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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, iPhone, Holidays, iPod touch

Buyer's Guide: 33 things you don't need if you have an iPhone

by Chris Rawson (RSS feed) on Nov 19th 2009 at 3:00PM

Every time I walk through Warehouse Stationery (New Zealand's equivalent to Office Depot) or Dick Smith's Electronics (pretty much Best Buy), I'm struck by how probably half the products in each store are pretty much useless to me since I've got an iPhone.

Thanks to the apps that come pre-packaged with the iPhone and the more than 100,000 third-party offerings now available in the iTunes Store, the iPhone has gained functionality that might have seemed hard to fathom under three years ago when Steve Jobs first announced the device.

"A widescreen iPod with touch controls... a revolutionary mobile phone... a breakthrough internet communications device... these are not three separate devices. This is one device." So Steve Jobs told us all back at Macworld Expo 2007. But since then, the iPhone has grown to be much more than just those three concepts.

What follows is a sort of anti-buyer's guide, a list of products and devices that you may never need or even want to buy again (or receive as a gift) if you have an iPhone. Some of these are certainly open for debate, but more than a few of them are products that, for all intents and purposes, are completely unnecessary if you have an iPhone. (Items in bold also apply to the iPod touch).

Office Products:

Telephone - Because it does so much more than simply make and receive calls, the phone part of the iPhone is the device's most easily overlooked feature. With many people abandoning their landlines for mobile phones, the aisle in Office Depot with nothing but bulky handset telephones looks like a relic from another century. I still have a landline in my house, but I've used it maybe five times in the past year and a half.

Calculator - Not only does the iPhone come with an extremely useful simple calculator, in landscape view it expands to a full-featured scientific calculator. And the App Store even has several graphing calculator apps, most of them costing $0.99, that can easily replace a TI-84 that costs far more. The only time I can see a use for a standalone calculator is for students at university -- examiners will inevitably protest against students using an iPhone for their exams, for some odd reason.

Personal Organizer (diary, address book, appointment scheduler) - Remember those electronic organisers people use to carry around with them five years ago? Those seem quaint enough, but go back even farther than that and you might recall people carrying around little black books with paper entries for appointments, addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists - all completely irrelevant now thanks to the iPhone's Calendar, Contacts, and Notes apps.

Calendar - Other than the novelty of having pictures of cute puppies, supermodels, or a Far Side comic looming over today's date, the traditional paper calendar doesn't even come close to being as useful as the iPhone's built-in Calendar app.

Wall Clock/Alarm Clock/Watch - The writing has been on the wall for all three of these devices since mobile phones started becoming popular. I haven't had a wall clock in my home in at least ten years, and haven't owned an alarm clock or watch since getting my first mobile nearly six years ago. Not only can the iPhone tell you the time and date without even having to unlock it, the Clock app can give you the time anywhere in the world, it also has a full-featured alarm clock that will never die on you if the house's electricity goes out overnight. As if that wasn't enough, it also has a stopwatch and a timer. Wall clocks and alarm clocks can't compete with those features, and the only advantage a watch has over the iPhone's clock is that you don't have to haul it out of your pocket to see what time it is.

Rolodex - Speaking of antiquated items -- has anyone actually used a paper rolodex in the past ten years? -- the iPhone's Contacts app handily replaces this.

Dictionary - I chuckle a little bit every time I pass the electronic dictionaries in an office supply store. Sure, I could spend $30 and up for a device nearly the size of a netbook that does maybe 1% of what a netbook does. Or I could buy an actual paper dictionary and haul that sucker around instead. Or I could bypass both of those options and download any of a number of dictionary apps from the iTunes Store. I use the app from Dictionary.com [iTunes link]; there are probably better apps out there, but the one from Dictionary.com has a definite price advantage -- it's free.

Voice Memo Recorder - Whether it's one of the old-school recorders that still uses tapes or one of the new models that has flash memory, no standalone voice memo recorder I know of enables you to e-mail your recordings to someone with the simplicity of the iPhone's built-in Voice Memos app. (Also works with iPod touch 2nd Gen and up with an external microphone.)

Pen/Paper - If you hate the iPhone's keyboard, this one might not sit well with you. Personally, I have no issues with it, especially in landscape view -- I can type about 30-35 words per minute on the iPhone's keyboard -- so the iPhone's Notes app initially replaced pen and paper for all my "I need to jot this down" needs, at least until I discovered WriteRoom [iTunes link]. I still carry a pen around with me, but only for two rare instances: when I need to sign something, or when I need to write something down for someone else.

Digital Photo Frame - Want to display a shuffled series of pictures of your wife and kids on your desk at work? Buy an iPhone dock and use the built-in Photo app instead. The iPhone's screen may not be as big as some of the digital photo frames out there, but it has the distinct advantage of being far less expensive and far more versatile.

USB Drive - This is another one that's a little less cut-and-dried. If you're one of those geeks who carries around bootable OS recovery discs or slimmed-down versions of Firefox with you everywhere on a flash drive, then the iPhone won't be a viable replacement for your needs. But if all you need is portable access to your files, the iPhone has one major advantage over a USB drive: not only can you carry files around, you can also view them. And if you're already paying for MobileMe, you can use the iPhone to access your iDisk from anywhere, giving you access to 20 GB or more of files while on the go.

If you hate MobileMe or just don't feel like paying for it, you can get Dropbox [iTunes link] instead -- it does pretty much the same thing as the iDisk app, with one advantage: a 2 GB account is free. The only time I've ever needed to use my USB drive since getting my iPhone has been when I needed to print something on a computer that didn't have access to my e-mail; in every other instance, I'd just e-mail the doc to myself and bypass the increasingly irrelevant 512 MB flash drive I bought several years back when 512 MB seemed like a lot of space.

Wireless Mouse - There's a number of apps in the App Store that replicate the functionality of a wireless mouse, and all of them are less expensive than even the cheapest mouse you'll find. I use Air Mouse Pro [iTunes link], and since buying it, my old wireless Mighty Apple Mouse has pretty much just gathered dust.

Remote Control - Those little "presenter" remotes that sell for $15 and up? Don't give them a second glance. Once again, Air Mouse Pro can replace all of the functionality of a "presenter" remote, and other apps, like Apple's own Remote.app [iTunes link] or VLC Remote [iTunes link] each give you access and control over your computer's media files that rivals or surpasses the abilities of those $100 media center remotes from Logitech. The white remote that came with my wife's MacBook (back when they were still free -- those were the days) has sat forgotten and forlorn on a shelf since I got an iPhone.

3G Modem/Dongle - Unfortunately, U.S. readers need not apply (thanks a million, AT&T!). For almost everyone else in the world, using your iPhone to tether over 3G completely obviates the need for a separate 3G modem for your computer, especially since iPhone data rates are often cheaper than the plans offered with standalone modems.

Navigation Aids:

Maps/Atlas - I have a glovebox full of maps that I never use anymore thanks to the iPhone's built-in Maps app. Not only can you do away with using maps for directions, if you use Google Earth [iTunes link], you can pretty much do away with using an atlas as well.

Compass (iPhone 3GS only) - Thanks to the 3GS's built-in magnetometer, there's no need to carry around a separate compass for navigation anymore. And apps that take full advantage of the compass, like MotionX GPS [iTunes link] make hiking trails far easier than a traditional compass.

GPS Nav Unit - If you have someone in the passenger seat to navigate and call out directions for you, you can easily get by using the free, built-in Maps app. If you're on your own, there's a glut of turn-by-turn apps in the App Store that replicate the functionality of standalone units like a TomTom, and all of them cost far less.

Media:

Digital Camera (iPhone 3GS only) - This one will likely be a bit contentious, but there's a well-worn saying even professional photographers live by: the best camera is the one you have with you. That said, I wouldn't recommend the awful camera in any iPhone before the 3GS as a replacement for even the cheapest point-and-shoot camera. The low resolution and lack of adjustable focus on the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G make their cameras next to useless for anything but the most utilitarian of shots.

The 3GS's camera, with its slightly beefier resolution, the ability to adjust focus, and the capacity to shoot, edit, and e-mail video, all make its camera perfectly acceptable for day-to-day use. Would you want to shoot your vacation pictures with it? Probably not. Would you want to try and take artistic shots with it? Almost definitely not (although some people are advocating it). But if all you want is a camera you can take with you everywhere for the odd shot here and there, the 3GS's camera is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a cheap- to mid-range point-and-shoot.

Digital Audio Player - Steve Jobs called the iPhone the best iPod they've ever made, and he's definitely right about that. Once I got an iPhone, my old iPod 5G got sold off almost immediately. The only advantage an iPod nano or shuffle offers over an iPhone is smaller size and comparative indestructibility, making them more useful for workouts than the iPhone. In almost every other way, the iPhone is the king of the hill when it comes to music players.

Portable DVD Player - This will be the first of a few entries where if screen size is a major issue for you, you might want to argue the point. Portable DVD players generally don't have very big screens in the first place, though, and every one of them is extraordinarily bulky next to the iPhone. Rather than carry one of these monsters and a booklet full of DVDs around, just rip some DVDs using Handbrake and put them on your iPhone instead. (Note: legality of ripping DVDs varies depending on where you live and who you ask. Personally, I don't worry about it at all when it comes to DVDs I own, but I'm just a rebel like that.)

Amazon Kindle - Once Amazon released their free Kindle for iPhone app [iTunes link], I knew I would never, ever drop northwards of $250 on a Kindle device. Some people swear by the Kindle's ease of use and readability, and those same people would probably balk at reading an entire novel on the iPhone's much smaller screen. Plus, last time I checked you still can't buy Kindle books directly from the app itself. However, I'm willing to accept those tradeoffs if it means saving $250 and not having to carry around a separate device.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare - To some people it might approach sacrilege (or induce blindness) to read Shakespeare's works on the iPhone. To other people (like me) the ability to carry around every extant Shakespearean play and poem with me everywhere I go and read them anywhere, at any time, with the Shakespeare app [iTunes link] far outweighs those considerations. To haul around a ten-pound book or a 65 MB application that lets me easily search through the text: that is the question, and it's an easy one for me to answer.

Any classical novel with an expired copyright - With the Stanza app [iTunes link] and its access to Project Gutenberg, thousands of classical novels are at your fingertips. Why spend $15 on Frankenstein at Barnes and Noble when you can get it for free? Project Gutenberg saved me literally hundreds of dollars during my undergraduate coursework, and thanks to Stanza, I have free access to an entire library worth of books wherever I go.

Portable Game Player - If you want to play AAA titles like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS or Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for the PSP, the iPhone is obviously not going to be your platform of choice. Twitch-heavy first-person-shooters also often don't translate well to the iPhone's touchscreen. But for casual games that you can just pick up and play in the supermarket line or on your lunch break, even Nintendo's DS can't compete with the vast sea of games offered in the App Store. Granted, the vast majority of those games are shovelware, but there are diamonds in the rough: iShoot [iTunes link], Flight Control [iTunes link], Hero of Sparta [iTunes link], Peggle [iTunes link], and 2079 [iTunes link] are just a few of the games that have gotten me through many minutes spent in queues or waiting rooms.

Miscellaneous:

Pedometer - With built-in support for Nike+, a traditional pedometer simply can't compete with the 3GS or iPod Touch's ability to keep track of your workouts. If you don't want to spend $20 on the Nike+ shoe transmitter (contrary to popular belief, you don't need to use Nike's Nike+ shoes at all), or if you have an iPhone 3G with no Nike+ support, you can buy an app like RunKeeper [iTunes link] instead.

Flashlight - This is another example of "The best [thing] is the one you have with you." The iPhone's screen isn't as bright as the eye-piercing halogen monsters or the tiny but laser-like LED flashlights you'll find at the store, and it also doesn't double as a shillelagh the way a Maglite does. But with an app like Flashlight [iTunes link], you can easily navigate your way through the house if the power goes out or even grab someone's attention with a strobe effect in an emergency.

White Noise Generator - Tinnitus sucks. Trying to sleep in an otherwise silent room with a constant eeeeeeeeee piercing through your brain is pretty much the worst thing ever. You can either drop $50 or more on a decent white noise generator, or you can spend $0.99 on Ambiance [iTunes link] instead, with access to over 500 free sounds to help you relax and fall asleep.

Guitar Tuner - Other than picks, guitar tuners are probably the one thing guitarists lose most often. Fortunately, there's an alernative to going to the music store and buying a new one -- go to the App Store and get a tuner on your iPhone instead. There are many free ones, though paid apps GuitarToolkit [iTunes link] and Cleartune [iTunes link] appear to be among the best-rated and most feature-rich. (Also works with iPod Touch 2nd Gen and up with an external microphone.)

One More Thing:

Netbook - When people wonder why Apple hasn't gotten involved in the current netbook craze, there's usually three schools of thought on the subject. The first is that Apple simply doesn't care about netbooks at all and doesn't want to cater to that market. Second is that the perennially forthcoming Apple Tablet, if/when it comes out, will do to the netbook market what the iPhone did for cellphones and the iPod did for audio players. Third is that Apple already has a netbook equivalent on the market: the iPhone.

Whether you see the iPhone as an acceptable replacement for a netbook will depend on a few things.

First is your relationship with the iPhone's keyboard. As I said earlier, I have no problems with it at all, especially since OS 3.0 came out and extended landscape functionality to almost every app. Some people out there have freakishly huge hands compared to mine, however, and for them typing more than a few sentences on the iPhone's keyboard is tantamount to Purgatory. As for me, I've written entire posts for TUAW on the iPhone's keyboard without issue, including this rather lengthy one.

Second is how willing you are to spend a large portion of your day staring at the iPhone's small screen. 480 x 320 as a resolution isn't competitive with even the cheapest of netbooks, but when using Safari this issue is largely alleviated by the ability to zoom in and out using Multi-Touch.

Third is what you're going to be using the iPhone for. If you're a weekend business road warrior who needs to edit Excel spreadsheets on the fly, then maybe you should stick with an actual computer. If all you're going to be doing is browsing the internet, sending short e-mails, or composing short documents, so long as the keyboard and screen aren't a problem for you, the iPhone is a perfectly acceptable replacement for a netbook. It also has the singular advantage of running (an admittedly very slimmed-down version of) OS X without resorting to hacks.

Anecdote time: On a trip to the States, Canada, and Fiji back in July, I left my MacBook Pro at home in New Zealand and used my iPhone as my primary computer for over three weeks. I certainly wasn't able to edit or even view any of the photos or video footage I shot, but as long as I had access to Wi-Fi, I was able to do almost everything else generally reserved for my MacBook Pro. I kept on top of e-mail from friends and relatives, kept an eye on the weather and news, listened to music, wrote up the first draft of two 1000-word+ posts for TUAW, wrote up more than 2500 words of impressions from the trip, kept up with schoolwork by reading three Shakespearean plays, kept myself entertained on 12-hour plane rides across the Pacific and hours upon hours of waiting in airport terminals by playing Peggle and iShoot... and all with a device that, unlike any netbook out there, fits in my pants pocket.

Does the iPhone do everything a netbook can do? No. But does any netbook do everything the iPhone can do, as well as the iPhone can do it? Definitely not.

That's all for the anti-buyer's guide. There's probably at least one item on this list that you can point to and say, "Yeah, I already have an app for that. Please, Grandma, don't get me this for Christmas this year, or at least make sure you get a gift receipt if you do."

More than a few of the items on the list are certainly debatable, especially the last one, but the point remains: in only three years, the iPhone has seen an explosion in functionality that very few people could have predicted when it was first introduced. It's become the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, capable of duplicating or outright replacing many standalone devices and items and rendering others completely obsolete. It seems somewhat counterintuitive that something that costs as much as an iPhone could actually end up saving you money in the long run, but if you can actually manage to replace all 33 items on this list with an iPhone as I have, you'll end up coming out way ahead.

Tags: 2079, Air Mouse Pro, AirMousePro, Ambiance, Cleartune, dictionary.com, Dropbox, Flight Control, FlightControl, Google Earth, GoogleEarth, GuitarToolKit, Handbrake, Hero of Sparta, HeroOfSparta, hgg, iPhone, iPod Touch, IpodTouch, iShoot, Kindle, MotionX, netbooks, Peggle, RunKeeper, Shakespeare, Stanza, VLC Remote, VlcRemote, WriteRoom

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• Comments (49)

We tried this at work today with dutch text and it worked perfectly. In face all the functionality is amazing. Google will even translate the captions on the fly from english into another language. And how it imports the text with no timing references and then converts the files to captions and syncs it perfectly!!! That is awesome. IMO one of the best advancements in technology in years! It is so hassle free!! Watch the video :)

Wow this is cool :) Via michielj

If you are upgrading to Windows 7 from XP you will need to do a clean install, and installing your favorite apps again is time consuming and annoying. Today we look at a new service that will install your favorite applications while you walk away and do something more enjoyable.

via Bob den Otter and pretty cool :)

LOL!

Illustration: Justin Wood

In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.

One of the students flipped a switch and intense blue light shone through the cable into the mouse’s brain, illuminating it with an eerie glow. Instantly, the mouse began running in counterclockwise circles as though hell-bent on winning a murine Olympics.

Then the light went off, and the mouse stopped. Sniffed. Stood up on its hind legs and looked directly at the students as if to ask, “Why the hell did I just do that?” And the students whooped and cheered like this was the most important thing they’d ever seen.

Because it was the most important thing they’d ever seen. They’d shown that a beam of light could control brain activity with great precision. The mouse didn’t lose its memory, have a seizure, or die. It ran in a circle. Specifically, a counterclockwise circle.

See the numbers.

Precision, that was the coup. Drugs and implanted electrodes can influence the brain, but they are terribly imprecise: Drugs flood the brain and affect many types of neurons indiscriminately. Electrodes activate every neuron around them.

This is bad for researchers, because practically every square millimeter of the brain contains a mess of different kinds of neurons, each specialized for a particular task. Drugs and electricity set off cascades of unwanted neural activity. Side effects.

It’s bad for patients, too. Cochlear implants, which let the deaf hear by shocking the auditory nerves, produce fuzzy sound because the electricity spreads beyond the neurons it’s aimed at. Deep brain stimulators for Parkinson’s patients allow them to walk and speak but may cause seizures and muscle weakness. Electroshock can help depression but often results in memory loss.

In 1979, Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, lamented the blunderbuss nature of existing technologies. What was needed, he wrote in Scientific American, was a way to control neurons of only one cell type in one specific location. Which, nearly 30 years later, was precisely what these students had achieved.

But how could they be using light? Neurons don’t respond to light any more than muscles do. The idea sounds as crazy as trying to jump-start a car with a flashlight. The secret is that the mouse’s neurons weren’t normal. New genes had been inserted into them — genes from plants, which do respond to light, and the new genes were making the neurons behave in planty ways.

Genes are just instructions, of course. By themselves they don’t do anything, just as the instructions for your Ikea desk don’t make it leap together. But genes direct the assembly of proteins, and proteins make things happen. The weird new plant proteins in this mouse’s brain were sensitive to light, and they were making the neurons fire.

The counterclockwise-running mouse was something new — a triple fusion of animal, plant, and technology — and the students knew it was a harbinger of unprecedentedly powerful ways to alter the brain. For curing diseases, to begin with, but also for understanding how the brain interacts with the body. And ultimately for fusing human and machine.

The story of this technology starts with a most unlikely creature: pond scum. In the early 1990s, a German biologist named Peter Hegemann was working with a single-celled bug called Chlamydomonas, or, less technically, algae. Under a microscope, the cell looks like a little football with a tail. When the organism is exposed to light, its tail wags madly, moving the cell forward.

Hegemann wanted to know how this single cell, with no eye or brain, responded to light. How did it “see”? What made it “act”?

Answers slowly emerged: Hegemann and his colleagues found that part of the cell’s membrane is packed with coiled-up proteins. They theorized that when a photon hits one of those proteins, the molecule uncoils, creating a tiny pore in the membrane. Charged ions flow across the membrane, which makes the cell’s flagella move. And the whole shebang swims forward.

This was good, solid cell research. Fascinating little machines! But completely useless fascinating little machines. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that scientists figured out how they might be put to use.

In 1999, Roger Tsien, a biologist at UC San Diego, was heeding Crick’s call for better ways to trigger neurons. When he read about Hegemann’s work with Chlamydomonas, he wondered: Could that photosensitivity somehow be imported into neural cells? To do that, it would be necessary to figure out which gene made the light-sensitive protein in the Chlamydomonas cell wall. Then the gene could be inserted into neurons so that, Tsien hoped, they too would fire in response to light.

Now, using light to make neurons fire wouldn’t be a huge deal; electricity could do that. But the exciting part was that a gene could be designed to affect only specific kinds of neurons. Scientists can mark a gene with a “promoter” — a cell-specific piece of DNA that controls whether a gene is used.

Here’s what they do: Insert the gene (plus promoter) into a group of viral particles and inject them into the brain. The viruses infect a cubic millimeter or two of tissue. That is to say, they insert the new gene into every neuron in that area, indiscriminately. But because of the promoter, the gene will only turn on in one type of neuron. All the other neurons will ignore it. Imagine you wanted only the lefty in an outfield to catch. How would you do that? Distribute left-handed gloves to all the players. The righties would just stand there, fidgeting and calling their agents. The lefty would spring into action. Just as the lefty is “tagged” by his ability to use the glove, a neuron is “tagged” by its ability to use the gene. Bye-bye side effects: Researchers would be able to stimulate one kind of neuron at a time.

It was a dazzling idea. Tsien wrote to Hegemann asking for the Chlamydomonas light-sensitivity gene. Hegemann wasn’t sure which one it was, so he sent two possibilities. Tsien and his graduate students duly inserted both into cultured neurons. But when exposed to light, the neurons did nothing at all. Tsien extracted two more genes from the algae and tried one of them, but that didn’t work either. “After three strikes, you have to admit that you’re out and try something else,” Tsien says. So he moved on to another line of research and put the fourth gene back into the lab refrigerator, unexamined.

Tsien may have put his work on ice, but Hegemann and his colleagues continued searching; two years later, they inserted a gene into a frog egg and shone light on it. Voilè0! The egg responded with a flow of current.

When Tsien read their paper, he recognized the gene immediately. It was, of course, the one he’d put away. “Our error was not to put it in the fridge,” Tsien says wryly, “but rather to fail to take it back out.” That’s science, though: “You win some, you lose some.” (And he did end up winning some. For his new area of research, using genes to make cells glow by cell type, he won a Nobel Prize in 2008.)

Hegemann’s team named the gene Channelrhodopsin-1. In 2003, they published a bold proposal about its variant, Channelrhodopsin-2: It “may be used to depolarize [activate] animal cells … simply by illumination.” Now someone had to find a practical use for this discovery.

Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist at Stanford, has seen many people with horrific brain diseases. But there are two patients, in particular, that drive his work. He once treated a bright college student ravaged by depression who had grown terrified by its assault on his mind. The other patient was frozen by Parkinson’s. The disease had slowly destroyed the motor control areas of her brain until she was unable to walk, smile, or eat. “I couldn’t save either of these patients,” Deisseroth says. “My inability to treat them, despite our best efforts, has stayed with me.”

Deisseroth, a compact man in his late thirties, is also a neuroscientist. He holds a psych clinic one day a week but spends the rest of his time running a lab. In 2003, he read Hegemann’s paper and asked himself the same thing that Tsien had back in 1999: Could the brain’s misbehaving cells be tagged genetically and controlled with light?

He took on several graduate students to research this, including Feng Zhang and Ed Boyden. Zhang had just graduated from Harvard. He is precisely spoken, his lean sentences tinged with a Boston accent overlaid on a Mandarin one. Boyden, on the other hand, talks so fast he swallows his words, as if his brain were perpetually outracing his mouth. He’s a man in a hurry. He had graduated from MIT at age 19 with a thesis on quantum computation and was pursuing his doctorate in neuroscience.

In 2005, Zhang and Boyden repeated Tsien’s experiment. This time, though, they had the right gene. They inserted it into a culture of neural tissue on a glass slide and poked a tiny electrode into one of the neurons so they would know when it fired. Then they aimed blue light at it. (Channelrhodopsin reacts most strongly to light at 480 nanometers on the spectrum, i.e., blue.)

Their apparatus looked like a microscope that spent its off-hours at the gym. It had a camera screwed into the eyepiece, a laser aimed at the slide, and big boxes of circuitry for amplifying the tiny current they hoped to see. If the cell fired, a huge in-your-face spike would appear on a screen. And that’s exactly what happened. With every flash, another spike marched across the whiteness.

They now had an On switch for neurons. But in the brain, it’s as important to inhibit neurons as it is to make them fire. As with computers, 0 is as crucial as 1; they needed an Off switch, too. When Boyden finished his PhD, he took an appointment at MIT and began hunting for it. He found there was a bacterial gene, halorhodopsin, that had properties suggesting it could do the opposite of channelrhodopsin. In 2006, Boyden inserted halorhodopsin into neurons and exposed them to yellow light. They stopped firing. Beautiful.

Over at Stanford, Deisseroth’s team was making the same discovery, and soon they were stopping worms in their tracks with yellow light. Other labs were already making flies leap into the air when exposed to blue light. And on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno had even joked about the technology with a clip in which he pretended to steer a “remote control” fly into George W. Bush’s mouth. The research was mushrooming, and dozens of labs were calling Deisseroth to ask for the genes. The new field was dubbed optogenetics: optical stimulation plus genetic engineering.

But neurons in petri dishes and in bugs were comparatively simple. Would optogenetics work in the staggeringly complex tangle of a mammalian brain? And could it be used to cure real brain illnesses?

By summer 2007, Deisseroth’s group had answered the first question with their counterclockwise mouse. They put the channelrhodopsin gene into the mouse’s right anterior motor cortex, which controls the left side of the body. When the light went on, the little guy went left.

Deisseroth immediately put his lab to work figuring out what part of the brain needed to be stimulated to cure Parkinson’s. Optogenetics was the ideal tool because it let researchers test various types of neurons to find which one would make legs move again, hands grasp again, faces smile again.

But test after test failed. “This was a discouraging time,” Deisseroth says. “The project was almost abandoned, because we had difficulty showing any therapeutic result.”

Many experts had thought the cure was to stimulate certain kinds of cells within the subthalamic nucleus, which coordinates motion. But when they tried that, it had no effect whatsoever. Then two of Deisseroth’s grad students began experimenting with a dark-horse idea. They stimulated neurons near the surface of the brain that send signals into the subthalamic nucleus — a much harder approach because it meant working at one remove. It was as if, instead of using scissors yourself, you had to guide someone else’s hands to make the cuts.

Their idea worked. The mice walked. In their paper, published in April 2009, they wrote that the “effects were not subtle; indeed, in nearly every case these severely parkinsonian animals were restored to behavior indistinguishable from normal.”

Over at MIT, Boyden was asking the obvious question: Would this work on people? But imagine saying to a patient, “We’re going to genetically alter your brain by injecting it with viruses that carry genes taken from pond scum, and then we’re going to insert light sources into your skull.” He was going to need some persuasive safety data first.

That same summer, Boyden and his assistants began working with rhesus monkeys, whose brains are relatively similar to humans’. He was looking to see whether the primates were harmed by the technique. They triggered the neurons of one particular monkey for several minutes every few weeks for nine months. In the end, the animal was just fine.

The next step was creating a device that didn’t require threading cables through the skull. One of Deisseroth’s colleagues designed a paddle about one-third the length of a popsicle stick. It has four LEDs: two blue ones to make neurons fire and two yellow ones to stop them. Attached to the paddle is a little box that provides power and instructions. The paddle is implanted on the surface of the brain, on top of the motor control area. The lights are bright enough to illuminate a fairly large volume of tissue, so the placement doesn’t have to be exact. The light-sensitizing genes are injected into the affected tissue beforehand. It’s a far easier surgery than deep brain electrical stimulation, and, if it works, a far more precise treatment. Researchers at Stanford are currently testing the device on primates. If all goes well, they will seek FDA approval for experiments in humans.

Treating Parkinson’s and other brain diseases could be just the beginning. Optogenetics has amazing potential, not just for sending information into the brain but also for extracting it. And it turns out that Tsien’s Nobel-winning work — the research he took up when he abandoned the hunt for channelrhodopsin — is the key to doing this. By injecting mice neurons with yet another gene, one that makes cells glow green when they fire, researchers are monitoring neural activity through the same fiber-optic cable that delivers the light. The cable becomes a lens. It makes it possible to “write” to an area of the brain and “read” from it at the same time: two-way traffic.

Why is two-way traffic a big deal? Existing neural technologies are strictly one-way. Motor implants let paralyzed people operate computers and physical objects but are incapable of giving feedback to the brain. They are output-only devices. Conversely, cochlear implants for the deaf are input-only. They send data to the auditory nerve but have no way of picking up the brain’s response to the ear to modulate sound.

No matter how good they get, one-way prostheses can’t close the loop. In theory, two-way optogenetic traffic could lead to human-machine fusions in which the brain truly interacts with the machine, rather than only giving or only accepting orders. It could be used, for instance, to let the brain send movement commands to a prosthetic arm; in return, the arm’s sensors would gather information and send it back. Blue and yellow LEDs would flash on and off inside genetically altered somatosensory regions of the cortex to give the user sensations of weight, temperature, and texture. The limb would feel like a real arm. Of course, this kind of cyborg technology is not exactly around the corner. But it has suddenly leapt from the realm of wild fantasy to concrete possibility.

And it all began with pond scum.

Michael Chorost (michael@chorost.com) wrote about his cochlear implant in issue 13.11.

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This is totally far out! Found via Simon Willison

Very interesting article... as I have had a very bad experience with Asus in the last 2 years. Still HP! a 25% malfunction rate in a three year period is way below par!

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10th November , 2009

Samsung Launches Open Mobile Platform

Samsung Launches Open Mobile Platform:
Samsung bada – The Next Wave Of The Mobile Industry

Developers get the chance to create mobile applications
for millions of new Samsung handsets

November 10th, 2009, Seoul, Korea - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, today announced the launch of its own open mobile platform, Samsung bada [bada] in December. This new addition to Samsung’s mobile ecosystem enables developers to create applications for millions of new Samsung mobile phones, and consumers to enjoy a fun and diverse mobile experience.

In order to build a rich smartphone experience accessible to a wider range of consumers across the world, Samsung brings bada, a new platform with a variety of mobile applications and content.

The name ‘bada’, which means ‘ocean’ in Korean, was chosen to convey the limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform. It also alludes to Samsung’s commitment to a variety of open platforms in the mobile industry. Samsung bada also represents the fresh challenges and opportunities available to developers, as well as the entertainment which consumers will enjoy once the new platform is open.

Based on Samsung’s experience in developing previous proprietary platforms on Samsung mobile phones, Samsung can create the new platform and provide opportunities for developers. Samsung bada is also simple for developers to use, meaning it’s one of the most developer-friendly environments available, particularly in the area of applications using Web services. Lastly, bada’s ground-breaking User Interface (UI) can be transferred into a sophisticated and attractive UI design for developers.

Samsung will be able to expand the range of choices for mobile phone users to enjoy the smartphone experiences. By adopting Samsung bada, users will be able to easily enjoy various applications on their mobile.

Samsung bada also offers an easy-to-integrate platform for mobile operators so that mobile operators can provide unique and differentiated services to their customers.

Samsung established its mobile application ecosystem through the launch of Samsung Mobile Innovator in 2008 and the Samsung Application Seller Site followed by Samsung Application Store as another key element of this offering.

Dr Hosoo Lee, Executive Vice President and Head of Media Solution Center at Samsung Electronics said, “By opening Samsung’s mobile platforms we will be able to provide rich mobile experiences on an increasing number of accessible smartphones.” He added, “bada will be Samsung’s landmark, iconic new platform that brings an unprecedented opportunity for operators, developers and Samsung mobile phone users around the world.”

The official website (www.bada.com) will open on November 10^th and will feature a range of information on bada including updates on product launches, features, and event notices. Samsung will also host an official launch event for bada in London, UK in December and will also unveil its bada software development kit (SDK) to developers for the first time on this date.

About Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2008 consolidated sales of US$96 billion. Employing approximately 164,600 people in 179 offices across 61 countries, the company consists of two business units: Digital Media & Communications and Device Solutions. Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs. For more information, please visit www.samsung.com

• Tags: bada, Press Release
  

Samsung is working on it's own platform! Unbelievable. They build android and windows mobile phones... Betanews says it's opensource and a replacement of symbian... except it is not Symbian but YAMP (yet another mobile platform).

When Google Chrome launched, many people complained that the browser didn't detect feeds. Apparently, this feature has been implemented in an extension that will come preinstalled in Google Chrome.

The extension "adds a button to the URL bar when a page has a feed that can be subscribed to". When you click on the orange button, the extension previews the feed and it lets you subscribe using a feed reader.

The support for extensions is only available in Chrome's dev channel. Google will soon launch an extension directory at https://chrome.google.com/extensions and the first beta version that supports extensions will be released in early December.

Labels: Google Chrome