Screw Avatar, 3D Gaming is What Will Get You to Buy a New TV

I've been skeptical of the big push for 3D in TVs and movies. But I just played the first 45 minutes or so of Metro 2033 on a top-of-the-line 3D-enabled gaming rig and, well, wow.

Playing games in 3D right now requires a lot of work on your part, or at least a lot of money. An Nvidia rep told me that you could get a decent 3d-capable tower for $800-$1,000, but it was telling that the setup they had me playing on at the press preview for the game had a to-be-announced Nvidia GPU inside a 3.5-foot-tall tower with a plexiglass side to show off the water cooling inside. Sure, it'll work with a slower computer, but if you want a great experience, expect to pay top dollar.

That's because 3D gaming will basically require a doubled framerate to get video as smooth as we're used to with 2D games, as it's processing a frame for each eye instead of one for both.

But that's fine. Unless you're a hardcore PC gamer or a serious early adopter, I wouldn't suggest running out and dropping $4,000 on a tower. What was exciting about this was that it felt like a glimpse into the near future.

PCs, after all, aren't where the majority of players get their gaming done. They play consoles. The PS3 is getting 3D capabilities this summer through a couple of firmware upgrades; the same is coming to the Xbox 360 sometime soon. In any case, even when the PS3 and Xbox 360 get 3D support you'll need a new 3D HDTV that supports HDMI 1.4 to run em, so it won't suddenly make 3D gaming mainstream.

And since 3D requires a doubled framerate, you shouldn't expect to be able to play the current crop of console games in 3D even when the PS3 gets that ability, because most of them are already pushing the console hard to hit its framerate as-is. Doubling that will not work out very well.

Post-Apocalyptic Moscow in Three Dimensions

The graphics of Metro 2033 are very good, to be sure, but they're nothing better than any other major release from the past year. What made the experience great was the 3D. It was amazing how much was added to the feel of the game.

Leaving an underground tunnel into a post-apocalyptic Moscow at night, my vision was filled with floating specs of snow and dust in some lights. But closer to me were some cracks in my gas mask, which represented damage to my character. In the middle distance were some other characters and piles of rubble. Off in the distance was a huge tower.

Each level of depth stood out completely and made the screen feel like a window. Aiming was easier, as I could immediately tell just how far off an enemy was, even when I hadn't seen it before and was unsure of its scale.

Back underground in the subway tunnels that make up 70% of the game, everything was much closer. But I could pass a cracked-open doorway and peer inside at the people sitting there, and it felt like I was really looking into someone's private room.

When You'll Be Able to Get In on the Fun

In short, 3D makes games feel more real than ever before. And this is just the beginning. With Natal, Microsoft will be able to do head tracking, which when combined with 3D really looks like the future of gaming to me. A next-gen Microsoft console with Natal and 3D built-in, complete with the guts to make 3D run smoothly, will completely change the way we play games.

And while 3D tech will take a bit of time to become affordable, if you really want to experience it now, you can. Games today are created in 3D already, so it's just a matter of processing to turn those 3D spaces into something you can see with glasses. Unreal just announced its Unreal Engine will be able to go 3D with the flip of a switch, and it powers loads of popular games. A gaming rig with a good enough graphics card hooked up to a 120Hz monitor can run many games in 3D right now, but Nvidia's 3DTV Play, just announced today, will let you hook up a gaming PC to a 3D HDTV in your living room. So if you've got the motivation and the money, you've got the ability to enjoy 3D gaming on the couch right now.

Really, this isn't going to hit the mainstream until consoles are pushing it. And that probably won't be for a couple of years, at least for console AAA titles, which is a bummer.

But if you're an early adopter looking to buy a first-gen 3D HDTV and Blu-ray player, you'd be crazy to not at least think about grabbing a gaming PC that can handle 3D games. Because trust me, you'll use that a lot more often than you'll watch Avatar.

Jesus Christ Is the King of the App Store

We know that ebooks represent the most numerous application type in the Apple Store, even topping videogames. The reason: There are lots of duplicate apps of the same book, and one Very Big Book is King of the Dupes.

The Holy Bible has more than a thousand applications at the App Store. We counted up to 1,001, but it was too boring to keep on going. Of those copies, not all were free. Some of the most popular works also have multiple copies, some are free, some are paid. Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular, with 48 copies, seven of them available for a few rupees. Dracula has 34, five being paid copies for whatever reason. And so on.

But the Bible beats all of them down by a wide margin. It's the king of all the duplicated books at the store. In fact, given the intense Apple's censorship, it's probably the absolute king of all the App Store application genres. The Gideons are happy. Hope you are happy too, Phil.

T-Mobile HSPA+ Speed Test: 3G Gets Pumped Up

Streaming HD video. Uploading gigantic files. Surfing the web comfortably. These aren't things you'd normally expect on 3G. But T-Mobile's beefed up HSPA+ network, which I tested recently in Philadelphia, handled all these tasks beautifully. At the same time.

While the other carriers are looking past 3G to 4G technologies—Sprint with its WiMax already up and running, and AT&T and Verizon banking on LTE—T-Mobile is the one doing the most to upgrade the 3G network it already has in place. Overhauling their existing HSPA 3G network to HSPA+ promises theoretical speeds of 21Mbps—three times faster than the 3G we know and don't quite love.

In my testing throughout Philadelphia, the first city to get the upgrade, I found that I was routinely getting triple the speeds we expect from 3G nationally—take a look at our nationwide 3G megatest if you need a refresher—with the HSPA+ network averaging in the high 3Mbps range and peaking at 7.81Mbps in one location.

The 3x jump makes a big difference. Consistently averaging download speeds in the high 3Mbps range might not seem like a terrific improvement, but in practice it puts the experience a lot closer to the broadband you take for granted at home than the crippled access you're often stuck with on 3G. And I really tried to push the HSPA+ network by using the internet the way I would at home, at my most extreme. At one point, I was uploading a several-hundred megabyte file to FTP briskly (around 150KB/sec), downloading a torrent even more briskly (~350KB/sec), and still loading web pages quickly and all at once, instead of piece by frustrating piece. At the end of the day, when I was done with all my testing and just catching up with the stuff I follow on the internet, I didn't immediately ditch the 3G and jump back on Wi-Fi. I didn't feel the need to.

Philadelphia is the first city to get pumped up to HSPA+, though T-Mobile is aiming for coverage in major cities across the nation by the end of the year. Since it's not a new network, just an expansion of their current one, many customers who live in areas with HSPA+ coverage will see improvements in speed with the gear they're using right now. Anything that's HSPA 7.2 compatible—that includes HTC HD2, myTouch, Moto CLIQ, Moto CLIQ XT, Samsung Behold II, HTC Touch Pro 2, Dash 3G—will notice snappier speeds. But to really see things crank, you'll need a dedicated HSPA+ device, and T-Mobile's first is the webConnect Rocket USB stick. I tried out the Rocket, which works with Mac and PC, all over Philly, and was impressed with the results.

I tried the same tests we used in our nationwide 3G test: several runs of speedtest.net, several timed page loads of the Wikimedia Commons Hubble page,and several timed loads of a big Hubble image itself.

Here's where I went. Some of the places were suggested by T-Mobile as optimal testing spots—and cheating or not, I followed them in search of the biggest bandwidth readings. But even when I was off on my own, I found that my speeds rarely dipped to levels currently attainable by standard 3G, and were often, as you can see, much much faster, including latency under 100ms at almost every location.

View Philly HSPA+ Testing in a larger map

The webConnect Rocket USB stick is on sale now and can be purchased for $99 with a 2-year contract or $199 without one. With the contract, you get T-Mobile's EvenMore Data Plan, which will run you $59.99/mo for 5GB data or $29.99/mo for 200MB data, and without it the Rocket gets the EvenMore Data Plus Plan, costing $49.99/mo for 5GB and $19.99 a month for 200MB. If you pay full price up front, the stick pays for itself in 10 months, which might be a good deal, as it's just about how long HSPA+ will enjoy its mobile broadband crown until AT&T and Verizon start deploying LTE in 2011.

That 5GB data cap, however, could be a problem. With the 3G speeds we're used to just surfing the web can be a chore. Downloading big files or watching HD video were usually out of the question. But since the HSPA+ feels like your broadband at home, it's easy to treat it that way, and I can imagine users racking up 5GB dangerously quickly. By my back of the napkin calculations, at the speeds I saw, it'd only take about 4 hours of continuously downloading files to eat up your month's allowance. I forsee customers clamoring for beefed up plans to match T-Mobile's beefed up network.

T-Mobile says they are planning "broad national deployment" for HSPA+ by the end of 2010 and will be naming specific cities at the CTIA conference starting next week. How aggressively they roll out the upgrades will determine the fate of HSPA+, if it emerges as a worthwhile pre-4G alternative or if it falls to the footnotes of mobile broadband history. But if you have the need for speed and HSPA+ makes its way to your city, it's definitely worth your attention. It's so fast, you might forget it's 3G.