Here is a visual representation of the latest information regarding Android’s “traction” in the 18 months since it debuted.
The charts are from the AndroidTapp.com website and the data was provided by Google Inc. at Google I/O 2010.
The Creative Competition came to an end on Friday and, Saturday morning, 3 winners were picked at random. They were…
1st Prize – Jackie Ankrah from London
2nd Prize – Diane Roberts from Prestatyn
3rd Prize – Sid Holton from Rothwell1
Congratulations to them all!
- Lauren Farrar from Halifax was our original 3rd prize winner but failed to respond to emails and even a written letter, so the prize was re-drawn and won by Sid Holton [↩]
Last week I became the proud owner of a set of Creative Aurvana In-Ear2 earphones which retail for £89.99. And these are the proverbial “bee’s knees” – oxygen-free copper cabling and gold plated connections. They are also really quite light and compact.
Now, I’m not the kind of person who gets excited about unboxing, but the packaging for these headphones is superb. Considering the contents the box is not overly large and a window on the front shows off the earpieces. Open up the box and slide out the plastic surround and you will come across a small, neatly folded black cardboard box – this contains an assortment of eartips (2 pair of small, 1 pair of medium and 2 pair of large – the other medium pair are already on the earphones), aircraft adapter, cleaning device and some tiny manuals. Back in the main box there is a handy case which the earphones can be wound into.
My usual headphones of choice are a relatively cheap (£20-£30) pair of foam-pad earphones. The Aurvana’s, in comparison, come with rubber eartips and fit snugly in your ear canal. As a result up to 95% of sound is blocked. Like sticking fingers in your ears, though, you end up hearing your own breathing a lot louder – none-the-less it does provide a much quieter listening experience without the background noise.
There is some sound leakage from them but it’s not excessive.
I’ve tried the earphones with a selection of music from Will Young to The Prodigy and all sounded clear and detailed. I love the soundtrack to the recent Star Trek movie, so that had an airing – the chimes in the opening number, for instance, I’d never heard before. Nor had I heard the musicians making various noises in the background. I also tried them with a BBC audio Podcast and it was immediately obvious the improvement in sound as I heard every rustle of script paper and could tell where all the edit points were.
Now, I’ll admit, I’m no audiophile. But, thankfully, a friend is so I asked him to try them. He stores all his recorded music uncompressed and uses earphones that cost many hundreds of pounds (and this isn’t including the £100+ it cost to have some custom eartips made). He thought the Aurvanas were excellent for the money and particularly liked their small size. He found them comparable to Shure SE210 earphones, which have a price of £125 (and they are a lot bulkier in size).
Summary of Creative Aurvana In-Ear2
I think these really are excellent – they look and sound brilliant and are extremely well presented. It’s such a shame that, thanks to breaking my last MP3 player, I’m reduced to using them on my mobile phone! Reviewed by David Artiss on 25th May 2010.
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Now updated to include Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.
It was my youngest daughters 1st birthday recently and I took the opportunity to record various videos during the day. What I now need to do is to splice them together and make some basic enhancements (one of the videos, for instance, was recorded in low light so I’d like to improve that). Oh, and it’s in MOV format. That latter fact rules out my usual video editor of choice – Windows Movie Maker.
Like, I suspect, most people I don’t need anything too fancy when editing videos. Yet, that’s precisely what most provide – they’re either incredibly basic (Windows Movie Maker) or incredibly overly complex for the average home user.
So, I needed something that would perform this task but not be so basic that as soon as I want to create another video, with slightly different requirements, that I’m looking for another editor again. What I wanted was something with the capabilities but simple enough for basic, home use.
After much searching, I downloaded and tested 4 trials – Adobe Premiere Elements 8, Pinnacle Studio 14, CyberLink PowerDirector 8 and Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.
Now, this isn’t an exhaustive review – like many of my reviews, I’m going to cut to the chase and give you the conclusions
Adobe Premiere Elements 8
A huge download which also runs extremely sluggishly on my PC. I own a copy of Photoshop Elements and I must be the only person who doesn’t like it – I find it over complex (swapping between different applications for browsing, editing, etc) and confusing. Premiere Elements is exactly the same.
I quickly found the option to improve the low-light video but I was given so many options that I was overwhelmed and upon trying to modify them later became very confused as to exactly how to do it. Just importing the videos in the first place was a chore.
Now, most of these trials restrict use for so many days and add watermarks to the videos. Which is fair enough – it lets you try out the editor without affecting its use. Except Adobe feel the need to splash a band across the video display in the editor, showing the fact that this is a trial, so watching your created video is made rather difficult.
Pinnacle Studio 14
An even bigger download and, well, I failed to be able to work out how to do even basic changes, such as the low light enhancements. The help file only refers to “brightness” in relation to editing it when capturing and what the word actually means.
After deciding against this product I tried to uninstall it, but the plugins refuse to.
CyberLink Power Director 8
A much more reasonable download size and, I think, the easiest to use. I was able to make the changes I wanted quickly and easily. The power appears to be there – indeed, one review of this product states it to be more for the professional than the other two (I’d disagree!). On top of all this, it’s the cheapest product to buy – just £32.99 (non-oem). That’s not to say all was roses – upon first run the updater program crashed and I never saw it run again.
Uninstalling it later was simple – just a single program to uninstall (it had installed something else at the time, and asked me if I wanted to remove that as well) with no files (that I could see) left behind.
Corel VideoStudio Pro X3
Again, a reasonable download size but it took an age to install (and uninstall) and was generally sluggish in use. I was able to do what I needed reasonable easily but struggled, once I’d applied a brightness filter, to work out how to change the settings. Also, I had no audio – it appears you have to import the audio seperately to the video (each come from the same file though but its a seperate process).
More worryingly, my video appeared to run a little quickly, even though VideoStudio insisted I was running it at normal speed – my camera takes picture in the NTSC format, rather than PAL, and I wonder if this had something to do with it.
Conclusion
CyberLink won out and I’ve purchased a copy – I’ll let you know how I get on.
However, I was disappointed at just how difficult these popular products are to get started with. There’s a definitely a gap in the market here – we seem to go straight from basic to professional video editors, with nothing in-between. Ok, some of these try with “wizards”, but most people don’t want some automated process creating a video for them – they want to drag and drop, trim, and make enhancements themselves. But they want this to be simple and don’t want it hidden behind an array of buttons and more advanced options.
Or have I missed a product on the market?
I’d just like to add one thing – getting hold of these trials. The Pinnacle one wasn’t easy to find and I had to do a trawl through Google to get there. Both Pinnacle and Abobe, possibly due to the size of their downloads (both over 1GB – Pinnacle was near 2GB), use a Java downloader. Adobe insist you have an account with them – I do, but before proceeding needed to know my home address. Not sure why, but why not? Except the country was down as the US and I wasn’t able to change it. So I just told them I live in Beverly Hills 90210. That worked.
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Things that I learnt holding my first competition
I’ve never run a competition before and, thanks to Creative, my first opportunity has just concluded.
And what did I learn?
Well, a lot. First of all, the questions I should be asking the prize providers. Instead I kept badgering them as I kept asking some pretty basic questions…
Whilst running the competition I kept an eye on the entries to ensure that I wasn’t receiving multiple entries per person or household. And, after only 24 hours, I appeared to have found a problem – 3 people, each with an AOL email address, and the same IP address. Suspicious? It looked like it to me.
However, the fact that AOL is their ISP is the key here – they use a proxy-based system, meaning that many users may share the same IP address. Wikipedia has discussed such an issue before on their own site.
The database I created to hold winner details held a name, address, email, competition answer and IP address. Based on the AOL problems I now realise that I should also store a time stamp and user agent. I’ll be making these changes for next time.
I did a lot of work on the competition coding to ensure SQL injection problems. None-the-less I realised a few days ago that although the competition entry form disappears after the closing date, the code to submit the form details into the database still exists. This means that a third party script could inject entries (although not anything that would affect security) after this time. Again, this will now be fixed for future.
Lastly, I had so many entries that just trying to keep track of “rule breakers” became a lot, lot harder – more work on flagging such things at the point of competition entry will be useful, and I feel an automated email coming on!
Meanwhile, I have contacted the 3 winners and am just awaiting a confirmation of their postal addresses before details are announced.
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