Sony’s finally put a name to their motion controller, and it’s called PlayStation Move. Updated with hands on.

Sony will have multiple packages. A standalone Move controller, or a package with PlayStation Eye + Move + a game, or an entire console solution. The Eye and Move and game combo will be less than $100. The preliminary launch window is Fall 2010.

One of the games for it is called Sports Champions, a game with a bunch of smaller mini games. One demo is a swordfighting duel game with a sword/mace and shield. It’s similar to the swordfighting one in Wii Sports Resort, but with a shield too. This needs two motion controllers at once.

One cool effect that they can do with the benefit of having a PS Eye is that they can do augmented reality stuff, like putting a paintbrush or a tennis racquet onto your Move controller on screen.

Sony also didn’t say that the controllers came in a pair, so for the games that require two controllers (like the swordfighting one), you may have to buy two Move controllers. Very Nintendo WiiMote + Nunchuck-esque in terms of having to buy two things.

Motion Fighters. A street fighting game that actually looks pretty cool, as it makes you make the entire motion instead of just flicking your wrist.

Oh, and there’s also a sub-controller that you can buy as an attachment to turn the controller into a WiiMote+Nunchuck like configuration. It’s also wireless.

Hands On

Update: I just got hands on with two of the games, one is Socom, a shooter that has been adapted to use the Move and the sub-controller, the second is the Sports Champions swordfighting.

Socom, compared to point-and-shoot shooters on the Wii, was much smoother, much less jittery and more accurate. The combination of Move and PlayStation Eye seems to work well in this aspect, but it’s not exactly better to use this when you compare it to a standard controller or a Mouse + Keyboard. I can see this as better for novices to shooters, being able to aim where you want to shoot.

The other game, the Sports Champions sword + shield fighting, is about what you’d expect. It’s more or less 1:1 motion, like the Wii MotionPlus, but it’s not so much more accurate than the Wii that you’d call it a dramatic improvement. An improvement, yes, but not dramatic. The left hand also holds a controller in order to wave the shield around, and that was a bit awkward in my experience. Right hand was fine, left hand a bit awkward to control simultaneously.

Swinging the hammer to your left, or right, or over your head actually moves it on screen, but again, it’s not SO much better than Wii MotionPlus. The graphics, of course, are one generation higher, but the controls, ehhh.

PLAYSTATION®MOVE MOTION CONTROLLER DELIVERS A WHOLE NEW ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCE TO PLAYSTATION®3

New PlayStation®Move Sub-Controller, Enabling Intuitive Navigation, to Accompany the Release of the Motion Controller This Fall and 36 Developers and Publishers to Support PlayStation®Move Platform

Tokyo, March 10, 2010 – Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) today announced that PlayStation®Move motion controller for PlayStation®3 (PS3™) computer entertainment system launches worldwide this fall, offering a motion-based, high-definition gaming experience unlike anything on the market. Concurrently with its launch, SCE will also release PlayStation®Move sub-controller to be used along with the motion controller for intuitive navigation of in-game characters and objects. The PlayStation Move platform, including the motion controller, sub-controller, and PlayStation®Eye camera*1, together with a strong lineup of software titles, will deliver an innovative and highly immersive experience on the PS3 system.

The combination of the PS3 system and PlayStation Eye camera detects the precise movement, angle, and absolute position in 3D space of PlayStation Move motion controller, allowing users to intuitively play the game as if they themselves are within the game. PlayStation Move motion controller delivers unmatched accuracy through its advanced motion sensors, including a three-axis gyroscope, a three-axis accelerometer, and a terrestrial magnetic field sensor, as well as a color-changing sphere that is tracked by PlayStation Eye camera. Through PlayStation Move system, both fast and subtle motion can be detected, whether the user is swinging a tennis racket, or painting with a brush. With PlayStation Move motion controller, users can provide direct input through action buttons and an analog trigger, while receiving physical feedback from rumble functionality and visual feedback from the sphere’s ability to display a variety of different colors. Furthermore, PlayStation Eye camera can capture the player’s voice or image, enabling augmented reality experiences.

The newly announced PlayStation Move sub-controller is a one-handed controller, developed to further expand the game play options that PlayStation Move games can offer*2. PlayStation Move sub-controller features a sleek curved design that pairs with the motion controller and comes with an analog stick and directional buttons that allow users to easily control the game when moving characters or choosing a direction. Like all other Wireless Controllers for the PS3 system, it comes with a built in lithium-ion rechargeable battery as well as Bluetooth® technology, enabling the controller to transfer the input information wirelessly to the PS3 system without a cable. PlayStation Move motion controller and sub-controller will further broaden the gaming experience on the PS3 system for all genres, from games that use one motion controller to games that use both controllers.

The introduction of PlayStation Move controllers has been well received within the industry and now 36 third party developers and publishers*3 have decided to support PlayStation Move platform. In fiscal year 2010, SCE Worldwide Studios will also release more than 20 games that are either dedicated to or supported with the PlayStation Move platform.

SCE, with strong support from software developers and publishers, will deploy various measures to enhance the PlayStation Move software title line-up and vigorously promote the PS3 platform.

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You can place your iPad pre-order at the Apple Store now. And if you’re still between a few models, it’s not too late to read our iPad Buyer’s Guide, Haiku Edition. [Apple]

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For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to turn today’s user-friendly gadgets into cold, utilitarian Soviet-era relics. It’s probably for the best that these don’t actually exist.

First Place—Bobo the Teddy
Second Place—Paul Vasco
Third Place—Goodie to You Dot Com

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Even if you don’t own a PlayStation 3, Heavy Rain is a game you should know because it re-imagines both videogames and movies, combining them into a new genre of Choose Your Own Adventure digital narrative. (Very minor spoilers ahead.)

This is not to say Heavy Rain is perfect, but think of this piece as less a review than a critical discussion of a new work. How about we start from the beginning?

Heavy Rain is by a French company named Quantic Dream. Unless you’re a hardcore gamer, there’s no way you’ve heard of them. Before Heavy Rain, they’d made a game that was so plagued by budgets and launch schedules that its narrative lost basic cohesion—yet Sony has most likely sunk millions of dollars (be it in indirect support) into Quantic Dream to create a unique, PlayStation-exclusive IP.

Why? There’s no other development studio on the planet like them.

Quantic Dream creates a game that’s equal parts video game and movie. And I don’t mean that it’s a game peppered with a few, slightly congruous extended cutscenes, like Metal Gear Solid 4 or any Square Enix RPG.

Heavy Rain, and its predecessor Indigo Prophecy (also known as Fahrenheit), are highly directed pieces of media, deploying fixed cameras to tell the story of a scene as your character walks through, nuanced motion capture to add realism to both jumping through windows and merely turning off a sink, and choices that stem from real actions and dialogue that will change the course of the story you see unfold.

What’s this mean? If a person cries in Heavy Rain, you will most probably feel for them as you would any fictional character in any photographic media. These games aren’t Grand Theft Auto, with humans filling the landscape as silly, bleeding sheep-like diversions. Heavy Rain’s writing is melodramatic to say the least, but its basic presentation of character is on par with any well-directed drama.

Heavy Rain may chronicle a serial child murderer through the perspective of four characters—an overweight private eye, a young FBI agent, a sexy photographer and a depressed father—it may take you through high speed chases and fight sequences that rival any action flick—it may have all the twists of any good yarn—but it opens with a father waiting for his son to come home.

The father walks through his house, exploring his life, completing mundane tasks and thinking aloud at any time with the tap of a trigger button.

Much of Heavy Rain explores the mundane, some of which fills in backstory, other of which just puts you in the shows of another’s life—like The Sims for someone 30 or over.

However, there is something to be learned in all this shaving and cooking. You’re mastering button combinations, strange holds and releases and analog stick maneuvers that you’ll need when things don’t go so well for Dad and his family. To drink a carton of milk, for instance, you’ll want to move the analog stick in the shape of a fishook…but slowly! Too fast and the realtime animation might make you spill on your face. Shaving works similarly.

Eventually, this same motion, coupled with a properly timed X or square button press could be the difference of life and death. And if your character dies during the course of the game, their story merely ends.

I know why Quantic Dream uses these quick time button mashing events. They want to make the gamer literally feel like they’re really controlling a character. And no matter how coordinated you are, knowing you’ll need to hit a random button at the right time is always stressful—allegedly mapping the stress your character feels in, say, ducking a swinging crowbar to your psyche as you press down on the controller.

And herein lies Heavy Rain’s greatest flaw.

I want to choose whether or not my character shoots an innocent man for information. I’d like to decide the best way to hide a body without getting caught. And yeah, when and if I kiss the girl—that should be my call, too.

Knowing a scene can end so many ways to make a story branch so many ways feels like, well, it feels like something very important in the future of storytelling and gaming alike.

But when these decisions, my decisions, are impeded, not just by my gaming skill, but by the nature of the Dual Shock itself, it rips me from the story and reminds me that this is just another game filled with characters that aren’t real.

A simple shake of the controller, that was the difference between life and death for two of my characters. I shook the controller, timing it just right. They both died.

Sure, that could be the end of their story—people die, and that’s one potential outcome that I witnessed. But while I find the ability to affect choices interesting, if my gaming prowess is put to the test—even when that Dual Shock is working fine—I don’t want my heroine to perish because I missed hitting X when prompted. I want her to perish because I stupidly told her to go into a deserted house where a murderer was waiting, or because I told her to fight the guy off with a banana instead of a meat clever.

It’s a key question that future entities like Heavy Rain will need to answer better than they are now: How much of a story’s outcome is based on the story, and how much is based upon player skill? But I have the distinct feeling—as intense as it is to jiggle an analog stick to unhook a bra clasp—we’ll realize that watching two people make whoopie is a lot more exciting than making a lame minigame out of it.

And just as we have for millennia, we’ll watch a story unfold in front of us, passively, just with a bit more choice and replay value.

If titles like Heavy Rain show us anything, it’s that, yes, technology is unlocking new ways to tell a story. While most video games focus on a very linear plot, modeling themselves after movies and theater, they have the great potential to allow the audience to explore parts of a story that could have happened, altering fiction to better emulate real life and challenging the construct of a story as we know it—all well allowing the viewer to feel like they’re somehow involved beyond mere spectating. Fiction evolves from a series of events to a series of choices, much like life.

All my critiquing aside, you should absolutely play Heavy Rain. The PlayStation 3 title, available now, blurs the boundaries of media, offers an extremely entertaining 10 hours (or more if you replay chapters for different outcomes) and, for just a few moments over the course of the game, renders characters that are spitting images for real people. (And the rest of the time, the game still looks damn good.)

Oh, and one of the characters has these virtual reality glasses that are really cool.

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These are the first photos of Microsoft’s Project Pink phones, snatched from deep within the bowels of the Microsoft/Verizon industrio-complex —not the Turtle, but the larger, Sidekick-like Pure. This doesn’t look like Windows Phone 7, so what is it?

The shots come just hours after a leaked advertising campaign for the Turtle outed Verizon as a carrier for the Pink Turtle, without so much as a mention of the Pure.

Our tipster confirms the Pure is also headed to Verizon, but doesn’t have a release date. (Though it’s hard to imagine the release date would fall too far out of line with the Turtle, which is expected to hit stores at the end of April. Business Week’s claim that the release will be May or June of this year supports this.) Anyway, this thing: It’s strange! It’s got a paneled interface, with fixed squares for everything from music (with Zune typography) and email to RSS feeds and what looks like a unified social networking hub. As hinted earlier, the aesthetic is similar Windows Phone 7, but the software is distinctly not Windows Phone 7. This looks like Windows Phone 7: Feature Phone edition.
Our source got a few seconds to use the Pure, and said it was intuitive, “better than Android,” and decorated with Windows Phone 7-style animations throughout. That said, the app situation still doesn’t add up. There’s apparently an download screen for new apps, but it’s not populated with anything yet. This could mean two things: Either the Pink phones will tap into the Windows Phone 7 marketplace somehow, which would be great (but also doesn’t make sense), or they’ll have apps like the Zune has apps—which is to say, only sort of, and only from selected partners.

The more we see, the more the Pure and Turtle look like they’re stacking up to be Zune-ified followups to the Sidekick. It’s an interesting move, but who does Microsoft think they’re going to sell this thing to? Tweens?

Update: Firmware Leak

We’ve got our hands on leaked Pink firmware, and we’ve dumped all the icons and photos we could extract. Sadly, there’s not way to run this right now, but we can see a lot of what’s shown above, like the homescreen application icons, in full resolution. There are also traces of Zune, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live. There are some shots (discovered by someone else who’s got the firmware) that show a lockscreen dialer, but these are likely placeholders of some sort. Also tucked away in the firmware are default wallpapers for both phones, in their rumored resolutions. Finally, we’ve got a shot from the Turtle’s unremarkable camera, which appears to have flash.

(Filenames included in the gallery, because they’re pretty descriptive.)

Here’s what we can glean from the dump so far:

• The carrier is definitely Verizon, though there are references in the firmware to AT&T and T-Mobile in the US (which are probably placeholders, since the rest of the evidence points to CDMA radios as standard for these phones.) There are also references to a wide range of foreign carriers in the UK, mainland Europe and Asia, but again, most of these carriers don’t support what looks like the initial version of the handset’s CDMA hardware, as far as I can tell.

• The OS is based on Windows CE, like the Zune and Windows Phone 7. This doesn’t mean a ton to users, but the guy who passed us the firmware sums up what that means under the hood:

Everything is programed in .NET a lot like 7 is. It does not say it inside the files where I have seen, but It is coded in XAMl and is in the structure that CE 7 is supposed to be structured, it is my belief that it will be based off CE 7, and it will have a lot of tie in to Windows Live as well.

• Turtle and Pure codenames are used in the firmware, but that doesn’t mean that those’ll be the shipping names for the product. There are also codenames for the “Pride” and “Lion” handsets, which appear to just be the international versions of the Turtle and Pure, respectively.

• The Turtle’s screen is 320×240, while the Pure’s is 480×320—the same as the iPhone.

• There are reference to something called “The Loop,” which sounds like some kind of central social networking hub.

We’re powering through the firmware dump now, so we’ll post more as we get it. [Special thanks to our tipsters, and Conflipper]

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With HTC’s upcoming crop of Androids, you’ll be able to separate people into two distinct groups: those who spring for the brainier, better-specced Desire, and those who get bowled over by the beautiful, yet lesser-specced Legend.

The Desire (or Nexus One) is the final word in the Androidsphere—it’s a mark of someone who knows what they’re doing, who wants to show people they NEED that extra computing power. If you compare it to the Legend, you could be justified in saying Legend-salivators are more shallow, ignoring the might of a Snapdragon processor in lieu of a unibody aluminum shell and slim build.

You’d be wrong, however.

I Mean, It Is Just a Sequel

The internal upgrades are minor, when you consider it next to the HTC Hero, but like the Empire Strikes Back, sometimes sequels are far better than the original. While we found the Hero “tragically flawed” in its slugginess, the Legend’s slightly more powerful 600MHz processor behaved—well, like a legend. The 3.2-inch screen has the same amount of pixels as the Hero, but swaps the HVGA for a more superior AMOLED. The 5.0-megapixel camera is still the same quality, but has the much-welcomed addition of a flash. You get the picture—the Legend is building on the Hero’s quality in incremental upgrades, but every change, however minor, radicalizes the experience of using the Legend.

It’s running Android 2.1, which as any Hero owner knows should be released as an over-the-air update soon. One day. The jump from 1.6 to 2.1 is impressive—it’s a lot faster, the multitouch is better, there’s greater integration of social networking profiles with contacts, and HTML5 support, amongst other—admittedly small—changes.

Design Works

Plain and simple—the Legend is the most well-built phone I’ve ever had in my hand. You just know when you feel the weight of it, the cool curved exterior of the unibody aluminum shell, and touch the ultra-responsive touchscreen. It’s that sensation when you first tenderly held the original iPhone, which has been long-missing in the market.

The bottom and top of the back is actually made from rubberized plastic though, so there are no issues with wireless signals—unlike the first generation of the iPhone. Removing part of the case reveals a very thin battery and a touch-sensitive catch which keeps the SIM and microSD cards encased. It’s a small point, but it’s also the most polished example of a phone’s innards that I’ve ever seen.

Just like BlackBerry, HTC is migrating its trackballs to optical trackpads. This is a relief, but in actual fact I barely had to use the trackpad—only when having to make an edit when typing out messages or emails. The screen is just so responsive, with nary a wrongly-actioned command made, that you can imagine HTC forgoing the trackpad altogether at a later date.

Only eight buttons reside on the Legend’s body. The on/off button up top, the two volume controls on the top left, and then on the lower face, home, menu, back and search. They all worked well, though the home, menu, back and search keys did feel a bit cheap in comparison to the high-end feeling of the rest of the handset.

Same Old Camera?

HTC’s used the same 5.0-megapixel camera as we saw on the Hero, but the addition of a flash is a new and exciting step for them—strange as that sounds. As you can see from the two photos below, the flash is very strong—too strong, I’d say. However, the quality is decent in lowlight conditions—noisy for sure, but I’ve seen worse.

My friends in lowlight at a cinema before Alice In Wonderland 3D

In daytime I had a lot more luck. Testing it out on some cakes in my kitchen in the late afternoon sun retained the nice rays of sun across the cakes, with the yellow of the flowers showing up bright. But even at 5MP, the general image performance isn’t enough to ditch your point and shoot just yet.

Testing indoors with daylight

More Sense Than HTC Sense

Most manufacturers are skinning Android with their own proprietary interfaces…MOTOBLUR, Mediascape, S-Class, they’re ok, but I’d almost rather use Android in its natural flavor than have to put up with some of their issues.

There just ain’t no Android phone like a HTC Sense Android phone. It’s simply the best skin an Android could ask for, even without the minor improvements seen in the Legend. By far the pick of the bunch is the new “Leap” view—or “Helicopter view” as it was known in-house when designed. It works much like Mac OS X’s Exposé function, bringing all seven homescreens up as thumbnails. The feature is very useful, particularly if you just can’t remember which screen your mail, or the weather widget, is listed on. The pinch command takes some getting used to, but once you’ve got the gesture down-pat, it’s a godsend.

Leap—or helicopter—view

But with ever feature that will be used often comes one with no point at all. FriendStream is a nice enough widget, which collates all your friends’ updates from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr into one feed, but for anyone who’s a purist and likes to see every form of update on each social networking site, it will be removed quickly from the homescreen. I preferred using HTC’s own brilliant Twitter widget, Peep, for the full Twitter options, and the Facebook app to see every form of action. The Flickr integration is handy, being able to see when my contacts upload photos, but not necessary if you get email notifications already.

Plus, FriendStream just felt slow sometimes—in fact, on a very speedy phone, it felt incongruous in comparison to everything else, often updating with tweets quite a few minutes later than the Twitter widget did. It’s not a big problem, but for someone who relies on Twitter heavily as a source of entertainment, it became a source of frustration.

FriendStream

Respectable Battery Life

The Legend ran 36 hours before it died on me. Not too bad, considering I had an hour-long call plus about five shorter ones, sent and received around 20 text messages, and spent almost a whole day browsing the web, checking Twitter, and showing it off to my friends. After the horror of seeing my G1’s battery deplete in half a day when I first bought it, the Legend’s 1300mAh battery ran to my satisfaction.

The Legend Is The Most Solid Android Phone I’ve Used

True, other phones may be better specced, but with that premium build it’s like comparing a Sony Vaio (not a bad laptop, sure) to a MacBook. Sometimes there’s just no contest. While the extra horsepower and added touches of the Nexus One and Desire are nice, I found the Legend more than satisfactory.

It wasn’t sluggish, certainly didn’t have bugs or issues like the G1 and Hero, and while it’ll inevitably slow down and have you cursing the fact you didn’t spring for something with a Snapdragon chip, I’m going to award it possibly the highest accolade a reviewer can gift a device: I’m going to upgrade to one.

It’s not the best Android phone. That badge still belongs to the Nexus One, or possibly the Desire, when we review it. But it’s one of the best all-rounders, when you consider the hardware—and the feeling you’re left with once it leaves your hand. I feel bereft without it.

Superb hardware quality

HTC Sense is better than ever

Addition of camera flash

Super-fast and responsive

FriendStream could be faster


Camera flash isn’t perfect

The HTC Legend hasn’t been announced for the US market yet, with the European launch sometime this month.

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Apple aired its first iPad ad during the Oscars last night, but it felt like something was missing, didn’t it? It was a voiceover. So I went ahead and added one for them. You’re welcome, Apple!

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Here’s the story: I’m in love with the Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless tablet. Free from cables, it’s the best graphics tablet experience I’ve ever had.

Smoother Than the Smoothest Thing

The Wacom Intuos 4 was quite a leap from the Intuos 3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen radial menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.

With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless tablet is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I’ve ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the tablet never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.

This performance is not only good for digital painting. It is perfect to retouch in Photoshop, allowing you to mask or clone with absolute precision, down to the last pixel, without having to vary the size of the brush. It makes everyday brush tasks so easy it makes me giddy when I’m using it.

Screw the Keyboard

But plenty of other tablet features also help dramatically in the daily workflow, allowing you to circumvent the keyboard almost completely.

Take the multifunction Touch Ring, a circular trackpad that allows you to perform four different, user-definable functions, like zoom: Circling my finger in one direction would zoom in. Doing so in the opposite direction will zoom out. The second function will cycle through layers, the third will change the brush size—although sadly this doesn’t work in Photoshop—and the fourth rotates the canvas to face the physical orientation of your tablet. To switch to the next function, you click in the middle button. An LED will change and your monitor will display an elegant transparent dialog that fades in and out briefly, but long enough to identify the new trackpad function.

The eight user-definable ExpressKeys are located in a perfect position: Four above and four below the Touch Ring. Each is labeled with a completely customizable OLED display, much like the Optimus Maximum keyboard, but presented in a starkly contrasting black and white. (The display looks so good that, at first glance, you’re sure the buttons are permanent, backlit cutouts.) Like the Touch Ring, you can define the functions for these buttons using the Wacom control panel. The labels will change according to your preference.

Another favorite feature of mine—which I’ve been jonesing for since I stopped using Alias PowerAnimator and Maya—are the radial menus. These are just software-based and can also be found on the Cintiq line, but they are great timesavers. Pop-up radial menus are easier to use than regular pop-up list menus (both for mouse and tablet operation). They are also user-defined, and give you eight functions at a time, which can also be sub-menus.

However, the best thing is that all these features can be application dependent, something that was possible with previous Wacom tablets, but not with this level of detail and finesse. In Photoshop, for example, my radial menus are tailored to fit my most used program features. The result is that I touch the keyboard very rarely, if at all.

Perfect Wireless Performance

All these cool features and exceptional performance, however, are shared with the existing, cheaper, cabled Intuos 4. The question here is: How good is the performance of the Intuos 4 Wireless over the Bluetooth connection? And what about the battery life?

Response is just as fast and just as good. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless works just like the USB-based Intuos 4.

As for the lithium ion battery, it charges quickly via USB. The tablet puts itself to sleep when it detects no signal and, as a result, you can use the tablet for a day, heavily, without recharging it at all. (Or just keep it around without worrying about losing power.) The advantage of USB recharging is that you can be using it while connected to the computer, with the cable itself as the connection (the Bluetooth goes off when the tablet is connected physically).

My only little gripe with the wireless component of the tablet is that, on occasion, it will take a few seconds to reconnect when you turn it on. This happened when the computer wakes up first, so I suspect is an issue with Bluetooth getting silly after the Mac wakes up. 99% of the times is instantaneous, however.

A Joy to Use

If you have a Wacom Intuos 4 you can probably skip this upgrade. That is, unless you are itching to have the freedom of movement of the Bluetooth connection. That’s the joy of this tablet: You can move around freely with it. It adapts to your position, not the other way around. You don’t depend on your table. You can lay back on your chair, and lose yourself in hours of photo retouching or illustration.

Given the nature of its custom menus, any user can take advantage of the Intuos 4 for every program. You can be using it constantly, instead of a mouse. If you just want to use it for graphic applications, however, another advantage is that you can put it away easily, without having to disconnect it or struggle with cables.

This tablet could only be bettered if they made it into a wireless display. Like the iPad, but connected to the computer so I can use Photoshop on my bed, the sofa or outside on the terrace (the Bluetooth signal gets there, I tried). Like the Cintiq 12 I tried, but with the same response, weight, and form factor.

If you have an Intuos 3 or any other display-less Wacom tablet, get the Intuos 4 Wireless. Even though it doesn’t come with a mouse—like the regular Intuos 4 Medium—it’s absolutely worth its $399 price tag (just $30 more than the USB-based Intuos 4’s list price).

Amazing performance with 2048 levels of pressure and only 1 gram of minimum pressure


Touch Ring and ExpressKeys customizable controls avoids touching the keyboard


Slightly pricier than Intuos 4 Medium, and it doesn’t come with the mouse


A couple of times it took the Intuos 4 a few seconds to reconnect after being asleep, although this is probably related to the computer coming out of sleep as well

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We just finished watching Google’s live announcement of the launch of the Google App Marketplace. Keep reading for information on what they’re offering users and developers. Oh, and know that the Marketplace is live today. Updating.

The event is called “Google Campfire One” and it’s all about how easy it will be to create, set up, and install apps using Google’s App Marketplace. It appears that the big focus is on how everything—apps and existing Google products—will work together seamlessly and allow for all your tools and data to sit in the cloud. Right now the appeal is for business applications, but the potential seems incredible.

The first portion of the announcement is about what developers will give and get in this whole deal. Google is offering them access to 25 million users and only asking for a one-time fee of $100 and 20% revenue in exchange—that’s less than what access to Apple’s App Store requires. Of course, Google is providing a solid system with apps being authenticated using OpenID, secured using oAuth, and made available through a universal Google Apps navigation system.

While there are already 50 partners right at launch, we’re hearing that after new apps are submitted, they may take a few days to show up in the Marketplace—mind you, there’s no word on what kind of approval process there is. But once an app is in the Marketplace, it’s easy for users or buyers to add them to their Google accounts: They agree to some terms of service, grant access to data—such as Gmail or GCal, and enable the app. Tada! It’ll show up in the new apps drop down.

Now apparently development of these apps is so simple that there are 40 developers who are on a bus traveling to an SXSW event and working on apps right now.

It looks like apps will be easy to integrate into existing Google products as seen by a demo of a payroll app by Intuit—information from it was embedded into Gmail or Google Docs.

Now remember how there have been some nice previews of YouTube videos in Gmail lately? Prepare to see more of that from these new apps because Google is offering developers the chance to set apps to be triggered by certain emails, events, or specific types of content.

What does all this mean right now? For business users, there are plenty of apps already available—ones for payroll, data entry, management, and an office suite—and they’ll be able to run everything right from the cloud. For us plain Janes and Joes though, the Marketplace is full of potential at this moment. Think social media, data management, communication—all the things you already get from Google, just better.

Yes, my head’s already in the cloud. Hopefully everything else will follow and I’ll be able to work and play there.

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What happens when Gizmodo readers capture action at 3-5fps? Why, the results of this week’s Shooting Challenge: Action Sequence Photography. Read on for the winners.

Second Runner Up

“Shot in my New England backyard during the lull in a snowstorm on February 26, 2010.”
Camera: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM
ISO: 3200
Focal Point: 73mm
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter: 1/4000
[Ed note: Loved the juxtaposition of the soft yet miserable environment and a young, undeterred athlete.]
- Ron Miles

First Runner Up

“I have shot this series in Engelberg Switzerland on Jochpass on an awesome day. I have used a Canon EOS 50D with a 17-85mm lens.”
Exposure Time 1/4000
ISO 100
Exposure bias +2 steps
Focal Length 17mm
[Ed note: The epic jump, mixed with the sun that blinds us to the full scope of the scene—my eye kept coming back.]
- Simon Sharp

Winner

“I was directly below the snowboarder, standing behind the jump ramp. All photos taken with Nikon D2x with Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye lens. I didn’t use any tripod, it was all hand held. Aperture was around f/6.3 and shutter speed around 1/1000sec. No flash Photos are then merged together in Photoshop cs4.”
[Ed note: It's just an awesome shot that required an element of risk, capturing a classic sports action sequence from an immersive perspective.]
- Vedran Frka

Truly fantastic entries this week. Thanks to everyone who entered.

Just a note to commenters: Please, please, sing praises for your favorites. There are so many great shots here, and it’s flat-out unfair for them not to be recognized. But there’s absolutely no reason to put down anyone’s work from the cheap seats. We will ban accordingly.

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