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Review -Olympus E-PL5 Micro 4/3 Mirrorless Camera

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ImagePicked up this camera along with a 45mm F1.8 lens at the duty free in Incheon (always dangerous to wait there for your flight). I had held off purchasing a full SLR for years because of the weight, but handling this, I found it to be light and extremely portable. The pictures it takes trumps anything you can Instagram on the iPhone (and I take a lot of decent iPhone shots). The optics and the larger photosensor gives you amazingly clear images that a point and shoot or smartphone cannot possibly match. 

Take this shot, cropped from a larger image taken from my bedroom window with the stock 14-42mm lens. 

ImageThe light capturing ability (this was dawn) and clarity are unmatched. The fixed 45mm F1.8 lens was chosen for the ability to compose portraits and capture kids in action. The picture below was taken with this lens.

ImageAll of these shots were taken on full program (auto) mode. The first shot of the camera itself was taken with the Olympus XZ-1 which has a F1.8 pancake lens. You can pick up the XZ-1 for cheap at about 200, while the E-PL5 is available for around 550-650USD. 

While I love my iPhone’s camera -after all, it is usually the only camera I have on me, the E-PL5 gives me the chance at taking some amazing shots. I will extend this review as I use the camera. 

 

 

 

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Are you in?

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The generations since World War II have been separated into marketing niches of Greatest and Boomer, then X,Y, and Z, but I suspect that no set of people since Homo erectus figured out fire, speech, and monogamy, have faced as much rapid technological and cultural change as have the people born since 1950. This unmooring of cultural institutions, socioeconomic niches, and family structures is remarkable and deeply unsettling to many.
Modernity has atomized the family, but we are still the Pleistocene mammal subject to possessiveness, territoriality, and stranger anxiety. We are just a handful of base pairs removed from our mutual ancestor with the chimpanzee who kill and eat intruders. And so we naturally flock with our kind in our hominid fashion, and wish to destroy the other if they get in the way. What stops us?

Strong ideas keep us from burning witches. Ideas of justice, equality of human worth, and an appreciation of value of freedom and liberty bind us together in a common identity. These ideas are shared across borders instantaneously, usually in English, on the internet via smart phones and social media. These are rather old American ideals and should not be new to those wary of change. Instead, it is the broadening of the definition of *American* that jars people. It is an America that people are still looking towards as they overturn dictatorships and established tyrannies. We see it in the Arab Spring, in the continue march of the huddled masses to the gates, and in gay Americans fighting to achieve equal status. We witness it as a force that China is trying to subvert with overt fascism, with likely failure in the long term.

This neo-Americanism is the lingua franca of business and diplomacy. It is the common operating system that everyone demands. At home, to succeed in this new America, you have to learn how to pass for a new kind of American. It is a fact that if you make yourself smile, your brain will register positive in its happiness centers, and you will transition to happiness (try it!). If you carry a smart phone, participate in social media, and read at above elementary school level, the centers of the brain that are stimulated will drive change. Corporate HR policies, public school codes of conduct, and public social mores are aligning around and driving this change, even for older Americans who one would assume would be all for not changing. It used to be said that you are basically set in your ways by the time you are forty, but I think even that generalization is done because I increasingly see retired people with smartphones and tablets watching the latest Youtube videos and family photos on Facebook. This at least informs them about the tectonic shifts in society, and at best changes deep seated notions.

Public perceptions of gun ownership, healthcare, education, equal rights, and our relationship to the world are being debated because the minds of the people are changing. And contrary to what even the history books say, it was not the federal government and federal troops that desegregated the schools, it was We the People. The shibboleth of these times, our times, are the smart phone, social media accounts, and the networks connected by these. Are you in?

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Installing Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) to Virtual Box

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I have a great love of Virtual Box, the free virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems on top of a host operating system -in my case OS X Mountain Lion on a souped up Mac Mini from 2010 -RAM has been maxed to 8GB and the hard drive replaced from a pokey 160GB spinning at 5000 rpm to 750GB spinning at 7200 rpm. The only problem is since Snow Leopard was phased out to Lion, Rosetta -a feature of Snow Leopard, was dropped.

Rosetta was a critical piece of Apple’s migration from PowerPC chips to Intel chips, allowing for PowerPC programs to run on Intel based Macs. When Lion was introduced, Rosetta was killed off, and my favorite game from 1994, Spaceward Ho, was killed off with it. Spaceward Ho has been laying dormant awaiting a iOS upgrade but for some reason, Joe at Delta Tao has been sitting on it.

After putting it off for a while, I decided to give running Snow Leopard 10.6.0 out of the box without updates (to prevent killing Rosetta) a try. Here is a snapshot of it loading successfully -it required a little bit of tweaking and appears to be loading well!

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Simple>Complex

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Pictured above are the Blackberry Bold 9930 and the iPhone 4. They demonstrate two divergent approaches to design. The Blackberry has a full QWERTY keyboard and a few more buttons. The iPhone has famously the single button up front, a power, and volume rocker switch. There are people who swear by the keyboard and for them the Blackberry will always be king. Truth be told, there is an appeal to having a physical keyboard for typing out longer pieces, but all of this is trumped by the convenience of a single large screen. There is a principle laid out in The Innovator’s Dilemma (link) regarding disruptive technologies that is at play here.

The Blackberry represents the sustaining technology of an established company, RIM which has been putting out keyboarded email communicators since the days of beepers and the Clinton administration. It offers a load of features and the apparent love of corporate IT with its locked down security features. The iPhone and other copycat Android phones are the disruptive technology that paradoxically offers less features, an apparently less accurate virtual keyboard, and the ire of corporate IT and geeks in general for missing lots of buttons, but offers utility in its screen, simple interface, and applications which can turn the iPhone into an infinite variety of gadgets. With evolution of the virtual keyboard, and increasingly higher resolution screens, and soon to be introduced bigger screen, and an app store with over half a million apps, the iPhone is eating the Blackberry’s lunch.

This is played out again and again and the established companies invested in their sustaining technologies get rolled over by startups with disruptive technologies that initially offered less or inferior specifications but offered utility with simplification. In vascular surgery, this happened with endovascular technology which compared to classic open vascular surgery appears to offer inferior results on some measures, but offers the utility, particularly to patients, of less invasiveness, fewer dire complications, faster recoveries, and ability to reintervene with acceptable consequences.

The Blackberry Bold 9930 is likely the last of its proud kind –highly evolved, beautifully manufactured, but frankly crippled by trying to be more than it should be by adding touch features to its core product –keyboarded email and text. I was told that IT will be swapping all of these out for iPhone 5 in October.

Apple isn’t sitting on its hands either. It is disrupting itself with its change of screen size and aspect ratio, with its change from a 30 pin connector to a 9 pin connector, and its introduction of Siri. Siri, while initially viewed with enthusiasm, is being panned for often hilarious inaccuracies which ironically mirror the gaffs of its ancestor the Newton in handwriting recognition, but it is classic disruption. It offers the simplicity of NO KEYBOARD, and the promise of conversing with your technology in meaningful ways.

Which leads me to my last point in that in a shifting landscape, you have to be willing to adapt or face the fate of the wooly mammoth, the floppy disk, and even the Blackberry.

Addendum: August 15th -I’ve been using this for two days straight. The battery lasts nicely all day -a reflection of RIM’s parsimony with regard to push email, I think. Dropbox and Evernote apps work okay, but the small screen, as sharp as a tack, is still too small and landscape oriented to be useful. While I don’t mind reading at 5point font or less, and am impressed that the display is nearly Retina-display level pixel density, the lack of space is problematic. Also, no obvious way to number lock the keyboard, but the keyboard does contextually switch to a num lock state, I think. The limitation of the OS to 192mB of total application memory is painful to even think about in this day and age. I don’t think RIM has the time to get this right after wasting so much time getting it wrong.

 

Addendum: I do have to remark that the screen on the 9930 is amazingly bright and visible in bright daylight and at all angles. The newest downer of the day is when you update or install an app -you are asked to restart which can take upwards of 2 minutes.

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Turn your iPhone into a microscope

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The image above, the all seeing eye from the US Dollar bill was taken with the iPhone, although any camera phone will work. By placing a drop of water on the lens and carefully flipping it, you create a macro lens on the cheap. With better lighting and a steadier hand, a much better shot could be had.

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This is not original, something I came across on the web.

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The HTC Flyer -Review (a Kindle Fire alternative) -updated with Honeycomb!

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Jan 24- okay Hulu works but Netflix does not (but I did get update last night so don’t judge yet). The annoying thing is I have shortcuts to three apps -medscape, epocrates, and dolphin browser, whose icons revert to a generic android app icon. This is a small but really annoying bug affecting just those apps.

Battery life seems better, but not hard numbers. Amazon runs fine for video over Flash but the tablet gets hot. Will try the updated Netflix app and will report.

ADDENDUM 1-4-2012 –

HTC has sent an over the air update of the Flyer to full Android 3.2 Honeycomb. Visually it’s great and appears to be working without a hitch. The only complaint that I have so far is that Hulu is broken (as of 1-18-2012 -Hulu now works fine but netflix still does not), and Netflix app runs with significant asynchrony between the sound and video. I haven’t had a chance to try Netflix via Flash, but other Flash runs well.

Will update as I use it more, but the great thing is that HTC actually supports their device beyond sale! That is a surprise for me.

Addendum 1-5-2012 –

I will be frank -I was dubious of any great improvement with Honeycomb, but I like it. It is Honeycomb 3.2, which is far more evolved and stable than Honeycomb 3.0 or 3.1 pushed by Motorola when they prematurely released the Xoom to disaster during the holidays of 2010. It is as stable as the Gingerbread 2.3 was (and will be when you buy the Flyer). I keep hearing differing reports about the appeal of Ice Cream Sandwich, and I can assure you, 4.0 and 4.1 will be the beta for 4.2 which will be about late 2012 or early 2013. For most people, that means buying phones that occasionally (or frequently) crash and waiting for the small chance that their manufacturer will update it. Don’t hold your breath if you purchase Motorola. I don’t have any experience with Samsung, but the business model just does not support upgrading the operating system for phones and tablets that have already sold because the manufacturers have no skin in the App Market game. The only exceptions are Amazon and Apple. Google will eventually realize with increased pressure from Windows and the churn out from Android to iOS that it really has to go to a OS support model where they dictate upgrades. The other option, which HTC appears to have opened their phones up to, is the official yet unsupported and warranty killing jailbreak. Rooting your phone or tablet will give you access to the great open source community – I enjoy the XDA developers forums because I like hacking old hardware.

That is the final point -in this era, THERE IS NO OLD HARDWARE, only unsupported software. Every manufacturer aside from Apple has no incentive to upgrade their software because they don’t own it. Apple will to make sure the Apps sell and their devices keep their intrinsic value.

I just upgraded a Compaq Presario V2000 with the latest Ubuntu and with another 2GB RAM, it runs Chrome FAST. This is a 6 year old laptop! If you stuck with HP’s software, you would be stuck at Windows XP SP2 with no upgrade path as they have abandoned support of their 64bit Athlon processored laptops. While I understand why they do it, it breaks my heart to think about all the computers that end up in landfills just because the software is no longer supported.

HTC Flyer with Honeycomb is a tasty treat. It hasn’t crashed yet in over 2 days of continuous use. I am disappointed with the lack of Hulu, and the curious asynchrony of video and sound with Netflix is annoying, but it is trumped by the new tablet level utility of Honeycomb. The functional notifications scheme is worth it alone to upgrade -you can now cancel out notifications rather than launch every facebook update and app update to clear the notice out.

Addendum 1-8-2012

I created this doodle with Sketch by Autodesk using the stylus. The stylus works throughout the tablet and not just in the context of a screen capture or Evernote entry. This is a big deal because I’ve always hated the meat stylus associated with the iPad for painting. This is very very cool.

Original Post from Summer, 2011

After leaving my iPad 2 in the hospital for the 3rd time -and tracking it down and having it returned -there are great benefits to living and working in Iowa, I decided to look into the 7 inch tablets. Apple famously does not make or plan to make a 7 inch tablet. That is unfortunate because for physicians, the 7 inch tablet is the perfect balance between screen size -big enough to show patients and families pictures, and portability. The 7 inch tablet fits the doctor’s white coat pocket.

I purchased mine, a 16gB Wifi unit, from Best Buy -$499, along with the pen accessory -$80. The inclusion of a pen accessory is a decidedly retro move, but the way it is implemented, at once brilliant and half baked -more on this later. The Flyer is a little more tall than the iPad 2 is wide. The screen, made of Gorilla glass, is bright and easy to view from multiple angles. It comes in a white box, beautifully packaged inside with white wires -a USB cable and a dedicated charger. Although it uses a proprietary dongle, it will take a micro USB connector, and I recharged it on my Kindle’s USB cable last night. The Flyer is a 7inch homage to the iPad and Apple’s design. It is iPad like in every way. It is sturdy and thin. Battery life is outstanding -there are reports of 12 hours. I went all day on the device and it still had half a charge. The decision to go with a fast single processor was wise, as adding a dual core chip would have resulted in larger battery needs.

It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread -the phone OS, and not 3.1 Honeycomb -the tablet OS, and that suits me fine. I was tortured by Android 2.1 on the Verizon Droid 2 until iPhone on Verizon came out. The combination of middling hardware and deployment of what was basically a beta level OS made the Droid 2 torture to use. That said, Flyer runs Android 2.3.3 which is much more evolved than Honeycomb -the Tablet OS. Running on a fast single processor, the Flyer really does fly, and is stable. Much more stable than Honeycomb, based on my perusal of the tablet display at Best Buy (a showcase of how NOT to sell stuff) where I got the Galaxy tab to stall on a Flash page, the Xoom to freeze by swiping too fast, and never got the HP’s tablet to get out of its sales screen. In 4 straight days of heavy use, Flyer has yet to crash, freeze, stutter or otherwise misbehave. I will know more after a month, because the Droid 2 had the problem of gumming up its works unless you actively cleaned up the junk every few days (including hard resets every few weeks).

The OS is stock, enhanced by HTC’s Sense UI. Of all the manufacturer add ons, HTC’s Sense works the best in my experience. Motorola’s support people suggested I turn off their custom interface (called Motoblur) to make their device work! HTC’s widgets and apps work well and are beautiful to look at. While the phone based software does cause small text, in the readers -the Kindle app, the Google Books app, and others, the text is nicely resizable. Flash support is there. I am Flash agnostic, but it is convenient for running sites that are Flash heavy like ESPN and Golf Channel. Flash does appear to slow down the web pages, and reportedly will shorten battery life.

It works well with my workflow -my scheduling and email are done through an Exchange server and everything just works. Citrix runs well and the hospital side software including the labs and PACS shows up fine. Our EMR should work, but I have had trouble getting it to work. Notably, my MobileMe email won’t sent email, and I downloaded the open source K-9 email client and now it runs fine. Amazon app store runs great. I am hopeful that Amazon will release its Kindle media software in conjunction with its own tablet, allow the full Amazon experience on all Android hardware. Most of my iPad apps have their Android equivalent. Notably missing are Hulu and Netflix players, but Amazon should make up for it.

This is a great device, and will stay in my pocket for a while.

7-28-2011
This device is glued to me. While I love my iPad, its nonpocketability relegated it to my bag along with the stethoscope and macbook air -coincidentally all three now get used about once a day. It really hasn’t frozen or crashed, and goes all day without hitting empty. If I were Apple, I would rethink the idea of a 7 inch tablet.

And speaking of sasquatch and unicorns, I would pay full price for a keyboarded iPhone.

July 31, 2011
Just got this faux leather cover from an Amazon hosted merchant. It copies the iPad 2 cover in having the tri-fold cover that acts as a stand, and a magnetic clasp. It has a two tone theme that makes it look like one of those leather Piel Frama cases. The case also copies the iPad 1 case in that the Flyer sits in a pocket with a leather flap that tucks in around it. There are cutouts for all the camera and controls and speakers.

Using this, it really is a perfect portal to Evernote. It also is a great reader, and is a portent of how the color Kindle tablet will look. The screen is near retina scale with beautifully saturated colors.

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August 21, 2011
Just had a thought. Amazon will release its tablet into this 7 inch tablet space and not directly confront Apple, all the while updating its Kindle App to include media -music and video and make it universally available. It fills in all the gaps that Apple left in its current offerings. How awesome would that be.

Also, after a month of use, I find Flyer to be stable and quick. This was a pleasant surprise because my first experience with Android was with the Motorola Droid 2 which was a textbook case of why Android would not win. Flyer is the textbook case of why Android could win over iOS. It marries the OS to the hardware perfectly like a well blended wine. The 12 hours plus of battery life could only be achieved by avoiding dual core processing, but speed was maintained by over clocking an already speedy single core processor. By using Gingerbread (2.3.3), it accesses many more apps than by going with Honeycomb (3.1). Gingerbread is more evolved than Honeycomb, and it shows in the stability of Flyer compared to my Droid 2 which ran 2.1. While Droid 2 got slower with use, Flyer has maintained its speed without the need for task k

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illers which I consider to be an egregious hack that highlights the flaws of the underlying software. I added a 10x 32gigabyte miniSD card for loading movies that I burned from DVD -a luxury, but definitely not a need as the device was working fine.

The cloud combined with fast network access trumps the need for large storage capacity. Rhapsody, which I have used for a while, and Pandora, fulfills any music needs.

But I’m waiting for Amazon!

August 31, 2011

I have gone more than a month and have not had to hard reset this device. This is amazing because I went through two Droid 2’s -replacing and hard resets as recommended by Motorola support failed to correct the increasing instability of that device that occurred with continued internet access and use of contacts and scheduling -basic functions! Writing a person’s contact into the outgoing address field instantly brings up a list winnowed from my contacts list of over 2000 people. Only iOS and Palm devices did this consistently well in my experience. My friends who own other non-HTC smartphones relay similar difficulties -I think this has to do with Android 2.1. I have to comment on this fact: that carriers and maybe some manufacturers seem to avoid updates of their smartphone OS’s simply for the desire on their part to have customers buy new devices rather than update. I even see this with my iPhone where Verizon mysteriously does not have iOS 4.3.x for its iPhone which would allow cloud access of prior purchased iTunes tracks among other upgrades. Android’s problems have less to do with bad programming than to do with Google’s ability to herd cats.

Flyer next to its analog ancestor

Mission Critical -this is a term I use personally to describe the need for a device to function perfectly. While no gadget can reach this standard, medical devices, space satellites, and Mars Rovers have a need for their operating systems to be bulletproof. Psion’s EPOC OS, was in my mind, written with mission criticality. On my 1998 Psion Series 5, I could have over ten open programs without a freeze or a crash. The monitors in the ICU all boot up and run without fail -mission critical. Flyer is beginning to edge into that space of mission critical in my mind -I have yet to perform any administering to memory, any supplication to the support desk, nor any return to factory settings after a month of nearly daily use in my hands. Mission Critical!

Update: 11-11-2011
I felt the need to make a comment about Flyer not that Kindle Fire is out. If I didn’t have the Flyer, I would probably get the Fire, but now that I have it, I am very pleased overall. It gets Hulu and Netflix streams via apps, and Amazon Prime Videos are available via Flash on the Browser. I recently picked up a leftover WebOS tablet bluetooth keyboard which is basically a black, plastic, nearly flawless copy of the Apple Wireless keyboard for the clearance price of $22, and pairing with the Fire, it behaves admirably as a a text input device.

That is the other thing -Evernote access is built into the DNA of the Fire. When you scribble a note on the note app, it goes to the Evernote servers, and I think get processed so they can be searched. I know pictures of text that I take certainly become searchable on Evernote. This means that Flyer is a reasonable stand-in for the spiral bound notebook.

The Kindle app works great on the Flyer. While I prefer to read on the physical Kindle e-reader which is easier on my eyes, in a pinch, the Flyer is a fine e-Reader. Zinio, on which I have a MacUser and Field and Stream subscriptions works well on Flyer (as it does on my iPad2).

The current price of Flyer is 299 at Best Buy, which annoys me because I paid the early adopter price. I think it is worth thinking about the $100 price differential when considering Fire versus Flyer. I personally like the flexibility of being outside Amazon’s cage and the killer app for this device is the Evernote capabilities. The average potential consumer of Amazon based media will be fine with Fire, but the more computer savvy will be looking to root Fire and open up the Android capabilities. I’m perfectly happy with my Flyer.

HTC recently sent an OTA (over the air) update of the OS. It’s not Honeycomb, but rather an update of Gingerbread which again works perfectly fine for a 7 inch tablet. I hear that the dual core tablets running Honeycomb are susceptible to lag -there is absolutely no lag on this machine and I only rarely get a reboot due to an instability in Sense -at the rate of once every two to three weeks. I used to reboot my Motorola Droid2 every day!

BTW, I typed this whole update with the keyboard on the WordPress app.

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Paper Camera brings some fun to Android

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The picture above is processed from an iPhone picture of the 9th hole at Wakonda Club seen from the driving range. It was processed using an Android app called Paper Camera (available on Android Market). It brings a bit of iPhon-ish fun to Android. It has a packet of desktop quality photo filters that it can run live on your view screen (there is a delay between shutter and access, so kids will not look as they were framed).

The filters are not all black and white, but of the initial shots I’ve taken, the black and white ones have come out the best. For a $1.99 , it turns my Android tablet into a very fun camera, something usually reserved for iPhone.

The camera is an unsung feature of smart phones that iOS has basically covered in terms of quality, convenience, and access with its wonderful pictures and Photostream. But Google is competing with built-in Picasa exporting from its Gallery app. Unfortunately Gallery is a mess as it offers up not just your pictures but also every jpeg available in the drives including those associated with icons and cached web pages. It’s for geeks, but it’s also getting better and more iOS-ish every day.

 

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The Unconnected

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I recently saw advertisement for a 16gB flash drive for $8 and I smiled as I thought about how cheap memory had gotten compared to twelve years ago when I bought a 32mB flash drive for $200. It is a nice benefit of Moore’s law, but it also brought a slight shudder as I thought about its provenance. Several years ago, there was a rash of malware transmitted from flash memory embedded in digital picture frames. It was a ham-handed attempt at infecting computers world wide, but it made me concerned that most of our technology comes from China. It also gave me the idea of maintaining an unconnected computer, one that requires no internet connection and would serve as a repository of important information and private thoughts.

The Chinese understand this issue as a national security one, and recently announced the creation of its first homegrown supercomputer. Less noticed was the fact that all the processors were custom silicon using custom instruction sets -without knowledge of these instructions, it would be devilishly hard to create programs to enter, monitor, and transmit information. It is the ultimate in unconnected computer and its appearance should be as dismaying as finding a black monolith pulsating with data in the Serengeti. With custom silicon and architecture and an unknown operating system -likely a custom written and compiled Unix, this computer stands apart.

My son’s favorite show is Star Wars Clone Wars. The loyal and brave clones in this series are doomed because ultimately, they are designed to betray their Jedi masters when they are most vulnerable. The Sith Lord enacts Order 66, which causes the Clones to turn on their Jedi leaders. It makes me wonder, how much of the processing power in government and military hardware is sourced from China, and if our insistence on transparency, openness, and interconnectedness is an exposed Achilles heel. Is my iPhone really mine, or does it serve several competing masters? Will our next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 be all the electricity and cell service turning off with planes and satellites crashing and my Facebook telling me to go quickly to the place where the planes and satellites will be crashing?

The only way to really know your computer is secure is to make your own computer using chips and circuitry of known provenance. For example, if you created a parallel array of G4 processors made in California with graphics processors made in California, and running an OS that you can inspect line by line and compile yourself, you might be safe. Going further, you can go completely off the grid and eschew technology and society, keeping your own counsel and recording your thoughts in Moleskine notebooks with pencils stolen from golf courses.

Plausible? Of course not. What China has done is create the equivalent structure of a walled city in its completely home-brewed computer. It sends a message and how you interpret it is up to you.

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Apple M-Series

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Apple needs to create a premium product line. BMW has their M series. McDonalds gives you the option to supersize their fries. You can now pay an extra 20 bucks to get seated in the exit aisle on your next flight. So why can’t we have serious upgrade options.

I know that when you buy a Mac, you can upgrade the processors and RAM, tweak the screen, and add software, but what I really want is the stuff out of Apple’s skunk works, some imbalance, a heaping load of cognitive dissonance. You see, the problem I’m having with Apple right now is that it is headed towards becoming General Computers.

Why can’t we have a Macbook Pro Premium with the DVD drive slipped out and the space filled with more battery, maxed out i7 processor, and 16 gigs of RAM with a retina display screen? In matte black. Why can’t we have a limited edition micro-Macbook Air suitable for pocketing with a 7 inch letterbox screen and small but full keyboard (like Psion’s), 24 hour battery life, and an SD card slot. Why can’t we have a limited edition iPod Touch with a 5 inch retina display and impossible thinness? How about an iPod nano phone with a separate, flawless bluetooth headset, that also functions as a wi-fi hotspot for all your iGadgets.

There is a market for these items, in much the same way that there is a market for Ferrari’s and personal submarines. When the overweight lady with crazy hair and too many shopping bag carry ons is poking around on an iPad -it’s not so fun.

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Golfplan -in app upgrade available tomorrow

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20110420-144803.jpgPress release for Golfplan -will have indoor golf drills to hone your game from the inimitable and formidable Mr. Paul Azinger.

SHOTZOOM AND GOLF PRO PAUL AZINGER HELP GOLFERS ACE THEIR GAME

Golfplan with Paul Azinger in-app purchase includes 28 new indoor instructional videos to help amateurs practice their game at home or in the office; Integrates with Golfshot, the world’s largest and most active online golf community

Phoenix, Ariz. – April 21, 2011 – Shotzoom® (www.shotzoom.com), the leader in active lifestyle mobile applications, and Paul Azinger, PGA Pro and victorious Ryder Cup Captain, today announced an in-app purchase to Golfplan with Paul Azinger, the best-selling golf instructional app in the world. Available for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, the updated app now includes 28 new instructional videos by Azinger to help amateur golfers practice at home or in the office. G

olfplan integrates with the world’s largest active golf community, Golfshot.com, where members share, compare and chart their golf game statistics, generate customized training plans and receive detailed insight into their performance over time.

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“I’ve spent thirty years touring and most golfers don’t have a good caddie, statistical charting and expert coaching,” said Azinger. “Golfplan, along with stats kept from Golfshot GPS, offers personalized tips, coaching and drills golfers need to take their game to the next level. And with this update, not getting to the course isn’t an excuse to not practice – rain or shine, anyone can practice with a purpose from their home or office with this app.”

Amongst the 28 new tutorial videos, Azinger demonstrates proper swing path, ways to create lag and proper weight transfer drills. Based on the user’s handicap and Golfshot statistics, Golfplan provides personalized instruction plans to help every golfer improve their game – from shaving strokes off their short game to adding a few extra yards to their tee shot.

“Our apps provide instruction as well as performance statistics that let members track their progress over time and compare results with others,” said Craig Prichard, president of Shotzoom. “The integration with our Golfshot community brings members into a network of highly engaged users with similar interests.”

Features of Golfplan with Paul Azinger include:

– Instructional videos for categories including driving, greens in regulation, short game, bunkers and putting
– Statistics that identify strengths and weaknesses
– Ability to see and track progress over time
– Sharing and feedback tools tied to community members
– Exclusive instruction from Paul Azinger

Golfplan with Paul Azinger integrates with Shotzoom’s Golfshot community, the world’s largest active golf community with more than a half-million active members. Through Golfshot’s suite of products, members have the ability to score and store rounds, gain insight into their game performance, track improvement, share their statistics and compare with community members. Members have played over 50 million holes of golf on 37,000 courses in 152 countries in the 19 months since Golfshot: Golf GPS launched.

Golfplan with Paul Azinger is available for $0.99 in the App Store (www.itunes.com/appstore) for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The in-app purchase that includes tips and drills for the home and office is available for $1.99.

About Shotzoom
Shotzoom, LLC creates market leading mobile experiences that empower active lifestyles and enhance the fun of sports and fitness. Its mobile apps integrate with its online participation platform, where people with active lifestyles can track their performance over time, share with friends and interact with members who have similar interests. Shotzoom’s apps include the newly released Tiger Woods: My Swing, the best-selling and top grossing golf GPS app worldwide, Golfshot: Golf GPS, the best-selling golf instructional app worldwide, Golfplan with Paul Azinger, and the most downloaded universal instructional baseball app, Baseball Gameplan with Jason Giambi.