The I.T. Life

Wired Magazine has a really nice write up on there hands-on time with the new Blackberry PlayBook. For those that do not now the specs already, it runs on a dual core 1ghz processor, and an entire 1gb of ram. Wired notes how light the tablet is, coming in at .4″ thick and .9lbs it manages to be light, without feeling cheap. This features a 3mp front facing camera, and a 5pm rear which can also capture 1080p video (both of these specs beat out the Motorola Xoom). It also features a micro HDMI out, so you can watch those great movies you recorded as well (I think it would be very awkward to record a movie from a tablet).

Getting into performance the hardware in this make it run very smooth, multitasking works great; the ability to watch a 1080p video and swap through other applications is very nice.  The PlayBook not only supports HTML5 video, but Flash as well; Wired did not that running two flash enabled sites caused the videos to be choppy. This performance limitation of Flash on a mobile device is further proof that though it may be nice to have Flash on a mobile system, the Flash player is not even close to being ready.

Wired pointed out that there is still no news on battery life, however one rep has pointed out “more than an hour”; I think he should have kept his mouth shut. Considering the extra power and features in this that the iPad does not have, I doubt it will really come close to the up to 10hrs of battery life Apple has blessed us with. The ability to tether with a existing BlackBerry doesn’t only add 3G data however it adds syncing as well, which is a very nice touch. It is reported that the 4G model will be out in the summer, so lets start holding our breath now.

Its hard to do a development blog, I’ve learn’t this. For a few reasons, mainly because anything really cool is protected behind NDA contracts, and also your so busy working on stuff, you don’t get a chance to talk about it. I keep a semi-up to date portfolio at http://jeffreyhann.com/portfolio.php but what isn’t up there yet is what I’m sharing with you now.
I’m working on a flash game at work. It will be release as a casual game, and its basically a puzzle game. It is very cool, there is nothing like it, and you will love it. But that’s all I can say.
I’m now the webmaster for Hal-Con (http://hal-con.com/), a local (re: Halifax) comic book and sci-fi convention that will be having its first year in the fall of 2010. I’ve set them up with a PHPBB forum and am working with them on getting a mailing list setup as well, other than that its small update, but still nice to do some volunteer work.
I’m also taking over the website for E2C, a huge orienteering challenge with both 8 and 24 hour courses. This is run by HRSAR, with lots of community support. To explain how tough this can be, the military runs it yearly. However anyone can do it, you choose the pace. Anyways, its a pretty basic site right now, but I’m gonna fix that, I’m thinking Drupal, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and updating there current payment system to PayPal (currently accepts checks by mail).
Thats about it for now