Also this week: AT&T ditches is bargain messaging plans; Netflix streaming gets kid-friendly; I go eyes-on with a new glasses-free 3D phone; free Hulu videos on your PlayStation 3 with a magic (well, sort of) Blu-ray disc; and how to decline calls on your iPhone without making enemies.

HP kills off HP TouchPad tablet, leaves mobile WebOS platform in the lurch
Once upon a time, there was a once-great smartphone company called Palm (remember the Treo?) that had fallen behind the times in the wake of the game-changing iPhone. Palm aimed for the fences with WebOS, a gorgeous touchscreen phone interface that rivaled Apple’s, but the resulting phones didn’t hit a home run with consumers.

Then HP came along and bought the struggling Palm, pledging to take the promising WebOS platform and make it its own, starting with a series of new handsets and the enticing TouchPad tablet.

Sounds like a heartwarming story—especially for those consumers who’d taken a bet on WebOS phones like the Pre, the Veer, and the new Pre3. Except this story doesn’t have a happy ending, as a stunned tech industry learned Thursday. Read more…

Google to buy Motorola: What it means to you
Once upon a time (yes, there’s a theme here), Motorola was the mightiest cell phone maker in the world (you remember the glorious RAZR, right?), while Google was just another frog in a big pond of search engines. But then something funny happened.

Google got really good at search and advertising, and it got bigger and bigger. It also invented Android, a software platform for smartphones that gave even the mighty iPhone a run for its money.

Motorola, meanwhile, managed to kill the RAZR that had laid so many golden eggs, and it started to flounder. But then it paddled over to Android and stayed afloat, making some pretty good Android phones in the process.

Now Google says it wants to buy Motorola, and Moto couldn’t be happier. But the other companies making Android phones are feeling spurned (and what about your non-Motorola Android phone, by the way?), while others think Google had an ulterior motive for sweeping Motorola off its feet. Read more…

Whatever happened to cheap messaging plans for cell phones?
The days of getting monthly “buckets” of, say, 200 or 500 messages for your cell phone seem to be numbered, with AT&T announcing Thursday that new customers who want to text will either a) have to sign up for a pricey unlimited plan, or b) pay through the nose for each individual text or picture message. Unfortunately, there might be a trend here. Read more…

Skype offers by-the-minute Wi-Fi for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Ready for some good news? If you’ve got an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, you can now buy Wi-Fi time at more than a million global hotspots by the minute, rather than by the hour or day—all thanks to a new Skype app. Read more…

LG Thrill review: Fuzzy outlook for a glasses-free 3D smartphone
3D without glasses? Great, right? Not so much. Read more…

Orb Blu-ray disc lets you watch Hulu videos on your PlayStation 3, no subscription required
A new Blu-ray disc for the PlayStation 3 lets you skirt around Hulu’s $8-a-month subscription fee for watching TV shows on your big-screen HDTV. But it’s not magic, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to use. Read more…

iPhone tip: A sneakier way to send incoming calls to voice mail
There are, in fact, two ways of sending an incoming call to voice mail on the iPhone—one a bit sneakier than the other. Read more…

Netflix’s “Just for Kids”: Yes to iCarly and Big Bird, no to Rambo and Jason
Nope, Freddie Krueger and Tony Soprano aren’t invited to Netflix’s “Just for Kids” party. Read more…

Google brings (more) catalog shopping to the iPad
The new—and free—Google Catalogs app takes all the paper catalogs piled on your coffee table and puts them on the iPad, perfect for searching, tapping, and swiping. Read more…

Don’t want to download “Lion”? Try Apple’s $69 USB installation drive
Now there’s an alternative for Mac users who’d rather install Mac OS X “Lion” using good, old-fashioned packaged media: a (pricey) USB thumb drive. Read more…

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Get ready for yet another Android superphone with a glasses-free 3D display—and yet again, while the phone itself is fine, the fuzzy 3D screen is leaving me with little more than a headache.

Set to land in AT&T’s handset lineup any day now, the $99 (with contract) LG Thrill marks yet another eye-popping Android phone with a massive 4.3-inch display, not to mention a bleeding-edge processor (1GHz dual-core, if you must know) and a front-facing camera for video chat.

But the Thrill marks just the second phone in the U.S. with a 3D screen that doesn’t require obnoxious 3D glasses. The first was the HTC Evo 3D on Sprint, which I reviewed back in June.

So, 3D without glasses—sounds like heaven, yes? Well … not really, no.

To achieve the 3D effect, handsets like the LG Thrill, the Evo 3D, and even the recent Nintendo 3D handheld game console use a technology similar to those novelty posters that “wink” at you as you move from side to side.

Those creepy winking Mona Lisa pictures typically use tiny lenses to bend the separate images to your left and right eyes, while the latest glasses-free 3D displays use a series of microscopic vertical slits to work their magic.

That’s the theory, anyway. The reality of recent glasses-free 3D screens is that your eyes must be at a precise distance and angle for the 3D effect to work at all—otherwise, the picture collapses into a jumble of flat double images.

The LG Thrill's 3D guide—in 3D, of course. (The photo is 2D, unfortunately.)

Which brings us back to the LG Thrill, a no-glasses-required 3D phone that brings little if anything new to the 3D table.

As with the Nintendo 3DS and the HTC Evo 3D, the Thrill demands a steady hand and a steady head for its 3D effect to work. A viewing distance between 12 and 15 inches is recommended—reasonable enough, except you must also hold the phone at the perfect angle for the 3D effect to work. A few degrees off, and you’re back in 2D.

Even if you do manage to hold the Thrill just so, the actual 3D effect falls well shy of “Avatar”-quality. Instead of a razor-sharp 2D display, the Thrill’s 3D images look disappointingly fuzzy, with obvious vertical pinstripes marring the view. Switch back to 2D mode, though, and whoosh—the annoying pinstripes disappear.

The Thrill comes with a handful of 3D games (including Asphault 6, a driving sim; Nova, a sci-fi shooter; and Let’s Golf 2), a gallery of 3D video clips and photos, and a link to YouTube’s 3D video channel. On the Thrill’s home screen, you’ll find a handy guide to all the phone’s 3D content, complete with a spinning, “comin’ at ya”-style interface that serves as an appropriately eye-popping 3D portal.

On the back of the Thrill is a pair of stereoscopic camera lenses for snapping 3D pictures—and the results, as with the HTC Evo 3D on Sprint, are meh.

Yes, there’s some initial fun in taking 3D pictures of your living room or the garden, and shooting 3D video of the cars driving down the street has its charms.

But the novelty quickly wears thin, particularly when you notice that the resolution of the Thrill’s five-megapixel camera gets chopped to about three megapixels in 3D mode. The good news, at least, is that you can pipe 3D videos and images to a 3D TV set over the Thrill’s HDMI video-out port, or share your 3D home movies on YouTube.

The Thrill's twin, stereoscopic camera lenses let you snap 3D photos and video clips.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from ignoring the Thrill’s 3D features altogether—and indeed, the peppy Thrill holds its own quite nicely as far as standard Android smartphones go.

The Thrill doesn’t ship with the latest and greatest version of Android (it arrives with Android 2.2, not 2.3), but that only means you’ll be missing out on a few interface and 3D gaming enhancements. And at $99 with a two-year contract, the Thrill is only half the price of the latest and greatest Android phones on the market.

Bottom line: If you want the Thrill for its bargain price, speedy processor, or solid Android features, by all means—go for it.

But don’t get the Thrill (or the HTC Evo 3D, for that matter) if you’re hoping for a life-changing, glasses-free 3D experience—because, frankly, you won’t get one.

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MoviePass will be raising the curtain on its first, private beta test this weekend in more than a dozen San Francisco Bay Area theaters, Wired reports, with a nationwide launch slated for the fall.

MoviePass subscribers will simply flash their smartphones at the box office for admittance, according to Wired, although they’ll have to cough up $3 extra for 3-D or IMAX features.

Given that the average price for a movie ticket these days is about $10 for adults (more like $15 each here in New York), MoviePass could be a bargain for die-hard cinephiles who go to the movies more than five movies a month.

Interesting, I guess … although the last time I actually went to the movies anywhere near that often, Netflix hadn’t been invented yet. And I love movies.

So, do unlimited movies at a theater for $50 a month sound like a bargain?

Update [7/1/11]: Bad news, movie fanatics. NewTeeVee reports that theater exhibitors aren’t all that keen on the MoviePass ideas—and without any deals in place, the company’s plans for a private beta in San Francisco are in jeopardy.

Source: Wired

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Billed as the first glasses-free 3D phone in the U.S., the Evo 3D went on sale through Sprint on Friday, and for the past few days I’ve been taking the jumbo-sized phone for a test drive. So, is a no-glasses-required 3D display the next must-have feature in smartphones? Read on.

Available for $199 with a two-year contract through Sprint (unlimited voice and data bundles start at $79 a month, including a $10/month “premium” data fee), the Evo 3D packs in most of the features you’d expect in a cutting-edge Android phone.

Armed with a massive 4.3-inch screen (compared to just 3.5 inches diagonally for the iPhone), a state-of-the-art dual-core processor (“dual-core” basically means two processors on a single chip, good for faster and more efficient performance), support for Sprint’s speedy 4G WiMax network, and a front-facing camera for video chat, the Evo 3D will certainly hold its own against such high-profile Android competitors as the Motorola Atrix, the Samsung Infuse and HTC’s own Sensation.

A sample 3D shot in the Evo's photo gallery; notice the double-image look you'll get if you're viewing from the wrong angle.

But let’s jump right to the good stuff—namely, the Evo’s 3D-capable display, which uses similar technology to that of the recent Nintendo 3DS gaming handheld for its glasses-free 3D effect.

(Note: It goes without saying that my 2D photos of the Evo don’t do justice to the phone’s 3D display … but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway.)

Unlike the 3DS and its eye-popping 3D menus, however, the Evo 3D’s home screen is stuck in 2D—and indeed, you’ll have to go digging around in the phone to find any 3D images or videos to gaze upon, so don’t be surprised if your first look at the phone’s roomy display feels disappointingly flat.

That said, just open the Evo 3D’s picture gallery app and you’ll find about a dozen artificial-looking 3D snapshots. They’re interesting, all right, but also very much in the vein of those old 3D View-Masters—that is, rather than having a real sense of depth, these sample shots look like a series of cardboard cutouts, one placed in front of the other.

The Evo 3D's stereoscopic, dual-lens camera, complete with a control for switching the camera to 2D mode.

Much better are the 3D photos you can take with the Evo’s dual-lens, five-megapixel camera, which you can view directly (and perhaps only, depending on whether you own a 3D TV) on the phone’s display. But while the 3D shots I took with the Evo looked a little more “real” in terms of depth perception, the images themselves looked fuzzy and washed out—mainly because each eye must split the full resolution of the full five-megapixel 3D image.

Another serious problem inherent in glasses-free 3D displays is that you must hold the phone at precisely the right angle for the 3D effect to work; angle the phone’s screen the wrong way by a degree or so, and your snapshot will turn into a flat mess of double images.

Same goes with the Evo’s 3D video camera, unfortunately—yes, you may notice a reasonable sense of depth, but don’t expect a razor-sharp image, and careful not to move your head.

It's hard to appreciate the depth of the 3D image in "The Green Hornet" on the Evo 3D's 4.3-inch screen.

The Evo 3D also comes loaded with a 3D movie: “The Green Hornet,” starring Seth Rogan. I admit, I didn’t sit through the whole thing (sorry, life’s too short), but I scanned to a few of the actions scenes.

How did they look? Well, fine, I guess; sure, I noticed the dual machine guns popping dramatically out of the Hornet-mobile’s hood, and I saw some loose fenders flying directly at my head.

But as big as the Evo 3D’s 4.3-inch display is, at least as far as smartphones are concerned, the screen is simply too small to get that “holy cow, I’m right there with them!” feeling that you do in the theater. Ultimately, I didn’t feel the novelty of 3D was enjoyable enough to make up for the necessary loss of image quality.

Finally, I tried GameLoft’s 3D “Spider-Man” game, which comes pre-loaded with the Evo 3D—and again, the 3D effect had a cardboard cut-out View-Master appearance to it, not to mention jagged-looking graphics thanks to the loss of image resolution.

Gameloft's "Spider-Man," complete with a touch control for tuning the 3D effect.

Thankfully, “Spider-Man” comes with a control for turning down the 3D effect—yet the feature only points out the lack of an actual 3D display control on the Evo itself. (The Nintendo 3DS does have a 3D hardware slider, handy for turning the 3D look down, or even all the way off, once your eyes have had enough.)

Of course, you could always get the HTC Evo 3D and never bother with its 3D features, and indeed, it seems like a perfectly fine phone based on my brief test drive—peppy, with a razor-sharp display in two dimensions, and running on the latest version of Android (2.3 Gingerbread, for those in the know). And at $199 with a two-year contract, the Evo 3D’s price tag is on a par with other Android smartphones in its class.

But if you’re asking me whether I think the Evo’s glasses-free 3D display is a life-changing or otherwise essential feature, well … no, it’s not—and unfortunately, the Evo suffers from a lack of truly impressive 3D games or other content. (The Nintendo 3DS, on the other hand, has the benefit of some pretty impressive games up its sleeves.)

Have any questions about the HTC Evo 3D, or any experiences of your own to share? Let me know!

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