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Review: The Speedmaster Moonwatch Co-Axial Chronograph Speeds Into My Heart

Posted: 11 Nov 2011 03:46 AM PST

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In the pantheon of mechanical wristwatches, the Speedmaster holds a high place. Originally built in 1957 as a reaction to the first wrist-worn chronographs coming out of competing houses, the iconic design – white on black with bold, eminently readable chapter rings and pips – the Speedmaster cemented its place in history when Buzz Aldrin wore his on the moon in 1969. Omega has been flogging that relationship ever since, much to the brand’s benefit and Speedmaster fans rabidly hunt for new and old models like madmen intent on owning stars.

Decades later the Speedmaster has maintained this original styling and functionality and, barring a few odd turns taken in the 1970s and 80s, hasn’t strayed far from the white on black design. This new model, the Moonwatch Co-Axial, pays homage first to the watch’s importance in the space race and, second, to the contributions of one of the greatest modern watchmakers, George Daniels.

I wore this watch for a week in China, alternating it with another GMT watch I own, in order to assess the legibility and usability of the piece. I was initially taken aback for reasons that should be clear to any Speedmaster fan. The traditional Speedmaster, the Professional, has four registers – a running seconds hand at 9 o’clock, a minutes register at 3 o’clock, and an elapsed hours register, going up to 12, at six o’clock, as well as a main elapsed seconds hand. To be clear, the main, “long” seconds hand doesn’t register “running” seconds but is activated by the pushers on the right side of the watch. There is no date on the Professional and it has standard baton hands with lume running the length. The Professional looks like this:

The model I’m reviewing today looks like this:

To the average watch buyer, the difference is, at best, cosmetic. However, to the Speedmaster purist (and I hold myself in that esteemed aviary of nerds) the reaction is horror. “What wickedness is this?” you cry. “Where is the hours register?”

Surprisingly, the hours and minutes register are on the same dial. The minutes turns quickly around the dial at 3 o’clock while the hours hand, slightly shorted than the minutes, turns a bit more slowly. You’ll also notice a date window at six o’clock that replaces the original hour register.

This minor change introduces a great deal of skepticism in the average Speedmaster fan but I’m here to tell you not to fear: this Speedmaster is as good or better than any other Speedy you can own. The legibility is excellent and, once you get past the initial shock, the small register change is more than acceptable. I also loved the small date window, an addition that improves the Speedmaster immensely. Even the date font hearkens back to a simpler time, being in a sort of bold, Art Deco style that you rarely see on watches anymore.

Why do I like this watch?

First, the movement is accurate to a fault and the pushers are strikingly improved over the standard Speedmaster. The co-axial escapement by George Daniels reduces the necessity of maintenance considerably thanks to the reduction in lubricant necessary over the life of the piece. As the owner of a Speedmaster Automatic and a few Seamasters, Omega watches require regular maintenance to remain accurate. I expect this watch to offer years of excellent service, whether you’re travelling to space or not.

The watch comes on a steel bracelet or leather strap and is about 44.25mm in diameter – a bold size to be sure. It is water resistant to 100m but it doesn’t have a screw-down crown so I’d be slightly concerned with giving it much of a bath.

This is an automatic watch – meaning it is wound by a weight inside the watch – and it holds about 40 hours on a bad day and 60 hours as advertised. I saw an amazing 50+ hours in reserve in my testing, a welcome improvement.

Now for the (relatively) bad news. This watch costs about 7,300 Swiss Francs or about $8,060 USD. You’ll notice that I rail against conspicuous consumption in other posts on this site, as is my prerogative, but I rail against consumption for consumption’s sake. This item is, in short, the epitome of modern horological engineering and mechanics, on par with a handmade Bugatti or, dare I say it, an artifact of equal importance to the lunar lander (at least in terms of horological manufacturing). Non-watch nuts can argue the negative, but the Speedy is a definitive timepiece and deserves at least some modicum of respect.

Where does that leave the beginning collector or, barring that, the fellow who wants a nice watch? Well, I can whole-heartedly recommend this particular Speedmaster without reservation as it takes the best of Omega’s past and future and compresses them into a watch that almost anyone would agree is handsome, bold, and mechanically superior. Watch collectors are an odd bunch, however, so you may want to look at the traditional Professional before diving headfirst into this improvement on the original.

Either way, Omega has, in this watch, remained true to the legacy of the Moonwatch and, more important, improved on their original design without alienating the purist. It’s a hard thing to do – and they haven’t always done it well (see their ridiculous Olympic collection) – and so this Speedmaster is definitely worth a second look.

Click to view slideshow.

Product Page



Video: Super-Realistic HRP-4C Humanoid Walks Like Human

Posted: 11 Nov 2011 01:46 AM PST

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Most robots that are labeled “humanoids” still have a common problem: they can only walk in a slow, mechanical and chopping motion. Even HRP-4C, in my opinion the most realistic humanoid ever created, wasn’t an exception – until now.

Even though she could sing and later even learned to dance, walking was never her strong suit (the first version couldn’t move her legs at all). But its maker, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), has been working on it: the newest HRP-4C has toes that support the legs during strides, for example.

You can see the result in the video embedded below. HRP-4C isn’t exactly walking like a human yet, but it’s the most impressive result I (as a robot otaku) have seen so far:

Via Plastic Pals

Sony Japan Announces UMD Passport Program for PS Vita Owners

Posted: 11 Nov 2011 01:05 AM PST

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In case you are planning to buy Sony’s new handheld PlayStation Vita and were wondering what will happen to your UMDs, Sony finally made an announcement [JP] today, albeit for the Japanese market only at this point. The company says it will establish a so-called UMD Passport Program to make it possible to download versions of your personal UMD games.

There is a bit of work involved, however: owners of UMD titles first have to download an app to their PSP, insert and register the disc with their PSN account, and then download the game onto their Vita.

Another drawback is that initially, not all titles are supported: Sony published a list of 200 games [JP] that are compatible with the program, and each download will cost players between 500 and 2,400 Yen (US$6.50 to US$31, depending on the game). In other words, you have to repurchase every UMD game that you bought for your PSP if you want to play it on your Vita.

The UMD Passport Program will start on December 6, ahead of the December 17 launch of the Vita in Japan.

Street Prices For Hard Drives Spike As Supply Contracts

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 06:12 PM PST

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By now you must have heard of the ongoing havoc being caused by flooding in Thailand. It’s claimed a few product launches already; Nikon and Sony have both had to delay shipment of new cameras, among others. But the single tech industry that seems to be hit the hardest is hard drive manufacturers. Many factories have been flooded and the production of drives has been seriously impeded.

Due to large inventories being kept by most retailers, the effect of the floods on a commodity like HDDs was bound to be delayed. And now we’re starting to see major rises in the prices of common drives like a Seagate 2TB. Street prices in Japan have risen by some measurements by 200% or more just in the last couple weeks.

The chart above, from Akiba, shows that the cheapest options for 2TB drives have gone up as much as 400% since late October. And indeed, at American retailers many cheap drives are sold out or selling far above the prices from a few months back.

The prices could come back down as quickly as they went up (some, you can see, are already bouncing back down, having overshot their optimum price), but it has to be a terrifying time to be in the business. A company that produces custom servers, for instance, is put in the uncomfortable position of taking a loss on sales or passing the cost on to their customers.

In essence, it’s the same kind of crunch you see when the stock of any commodity is significantly reduced: LCD panels or printer ink or bananas would have similar ripple effects. Still, storage is an essential part of the PC and consumer electronics world, and everyone involved is hoping for a speedy recovery effort in Thailand. With the waters only just beginning to recede and damage widespread and serious, some are estimating a year or more before the factories can return to pre-flood productivity levels.

Incidentally, you can donate to the Thai Red Cross’s recovery efforts here.

Sony Hopes To Debut “A New Form Of Television”

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 04:01 PM PST

Sony CEO Howard Stringer isn’t in an enviable position. The company has had a rough few years, and expects to lose a cool billion dollars in the fiscal year ending in March 2012. The TV business, in particular, has been a millstone around his neck; the price of TV, very much a commodity, has gone down steadily for years, and the poor economy has driven people towards budget brands and smaller sets if they buy anything at all. Despite this, Stringer is philosophical about the hard times.

You have bad years,” he told the Wall St Journal. “The trick is to weather them, learn from them, act graciously through them, and learn why and when you have to change.” And the TV market is ripe for real change, but whether they can make a better change than their new adversary in there, Apple, is up in the air.

Jobs was rumored to have been working on just this problem, the reinvention of TV, before he died. Inventor, manager, or tweaker, whatever the man was, he was certainly someone you didn’t want working on a product that competed with yours. Stringer, aware of this, began preemptively working against Apple: “I spent the last five years building a platform so I can compete against Steve Jobs. It’s finished, and it’s launching now,” he said.

This was in reference, however, to a multi-screen strategy that unifies experiences across mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and TVs. If Apple is building something, it’s going to be a single “breakthrough device,” as they are sure to call it, not an ecosystem or a meta-platform optional to a hundred different devices. Is Sony ready for that?

It’s been a long time since Sony had to invent anything on its own in this sector. For years it has sold the same products in increasingly powerful variations or with lowered price points. Despite real advantages in some areas and a global network of consumer electronics companies that rely on its OEM portion (the iPhone 4S’s new camera is a Sony, for instance), it has had precious few original ideas.

Is it even possible for this company to rise to the challenge and beat Apple to the punch by disrupting its own industry? Sony is many things, but surprising isn’t one of them. Their forces are too widely distributed, and are vulnerable to a blitzkrieg by someone like Apple who, having no commodity business to look after, can afford to go all out on a single device, price, interface, and platform. Sony’s CEO is at least treating the issue with the respect it deserves, but that probably won’t be enough.

PSA: Steam Hacked, User Info May Be Stolen, But Personal Data Safe

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 03:08 PM PST

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Valve CEO Gabe Newell has contacted all users of the Steam game distribution platform to let them know that the company has suffered a security breach. The hack was originally thought to be limited to the official Steam forums, but further investigation has revealed that the hackers had access to a database containing “user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.”

That said, they says that they have no evidence that any personally identifiable information was actually taken, and have detected no fraudulent credit card information.

Users of the service are advised to change their passwords and be on the watch for suspicious account activity.

Here’s the notice in its entirety:

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users,

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

A New Gesture Appears In Apple Patent: Hold-And-Swipe

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 02:44 PM PST

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Coming up with new gestures that can be performed with one, two, or three fingers is a surprisingly difficult job. Many are proposed; few actually make it into daily use. Here’s one from Apple entitled “hold and swipe,” in a recent-ish patent application. But is it really new?

I’m leaving out the part where patenting a gesture is an absurdity, because that’s an entirely separate issue.

The gesture has to do with navigating visual information on a small screen (like the new Nano). Zooming in on a face or object within a picture, or selecting an aspect of it, can be difficult both for the user, who can’t see where they’re touching, and the touchscreen, which can’t accurately determine where the user intends to touch. The hold and swipe method would rely heavily on image metadata like facial recognition, and allow users to go between points of interest without repeating a single inexact gesture multiple times.

The idea is that you’d touch down on the display, on or off an object of interest, and after a short delay, move your finger in whatever direction. Contextual actions are done based on a few things: if you put your finger on someone’s face, then move off to the right, it could either go to other people’s faces in the picture, or switch to other pictures with the same face. The rate could be modified by the distance your finger is from the original point, or by tilting the device itself.

Unfortunately, as I said, coming up with new gestures is quite difficult, and this one is likely to end up totally unused. For one thing, it doesn’t solve the problem it sets out to solve: not only is the user’s finger still obscuring much of the display, but they can’t remove it while navigating the content. It’s also overcomplicated: tilting the display while holding your finger down at a certain distance from the original point? It’s all most people can do to master two-finger scrolling. And the UI elements are also nontrivial additions. How do you tell the user it’s time to move their finger? How do you indicate, on this small screen of theirs, which face or element of the picture they’ve landed on?

It’s also not original. The idea of placing an “anchor” by holding a finger or stylus down, and then scrolling in the direction indicated by the next movement is quite old. Apple’s addition of moving between points of interest or photos with the same face or tag is just a veneer on a gesture that’s been around in games and apps for years. If this patent were legitimate you could also patent using this gesture to move between cells in a spreadsheet, or brush sizes in photoshop, or tabs in a browser.

It just goes to show the amount of chaff that’s produced while you’re trying to get some wheat. Most of these ideas die early on in focus groups (we produced and killed a dozen in a couple hours at a recent Microsoft event), but this one, perhaps, they felt was on the border line. I wouldn’t expect Apple to include something this inelegant in devices like the Nano. Limiting the user’s UI vocabulary has been a big part of Apple’s success, and part of that has been binning ideas like this one as quick as possible.

Patently Apple has more information, but for some reason I couldn’t bring up the patent itself. I’ll update with a link as soon as I get it.

Nokia’s Crazy Bendy Kinetic Concept Blew Your Mind? Watch This!

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 10:50 AM PST

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Nokia is totally ready for the future. They’ve already debuted a totally insane flexible kinetic interface concept, and now they’ve even drawn up an implementation for it: HumanForm. No, the phone doesn’t look like a you-themed action figure, but rather has a tear drop shape (probably my biggest gripe about the concept).

I’m not going to go into too much detail about what’s included in the video, as you can easily see for yourself. I will, however, say that this takes the cake compared to Nokia’s earlier flexi-screen concept. One thing that really jumped out at me is the idea of electro-tactile feedback. Seems pretty out there, but it would be pretty freaking sweet to take a picture of velvet or wood and feel that texture.

I’m not so sure how I feel about the shape, though. In the hand, I’m sure this concept is actually much more comfortable than our usual candy-bar phones. But (and this is a big but), how do you account for corners of anything? At this point we’re watching video and viewing pictures on our phone pretty regularly. Web pages happen to be rectangular, as is just about anything you pull up on a mobile phone.

I’m sure there are ways to circumvent this issue, but it seems like too far of a leap to make from rectangle to teardrop. It reminds me of when Dwight wanted everyone in The Office to sell the Sabre Pyramid, a triangular tablet. It seemed crazy, but in the fictional version of Scranton, PA people still seemed to be interested in “unleashing the power of the pyramid.” Maybe the same will be true for Nokia.

Then again, if this concept even comes to fruition, it won’t be for quite a while. Enjoy the video while you wait.

[via Engadget]

Class-Action Lawsuit Forces Apple To Replace Frayed MagSafe Power Cords

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 08:25 AM PST

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Any long-time Apple devotee has struggled through the charger situation. Those Mag-Safe T-shaped chargers fray pretty easily, at which point you have to twist and turn the cord to pull in a charge. It’s a huge pain, to say the least. But it appears those struggles are coming to a close, as Apple has lost a lawsuit which will now require the company to either replace MagSafe power cords or hand over a chunk of change.

In 2006, Apple made a smart move by introducing magnetic power cords. The idea was that people would stop damaging the charging port and/or their MacBooks if they happened to trip over the cord. The only problem was that the T-shaped adapters ended up fraying at the end, probably since everyone felt free to trip over them and yank them out of the computer.

Still, they should’ve been more durable, and now Apple has to clean up the mess. After now realizing that the 60W and 85W MagSafe MPM-1 power adapters are defective, users will have until March 21, 2012 to file a cash claim, or until December 31, 2012 to go get a replacement, reports the Register. Simply take your damaged charger into an Apple Store or an official Apple partner and ask for a replacement. But know that any signs of accidental damage (which to me would look a lot like “stress relief” damage, so who knows how they’ll determine that) will invalidate your claim.

Here’s Apple’s official wording on claims:

Strain Relief Damage means fraying, melting, straining, sparking, weakening, discoloration, bubbling, overheating and/or separation of the Adapter's strain reliefs.

If you’re a more recent Mac convertee and own the L-shaped MagSafe charger, no worries. You shouldn’t have the same fraying issues. No word yet on whether non-U.S. MacBook owners will get the same deal.



Will An LTE-Friendly Lumia 800 Hit U.S. Shores Next Year?

Posted: 10 Nov 2011 08:18 AM PST

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The Lumia 800 may not have a gargantuan screen or a front-facing camera, but according to The Verge, the U.S.-bound version of Nokia’s flagship Windows Phone may play nice with some of our LTE networks.

It’s a welcome surprise for domestic Nokia fans — when the Lumia series was first announced last month, Nokia slyly omitted any release details for the United States. Nokia U.S. boss Chris Weber also mentioned not long after the big event that the company is preparing to bring a “full portfolio” of Windows Phones to the States starting in early 2012, but wouldn’t shed any light on the Lumia situation.

According to The Verge’s sources, that delay is due to Mango’s currently inability to play nice with LTE out of the box. As such, it’s unclear whether Mango will be tweaked to handle the change or if the LTE Lumias will run on the forthcoming Tango software build.

The Verge does seem pretty confident in saying that AT&T will get an LTE-friendly variant of the Lumia 800 (which is great news considering their new LTE network seems rather snappy) Meanwhile, details regarding other LTE carriers like Verizon are still murky, though Nokia going full-bore with LTE support could only help as the networks continue to grow.

I’d advise everyone not to get their hopes up too much — after all, a lot could change in the next few months — but the prospect of a 4G Lumia has me more than a little giddy.