Isn’t Life Strange?

The last few weeks have seen quite a few interesting developments and announcements in web technology and gadgetry. Here are a few that have caught my eye.

The Palm Pre is the most significant product designed by Palm since… well, a long, long time ago. Abandoning the years-old Palm OS, Palm’s hail-Mary effort to design an exciting competitor in the smartphone category has everyone comparing it to the Apple iPhone. Is it as good as the iPhone? I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. A strong Palm Pre would be good for everyone in that competition will always drive innovation. If Palm and Apple each work hard on outdoing one another, then we’re going to have some amazing advances in smartphone technology in the near future.

Not to be outdone, Apple released the new iPhone 3GS last week. An upgraded 3G, the 3GS provides new owners with a significant improvement in speed, an upgraded camera, video recording and editing capability, the ability to understand a number of voice commands, and an on-board compass. For those iPhone owners who aren’t prepared to spend all the money on the new iPhone, Apple also introduced OS 3.0, offering all current iPhone owners a voice recorder, an all-encompassing search function, MMS functionality, tethering, and other new enhancements. It should be noted that iPhone owners in the United States cannot yet use the MMS or tethering functions until they are implemented by AT&T sometime later this summer.

Microsoft announced an interesting new gaming concept for their XBox 360 game console. Project Natal is a motion-sensing, voice-recognizing attachment that will allow gamers to interact with games and other content without the use of controllers. There is little doubt that this is a direct response to Nintendo and their groundbreaking Wii console, but Microsoft has certainly upped the ante with this concept. It will be interesting to see what kind of content Microsoft can create for Project Natal.

Web giant Google announced that they are developing a new web-based tool for collaboration that they call Wave. A “wave” is essentially a workspace in which you and others can type, post photos, video, and other materials. Communication between members in the wave is instantaneous, which means instant messaging and chat room functionality is also possible. I watched the entire 80-minute long presentation and was fascinated at how powerful and flexible Wave can be, yet I struggled to see how I might find a reason to use it. And even as I type this, I know that others will find uses that the developers haven’t even considered.

The Norwegian company, Opera introduced an exciting new product called Opera Unite. Built into the latest version of the Opera browser, Unite allows users to easily share files, host websites, host chat rooms, or even set up a media server that can be accessed online through Firefox, Internet Explorer, or any other browser. Unite users can restrict access privileges through passwords. Personally, I have questions regarding the security of personal data using this kind of technology - but it is an exciting development nonetheless.