I got a new job as a Senior Editor at PC World. Just started last week, and I’m still getting my feet wet. Jumping in right before the Christmas holiday break and then CES is a hell of a time to start. Lots of meetings, lots of learning the product database system and publishing system and gearing up new coverage for next year and so on and so forth.

Right now, I’m getting up to speed by taking the reins of the laptop/notebook beat. But I’ll be heading up a “system group” that covers notebooks, desktops, some parts and peripherals, how-tos and stuff, things like that. It’s a goal to re-boot the graphics card coverage over there early in 2010.

So that’s all for now.

I’m not sure how the review ended up with a score of 72 (good). They come up with that number as a composite of various sub-scores and stuff I give them when I submit it, but my scores were pretty low. I think the text of the review makes it pretty clear that I don’t think it’s a “good” ebook reader.

Stuff for you to do:

1. Watch the show, dummy! You can also grab it on iTunes and Zune. Leave constructive feedback at presspause@mevio.com.

2. Watch live and chat. The show tapes every Thursday at 3pm. We stream the taping of the show on justin.tv/presspause, and we interact with the chat room before and after the show. We ask you guys stuff, we answer your questions.

3. We’re in San Francisco, so if you’re a developer in the Bay Area, we’d love to shoot a quick and painless interview where you can talk about your games or company or whatever. Or we can talk about the meaning of life. Or what your favorite morning beverage is. We’re not picky. And we promise not to ask how many levels or how many weapons your game has. If you’re not a developer or publisher, use the power of the many social media thingies on the Inter-tubes to tell them you wanna see them go on Press Pause.

4. Follow us on Twitter. I don’t think there’s an official Facebook page yet.

Update: Just a clarification. This isn’t a new full-time job or anything like that. It’s a one afternoon a week gig. So you’ll still see my freelance work on other sites, and I’ll continue to update here.

As they point out in a pretty neat article about the issue at Icrontic, the problem is that the industry standard for measuring battery life is a program called MobileMark 2007. This program basically runs your computer through some productivity apps, which are pretty easily cached into RAM on modern notebooks so you don’t get much hard disk usage. These run until the battery dies, and that’s your battery life benchmark. Wi-Fi is almost always disabled, the laptop is almost always in its most power-saving and low performance profile, screen brightness is usually at 50% or less, etc.

There are plenty of advocates for changing this, to use different ways of measuring battery life in notebooks. Most call for a new set of procedures revolving around real-world application tests and new logos or stickers to describe battery life. Frankly, I think most of these ideas won’t go very far. Testing labs want a reliable, repeatable, “set it and forget it” test. We don’t need to rewrite the book on battery life testing, we just need a new version of MobileMark.

What should MobileMark 2010 look like? First, it should reflect what people actually use their notebooks for. This means mostly browsing the web (the modern, dynamic web, not static HTML), some document creation and editing, a little video, and a little 3D gaming.

First, the standard should be for notebooks to be set the way normal people set them. Power profile set to “balanced” or whatever the middle-of-the-road general setting is. Screen brightness at 80% or 90% (which is how most users have it set). Wi-Fi enabled. In fact, Wi-Fi should be used for some of the test.

The test itself should be a 10-minute loop that runs through several typical laptop scenarios. Why 10 minutes? Any shorter and you spend all your time loading tests, not running them. Make the test too long and some notebooks won’t go through enough loops of the test to average out the tests over time. A 15 or 20-minute test might work, but anything longer than that is probably too long.

The first 4 minutes should be a web test. Today’s dynamic web sites are the #1 use of notebooks. BAPCo should host several mock websites (accessible only to registered MobileMark users) that the notebook will load. They mimic the javacript and Flash heavy environments of modern popular sites like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. The test can use whatever browser is set as the computer’s default, but it should actually interact with the sites, virtually “clicking” on buttons and opening menus and such.

The next 3 minutes is standard document creation. Load up World, Excel, Powerpoint, and some light image-editing app and run through a scripted scenario of searching, typing, copy/pasting, etc. This is straightforward stuff, and is what MobileMark already does.

The next two minutes is all video. Full screen, hi-def video in a popular format like H.264. If the laptop has a graphics chip that can assist with GPU decoding, that’s fine, it can be used. If not, the video might be jerky and drop frames and such – which is fine. We’re measuring battery life, not quality or performance.

The same goes with the last minute of the 10-minute test. This should be an intense 3D game, or rather, a test made to mimic the load of one. Full-screen 3D graphics that actually puts a load on typical notebook graphics processors, together with some physics and AI routines running a canned animation. It doesn’t need to actually be interactive, it just needs to load up the CPU and graphics chip like a game would. It should be reasonably forward-looking, too; it doesn’t matter if Intel’s integrated graphics gets 4 frames per second while a mid-range discrete GPU from ATI or Nvidia gets 40. Again, we’re just measuring battery life here.

As with the current MobileMark 2007, this loop of tests would just repeat until the laptop dies. I’m guessing your typical “four hour” laptop of today would die in about two hours of this new MobileMark, which is in line with the reality where most users’ laptops die in half the promised time.

This hypothetical new MobileMark 2010 would be a vast improvement over what we currently have, without making the testing labs for notebook manufacturers and editorial press have to make major changes. They would just load on a different version of MobileMark, and the checklist of pre-test conditions (Wi-Fi state, energy saving mode state, screen brightness state) would slightly change. It’s not more work for anyone, it doesn’t mean changing stickers or labels or building a new logo program or any of that sort of stuff.

Of course, it won’t happen unless everyone agrees to jump at once. The need for a more realistic battery test has existed for a long time, but manufacturers don’t want to adopt a standard that makes their notebooks look like battery life is shorter. Certainly, they don’t want to do so unless everybody else does. Yet another reason why a new version of MobileMark with newly mandated test conditions is the best way to go – it’s the path of least resistance to broad industry adoption.

“If you want a portable player primarily for media, the Zune HD trounces the iPod Touch. Music, video, and podcast offerings are similar, but the Zune has FM and HD radio, marginally better sound quality, 720p video output, the optional Zune Pass subscription service for music, and an honest-to-goodness superior interface. The software on both desktop and device is designed to be vastly better for discovering new music. If you want a pocket computer to run apps and play games, with music and video playing as a second-tier function, the incredibly robust App Store on the iPod Touch make it still the obvious choice.”

Zune Pass is magically awesome. $15 a month gets you all the music you want. Obviously it has DRM so that it expires when you stop subscribing. Otherwise you’d just subscribe for one month, download thousands of songs, and quit, laughing all the way to the bank. But for that $15 a month, you also get 10 song credits you can use to download 10 totally DRM-free songs you can keep forever. And believe me, when you can download and listen to as many tracks as you want, you’ll easily find way more than 10 songs you want to keep a month. This, combined with the software’s new Smart DJ feature, will introduce you to lots of awesome new music you don’t have and let you quickly, easily, and legally download it.

Seriously Microsoft, it’s time. The iron has never been hotter, so to speak. The stars are aligned. And other clichéd turns of phrase. You have the right device, the right momentum, and the right opening to establish to the Mac crowd that, yes, Microsoft is indeed capable of making great software and sexy devices that have great features and are easy to use.

First, the Zune HD is hot. It has the gadget and tech community excited. Gizmodo loves it, calls it the best PMP on the market, and says “It’s got the most unique vision, the most impressive hardware and the most stylish software.” The new iPod announcements from Apple are nice, but they didn’t “wow” the press. That’s not going to last, so Microsoft should do something dramatic while the tide is in its favor.

Second, the Zune 4.0 desktop software is at a place where it’s honestly a better way to organize, find, and listen to/watch your media than iTunes is. I mean, go to the main music landing page in iTunes 9 and it looks like this:

The iTunes 9 music landing page is a bit cluttered

Compare that to the main music landing page in Zune 4.0:

The Zune 4.0 music landing page is clean and organized

By comparison, iTunes is cluttered and full of interface no-nos like mixing vertical and horizontal scroll bars, unaligned major elements, and so on. Main artist pages are even worse, compared the the Zune stuff.

When you’re listening to music, iTunes doesn’t really show you anything. The best you can do is enable the visualizer, which is certainly quite pretty. It’s not every useful, though.

iTunes gives you a visualizer that is slick, but not useful

Compare that to the Zune now playing, which pans beautiful hi-res artist artwork, nifty scrolling stats, and gives you access to the list of stuff you’re currently playing (it fades away when you stop interacting with the software for a few seconds).

The Zune 4.0 Now Playing screen combines attractive art/animation with useful controls.

Zune 4.0’s “Smart DJ” feature is about as useful as the Genius stuff on iTunes. I prefer Smart DJ because, if you have a Zune Pass, it can optionally stream in songs from the marketplace, while Genius is limited to stuff in your collection. In fact, you can Smart DJ any artist you’re browsing in the marketplace without even having any of their music.  But even if you don’t have the $15-a-month Zune Pass, the Smart DJ gives you the option of turning the software’s mix into a playlist, and even auto-refresh the playlist every X days (you can adjust it per-playlist).

Apple has continued to avoid giving iTunes users a subscription option like Zune or Rhapsody. Of course this isn’t for everyone, but there are those that really like it, and I constantly see comments from Mac users that they’d love the option.

Importantly, compatibility with users’ existing iTunes stuff isn’t the barrier it used to be. Both iTunes and Zune have moved most of its “purchased” content to DRM-free MP3, or at least AAC (which the Zune software and hardware plays just fine). The Zune software and hardware plays MP4 video, too.

So I’m making a list, out of curiosity. After the jump you’ll find some of the albums they don’t have on the Zune marketplace, but do have on iTunes. Sometimes the album and tracks are in the database, just unavailable for purchase/download.

Help me make my list, won’t you? Post in the comments some of the songs or albums you can’t find available in the Zune marketplace. (If you’d like to play along but don’t have the Zune software, just go download it. It’s free.) I just started. What follows is a partial list, by no means complete, just some of the first things I found. But I figured I’d solicit some help before I got too far along.

Not in the Zune Marketplace, but in iTunes:

Halo 1, 2, or 3 soundtracks. (seriously…Halo)

Miley Cyrus – Party in the U.S.A. (uh, barf…but it’s #3 on the Billboard Hot 100)

Nothing from Blizzard’s game soundtracks – no World of Warcraft or Starcraft

Assassin’s Creed soundtrack ( they have The Chosen hip-hop single, but not the full soundtrack)

Street Fighter 4 soundtrack

King of Kong  movie soundtrack

Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack (not Vladivostok FM, which they do have)

Update:

I kind of gave up on this. I spent several hours looking for things, and I found a few (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers self-titled 1976 debut album, The Raconteurs – Broken Boy Soldiers), but for the most part I found that if it appeared iTunes has something that Zune Marketplace did not, it was because Zune has the re-release a year or two later.

iTunes definitely has considerably more tracks, but given the propensity of the music industry to re-release and re-master and issue compilations and stuff, you don’t actually miss out on that much stuff on Zune. I wish they’d shore up their video game soundtrack selection, especially given how buddy-buddy Zune and Xbox are. And the Halo thing is still terribly embarrassing.

Of course, Apple announced some stuff beyond iTunes 9 and a new iPhone firmware update, like a major upgrade to the iPod nano, and new iPod touch models and pricing. There was no huge, drop-everything-and-run-down-to-the-Apple-Store announcement, but overall a decent day of releases.

(A side note: On the bus one day, I heard a group of inner city teens talk about going to the “iPod Store” downtown, referring to the San Francisco Apple Store location. That’s what Apple is to them – the iPod company. Take that to mean what you will.)

Now that I’ve had time to use this stuff and let the other announcements sink in, here are some thoughts.

The New iPod nano

This is a pretty good upgrade for an aging, some would say out-of-date product. It’s disappointing that the camera doesn’t shoot stills (even just VGA stills), and the resolution is limited compared to those cheap HD video devices out there, but who cares? It’s basically a “gimme.” The best addition is the one Apple cribbed from Zune, the FM radio. I know a lot of people say “who the hell wants to use FM radio anymore?” I’m feel that way, too. The Zune folks have excellent data on this (based on anonymous opt-in data collection from the Zune software) that something like half of Zune owners use the FM radio at least once a week. I guess this makes sense. Places like gyms will often broadcast the audio from TV sets on FM stations so you can listen while you sweat, and there are tons of people who love their talk radio. Plus the ability to see RDS data and tag a song for future download, also cribbed from Zune, is a nice little music discovery feature.

Apple even one-upped the Zune team by letting you pause radio for up to 15 minutes. That’s a good “bathroom break” buffer, and the inability to save that buffer probably steers Apple clear of any legal troubles.

iPhone 3.1 Update

A minor update if ever there was one. You can now buy ringtones from a giant ringtone store for the “breakthrough price” of $1.29. That’s right, you can now buy a lower-quality short snippet of a song to annoy everyone around you with for only 30% more than the full song! Ringtone prices are a total ripoff across the whole industry, and it sucks to see Apple encourage this bullshit with a whole ringtone store. I don’t even think this is available yet. I can’t find it on my phone nor iTunes.

3.1 also introduces Genius recommendations for Apps in the App Store. Nifty. But why is it only on the phone, and not in iTunes? I do most of my App shopping through iTunes.

iPod touch

The price drops seem to be clearly a reaction to the announced prices of the Zune HD. Apple’s dropping the 16GB model, interestingly, and selling a new 8GB model for $20 less than the 16GB Zune HD, hitting that magic $199 price point. The 32GB version drops to $299 ($10 more than the 32GB Zune HD), and a new 64GB version sits on top at $399. Yes, Microsoft, that is your cue to announce a $379 64GB Zune HD, if you were wondering.

The 32GB and 64GB models are getting the same CPU/GPU as the iPhone 3GS, which represents a nice speed bump, but it would appear that the 8GB model at that price point Apple emphasized as being so magical still uses the old platform. Lame. Also lame is that they gave the units a speaker (good for games without headphones) but no mic (bad for app developers that want to do nifty mic stuff). And they didn’t add a camera. So overall, sort of disappointing.

iPod Classic

Oh come on, Apple. You used to sell a 160GB iPod Classic, then you got rid of it. Don’t bring it back and pretend you’re giving people a capacity bump.

Next page, iTunes 9…

Anyway, I’m going to try embedding the episode after the break here. I have no idea how I did – I can’t stand watching myself on video, so I try not to do it.

So that’s the latest freelance thing to go up. I do other posts at the Geek Tech blog from time to time, and I’m not going to link all of them here. This one was much larger and more involved than most, so I thought I’d call it out.