New Android, new Chromecast, old marketing tricks: Ars readers react

On Wednesday, Google held an event in San Francisco announcing a couple of new products that proved interesting to Android and Apple adherents alike. These included the revamped Nexus 7, Android 4.3, and the Chromecast, a tiny dongle for your TV's HDMI port that pushes music, photos, and videos from Android and iOS devices and laptops to the...um...medium screen.

Ars sat down to run some benchmarks on the Nexus 7 as soon as we got our hands on it, and Andrew Cunningham wrote up the results in The 2013 Nexus 7 performance preview: a huge speed upgrade in every way. The benchmarks showed the newest tablet vastly outperforming the original Nexus 7 as well as the Nexus 4, and coming close in performance to the larger Nexus 10.

Storage, incidentally, was the most controversial part of the new tablet. daneren2005 wrote, "I think the better storage performance is the only thing I really care about in an upgrade. The Nexus 7 deteriorated so fast it was ridiculous and got extremely laggy when approaching full. I'm hoping this version doesn't have these issues, or at least not at the same level." charleski agreed: "Hmm. I was planning to keep my old N7 since I mostly use it for reading. But storage speed is the one thing that really bugs me about the original model, and these improvements are quite enticing."

Digitali missed the old ways. "Still no SDCard storage? I love my original one, but the lack of additional storage options is insane." Chronoreverse didn't want to hear it, "You're never going to see MicroSD storage in a Nexus device." But greenmky stepped in to offer a more thorough response:

I'd prefer an SD card slot too, but considering the bang/buck that Google offers with Nexus devices I've been willing to overlook it. I don't keep that much music on hand, and on a tablet, the only reason I use the space is for disc images for DOSBox or something. I don't watch movies or TV on a tablet (would rather wait and watch on the plasma/HT setup).

I really like SD cards (for media storage, Titanium Backup, Photos, etc), but somehow I've ended up with a Nexus 7 / Nexus 4 combo anyway.

My wife grouses about not having enough room for her music all of the time on her Nexus 4. She's talked about getting another Android device with MicroSD just for playing music. So far, it's just talk.

For my kids (age 7 and 5), however, an SD card slot is critical. I load it up with episodes of My Little Pony: FIM and whatever else they want to watch for trips, camping, etc. They load up the internal storage with terrible insipid games and such 

Devil’s in the details

Verizon also announced it's Motorola Droid lineup this week, and while the phones sounded awfully impressive, the specifics of the "Motorola 8X" chip that powers the lineup revealed decidedly average hardware. Again, Andrew Cunningham took down the details in Motorola’s “8-core” X8 chip gives us a lesson in marketing-speak.

The deception made Doctor Hoot mad. "So your new 'flagship phone' has a lower-resolution screen, a similar processor, and the same RAM as the GSIII? Way to produce a flagship last year's flagship phone and sell it for $199, Motorola. No wonder your market share is dropping."

ounkeo already hit the acceptance stage:

This is just the general problem with companies and manufacturers in general. Nearly everyone inflates. The goal is to bedazzle ignorant users. The fact that it works and you have users going on and on about yet more pointless cores means it will continue to be done.

This has been happening in the PC market for a long time though not quite as blatant as Motorola, Google, and Verizon. We had the almighty Jiggahertz warz, the megapixie wars, the core warz. And ignorant people lap it up.

Outside of Ars, pretty much any other blog comment section is filled with "it doesnt haz 16corez...it is bad and useless."

Others joked about the offending 8 core chip. "Reminds me of the time I went to a 'computer blowout' sale and saw vendors selling MP5, MP6, and MP7 players," wrote RolandKSP.

And TerribleTony told us of his incredibly intriguing product: "I'm working on a 36-core SoC design. 16 of the cores are 6510's, 10 ten are Z80's, two are Hercules Graphics Adapters, two are FM synthesizers I pulled off of old SoundBlaster Pro or Adlib cards (whatever I could find at Goodwill), three are 8088s, and the remaining three are actually people doing jobs it offloads to Amazon's Mechanical Turk."

Chrome...um...castic?

At Google's Wednesday event, a tiny little device called the Chromecast. In her article, New “Chromecast,” a $35 HDMI dongle to get video streams to your TV, Casey Johnston took a look at Google's pitch to get one of these things in every TV in every home. Ultimately, Ars readers were enthusiastic, but some were skeptical that it would really be a great at Google promised.

"Looks nifty, but no 5GHz Wi-Fi will be awful in any area with congested 2.4GHz operation," Bob Loblaw posted. DOOManiac had another idea: "I wish the thing had an IR port on it so you could pause/play/rewind/ffwd using your remote instead of digging your phone/tablet out again."

Ars of Ares thought the dongle's ultimate usefulness would come down to content:

I'm cautiously excited about this. I really dig connecting my PS3 to my phone via YouTube, so I'm fairly aware of the potential.

I do wonder about dev support though. It's great that they got Netflix right out the gates, but that's kind of a given these days; I already have five separate options to watch Netflix on one TV, how many more do I need? HBO Go, on the other hand...

I hope they have some way of syncing the audio, but I sort of doubt it. It would be awesome to have Google Music or Pandora playing the same stream on multiple receivers and/or TVs throughout the house—like the Nexus Q—but this little stick doesn't seem to be meant for that. Hopeful, there...

They hit the pricing right out of the park. $35 is deep into impulse territory!

outlaw2005 had no such reservations though. "I just ordered one for each TV in the house. This is exactly what I was looking for."

You are where you eat

Towards the end of the week, Nathan Mattise brought us the story of a programmer who kept being thwarted in his attempts to get a table at a swanky San Francisco restaurant. To realize that fine dining dream, the programmer built a bot to make online reservations—only to realize that others were using superior bots for the same task. In Engineer can’t get decent dinner reservations, creates Urbanspoon-dominating bot you can get the whole story of the eatery arms race. 

psd sort of missed the point, but had a good DIY sentiment. "I'll tell you where you can easily get a reservation—your own kitchen table! Ditch the laziness, get off the keyboard and finally learn how to cook gourmet meals for yourself! Start being self-sufficient for a change."

Happysin saw the future in this particular story: "This seems like the natural beginning of agent-based life management. We've seen it in Sci-Fi for years, but it would be great to tell your personal agent that you want reservations as X place, and make sure to notify Y person of the date when it's finalized. Then also manage things like dentist and doctor scheduling, etc. Having an agent manage calendar for things like that would be pretty great. You lose direct control over parts of your schedule, but if it's set up properly, it shouldn't be a problem."

But surely the restaurant would see something strange afoot. Right? "'How come our only patrons are IT geeks?'" Stone joked as the restaurant owners.

But FoneFreak spoke the voice of the common man (and woman): "I'll be eating my Stouffer's Lean Cuisine and watching 'Rin-Tin-Tin' reruns on antenna TV while these startup guys feast on braised peacock tongue and in vivo monkey brains while they furiously blog about it in real-time on invisible, holo-keyboards projected from a Google Glass add-on dongle. *sigh*"