Keep in mind, the name "Natal"—referring to a city in Brazil—doesn't really do the platform's infancy any justice. It should really be called "Project Prenatal," as the peripheral's dev kits just shipped to the first set of developers this week.

But after testing the system and getting a good look at what makes its motion tracking tick, I'm going to fanboy out a bit on the platform, as responsibly and logically as I can. Here's why I think Natal is a watershed in motion controls.

For a Motion System It Facilitates Passive Entertainment
People are lazy. If we can use a remote instead of changing a channel on the television five feet away, we'll use a remote. And I'd argue that if we can login to our preferred entertainment by just sitting on the couch (through Natal's facial recognition), we'll do that next. Is talking or gesturing more simple than channel surfing on a remote? Not necessarily, but...

Voice Recognition Is Still Promising Technology
Just because we haven't managed to perfect voice recognition doesn't mean we should write it off in every product into the future. It's getting better all the time, helped by increased processing power, and once you integrate voice into a system, it allows you to jump deeper into any tree of menus than most UIs allow. For instance, on an iPod, you have to navigate through a handful of separate screens to get to a particular artist. With voice recognition, you'd just say that artist's name.

Natal Can Support Peripherals Too, You Stupid, Stupid Idiots
If there was one thing I couldn't stand hearing again and again at E3, it was that Natal would force all gamers to mime controls in every game. Not true—at least, not for any reason made clear to me. Programmers would be free to include all kinds of controllers should they chose to. And if Natal's cameras are tracking 48 points on your body in 3D space, and its software can distinguish you from various non-human objects, I find it hard to believe that you couldn't hold an actual steering wheel to play a racing game, if you wanted to. Personally, I've grown a bit sick of tripping over plastic controllers in my living room, but I'm sure that third-party devs and hardware manufacturers will be happy to integrate and sell all the acrylic modular baseball bats you can stand.

Natal Can't Cost More Than a Party's Worth of Wiimotes
No one knows what Natal will cost. But you know what? I doubt it will cost more than $242, the amount a Wii owner needs to spend to outfit their console with controllers for four people. Microsoft was not specific as to the number of gamers supported simultaneously in Natal's multiplayer (to be fair, we haven't seen the system fully tracking wireframes beyond two people at a time). But a future in which a console's price isn't doubled by its peripherals sounds pretty appealing to us.

Natal Tracks 48 Points, Nintendo and Sony Track 1, Maybe 2 Points
Sony's Wiimote-like demo was the best physically-based motion tracking I'd ever seen. It was pretty freaking impressive to watch augmented reality replaced Sony's controller with a sword, whip and even bow and arrow. But even with two controllers, Sony and Nintendo's systems are really only tracking two single objects (perfectly) in space. So when you are swinging that sword with so much flourish, the human figure is just an arbitrary placeholder. How will you dodge? Or should I say, how will you feel like you're dodging? The D-pad, I can almost guarantee. OK...so how will you kick?

Natal Would Be Too Good To Be True...In Nintendo or Sony's Hands
Other companies could (and have) made infrared body-tracking cameras. Why are we so confident in Natal? Aside from our positive hands-on experience, Natal has Microsoft middleware/dev tools behind it. Where few third parties have wielded the Wiimote with as much finesse as Nintendo, and Sony is traditionally mute on how companies can unlock the power of their complicated hardware architecture, Microsoft launches Xbox products with the software necessary to make them work. Oh, and Microsoft is approaching Natal with 100% earnestness, calling the platform "the endgame." Sony's motion control, according to Sony, is less important.

The Coolest Mind In Motion Controls Says It Exceeds Anything He's Seen
Johnny Chung Lee, the same guy behind those crazy-awesome Wiimote mods, is working on the project. And he says this about it:

The human tracking algorithms that the teams have developed are well ahead of the state of the art in computer vision in this domain. The sophistication and performance of the algorithms rival or exceed anything that I've seen in academic research, never mind a consumer product. At times, working on this project has felt like a miniature "Manhattan project" with developers and researchers from around the world coming together to make this happen.

That quote's more than just hype—it's educated hype.

Also, if you haven't seen Lee's video showing off the potential of headtracking in displays, do so right now. Why? Because I'm all but positive that headtracking is one of many unannounced features in Natal that will change the way we think of 3D, without a 3D display.

I don't know that Natal will render the PS3's motion controls (or Nintendo's new Wii MotionPlus) completely worthless overnight. I do think there's a level of speed and accuracy (60 fps!) with which Sony will be able to duplicate a good old blunt instrument, possibly even better than Natal. (Then again, no one has actually played Sony's prototype.)

But an idea as bold as Project Natal, in the hands of Microsoft, which has been on its game, so to speak, with the 360...yeah, it took E3 in my book. And next year, when there are some actual games to see on the platform, it damn well might take E3 again. [Project Natal on Gizmodo]

I've reviewed a few iPhone battery packs and a few laptop battery packs, and the common conclusion is that these are fantastic for the person who needs to work from the field.

The current battery I'm looking at—the HyperMac External Battery—actually delivers an extra eight hours of power to the MacBook Pro. If we had a MacBook Air, it might even deliver up to their claimed 32 extra hours.

So why do I love these so much when it's another thing to carry around? There aren't always outlets to plug into when blogging from the field, and Apple Liveblogs are a perfect example where you have to keep going while sustaining an EVDO connection and transferring images every few sections to your laptop. That's not a time for your equipment to die. Eight extra hours of power? Yes please.

As for phones, there's always a need for extra power for smartphones. I welcome the extra heft if it means that many more songs, or movies, or emails or tweets. Until batteries get good enough that we can either charge them in a few seconds (capacitors), or dump a few ounces of liquid inside (fuel cells), I'm going to stock up on external battery packs.

Do we want tens of plastic guitars, skateboards, drums, balance boards and light guns cluttering up our living room space? No, of course not. But ponder these simple questions.

1) Would you rather be pushing buttons in time to music with your Xbox 360 controller, or strumming along with your fake guitar and hitting a drum pad?
2) Would you rather be pushing buttons to make your character do a 720, or actually tilt your body on a skateboard?
3) Would you rather be pushing buttons and tilting a stick to shoot something on the screen, or point a gun at the screen and physically shoot the screen?

It's simple; most everyone would rather be simulating the act because it gets them closer to the experience of actually playing the game and mimicking what the character is doing on screen. And that's just the way we're headed. The first controllers had a joystick and one button, and technology's progressed along until we're actually getting 1:1 motion detection.

But where is this all going? The endpoint, in our minds, is something like the Holodeck from Star Trek. A room that, although finite in reality, has the mechanical and optical abilities to simulate just about anything you can program. But we're a long way from that. What we can do is take steps toward that goal, by simulating the experience with plastic instruments. But there are many steps between here and there, and hopefully the next one won't cause us to fall down because there's a plastic guitar in the way.

One name came up again and again. It was the Flip Video, the little camera that changed the industry. While tech giants like Sony, Canon and Nikon were duking it out in the typical, spec-warring dSLR space, a relatively small company named Pure Digital Technologies developed a real piece of crap camcorder called the Pure Digital Point and Shoot. The video quality was absolutely atrocious for 2006. The name was obviously equally as bad.

But as technology improves, we're reaching the era of "good enough."

The Pure Digital Point and Shoot (later renamed the Flip Video/Mino) was pocketable, cheap ($180) and served an important function: It was the perfect YouTube camera. And that, in itself, was enough.

Because of Pure Digital's singular vision and perfect timing, not only did the camcorder quickly steal 13% of the camcorder market causing bigger companies start duplicating the Flip (with only moderate success), but Pure Digital was itself bought out by mega corp Cisco.

However, the Flip Video is not alone in under-performing game changers. You may remember way back to 2007 when a company we all kind of knew named Asus had something planned called the Eee PC.

Its screen was but 7-inches, and its storage was dwarfed by most iPods. But once again, the Eee was small, cheap ($245-$400) and served an important function: It was the near-perfect knock around computer. And that, in itself, was enough to drive the entire computer industry mad overnight.

I'm by no way implying that the technological arms race is over, that companies no longer care about building the fastest machines with the biggest storage and most ridiculous sticker prices. But a number of technologies are finding a new equilibrium of price and performance in the industry by knowing just where consumers are willing to settle.

These are devices that fulfill a functional niche, sure, but do so with the minimum amount of effort possible—keeping a unit price and bulkiness to a minimum. The breakthrough "good enough" product features the price and specs of a third tier product, the build quality of a second tier product and the design aesthetic of a first tier product. The hardware is fully capable, but it's just sort of...cheap...for lack of a better term.

And yes, like Wired, we have to marvel at how magnificent gadgets of yesterday—the ability to record something in HD (HD!)—became just a "good enough" gadget.

Of course, now we must wonder, what is the next Flip or Eee? What's the next technology that can have its bar set ever so lower but actually excite the public with a new, utilitarian form factor in the process?

If you know the answer to that question, you stand to make a good deal of money.

Let me backtrack for a moment. Someone I know has a birthday coming up, and one item I'd really like to get them is an XBLA (Xbox Live) title. Since the game isn't available in stores, that means I have two solutions. One, I can sneak onto their Xbox like a ninja, enter my credit card info and make the purchase for them (which is just sort of creepy), or two, I can give them an Xbox gift card for the sum of the game.

I'm not really happy with either option.

My sincere gesture, giving a friend a game they'd enjoy because I've accounted for their tastes, is diluted to an exchange of capital. It's really just giving them cash in a nicer form. Sure, you can buy someone a gift card, but you can't actually buy them a gift.

This is a problem.

Today, the limitation is probably only bugging me and a handful of other uber nerds. But what about in four or five years? We're a society that's only moving more and more digital. Soon, even giving someone a CD may very well seem like a dated gesture—one that may inconvenience the recipient since, hell, they don't have a CD drive anymore!

I just don't want to be condemned to a life of gift cards with a little note written in Sharpie "for the new Batman."

Luckily, implementing gift giving on a service like Xbox Live would be incredibly easy. They already have the infrastructure to manage various payment accounts and allow users to communicate to one another and a central server. So imagining a system in which you receive a message informing you that Sk8rB0y has sent you a game is by no means a far stretch. (The feature would probably take Microsoft all of a week to complete, if they put their mind to it.)

But what about an iTunes? UPDATE: They actually offer gifting through email. That's something I didn't realize and I'm guessing a lot of people don't realize. Including even custom playlists, I'll admit, it's a good start. My question to you is, do you consider an email link enough? Does that feel like a gift?

Maybe it's just my perspective that will be forced to change as I bow to the next level of consumerism. But for the moment, the gift card approach feels like a one size fits some philosophy being squeezed over nearly the entire modern home entertainment industry—and I can't imagine it's adding a lot of humanity to the already cold digital realm.

I blame the state of the technology. The lack of real innovation and news. Touch was finally everywhere—two years after the JesusPhone and one year after Research In Motion officials said touch screens were going nowhere—but so what? Been there, done that, got the bloody' t-shirt. Seriously, you know something stinks when you see the BlackBerry people racing to plaster their booth with this:

Yeas, it's one of those phony industry awards. The Storm named as the "Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough". "Press and be impressed", it claims. The BlackBerry Storm is considered a "breakthrough" by "the industry". The not quite a perfect storm, as Matt put it, with its bugs and half-baked SurePress technology.

I rest my case.

And so did everyone else on the floor. You can see people wandering the aisles, looking for something exciting, new, but everyone in the floor was kind of blah and smleh about everything. Just a mass of androids pushing around the floors, searching for nothing.

Here's some of the best—and worst—of what I found.

• Android G2 Hands On: Close to Perfection

• Why Do the Android Phones Have Chins?

• Windows Mobile 6.5 Hands On: The New Interface Rocks

• Coolest Cellphone Interface Ever Is Also Absolutely Useless

• Bluetooth Over Wi-Fi Zoomtastic Speed Shocks Our Pants Off

• How Not To Make a Touchscreen Phone

• Samsung Omnia HD Hands On Video: Amazing Screen, Still Bad Response

• Nokia N97 Hands On Video of Nokia's First N-Series Touch Phone

• Nokia E75 Hands On Video: Shiny Slick Boredom

• Sony Ericsson Idou's Interface: Hotter than Butter Down Beyoncé's Pants

• Garmin Nuviphone G60 GPS Smartphone Video Hands-On

• Garmin Nuviphone M20 Smartphone (Aborted) Video Hands-On

It's not that I think all kids are bad. Nor is it about avoiding breeding spoiled brats. Buying high end gadgets for kids is not quite like buying new driver a sportscar. Not exactly. But a kid driving a beater that is slow, handles poorly and needs mechanical love once in awhile can teach an early driver a lot more about how to coax the maximum performance and life out of a car when learning on a piece of junk. Likewise with tech. Giving them great gadgets can deny kids the unavoidable toil poorly designed or rough-around the edges technology offers that can be so educational. I don't have kids, and I won't presume to actually propose parenting advice to anyone, but I can draw on my own childhood, where I learned tech by taking the harder way.

My dad wisely refused to buy me a complete toy remote controlled car, but instead had me work on a Tamiya kit car, which required me to learn how to solder at age 7. The kid across the street from me eventually had to ask me how to build his own car. He was 16. In another instance, one of many, I couldn't get Ultima to run on my dad's old 386 until I got the autoexec batch file set up right. It was a pain but getting that game to run right taught me a nugget of knowledge. I had plenty of experience like this, and they all added to my collective experience with machines.

One famous geek dad I put this theory to said he didn't think high end gear in itself was the problem.

Because computers suck so much, every high-end gadget requires learning all sort of tricky OS stuff like managing several devices, understand DRM, password and username management, updating firmware, rebooting when things go wrong, etc. Compared to a games console, practically everything involving a computer is a mini lesson in IT.

I can agree with that, but I think it strengthens my point. What's funny is that the types of devices I use manage most of these problems he mentions very elegantly. Today, most of the gear I use is from a certain manufacturer that prides itself on making things very easy to use and consumer oriented. And I appreciate it, but I can't help but feel like I'm becoming dependent on technology so polished, its no harder to use than biting into an...Apple.

Then again, other tech parents I talked to believe what I'm saying is nothing new. One creative family in particular thought the philosophy here could be applied to all mediums. For example, Instead of having their kid listen to pop music, they give her weekly music lessons. And although their daughter has total access to all the gadgets her father and mother do, they're using it to ramp her up to more difficult and advanced ways to interface with and control tech. That is, she's getting programming lessons soon. Knowing the girl, I think she'll enjoy them, even thought she's been raised on easy to use tech. But perhaps the difference here is how that energy is diverted — instead of using a tinkering mentality to get the baseline OS working, she might use it to write programs.

Another parent says this is all theoretical. I heard on some NPR show awhile ago that there's not much you can do to encourage or discourage the spirit of a young person. I guess what I'm saying is that giving junior geeks personal tech problems from a young age can be can be good basic training, so what benefit do we get by buying them stuff that works out of the box?

To summarize, Jill Price, 42, can remember everything from the year 1980 on. This is fine if she wants to remember exactly when and where O.J. Simpson was arrested, but horrible if she wants to forget an embarrassing situation, a loved one dying or any slights anyone has ever caused her. In Price's case, she's actually not that great at all types of memory recollection, but can remember exactly how she felt during certain instances.

The researcher who studied her case and subjected her to five years' worth of tests, says that it's actually a part of our brain's design that we have to forget things. If there are too many connections, "the brain would be hopelessly overburdened and would operate more slowly." (Full article here)

But in the next 50-some years, super memory may not be relegated to just the realm of individuals with specific genetic quirks, but belong to everyone by way of computer assisted memory. Here's one of several research projects dedicated to the topic. Here's a NYT article talking about replacing living neurons with silicon ones. It's all very far in the future, but would you want it if you could?

No: If all it meant was an increase in what we currently have; meaning, the ability to make more memories like Jill Price but no further ability to control it. Not to get too existential, but what would you do if you couldn't forget anything? You'd be like Leonard in Memento, reliving your wife's death every time anything reminded you of her. You'd alienate yourself from not being able to forgive others' indiscretions. No thank you.

Yes: If the technology gave you extra abilities to control your memory. You could access anything you wanted from the past—where your keys are, for example—but control what you wanted to remember. There's already a chemical found to erase long-term or targeted memories. Had a bad day at the office? Block it off, or at least block off the emotions that are attached to it. Had a family member pass away? Technologically put some distance between you and the event, letting mental scars heal faster. This option introduces many other implications that are more philosophical than we should get into here, but as we're doing more and more body modifications in the future, it's something we'll all have to think about.

What do you think? Which would you choose? [Spiegel via Boing Boing]

I love the internet as much as the next guy. Be it news, emails, or just videos of some dog lipsyncing to Thriller, I can't get enough. And there's nobody—and I mean nobody—who reaches for his smartphone faster when the plane lands to thwart his cold sweats and shaky hands than me. But while we may have felt oppressed without access to internet from 30,000 feet, we're far worse off with it.

I want you to look back for a moment all the way to high school. Remember that one time you left, say, your math book in your locker the night before the test? It was too late to return; the school was locked. So all you could do was sit back that evening, watch some reruns on television and await your inevitable sub par performance without guilt. And isn't that what life is really all about?

Without mobile Wi-Fi, flights are one of the few socially acceptable circumstances of procrastination. It's not your fault that the spreadsheet isn't done or that you didn't get back to that client, friend or family member. You were in the air! You were helpless! All you could do was...hang out...and maybe read some sort of Oprah-approved, paper-bound manuscript.

And in case anyone here forgot, we can still get work done without the internet. There is, after all, a use for laptops that aren't connected to the world's information. But the beauty of this work is two-fold: One, without access to extended materials, most of what can be accomplished is limited to, dare I say, reasonable levels. Two, without access to communications like email impeding actual work, most of what can be accomplished will be far more productive.

So sure, with internet access coming to planes, the business world may benefit from an extended level of communication. Some merger may go through, or it may not. Some presentation may have more polish, or the presenter might just be more tired because of it. But since when did I sign up to fly in a cramped office with a bunch of people taking life too seriously? It may be called "business class," but we all know what it's really meant for: Drinking.

Besides, I'm more than happy to give up the prospect of in-flight porn if it means you do too.

P.S. Brian, I'm not sorry for calling you a dufus. But I am sorry that those devil horns look more like cat ears—not that it's necessarily a bad look for you.

She'd been warming me up to the idea for months, unsuccessfully. We would ditch the cases and file the media neatly into more efficient storage boxes. And given that a.) I wanted to be a good husband b.) we're soon moving from our large house into a tiny city apartment and c.) I'd get to keep using the cases of my 100+ video games, I finally gave in to her request.

Here's the sequence of painful events that followed.

During a quick trip to one of those red and white office supply stores, she picked up a set of boxes (coffins) and sleeves (coffin liners). Then on one particularly sunny afternoon, she sat down at our coffee table and transformed into some split personality I'd never seen in the 12 years I've known her. With crisp, militaristic movements, she quickly studied each case, noted its contents, and ripped its silver heart from inside.

And she didn't shed a tear.

I realize that the future of my movie collection is with digital downloads and that all this packaging is horrible for the environment. I know that with current technologies, it's just plain stupid to waste your shelf with codecs better suited for hard drives. But that didn't make the experience any easier.

"Maybe we could just keep the box sets intact," I offered.
"Why?" she responded, her eyes emotionless like a killing robot.
"They're just nice to have. I like looking at them," was all I could say. That was enough to keep a few on display.

But I knew how defeated I sounded. Many of these DVDs hadn't been watched in years. And a sickening amount of them were never even opened before the unceremonious gutting by my wife. So why had I bought them in the first place?

I think that I just liked having them on the shelf. It wasn't about having a particular movie to watch. It was about owning a particular movie.

To her credit, my loving wife was being extremely thoughtful in her digital cleansing (while I was too distraught to help). She noted all sorts of details from each box that I might want to know, like bonus features and episode titles. And when I pressed her again on keeping some of the more loved cases around, she reminded me that her larger plan was to store the DVD cases for when we move back into a house one day, or at least a larger apartment.

"So we're going to store the storage?" I ask.
"Why not?"
"That's ridiculous. We'll just throw them away."

After all, I have iTunes' Cover Flow and programs like Delicious Library to curb that craving for packaging and album art. But still, my stomach dropped with every case tossed to the wayside, my trophies of consumerism simultaneously helpless and useless upon our rug.

At the moment, my once-cherished shelf of DVDs stands as a temporary monument to a once-thriving civilization. The cases sit empty—soulless—awaiting a trip to the trash in fleeting tribute to an era gone by.

But really, PC World had no choice. After 16 years of service to IDG, and the this current episode highlighting his integrity, the magazine couldn't really move forward without looking like editorial corruption was in place. Unless Harry came back.

His conditions? That "editors were allowed to be editors." He made no comment about whether or not Colin's reshuffled position were the terms of his return.

IDG is going start a search for a CEO for both PC World and Macworld, two magazines that Colin Crawford used to be the CEO of. Our thoughts? All the reader outrage online after the story first broke is what caused the sudden 180. Or, we suppose it's probably more of a 540 since PCWorld actually went ahead and published a tame 10 Things We Hate About Apple anyway.

As an aside, I think it could have been better to have PC World write the "Apple Love" piece, and Macworld write the "Apple Hate" piece. Nothing better than to provide surprising thoughts to your already hypnotized user base.– Jason Chen and Brian Lam

Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PC World [PCWorld]