Sony Takes Another Swing at Android Tablets With Xperia S

The 9.4-inch Xperia Tablet S is Sony’s latest shot at an Android slate. “Every Android tablet has to be compared against the Nexus 7,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. Like the Nexus 7, the Xperia Tablet S is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, the Google tablet is priced at $200, while the Xperia Tablet S will be offered in three models starting at $400.

Sony on Wednesday launched the Xperia Tablet S at the IFA consumer electronics show in Germany.

It’s the second generation of the Tablet S, and it continues its predecessor’s positioning as both a tablet and a universal remote control.

However, the Xperia Tablet S is slimmer than its predecessor. Further, it has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and is now included in Sony’s Xperia sub-brand, which covers mobile experiences and includes the PlayStation.

The Xperia Tablet S will replace the Sony Tablet S, Sony Electronics spokesperson Maya Wasserman told TechNewsWorld. It will be available in the United States on Sept. 7.

Specs for the Xperia Tablet S

The Xperia Tablet S runs Android 4.0. It will be upgraded to Android Jelly Bean when the version becomes available.

The device’s 9.4-inch screen is coated to reduce fingerprint smudges and glare.

The Xperia Tablet S has a full-sized SD card slot and HDMIconnectivity. It also has built-in WiFi capabilities.

Sony will preload redemption codes that will let purchasers access three out of 15 available movies from the Google Play movie library.

Sony Cosa Nostra

The Xperia Tablet S will come with Sony Entertainment Network Services preloaded. This will give users access to music, videos and games from the network. It will also let users store photos and videos in the cloud and share them on any device at any time with friends through Sony’s PlayMemories Online service.

A preloaded Reader app will let Xperia Tablet S owners purchase eBooks from Sony and manage their books across Sony Readers and Xperia smartphones. This fall, Xperia Tablet S owners will be able to access dedicated content from PlayStation Mobile.

Sony also offers Small Apps, which will let Xperia Tablet S owners use minimized versions of various apps simultaneously with another app. Any widgets downloaded to the tablet can be added to the Small Apps.

The tablet’s Socialife feature aggregates owners’ social networking sites and news feeds. Further, Sony offers three media apps on the tablet: Walkman, Album and Movies.

“Sony has a history of doing things differently from other brands,” said Jeff Orr, senior practice director mobile devices at ABI Research. “They work with the standards organization and give a little spin on the end to work with their own ecosystem.”

Making the Android Pilgrimage

Sony hasn’t had much success with its Android tablets so far, but this might change. “It has the user experience and the content ecosystem and now just needs to get its sales and marketing fully functioning,” Peter King, director of tablet and touchscreen strategies atStrategy Analytics, told TechNewsWorld.

However, a lot will depend on whether consumers will appreciate Sony’s quirky approach.

“Every Android tablet has to be compared against the Nexus 7,” ABI’s Orr told TechNewsWorld.

Like the Nexus 7, the Xperia Tablet S is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, the Nexus 7 already runs Android Jelly Bean, the latest iteration of the OS. Further, the Google tablet is priced at US$200, while the Xperia Tablet S will be offered in three models starting at $400.

Controlling the Home Media Center

In the U.S., Sony is marketing the Xperia Tablet S primarily as a remote control device, using infrared (IR) technology.

Pairing IR with DLNA technology “would give users the ability to discover audio and video content on DLNA-enabled devices,” ABI’s Orr pointed out. However, IR is competing with Bluetooth as the standard for remote control devices.

Further, “[we must ask] how does the Sony experience compare with what Apple’s doing with Apple TV and Airplay, and with what Samsung’s offering?” Orr continued. Features in Samsung’s Smart TV line include facial recognition, gesture recognition and a variety of apps.

Also, users with iPhones who want to fit it into the Sony [home entertainment] environment need to figure out if that will work, Orr said. “It probably doesn’t.”

Apple's Record-Breaking Value: Hard to Reach, Hard to Keep

ueled by a mountain of cash combined with excitement over upcoming products, Apple's value has reached new heights, making it the most valuable publicly traded company in history. How long it can stay at that peak, however, is anyone's guess. "Many companies whose total value was huge only 20 years ago, such as Microsoft, IBM and GE, have a total value smaller today," said Siegel+Gale's Russ Meyer.

The stock market can't get enough of Apple, it would seem. On Monday the company's shares passed the US$664 mark, setting a new record as the most valuable publicly traded company in history. On Tuesday morning the legend continued: Apple's stock rose close to 1 percent, trading at $671.30 per share before hitting a mid-morning decline.

Apple is the tech industry's darling, its golden child. It would be easy to attribute Monday's events to merely its overall aura of financial invincibility.

Recent events that might have given Apple's stock an extra push, however, include the growing anticipation of its next iPhone, expected to arrive this fall, as well as a rumored iPad mini and a possible full-sized television.
What's at Work Here?

Then there's the matter of Apple's huge cash stockpile, Russ Meyer, global strategy director for branding firm Siegel+Gale, told MacNewsWorld.

Essentially, he said, "what people will pay for the product is relatively high, and Apple's costs are relatively low. Thus, a lot of cash being created."

More immediately, though, the rumored upcoming product launches have been driving Apple's stock price, he said. "Given Apple's track record of creating -- and recreating -- products that exceed customer needs, are different than the competition and create a simple, delightful experience, investors are anticipating Apple will do it again with these new product launches." Thus, he said, the price of the stock rises with the expectation of even more brand-driven cash being created.
How Long Can It Last?

It's unclear whether Apple can maintain such heights, especially if one accepts that the rumored products in its pipeline are indeed the driver behind the recent increases.

"The iPhone 5 and 7-inch tablets will face a lot more competition this time, and the iPhone 5, based on what has leaked out of Apple, had far less of Steve Jobs in it than expected," Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, told MacNewsWorld. "I'm hearing it was basically built by committee, which suggests it may not meet expectations."

That means, he continued, that there is a lot of risk to investors who think Apple will maintain this valuation. Also, he added, he has his doubts about the "most valuable company in history" title. "If you adjust for inflation, you'll likely find firms like the original Standard Oil, before the market collapse, and even Microsoft were more highly valued at their peak."

Apple, though, "is clearly the most valuable company in recent memory," he conceded.

"It's hard to stay on top forever," Meyer added. "Many companies whose total value was huge only 20 years ago, such as Microsoft, IBM and GE, have a total value smaller today.

But, he added, while it may be true that inevitably Apple will be overtaken by some other company, it is harder to make a case that Cupertino's surge is fueled entirely by hype and hot air.

Apple's P/E ratio is actually relatively low (15.57) compared to the overall S&P 500 (16.1), Meyer said, as well as to other tech stocks like Facebook (68.51) or Amazon (291.73).

"Stocks in the midst of a bubble usually have a relatively high P/E ratio. This doesn't seem to be the case with Apple," he explained.
Best Ever Title Not Necessarily a Prize

Still, Apple may regret the day it was crowned "most valuable."

"The biggest problem with being the best ever is that you also have to maintain 'perfection,' which everyone knows is impossible, even if you are considered the 'best ever,'" Jeff Sica, president and chief investment officer of SICA Wealth Management, told MacNewsWorld.

"The greatest problem with Apple is that despite its monumental technological innovation of the past, it's what's next that counts. The innovative mind behind Apple, Steve Jobs, has passed, and since his departing, there has been limited innovation at Apple."

It will be only after Apple proves it can continue to innovate, instead of just rolling out new versions of established products, that they can justify their "best ever" designation, he said.

Curiosity Rover Zeroes In on Traces of Past Habitats on Mars

At 10:31 P.M. Pacific time on August 5, NASA’s Curiosity rover will begin the first direct search for habitable environments on Mars

All science begins in a star trek mode: go where no one has gone before and discover new things without knowing in advance what they might be. As researchers complete their initial surveys and accumulate a long list of questions, they shift to a Sherlock Holmes mode: formulate specific hypotheses and develop ways to test them. The exploration of Mars is now about to make this transition. Orbiters have made global maps of geographic features and composition, and landers have pieced together the broad outlines of the planet’s geologic history. It is time to get more sophisticated.

Our team has built the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as the Curiosity rover, on the hypothesis that Mars was once a habitable planet. The rover carries an analytic laboratory to test that hypothesis and find out what happened to the early clement environment we believe the planet had. Loosely defined, a habitable environment has water, energy and carbon. Past missions have focused on the first requirement and confirmed that Mars had—and occasionally still has—liquid water [see “The Red Planet's Watery Past,” by Jim Bell; Scientific American, December 2006]. Those missions have also seen hints of geochemical gradients that would provide energy for metabolism. But none has seen carbon in a form potentially suitable for life.

Gospel music in Paris flourishes

France may be the most militantly secular country in Europe, but Paris’s gospel scene is flourishing.

The choir sways and their orange robes sway with them. The conductor, packed in an ice-cream-white suit, urging them on, while out front the Reverend Jean Carpenter – moving quite possibly like nobody has ever moved before in this ancient church in the medieval heart of Paris – sings praise to the Lord.

The person who emailed to say I should go and hear her sing described her voice in one word – “Biiiiiiiiiiig”.

She wasn’t exaggerating.

“Oh my gosh!” she cries when asked how she feels when she’s up there performing. “I want to dance! I want to sing! I want to touch everybody! I want to touch Jesus! I want to see his face! When I’m up there, I feel love.”

Not the sort of thing the French are used to hearing.

France – with its burka ban, and strict separation of church and state – is the most militantly secular country in Europe. Many people regard religion with suspicion and even the six per cent who regularly go to church are often shy of using the J-word, let alone shaking their stuff in church to praise Him.

It’s a difference in religious culture as wide as the Atlantic, which is maybe one reason gospel concerts here sometimes provoke intense reactions.

“I don’t preach, but I speak ‘Franglais’ with the people and they help me with my French,” says Jean, who hails from Queens in New York State. “I ask them if they understand and they say ‘Yes!’ And sometimes we all end up in tears. We end up touched by what comes through me and then, in essence, it touches them and then they give it back. We can have such a powerful time.”

Like the time a man who’d lost his daughter came to talk to her after the concert.

“She had died. He told me he needed prayer,” Jean recalls. “And needed someone to pray with. So we held him, we hugged him and cried with him and we found the priest of a church and we put him in contact with that church.

“That is what we are hoping to do. Not just do a show and leave. No! No! I would not have done my job if that happens.”

For Jean Carpenter and the other singers on Paris’s flourishing gospel scene, this music is not a style – it is a mission.

Indeed, she says, the reason she moved here was that, after singing in Paris for the first time on tour in 2004, she thought her voice and her ministry would make more impact in France than back in the USA.

“African-American gospel? Oh, the French just go crazy,” says another long-term Paris resident Ricki Stevenson. She is the creator of Black Paris Tours, which guides tourists round the landmarks of black America’s long love affair with this city.

“It’s kind of surprising, but the French just have a passion for this music,” she says. “They feel deeply those sounds. It touches them in a way that I have not seen a lot of others being touched.”

Gospel musicians were at the forefront of a movement of black American artists from the US to France. Later on came the likes of Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. But the first were a gospel ensemble called The Fisk Jubilee Singers, who came to Paris as early as the 1870s.

They also performed in England during that tour and sang “Go Down, Moses” to Queen Victoria.

The Wilberforce Choir came to Paris in the 1900s. Much later, in the 1950s, one of the most celebrated gospel groups of all time, the Golden Gate Quartet, didn’t just play in Paris, it settled down in the city and stayed.

Still swinging at 84, lead singer Clyde Wright remains in Paris today.

Sure, he says, there was racism in France too. You could still see the same dark looks in some people’s eyes. But there wasn’t the institutionalised racism he’d known growing up in North Carolina.

“We had to walk about three kilometres (two miles) to get to school,” Wright remembers.

In the winter time, it was cold with no shoes on your feet or whatever shoes you could find. There was a bus, but on that bus there were about 13 whites – boys and girls on their way to their brick school. And that bus would just pass by us, and if you were in the way, he would blow the horn and say, ‘Get over’… not one would stop and say, ‘Get in’. That was out of the question.”

Gospel music was the milk he was raised on.

“I’m very religious,” he says. “I’ve sung other songs, but for me it has no meaning. It’s just for the pleasure of people. But (gospel) is soul music and that is something that I learned as a child. In pop music, they have what they call soul music, but soul music, in reality, it’s the old negro spirituals sung in the days of slavery.”

At a Paris club called the Speakeasy, a few paces from the Arc de Triomphe, another pillar of the Paris gospel scene, Linda Lee Hopkins, even throws in the occasional gospel number when she’s singing to the night-time cocktail crowd.

She’s full of stories about how the Holy Spirit works through this music – about French people in tears, French people feeling something, French people getting over their initial hostility to anyone or anything to do with religion. But sometimes, when they’re booking her in to play somewhere, people ask her to tone down the God stuff.

“They want you to compromise sometimes. They want gospel because they think it’s radio music – especially the songs from Sister Act,” she says. “I tell them, ‘That is not gospel. They are secular songs adapted for the film.’ So if they tell me, ‘I want you to sing gospel, but don’t mention Jesus.’ It’s like He’s my life, I cannot not mention Him!”

They don’t always understand, says Linda Lee Hopkins.

Wanting gospel music without the gospels, without Jesus, without the Lord, is like wanting cake without the flour, she says. So what does she do? She leaves it up to the Holy Spirit. If He wants her to sing about Jesus, she does. And guess what? He does.

Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people

As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French.

But music does emanate from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills, and make us cry. According to a recent paper by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya from the University of London, music even affects how we see visual images. In the experiment, 30 subjects were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face. Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling – while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy.

The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown. A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another. Now I never sit down to my wife’s meals without first putting on a jolly Sousa march.

Although it probably seems obvious that music can evoke emotions, it is to this day not clear why. Why doesn’t music feel like listening to speech sounds, or animal calls, or garbage disposals? Why is music nice to listen to? Why does music get blessed with a multi-billion dollar industry, whereas there is no market for “easy listening” speech sounds?

In an effort to answer, let’s first ask why I was listening to French instructional programs in the first place. The truth is, I wasn’t just listening. I was watching them on public television. What kept my attention was not the meaningless-to-me speech sounds (I was a slow learner), but the young French actress. Her hair, her smile, her mannerisms, her pout… I digress. The show was a pleasure to watch because of thehumans it showed, especially the exhibited expressions and behaviors.

The lion share of emotionally evocative stimuli in the lives of our ancestors would have been from the faces and bodies of other people, and if one finds human artifacts that are highly evocative, it is a good hunch that it looks or sounds human in some way.

As evidence that humans are the principal source of emotionality among human artifacts, consider human visual signs. Visual signs, I have argued, have culturally evolved to look like natural objects, and have the kinds of contour combinations found in a three-dimensional world of opaque objects. Three-dimensional world of opaque objects? Nothing particularly human about that, and that’s why most linguistic signs – like the letters and words on this page – are not emotionally evocative to look at.

But visual signs do sometimes have emotional associations. For example, colors are notoriously emotionally evocative, and arguments about what color something should be painted are the source of an alarming number of marital arguments. And “V” stimuli, such as that yield sign on the street, have long been realized (within the human factors literature) to serve as the most evocative geometrical shape for warning symbols. But notice that color and “V” stimuli are plausibly about human expression. In particular, color has recently been argued to be “about” human skin and the exhibited emotions – which is why red grabs our attention, since it’s associated with blushing and blood – and “V” stimuli have been suggested to be “about” angry faces (namely, angry eyebrows).

Which brings us back to music and the Logeswaran paper. Music is exquisitely emotionally evocative, which is why a touch of happy music makes even unrelated pictures seem more pleasant. In light of the above, then, we are led to the conclusion that the artifact of music should contain some distinctly human elements.

The question, of course, is what those elements are. One candidate is our expressive speech – perhaps music is just an abstract form of language. However, most of the emotion of language is in the meaning, which is why foreign languages that we don’t understand rarely make us swoon with pleasure or get angry. That’s also why emotional speech from an unfamiliar language isn’t featured on the radio!

But there is a second auditory expressive behavior we humans carry out – our bodily movements themselves. Human movement has been conjectured to underlie music as far back as the Greeks. As a hypothesis this has the advantage that we have auditory systems capable of making sense of the sounds of people moving in our midst – an angry stomper approaching, a delicate lilter passing, and so on. Some of these movements trigger positive emotions – they conjure up images of pleasant activities – while others might be automatically associated with fear or anxiety. (The sound of running makes us wonder what we’re running from.) If music were speech-driven, then it is missing out on the largest part of speech’s expressiveness – the meaning. But if music sounds like human expressive movements, then it sounds like something that, all by itself, is rich in emotional expressiveness, and can be easily interpreted by the auditory system.

Regardless of whether music is emotional intonation from speech or a summary of expressive movements – or something else altogether – the new research by Logeswaran and Bhattacharya adds yet more fuel to the expectation that music has been culturally selected to sound like an emotionally expressive human. While it is not easy for us to see the human ingredients in the modulations of pitch, intensity, tempo and rhythm that make music, perhaps it is obvious to our auditory homunculus.

A brief history of Gospel music Part II

1960s to present day

The financial success of secular black music in the 1960s and 70s ushered in a new kind of Gospel artist: more performance-aware yet equally spiritually and socially engaged. They included the ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Reverend Al Green, Sam Cooke, Shirley Cesaer and The Staple Singers. It was common for these artists to chose one side of Gospel’s divide as religious and secular music industry did not mix. It also confirmed the acceptance of Gospel artists as solo performers.

In the 70s and 80s artists like the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Andrae Crouch, Commissioned and Candi Staton brought the popular sounds of disco, funk and other mainstream genres into the growing spectrum of Gospel. This era also brought to prominence some of Gospel’s biggest musical families including The Clark Sisters, The Hawkins and The Winans.

The 90s brought an R’n'B crossover explosion when Gospel artists such as Sounds of Blackness, Helen Baylor and Bebe and Cece Winans scored big international chart and club hits. This was also a good time to be ‘Gospel’ and British, as record companies took note of the US success and tried to emulate it with homegrown artists like Paul Johnson, The Escofferys, Nu Colours, Mica Paris, Ruby Turner, Patrick Jean-Paul Denis, Lavine Hudson and Bryan Powell. This favourable mood also bolstered recognition for the existing traditional Gospel groups like the London Community Gospel Choir and the Inspirational Choir.

The current genres of Gospel owe as much to its rich heritage as they do to the upbeat performance of urban or ‘street music’. Kirk Franklin, Tye Tribbett, Tonex and J Moss have adopted a Holy Hip Hop attitude in bringing the ‘good news’ to a younger generation. However, the popularity of more traditional artists like Smokie Norful, Donnie McClurkin and Yolanda Adams remains strong.

Today’s UK Gospel sound celebrates the full spectrum of Gospel music, with funk bands like Four Kornerz, praise and worship with the traditional ‘church’ sound of Noel Robinson and Nu Image and the African influence of Muyiwa and Riversongz, and the urban styling of groups like Raymond and Co and Siani, and solo performers like Priscilla Jones and Roger Samuels. It also includes other subgenres like house, reggae and grime that dominate youth culture.

A brief history of Gospel music

The history of Gospel is predated by its African roots, in the traditions of indigenous African people, with songs of praise, worship and testimony to cultural gods and deity.

The earliest coming-together of a Christian message interpreted into black music history was through the incidence of the transatlantic slave trade - the movement of African people from their customary faiths into an interpretation of Christianity.

The first incarnations of Gospel music were in the three phases of Negro spirituals: work songs, jubilees and social Gospel. Work songs came into being pre-1867. They were songs and chant composed by the slaves and sung largely outside church, in the cotton fields and plantations. These songs drew from Biblical imagery as inspiration through the hardships of slavery but also as coded songs of hope and freedom.

Jubilees were similar to work songs but sung in church as slaves began to embrace Christian forms of worship. They were ‘call and response’ style hymns and developed harmony as different parts sung as a group.

The struggle for civil rights and the tangible problems of segregation and inequality inspired a new brand of socially aware Gospel music in the mid-1920s and through to the 1960s. These songs integrated social messages with scripture references. Gospel music divided into church-based worship songs on one side and music by Christians with more of a secular social conscience on the other.

The term ‘Gospel’ is attributed to Thomas A. Dorsey in the 1930s. Dorsey was a former bluesman who went on to write some of the most enduring standards of Gospel music. Dorsey’s songs inspired a number of Gospel and Southern American artists, including Elvis Presley. The Gospel music of the civil rights era, often referred to as the Black Gospel period, defined Gospel’s richest heritage with artists like Mahalia Jackson, The Clara Ward Singers, Dorothy Love Coates, The Caravans, The Dixie Hummingbirds, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Blind Boys of Alabama and The Edwin Hawkins Singers.