What makes CNN Mobile interesting is its video content, which is split between on-demand clips from the network, and an intermittent live feed from CNN.com, which kicks on during major news events:

[CNN] has packed the app with recorded video "news" clips — for example, "Take a Look at This!" featuring a "crazy burger like no other!" — and will sometimes offer a live stream of its separate CNN.com news feed. (We're tuned in right now. The picture quality is fine; the programming isn't as sharp as the TV network.)

The complaint is that the occasional live news feed is from CNN the website, not CNN the network, meaning that you're getting second-tier content. I don't really take issue with this as much as Frommer does, since the live stream, as I understand it, is meant to air breaking new or scheduled event content that'll look the same no matter how it's packaged like speeches, disaster footage, anticipated milestones, etc. But the larger point? Why can't we use the app to tune in to CNN whenever we want?:

Cable giants like Comcast and Time Warner Cable pay big bucks to distribute channels like CNN in your area — perhaps $7 or $8 per subscriber, per year — and have no interest watching their monopoly evaporate thanks to the Web, the iPhone App Store, or any other distribution vehicle they don't control. And because CNN gets a huge portion of its revenue from these cable subscriber fees, it has an economic incentive to preserve the status quo, even if it means offering its iPhone app users an inferior product.

So, our TV apps will be crippled senseless until the cable industry, as we know it today, ceases to exist. Good evening! [Silicon Alley Insider]

Once you've gotten over the fact that no, CNN somehow didn't already have an iPhone app, consider the feature list: CNN.com's text content is formatted into swipeable panels, organized by category. You can save stories for offline reading, and select subjects to create personalized news feeds from CNN's stories. (In blogland, we call these "tags," but hey!) If you're particularly reportorial, there's also a panel for iReport submissions—3GS users can upload video, and everyone can upload stories and photos.

The newsreading and reporting functions look fine, but he app doesn't really start to shine until it starts to stream: Video is available in both VOD and live flavors, the first of which is organized in a catalog, and the second of which jumps in and out of service at the whim of CNN. Here's the theory: Users sit tight with their text content and old clips of Anderson Cooper interviewing panda cubs, or whatever he does, until NEWS BREAKS: Anderson has been mauled by mother panda. This is huge. You get a push notification that says, "Hey, CNN's live right now," which means that the station's content is streamed over Wi-Fi, 3G or EDGE. And, you watch.

CNN says this'll kick in fairly frequently, mostly to correspond with big news events— you know, the kind of things you might rush to a TV to find out more about. It might not sound like much, but conceptually, cable news streaming over the air to the iPhone is, well, a pretty big deal. Sadly, CNN seems to have realized this, so they aren't giving this one out for free: the app will run two dollars when it goes live later this morning. [CNN]

[Shanghaiist]

After explaining to the carrier how outrageous that is, he was made an offer: They'd knock the bill down to what it cost them in bandwidth. Unfortunately for Alberto, they claimed their cost was still $17,000.

Alberto called in to one of those cable news network shows about money where the host wears headphones and yells at the viewer for half an hour and neglected to mention the carrier's name, but we can't see any way a 700MB file would cost $17,000 in bandwidth fees. There's a lesson in all this: If you're going abroad, buy a roaming plan. Or at least tell us the name of the carrier so we can complain more effectively. [CNN via Ars Technica]

Kristile Cain took her iPhone to the Apple Store when the headphone jack started flipping out. She almost got a new one, until the Genius spotted the moisture indicator: Her iPhone had been moist. But she had never dunked in water! Is the iPhone so absorbent it simply pulls water out of the air?

"My only guess is that when I take a shower, I always put the phone on the counter, and the steam must have caused [condensation]." Oh. [CNN]

Microsoft's Photosynth is cool tech, stringing together a big bucket full of photos of a single event and arranging them in a zoomable 3D space by looking for common reference points. Here we're only working with 140 photos though, but CNN says they're going to keep working on it, adding in as many of their crowdsourced pics as possible. It's up for Silverlight zooming here where it will hopefully keep getting bigger. As you may remember, CNN set the ridiculous bar pretty high with their election night hologram, so it's going to take a little more to get a rise out of us jaded couchsurfers now.

Meanwhile, John King looks like he's still best in the business at providing the most 100% mind-numbing commentary while manipulating a touch interface of some kind on cable news.

We'll keep a look out for more CNN inaugo-tech. Grandpa Wolf has also been touting a satellite photo "specially ordered" for the occasion.

"Is that from one of those Predator drones?" asked Anderson a few minutes ago. "No, it's a satellite" replied Wolf, without a hint of amusement. Cable news tech at its finest, folks. [CNN's The Moment]

Update: We knew this wasn't the beginning of the Inaugo-tech train. SuperQuickZoom!

Update 2: It's getting bigger. Who's that in the crowd, Twittering live? @SCHWARZENEGGER!

Update 3:And behold, the promised satellite photo. Looks like...er....Google Maps! John King says this is the "fastest non-military turnaround of a satellite image." Mmmhmm.

All you have to do is take a picture (under 10 MB), send it into themoment@cnn.com, and then wait for Microsoft's 2D to 3D software to compile the whole thing. It's gimmicky, sure, but not in the same way as the "holographic" nonsense on Election Night. This could turn out legitimately cool; PhotoSynth is a very capable piece of software and with the volume of photos that CNN could gather, a 3D compilation would be a real looker. So if you're planning to be in D.C. on Tuesday, show those stodgy CNN people how we take a photo here at Gizmodo. [CNN, photo by AFP/Getty]

Last week, CNN's attempt to display the future of TV news ended up making 3D look like the gimmick that it is. Yep, 3D is a gimmick, most associated (outside of CNN) with those stupid glasses designed to fit Blockheads from Venus. But as you know, there are many different scientific approaches dedicated to tricking you into thinking bullets—or other deadly projectiles such as children—are popping out of the screen and coming right at you. Here's a quick and dirty guide to 3D magic.

Most 3D operates on a single basic principle—tricking our dumb, binocular brain into interpreting a 2D image into one with depth. The most basic way to do this is stereoscopy, which is essentially showing a slightly different image to each eye which the brain mashes together into a 3D image. We've broken up the million different ways to do 3D in a few broad categories.

Stupid Glasses
It's easiest to do stereoscopic images with glasses or other nerdtastic eyewear to change how you see stuff—hence there are a lot of variations in 3D glasses tech.
• An anaglyph image is the old school 3D we all know and got headaches from: An image has two different color layers, one for each eye, with slightly different perspectives and when we look at them through those awesome plastic glasses (usually with red and blue lenses) that block one layer in each eye, our dumb brain takes the resulting separate image from each eye and mashes them together to make a 3D scene in our head.

• Polarized 3D glasses are the more modern choice for cheap 3D for the masses—you've worn them at IMAX if you've caught a 3D movie there, or at Disney World, since the big thing they allow over an anaglyph is full color. They work kind of the same way as the red/blue glasses though—two synced projectors throw images with slightly different perspectives up simultaneously, but at different polarizations. The polarized glasses only allow a single corresponding polarized image into each eye, and the brain does the hard work again, combining two separate images into a single 3D one.

•The Pulfrich effect is a brain bug where side-to-side motion is interpreted to have some depth when there's a slight sync lag between your eyes. A set of glasses with a dark lens over one eye will make this happen, so when something moves from left to right, it'll look like it's moving back or forward—you know, in 3D. It's been used for the Super Bowl and Married with Children, since the glasses are so cheap. [Thanks David!]

•ChromaDepth is perhaps the fanciest glasses tech using micro-prisms and whatnot (hello red and blue again), but all it essentially does is slightly shift the way colors are perceived in each eye, so they see different things and boom, 3D. The major limitation of the tech is that if you change the color of an object, you also change how its depth is perceived, since it's all based on color. (Check out the video above, done in ChromaDepth, to see what I mean.) [Thanks David!]

 • LCD shutter glasses are excellent because they're so ridiculous. They actually block vision alternately in each eye in time with the refresh rate on the display by rapidly darkening each lens, while the display alternately shows images with a slightly different perspective (this is called alternate frame sequencing). It's essentially the "show different stuff to each eye" principle taken to its logically absurd conclusion—literally blocking the sight of the unwanted eye. Yes, these complicated puppies usually run over $100 (or way more, even), and can give you a headache on a monitor without a high enough refresh rate.

No Glasses Required
Okay, so you don't wanna wear glasses. No problem—you just move the one-image-per-eye dance to the display itself.
• A parallax barrier is one of the more popular ways for swinging 3D without glasses—you see it in Sharp TVs for instance. It actually works a lot like polarized glasses, it just moves where the obstruction magic happens to the front of the TV. Instead of having glasses filter the image for each eye, the screen's parallax barrier—think of it is a very finely grated fence with precisely angled holes—directs different light into each eye, and your brain turns the mixed signals into a 3D image. The bad part? With a normal parallax barrier, the screen is permanently in 3D mode and you don't have exactly have a wide viewing angle. Sharp's trick for 3D in LCD displays is fancier—there's a second LCD that creates the parallax barrier with a polarized grid of lines, which is nice because you can turn it off and go back to regular 3D viewing.

• Integral Imaging is a form of parallax actually. You've got a bunch of supertiny micro-images that you actually peep through an array of spherical convex lenses, one per micro-image. All these micro-images come together when you look at them to form a 3D image.

• Another form of parallax is continuous-motion parallax. Here, HoloVizio's system dumps pixels in favor of voxels, which can project multiple light beams in multiple directions simultaneously.

3D in 3D
So far, we've just talked about 2D images on a flat screen, which your brain is fooled into thinking are three-dimensional. The other side is creating images in real 3D— you know, meatspace. Still, most of them make use of lighting and projection tricks too.
• The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has come up with a cheap way to create images in 3D space (as opposed to planar space) by using a spinning mirror called a light-field display. Basically high speed video is projected onto a quickly spinning mirror, which then "reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer." The system uses an algorithm to figure out the correct shading and occlusion for the image.

• Japanese researchers' new plasma-laser hologrammy device takes advantage of the "plasma emission phenomenon near the focal point of focused laser light." By manipulating the laser's focal point, along the x, y and z axes, they can display real 3D images in mid-air.

• Heliodisplay actually creates a surface in mid-air to project an image onto, which allows you to do the "Help me Obi-wan Kenobi" type of floating holograms that look 3Dish, though they're actually planar (2D) images. Yep, it's expensive.

FAKE FAKE FAKE
There are lots of suggested 3D images out there that aren't any kind of real 3D—videogames are of course the most obvious. But why pick on them when you can pick on CNN?
• Sorry Wolf, but we gotta hit people with the truth: CNN's "holograms" are totally fake. We already explained this before, but no one was projected in front of Wolf Blitzer. He was looking at a wall. What we saw at home as computer-generated: A bunch of HD cameras filmed the hologramee from all sides, computers crunched that data and delivered whatever angle the studio camera needed at the time. As long as the source angle was synced to the studio angle, it looked, to viewers at least, like a 3D "hologram." Nice try, Wolfie. Call us when you score an R2 unit. –With Reporting by Seung Lee. Post updated with two additional 3D technologies.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about 3D, double Ds or croissan'wiches to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Results from "Do You Prefer a Paper Ballot or a Voting Machine?"

Which Do You Prefer?

Touchscreen 29%
Lever Machine 9%
Punch Card 3%
Paper (Optical Scan) 32%
Paper (Ballot Box) 20%
I Don't Care 6%

Which Did You Actually Use?

Touchscreen 26%
Lever Machine 7%
Punch Card 1%
Paper (Optical Scan) 42%
Paper (Ballot Box) 13%
I Didn't Vote 10%

Han first showed off his wall at an entertainment and design conference known as TED, where he charmed the CNN crew enough to take his product mainstream. The crew bought an eight-foot long version of his wall, which became an instant hit—garnering about as much screen time as Wolf Blitzer and inspiring parodies all over the place. But what I want to know, and what the article unfortunately doesn't touch on, is... where do I get my own? [CNN]

Did anybody catch Toobin doing anything? – Jason

CNN's holographic election coverage is fancy pantsy, but how did they manage to send 3D 360 degree footage of virtual correspondent Jessica Yellin from Chicago all the way to the station's election center in NY? As Arthur C. Clarke says, Magic. A magic made possible from technology Vizrt and SportVu with the help of forty-four HD cameras and twenty computers. Here are the details.

On the subject's side:
• 35 HD cameras pointed at the subject in a ring
• Different cameras shoot at different angles (like the matrix), to transmit the entire body image
• The cameras are hooked up to the cameras in home base in NY, synchronizing the angles so perspective is right
• The system is set up in trailers outside Obama and McCain HQ
• Not only is it mechanical tracking via camera communication, there's infrared as well
• Correspondents see a 37-inch plasma where the return feed of the combined images are fed back to them. Useful for a misplaced hair or an unseemly boogar
• Twenty "computers" are crunching this data in order to make it usable

On the HQ side:
• Only used on two out of 40-something total camera feeds that CNN has
• Wolf Blitzer really loves it (or loves Jessica Yellin):

It's still Jessica Yellin and you look like Jessica Yellin and we know you are Jessica Yellin. I think a lot of people are nervous out there. All right, Jessica. You were a terrific hologram.

• The delay is either minimal, or we've gotten used to satellite delay that we don't even notice now
• An array of computers takes the crunched info feed from the subject's side in order to mesh it with the video from Wolf's side.
• Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the images are actually "projected" onto the floor of the CNN studio so that Wolf can actually talk to the person, you know, in a face to face. So it's not quite Star Wars just yet. Only after computers merge the video feeds together do you get a coherent hologram + person scenario

The dude being beamed across the country next to Wolf will have 44 cameras trained on him, with 20 computers in his location crunching the video feeds to produce 360-degree imaging data. All of that stuff is sent to New York, where the images are processed and projected by another array of cams and comps. then, plasma TVs back in Chicago and Phoenix will let the interviewees see Wolf and the other CNN people. CNN can project two different views from each city, so Wolf can be flanked by two different holograms.

Man, I so know where I'm watching the election coverage. The future. [USA Today via The Guardian via Waxy via BBG, Whew]

For this week's Photoshop Contest, we focused on new Friend of Giz Jeffrey Toobin, brilliant CNN legal analyst and fellow work-avoider. After busting him not once, but twice surfing the internet on his laptop while on-air during a presidential debate, we decided to give him some more fun stuff to read on the internet when he's supposed to be working by making him the focus of some Photoshoppery. Hit the jump for the top three winners and then the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Oh, and Toobs: it's all in good fun. Nothing but love.

First Place — David Torcivia
Second Place — GUI Man
Third Place — David Nard

So come up with your genius image (just use Google Image Search for source pictures of Toobin) and send it to me at contests@gizmodo.com by next Tuesday morning. Your subject line should be "Oh Toobs!" and your files should be named FirstnameLastname.jpg (using your name, duh) in JPG, PNG or GIF formats. I'll pick the three best winners and then show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions.

And yes, someone else thought of putting porn on his screen. Let's be a bit more creative than that. And remember: he's a lawyer, so don't get us sued.

During the last debate, we caught CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin watching a live feed of playoff baseball while on the air on his laptop. Tonight's debate? Facebook. Either he's messing with us (are you messing with us, Toobs?), or he's really good at multitasking and really bad at being discreet. Either way, that's some fine reporting. Also: I just added him as friend on Facebook. Approve my friend request, Toobs! Update: We're officially Facebook friends, and he explained himself via a Facebook message:

"I am clearly a recidivist in this area. I figure as long as I stay away from porn, I can keep my job."

I like this guy. [David Cho]

Gotta love Anderson's tone when mentioning his "friends at Gizmodo." We love you too, dude—if there's anything else we can do to help drive your news cycle, you know where to find us! Toobin, thankfully, handles it like a champ and is now our new favorite television legal analyst.

In the arms race to squeeze more pundits with more laptops into a single stage, CNN has always held the lead. They're for keeping an up-to-the-second finger on the blogosphere's pulse, receiving sordid tips from 21st-century Deep Throats, yes? Tell that to CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin—what you up to on that screen there, Jeff?

Yeah, just watchin' a little pitch-by-pitch playoff baseball. Despite being from NYC, looks like Toobin had to keep watch of the Cubs action last night as they continued their epic choke, dropping to 0-2 against the Dodgers at home. But I can't say I blame him—being part of CNN's pundit brigade is probably doable while half in the bag on 45 minutes of sleep. Just ask James Carville. [Thanks Mark for the pic! And Nihal and Alex too]