Category: Tech news

I’m sold. One picture did it. The one above by Josh Miller at CNET. I want the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch. It doesn’t matter if the UI is sluggish. I don’t care if it requires charging once a day. I don’t even care if Samsung overloaded it with applications, which seems to be the case. I’m not going to buy it. But my inner nerd really wants it. The Galaxy Gear watch is hot, even if it has a critical flaw.

Samsung just beat Apple to the punch by a large margin. But that should be expected.

Samsung is a different company than Apple. Samsung iterates where Apple innovates. Samsung releases a first generation product that’s far from perfect. The first Galaxy Note was large enough to kill a man and was too slow for general use. The original Galaxy S was one of the worst Android options when it was released. Remember the Samsung Galaxy Tab? Yeah, twice as thick as the Nook Color and seemingly half as fast.

But this works for Samsung.

Apple on the other hand waits until they can release a product that’s nearly perfect. The original iPad was in development since at least 2002, eight years before the original hit the market in 2010. And even since then the product has simply seen updates. The first big overhaul is rumored to hit just this year.

And this works for Apple.

Yet, the consumer electronic scene is a different world than it was when Apple and Samsung first became the two superpowers. Samsung has a massive following now. Samsung has sold tens of millions of Galaxy S III and IV smartphones. It’s the leader in Android and general tech enthusiasts look to Samsung for innovation the same way they used to look to Apple.

Apple will likely follow its tradition of waiting until its smartwatch is ready. And now they have a good look at their main competition’s high and low points.

The Galaxy Gear watch seems to hit most checkboxes. The watch’s design is fashion-forward without being completely nerdy. It’s available in a wide range of colors. And it packs a good amount of tech including a camera into a modest-sized frame. The screen is attractive. It’s open to applications and there’s even a camera in the wrist band, because why not. And you can actually take calls on the thing by holding it up to your ear.

Engadget reports from some hands-on time with it that the UI is a bit sluggish and occasionally unresponsive. The S-Voice is not entirely hands free and the battery will only last a day. But this is Samsung. Those items will get better in the second generation.

By far the biggest drawback is the Galaxy Gear, at least at launch, is only compatible with the Note 3 and the new Note 10.1. It will likely work with the GS4 somewhere down the line, but it will require an update. Samsung has yet to say if it will work with any ol’ Android device. It’s very unlikely that it will ever work an iPhone in the same way Apple’s smartwatch will likely not work with an Android device.

As clever as the Galaxy Gear might be, there is still a lot of room in the market for other players. Pebble, for instance, already has a large following and will likely be viewed in the marketplace as a lower cost alternative to the Galaxy Gear. The Galaxy Gear is $299. The Pebble is $150.

There are also several smartwatch upstarts attending Disrupt next week and will be exhibiting in Hardware Alley. Samsung’s entrance into smartwatches will help move the market from niche to mainstream. As long as hardware startups can differentiate themselves from Samsung and eventually Apple, there is still plenty of money to be made in this growing market.

Should you buy the Galaxy Gear? Nah, wait for the next one. Or Apple’s smartwatch. That’s what I’m going to do. A Pebble is good enough for me until then. But I still want this one. Well done, Samsung.

[Photo by: Josh Miller/CNET]

Adobe today announced its Photography Program, which for $9.99 per month offers photographers who own a previous copy of Photoshop (starting with CS3) access to a “lite” version of Creative Cloud with Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5, as well as a Behance membership with access to Adobe ProSite and 20GB of online storage.

This offer is valid until December 31, 2013, but it’s worth noting that this is not an introductory price. Users who subscribe now will continue to pay $9.99 even after the offer expires. We asked Adobe about its plans for after the offer expires, but the company had no comment.

Adobe notes that it’s making this offer based on the feedback it has received from “advanced professionals to casual enthusiasts.” Adobe’s Creative Cloud gives users access to virtually all of Adobe’s tools (starting at $49.99/month) and the company also offers $19.99/month subscriptions to individual apps. For photographers, who often only want access to Lightroom and Photoshop, there really wasn’t a compelling offer so far.

Adobe announced in May that it would fully switch to a subscription-based business model, which came as somewhat of a surprise to most pundits who assumed the company would take a more gradual approach to this switch. Since then, it’s been quickly adding new subscribers. In its June earnings report, the company said that it had 700,000 paid Creative Cloud subscribers, an increase of 221,000 since the end of the last quarter.

Today at Samsung’s Unpacked event in Germany, the company unveiled an updated version of one of its big tablets — the Galaxy Note 10.1. Until now, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy Note 10.1 came with a 1280×800 display. The company finally put a 2560×1600 display to better compete with the iPad’s retina display. As always, Samsung bets on its own set of features, such as the S-pen, to convince customers. But Android tablets really shine in the 7-inch form factor, not in the big iPad-like form factor.

Inside the tablet you’ll find the same components as the newly unveiled Galaxy Note 3: an 8-core Octa system on a chip clocked at 1.9 GHz, 3GB or RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera with a 2-megapixel front camera. Just like the Note 3, you’ll get the same faux-leather casing. Finally, all of this will come in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models.

But specs only tell part of the story. Why should you get this tablet? Samsung hopes that its unique features are enough to pick this one over an iPad. While it comes with Android 4.3, you will be able to use Samsung’s multi-window mode, S Voice, S Note and everything Samsung. The S Pen is a nice addition that some users will actually find useful. But many users won’t ever use the vast majority of those Samsung-only features.

Yet, the most important flaw is the Android ecosystem itself. 10-inch Android tablets are not popular because Android captured the lower end of the market. That’s why many tablet apps are just scaled up versions of their phone counterparts. Developers don’t spend time reworking the UI for big screens. It still works on a 7-inch tablet, but it makes you feel like you are holding a giant phone with a 10-inch tablet.

When it comes to watching movies, photos and browsing the web, the Galaxy Note 10.1 will be a nice device for Android users. But if you plan to make the best of the display, you won’t find many apps to achieve this. Most Android users would prefer a smaller tablet. It’s easier to carry in one hand and you get the exact same apps without wasting screen real estate. Moreover, the high resolution display will make the overall experience more sluggish with stuttering animations.

While the Galaxy Note 10.1 is a good attempt to compete with the retina iPad, Android still has a long way to go to make these tablets compelling. No word on price or availability yet.

Sony’s new smartwatch, which is actually named the SmartWatch 2, has been a known quantity since its official announcement in June at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, and now the Samsung Galaxy Gear has been itemized by its creators in Berlin at IFA. Meaning it’s time for the two to square off in our blogger arena of champions for a spec and feature showdown.

Sony Smartwatch specs

• 1.6-inch, 220×176 display
• Aluminum body
• Micro USB charging
• Compatible with most Android phones
• NFC and Bluetooth 3.0 for connectivity
• 3 to 4 days battery under normal use
• €199 ($262 U.S), Ships in late September
• No camera, mic or speakers

Samsung Galaxy Gear specs

• 1.63-inch, 320×320 display
• Stainless steel body
• Snap-on, proprietary USB 3.0 charger
• 800MHz Exynos single-core processor
• Bluetooth 4.0 LE
• Compatible with new Galaxy devices, previous gen Galaxy support coming soon
• Around 1 day of use
• 4GB of onboard storage
• $299
• Ships in September (October for U.S.)
• 1.9 megapixel camera, 720p video recording, speaker + 2 mics
• Gyroscope and accelerometer for workout tracking

The SmartWatch 2 isn’t cheap at €199; in fact, it’s the same price as the newly-reduced 8GB Nexus 4 model. Samsung’s is $299 and much more full-featured, with Samsung managing to pack a whole host of A/V equipment in its device. It also runs a number of Android apps out of the box, which have been redesigned specifically for the watch.

SmartWatch 2 does have NFC for easy pairing with Android devices that support it, as well as more battery life, a better, higher resolution screen, and water/environment resistance that should keep your device protected from general grit and submersion at 3 feet for up to 30 minutes. Sony’s also doing a big push for bringing third-party apps to the SmartWatch software platform, which could help narrow the gap there.

Overall though, as you can see from the list of specs above, there’s not really much of a competition between the two devices in terms of features; but Sony’s SmartWatch 2 has an edge in battery life owing to its much more narrow feature set, and it offers wider support for other Android devices out of the box.

These are two very different definitions of the term “smartwatch,” with the more ambitious vision coming from Samsung. Aside from the steep requirement of apparent (temporary?) platform lock-in, I’m definitely much more intrigued by the Gear, but I also suspect both devices will find a mostly limited receptive audience among consumers.

Nobody wants to throw away their child’s artwork, but when crayon drawings accumulate, finding a way to store the piles of 8.5″ x 11″s can be difficult.

After dealing with this problem first-hand, Offir Gutelzon, who sold his last company to Getty Images for $20 million two years ago, has launched new iOS app called Keepy that aims to be an intergenerational social platform and digital refrigerator door for children’s schoolwork, art, and keepsakes.

On Keepy, parents can snap a photo of their son’s macaroni masterpiece, frame it, and add a voiceover or video. Relatives who subscribe to their feed can then add video comments, building a family conversation and, over time, an interactive scrapbook.

Because a photo of a report card doesn’t carry the same memory as the original, the addition of video is meant to put some of that emotional weight back into digital storage.

“I talked to parents and found out that when you take a photo, it doesn’t have enough emotional feeling around it because the picture is blurry or unframed, or it’s just a piece of paper on the table,” Gutelzon said. “What we’re doing is taking tech into one place to build their family emotional timeline.”

Gutelzon said that Keepy is still finalizing its seed round and will announce it in 4-6 weeks, although this SEC filing puts it at about $1 million.

The first 50 Keepies come free with the download, and parents can get more with a one time in-app fee, or by sharing Keepy with their friends. That also comes with lifetime storage on Keepy’s cloud, which can then be linked to a Dropbox account.

Keepy is rolling out what may be the best aspect of its platform in the coming months: the addition of video, rather than photo, as alternate type of post. Showing family videos has become something of a free-for-all since camcorders were replaced with smartphones, and Keepy could be a helpful catalogue and private forum for that.

The company will also be releasing an app for Android, adding more language options to its system, and building a network of international parent ambassadors to spread the word. There is also potential to build out Keepy as a platform for school fundraisers, Gutelzon said, which would enable it to share revenue with schools.

A number of family apps like RedRover and Life360 focus on GPS location, while WhatsApp and Tango can keep family members in communication. Gutelzon said that Keepy isn’t trying to replicate another communication channel, but rather become a growing memory box for families.

“Keeping it digital lets you keep more and document more,” Gutelzon said. “You can still keep the original piece, and I do as well, but when you get 20 or 30 pieces of offline content every week, or you have boxes and boxes, at some point you have to look back and ask what you’re going to do.”

San Francisco startup Mobeam has been awfully quiet since it revealed a whopper of a smartphone partnership earlier this year, and today the reason for that relative silence has become clear. Mobeam announced today that it’s firming up its deal with Samsung by launching its new Beep’nGo app for the Galaxy S4 and Note 3, along with a Beaming Services app it hopes will help drive Mobeam use by developers.

“But wait,” I hear you saying. “What on earth are those?” To really get a feel for what Mobeam is up to, we need to flash back to Samsung’s Galaxy S4 launch event — Mobeam secured a deal to bake its infrared technology into the smartphone that would allow users to effectively use their S4s as rewritable barcodes at point of sales systems in stores. Samsung’s newly-announced Galaxy Note 3 also has that feature built in, which means those two devices are the only ones that Beep’nGo will work with for the time being.

In a nutshell, Beep’nGo is a wallet app that lets users load up their loyalty cards, gift cards, or gym passes (anything with a barcode, really) onto their Samsung device — those barcodes can later be reproduced in the form of infrared flashes wherever needed.

That’s all well and good, but Mobeam’s Beaming Services angle is the really interesting bit — with it, Mobeam is trying to open access its infrared beaming tech to developers and would-be commerce partners. The big problem that would normally arise here is that developers don’t have the sort of low-level access needed to create apps that can use Mobeam’s infrared flashing API. Even worse, if they wanted to gain that sort of access, those developers would have to petition Samsung, a process that can take between weeks and months.

Instead, Mobeam built a Beaming Services app that removes much of that legwork. Developers from banks and other commerce-centric organizations are the real target here — they’ll be able to tap into the Beaming Services app installed on those devices to gain access to those low-level APIs and built out new self-branded apps for their own loyalty and credit cards.

It’s not hard to see how this is a win-win for Samsung and Mobeam — the former gets yet another feature to help push it ahead of the smartphone pack (not to mention a potential competitive edge for its Samsung Wallet), while the latter gets even more buy-in from the world’s biggest smartphone maker. I think Mobeam may really be onto something here, but it can’t let its fortunes rise and fall on the back of a single OEM, no matter how big it is. That’s why Mobeam has spent the past few months trying bring to get other device manufacturers to sign on — CEO Lee wouldn’t name names, but he confirmed that at least one OEM had expressed interest and is aiming to push out its first Mobeam-enabled device early next year.

Microsoft’s Bing today launched a major update to its video search experience that gives the service’s video search results pages a complete overhaul. The update, which Microsoft says was “designed from the ground up,” introduces a new lightbox-style video overlay with a list of related searches on the right and a carousel with related videos on the bottom.

Bing now also features high-resolution pop-out video previews that are significantly larger than before and also offer more information about the video. For YouTube videos, for example, this means you can immediately see how many views a video had and a short description of the video with your search terms bolded. The previews now also feature audio controls and the favicon of the site they are coming from.

With this update, Bing also introduces a new set of filters that allow you to just view videos with 720p or 1080p resolutions, for example. You can also use this tool to filter your favorite Disrupt videos by date, length and source.

Bing’s video search has long been a standout feature of Microsoft’s search engine, and it can easily compete with Google’s video search, especially given that its feature set is now actually a step ahead of Google’s.

In the past, Bing’s video search caught some flak for making porn searches a bit too easy. Since then, Bing has gotten better at using its safe search feature to completely remove or pixelate adult content (depending on your setting) on the service. Still, with its new high-res previews, channels and related searches, Bing can now easily compete with the best of the tube site aggregators. It’s not something the company is likely to advertise, of course, but Bing isn’t exactly shying away from this “use case,” either.

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS), which gives developers access to MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engines, added a new instance type for applications that need a lot of memory. With 244GB of memory, the new High-Memory Cluster DB Instance Class offers 3.6x as much memory as the “quadruple extra large” instance, which has 68GB of memory. But for now, this new instance only supports MySQL databases.

The new instance is also significantly more powerful and offers — using Amazon’s measurements — the equivalent compute power of 88 2007 Intel Opteron or Xeon processors running at 1.0-1.2 GHz. Amazon says it uses two Intel Xeon E5-2670 eight-core processors to power these instances, which operate on a high-bandwidth network. Overall, the company argues, this new instance will allow developers to realize speed increases of about 60 percent compared to the smaller instance. As Amazon’s Jeff Barr notes, he believes that this new instance type “opens the door to database-driven applications that are even more demanding than before.”

As Amazon notes, this massive amount of memory will allow developers to configure MySQL to fit most online transaction processing databases into memory, which should make this instance type perfect for this kind of usage. Because Amazon’s RDS offers support for SQL and Memcached API access, developers can use the service for complex SQL transactions, as well as high-performance NoSQL operations that draw from a single database.

Unsurprisingly, this new instance type also comes at a relatively hefty price, starting at $2.074 per hour with a three-year commitment and just over $3,000 in upfront costs. On-demand usage in Amazon’s US East and West regions start at $4.725 per hour.

Well, there we go ladies and gentlemen. After much anticipation, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear is here, and, at first glance, it’s not quite as strange as some earlier reports made it out to be. In case you don’t care about any of the following information and just want to own one (you weirdo), the Galaxy Gear will start its world availability tour on September 25 — it’ll cost $299 when it makes its October debut in the U.S. and for now you can only use it with the Galaxy Note 3 or the revamped Galaxy Note 10.1.

In a brief press address delivered before Samsung’s New York live-stream event kicked off in earnest, Samsung Telecommunications America president Gregory Lee very briefly flashed the Galaxy Gear on his wrist. That’s all it took to confirm suspicions that the images leaked over the weekend were of a very early version of the wrist-worn gadget. That said, it’s still not exactly a petite device so those with slim wrists should approach with a bit of caution.

“I believe it will become a new fashion icon around the world,” said Samsung chief JK Shin, after confirming that the device would let users make and receive calls, notify people about their SMS updates, and snap photos. Curiously enough, Shin only talked about the Galaxy Gear for a few moments (and basically used it to prove that the Galaxy Note 3 runs Android 4.3), but Samsung’s IFA team circled back around to share a little more about the wearable timepiece.

For now, here’s what we know about the Galaxy Gear: it sports a 1.63-inch AMOLED display, and (as suspected) users will be able to issue S Voice commands to their connected Samsung phones. As seen above, the Gear will come in six colors for you chromatically conscious types, and under the hood there’s an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. For those of you worried about having to charge this thing too frequently, Samsung says the 315 mAh battery is enough to last a day on “regular” use — whatever that means.

Most importantly, Samsung has managed to drum up some serious support from third-party developers — health-conscious apps like MyFitnessPal and RunKeeper will be available when the Gear launches, along with social services like Path and Highlight. According to Engadget, some 70 applications tailored for the Gear will be available by the time it starts hitting store shelves later this month.

Now this is all well and good, but there’s still one question Samsung’s little presentation couldn’t answer: What is it actually like to use this thing? Stay tuned for our hands-on impressions to find out.

Samsung’s big Unpacked Episode 2 event is underway, and as expected, the company has used the venue to announce the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. The Note is the original phablet, and the new version continues the tradition of big screen gadgets best-suited for big-handed people.

The new Galaxy Note 3 features a design with extremely slimmer bezels and sharper angles on its rounded edges, marking a slight departure from Galaxy device design language thus far. It’s thinner than its predecessor and lighter (168g), despite offering a larger screen at 5.7-inches. It also offers more battery life than the Galaxy Note 2, and there’s a new and improved S Pen, too. Plus it supports faster, and more “seamless LTE” with multi-band support.

The camera has 4K video recording capabilities with a new CRI LED flash that should improve low-light photography. Samsung claims nearly four more hours of battery life when playing back video, and performance in general during normal use should also extend battery by up to 40 percent over the previous generation.

Samsung was emphasizing craftsmanship with the Galaxy Note, which features a stitched leather rear cover (available in black, white and pink). It also has a metallic rim running around the edge, and there’s a flip wallet accessory available in 10 different colors that also features a larger S View window cover for checking messages, making calls and accessing more info at a glance without having to activate the whole display.

The new S Pen is designed to work with the larger screen. Samsung called it the “key” to unlocking Note features and power. This works via a number of new interface controls. There’s a dot on-screen that appears when you can activate “Air Command,” which is a tool wheel that provides quick access to memo, scrapbooking, screenwriting, and a finder search function. There’s also something Samsung calls “circle,” which uses a circle drawing gesture to capture content you want to save to your scrapbook, as called up via Air Command. Box is a way to multitask, that lets you do two things at once via essentially a picture-in-picture interface.

Samsung’s Knox mobile security feature, which is designed to help increase enterprise and consumer security via partitioned software for consumer and business use for BYOD device users. The Note 3 will ship September 25 in 149 countries around the world.

Samsung’s smartphone fortunes are the subject of major scrutiny at the moment, since the company is perceived as possibly having hit a ceiling in terms of growing its overall share of the market. The company is hosting a meeting with investors and analysts to discuss its long-term plans in the face of these fears, and the Note line drives quite a few sales, though not as many as the flagship Galaxy S4. Estimates for break-out sales of the Note 2 on its own are hard to place, but Samsung has in the past said it anticipated the device would pass 20 million units shipped.

Galaxy Note 3 specs:

• 151.2mmx79.2mmx8.3mm
• 5.7-inch SuperAMOLED 1080p display with 368 ppi pixel density
• 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, or 1.9GHz Samsung Exynos Octacore depending on market
• Android 4.3
• 13 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel front camera
• 3GB RAM
• 32 or 64GB storage
• MicroSDXC card storage expansion
• Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi 802.11ac, LTE Category 4
• 3,200 mAh battery
• LED/IR combo

No information on Galaxy Note 3 availability just yet beyond the September 25 date, and the official Samsung press materials around the launch says only that it’ll make it out to all major U.S. carriers “later this year.”

Developing…

Direct-to-fan video distribution is all the rage these days, with artists and performers like Louis CK and Aziz Ansari foregoing all the usual distribution channels in an effort to engage with their followers directly and hopefully make some money. A new company called LittleCast is hoping to offer content creators a platform to do just that, with distribution on Facebook and on mobile apps.

The advantage of direct-to-fan is mostly the ability to make more money, as artists aren’t sharing the majority of sales with the distributor. But the problem that many content creators run up against is an inability to reach as many fans as possible. LittleCast hopes to solve that problem, with the ability to market to fans directly on Facebook.

LittleCast’s platform for direct-to-fan video sales allows content creators to connect with viewers and form a transactional relationship with them, without all the messy middlemen distributors getting in the way. But unlike some of the other direct-to-fan platforms out there, LittleCast takes advantage of Facebook as its primary means of distribution.

Artists and content creators are able to embed videos directly into their Facebook pages, with LittleCast handling all the payment and video streaming. Thanks to a tight integration with Facebook, the platform also shares video purchases directly into a fan’s news feed, which it hopes will ensure a more viral distribution of videos.

Payment can be made through Facebook, and content can be played securely within the social network. While LittleCast leans on Facebook for distribution and virality, the company also has mobile apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play to allow viewers to watch videos on their mobile phones and tablets as well.

LittleCast was founded by Amra Tareen, who also co-founded citizen journalism site Allvoices, along with Touch Adventures CEO Stephen Ackroyd and Levensohn Venture Partners managing partner Pascal Levensohn. The company has raised $2 million in seed funding from investors that include Dolby Trust, Intrepid Capital, Manatt Digital Media, Arden Road Investments, Seven Lions Group, and others.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S is the best Windows 8 hybrid available.

Samsung is getting ready to pull the curtain on its curious Galaxy Gear smartwatch (well, among other things) in just a few days, but what’s a major product unveiling these days without a slew of last-minute leaks to ruin the surprise? To that end, VentureBeat recently got what may be the first real glimpse of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear and it’s, well, pretty bizarre.

Unlike most of the other smartwatches that have exploded onto the scene these past few years — think the Pebble, the MetaWatch, or even Sony’s family of wrist-worn gadgets, the Galaxy Gear is shaping up to be a real whopper. VB reports the square display plus the bezel that runs around it means the watch itself measures about 3 inches diagonal, and images culled from an internal promotional video depict a device that looks like a Galaxy S4 that got nailed with a shrink ray. So much for subtlety. I’m no watch nerd (I leave that sort of thing to John) but I can’t imagine bigger always equals better when it comes to stuff you wear on your person.

It looks like a Galaxy S4 that got nailed with a shrink ray

In typical Samsung fashion though, the company has apparently packed the thing to the gills with a 4-megapixel camera nestled inside in the Gear’s strap, a WiFi radio, speakers, and a microphone so users can deliver S Voice commands to a connected Samsung smartphone.

Perhaps the biggest bummer is that the Galaxy Gear may only be able to run for 10 hours before having to be recharged. That’s just about respectable for modern smartphones (though we should all be demanding more longevity from Samsung and its ilk), but who wants to worry about charging their watch that often? And manufacturer provided battery stats tend to be optimistic too, so that anemic battery could spell trouble for early adopters.

Throw in a handful of “pre-loaded Android apps” and an apparently substantial focus on mobile fitness and health tracking, and you’ve got an ambitious device that seems to have an identity crisis. Is it for your average smartphone nerd? Fitness buffs? Both? VentureBeat’s report provides the clearest look at the Galaxy Gear to date, but I’m looking forward to Samsung trying to explain its rationale for why people would actually need something like this.

If you’ll allow me to wax personal, the reason I’ve stuck with a device like the Pebble instead of dumping it in favor of a more robust gadget is because it’s focused on doing a small number of things well. Notifications? Taken care of. Changing tracks over Bluetooth while I’m driving? Works like a charm. With the Galaxy Gear, Samsung has added plenty of complexity to the smartwatch formula, which also means there are more bits that just may not live up to people’s expectations.

Then again, it’s not like the Korean electronics giant doesn’t have the resources to go out on a limb like this every once in a while. Strange first steps like this one often beget staggering successes down the road — for all we know, Samsung may flex its design and production muscles to becomethe de facto smartwatch maker within a few years. For now though, I’m still not convinced that we’re looking at the full Galaxy Gear picture here, so stay tuned for our coverage of Samsung’s IFA bonanza later this week.

Last week, I published a piece of speculative fiction about how I saw Google and Uber evolving as companies and taking advantage of new technology 10 years from now. That “Dispatch From The Future” got quite a lot of attention, in part because more than a few people got very excited about the prospect of driverless cars and the impact that they can have on the way we think about transportation.

Since a lot of people read it as the future is now, and others have said that my ideas about what the world will look like in 10 years might actually be conservative, I thought it might make sense to explain some of my thinking around my outlook for the driverless car.

The story was based mostly on Amir Efrati’s story on Google’s interest in possibly manufacturing driverless cars and so-called robo-taxis, as well as the big Google Ventures investment in Uber that was finally announced the week before. The idea was to take those pieces of news and think about how the companies will evolve over time. So here goes.

Google

Let’s start with Google. My piece last week presupposes not only that Google has built a fully electric driverless car by 2023, but that it’s actually on its third line of commercial vehicles by that point. Note that in my piece, Google doesn’t announce its plans to manufacture its own vehicles until 2018 or so, five years from now — which I think is a fair amount of time for it to figure out the logistics of autonomous vehicles and get them to the point where they have a five-nines safety rating.

You might think that Google wouldn’t want to manufacture the cars itself, as it mostly deals in software. And one could see Google developing autonomous driving software and then licensing it to third-party manufacturers, like Ford or Toyota. But if those manufacturers weren’t interested, it also wouldn’t be completely unprecedented for Google to get into the manufacturing game itself.

Just look at its acquisition of Motorola, or its development of Google Glass, and you see that the company increasingly has developed an appetite for making things. Things you can touch and feel, and not just the software that powers them. When it comes to cars, I could see Google doing the same thing. It’ll probably want to control its destiny in manufacturing the first car that runs its software.

In addition to manufacturing the cars, I believe Google will also build infrastructure to support fully electric vehicles, kind of like Tesla’s supercharger network. But if you have a driverless car, you also need a driverless way to power up. I picture some sort of fully automated Roomba-like dock for cars these PowerUp base stations.

As for the types of driverless vehicles that Google would produce — I don’t know why, but I like the idea of Google making autonomous vehicles built around actual utility — like the Google GX10000 two-seat commuter vehicle or the four-seat robo-taxi model. I just don’t think it’ll want to build the traditional five-seat family sedan that appeals to your usual car owner. But that’s just me.

Uber

So what about Uber in 10 years? For one thing, it’s a public company, according to my report from the future. But that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The company is just three years old, and is just printing money.

One interesting wrinkle from my story is the idea of Uber as a “transportation and local delivery service” — meaning that somewhere along the way it made at least some of its drivers delivery guys. Of course, there’s no shortage of folks fighting over the local delivery market, including startups like Postmates and Instacart, as well as big Internet players launching services like Google Express and eBay Now.

None of them have built the logistics framework that Uber has for routing rides in the last few years, however. That’s why I don’t think it’s crazy to assume that Uber will also be adding delivery services in several markets over the next few years. It’s already experimented with ice cream, barbecue, and mariachi band delivery. It seems like only a matter of time before it gets serious about partnering with local merchants and retail chains to power on-demand drop-off of goods and services.

Another interesting tidbit about Uber was the future impact that I believe the company will have on traffic and congestion in major cities in the future. I personally haven’t owned a car in at least 10 years, having lived in New York and San Francisco — two cities where the combination of good public transportation and bike friendliness make that doable.

But take a look at Uber’s piece on the economics of car ownership, and you see that going car-less and just relying on Uber isn’t such a crazy idea. I think others will, over time, figure out that it’s actually more convenient and less costly to take Uber than to own their own cars. Ten years should do it.

One of the critiques of my piece last week was that 2,500 driverless cars isn’t a whole lot when you consider the size of taxi fleets in most cities. Uber would surely want more, right? Well, for one thing, it’s a trial run.

But for another — think about the efficiencies that come with cars that don’t take shifts, don’t need to sleep, know the fastest route to pick up the nearest passenger, and can charge themselves in their downtime? I’m guessing that 250 autonomous vehicles could probably do the work of 1,000 cabbies in some cities.

The Regulatory Environment

One of the big knocks against my piece is that the future might actually come sooner than I expect, that 2023 is actually a pretty conservative estimate for robo-taxis. But then I think about all the legal and regulatory wrangling over services like Uber today, I think about the taxi lobby and the insurance lobby, and I wonder if 2023 might actually be too soon for some of these changes to take place.

I don’t doubt that, once the technology is proven and that autonomous vehicles actually prove safer than human-driven cars, there will be states like California that introduce special driverless car lanes on their highways. It only makes sense, right? Get the cars that can be trusted to steer themselves away from those that can’t, and let them go as fast as they can. This would also become an incentive for adoption of the technology, as there are real advantages to driverless cars — fewer accidents on the road, less traffic, etc.

That said, it’s one thing for governments to let users have autonomous cars that could be pulled out of autopilot mode and driven by hand. It’s a whole other thing to have cars without drivers scooting people around town. I think that’s a dicier proposition, and one that will probably be held up in regulatory review for a while.

I have no doubt that robo-taxis will someday arrive, just maybe not as soon as we think (or hope).

The Moto X has caused a rift between the TechCrunch Gadgets family. Chris Velazco and I think it’s just fine, whereas Darrell Etherington and John Biggs are rather unimpressed.

But why?

Well, the Moto X is Motorola’s first real Google phone, with pure Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, customizable back plating, a 4.7-inch 720p display, a 10-megapixel camera, and a dual-core Snapdragon processor running the show.

Under the hood, you’ll find 16GB of internal storage and 2GB of RAM.

In other words, the specs are right on par for a phone of this price ($199 on-contract) but nothing to write home about. There isn’t one feature of this phone that truly sets it apart or above any other phone, except maybe the customizable back panel, giving the user slightly more cellular flare than was previously available.

Pure Android, without any of that TouchWiz, Sense, Motoblur crap is actually quite wonderful, and voice-activated Google Now is a nice touch. But like Siri, it’s not always dependable.

It’s hard to come down to a solid conclusion with this guy. Still, whether you’re excited like Chris, ambivalent like myself, bored like John, or actively against the Moto X like Darrell, the phone itself seems to have a solid build at a fair price.

You can also listen to us argue about the Moto X here on the TC Gadgets podcast.