required any of these devices. From a business standpoint, they could potentially lose a lot of sales just because a potential customer doesn’t have what’s needed to play the game.

So, the remaining option is to create games with optional support for these accessories. That way, a sale would be much more likely when the consumer is assured that he or she could play regardless if they owned that particular accessory.

But, the minute an accessory becomes optional, it starts to have a less important role in the living room, and may even be discarded or forgotten because - hey, why would you want to spend the time setting it up when you could be actually playing the game quicker?

That was, of course, an extreme example. Most consumers would not discard something they just bought for entertainment, but another issue still presents itself - video game peripherals simply aren’t getting attention from very many games. As I mentioned above, the major add-ons for Nintendo’s console this generation have hardly seen any use at all outside of the game they were originally designed around.

I will admit that both a Wii Remote “extension” for more accurate motion control and a microphone designed to listen to everyone in the room seem to have a lot more practical applications for future games, but game accessories I’ve seen so far are poorly thought out, resulting in an almost identical “shelf life” to the game it was purchased with.

What I hope to see in the future is both the foresight to include any hardware needed to play games included with a console right from the start, and broader game support for well thought-out accessories that do happen to get released. Without these, the future market could very quickly become saturated with accessories that have hardly any use. While the people looking at Nintendo’s bottom line would be happy, not very many gamers would be smiling about it after a while.

But why did this happen in the first place? The answer is within the device’s routing program. By default, GPS devices attempt to calculate a route based on the shortest time possible to get to a destination. This usually works great, but every once in a while, it runs across a combination of roads in its route that proves to be tricky, and that’s when directions like the one above get spit out.

Here’s another example that I encountered recently - “in 0.2 miles, keep right, then turn right.” The problem with this instruction, however, is that there were two right-hand turns one after the other, and only by looking at the on-screen map could I tell that it referred to the second intersection instead of the first one. The reason it gave this direction, however, is because the turn it intended you to make was within a certain proximity of another direction - in this case, the “keep right” - and because it needs to make both of them known right after each other (to avoid missing the turn after you kept right), it simply ignored that other road.

From the GPS’ perspective, these directions seem fine. But from a driver’s perspective, they can sometimes make less than perfect sense. In the first example, the program logic should have said to remain on the freeway, or better yet, not said anything at all. This way, it would have avoided confusing the driver with unnecessary directions, since it can be assumed that most drivers would remain on the freeway anyway unless told to exit. As for the second example, a better solution would be for the program to say “keep right, then turn right at the second intersection” - or something similar. These small changes greatly reduce the chances of somebody making a mistake when trying to follow the directions, and in turn, help them to focus more on the roads instead of deciphering the instructions.

The good news is that improvements to routing logic are being made all the time, but on the other hand, the infinite combination of road shapes already paved, with more being added all the time, makes it nearly impossible to achieve an algorithm that routes perfectly between any two points.

This is also why it’s very important to use instructions from any device like this as suggestions only. Too many times I’ve heard reports that a vehicle crashed, or made a wrong turn onto a one-way street, or did some other unfortunate action due to a GPS’ directions, because people think they need to follow them to the letter. It’s much more important for people to use their common sense, and let the GPS fix itself when you turn somewhere you know is correct.