5Words for February 18th, 2009

Late today–I’ve been airborne:

Facebook reverts to old terms.

Intel and Nvidia’s legal tussle.

Folks are dropping cable, apparently.

Tumblr shuts down unkind blogs.

Verizon preps for 4G wireless.

Mozilla: iPhone jailbreaking is OK

Microsoft kills subscription software offering

Text in school, get arrested.

Time to stop using CAPTCHA?

Western Digital’s remotely-accessible drive.

April 5th arrival for Nintendo DSi.

What Just Happened With Hulu and TV.com?

Users of TV.com that may have been using the site to watch programming offered through its joint venture with Hulu — programming from sources such as NBC and News Corp. — got a rude awakening this week.

Attempts at accessing that programming failed with a “Video Unavailable” message. Neither Hulu nor TV.com were responding to requests from the media to comment on the situation, although Paidcontent.org did say TV.com did confirm the end of the partnership.

TV.com is owned by CBS, one of the media providers who declined to become part of the Hulu service. However, in an effort to broaden the content available through the service, TV.com partnered with Hulu to offer that sites content.

Well, that deal lasted two months. For whatever reason, Hulu pulled the plug on TV.com, and rather abruptly too. In any case, it now looks like we’ll see a full-court press by both services in a race for supremacy in the licensed video content space, no?

Verizon Wireless Looks to Launch LTE This Year

Verizon Wireless will likely lead the charge towards LTE, with the company already testing the technology in the Minneapolis, Columbus, Ohio and Northern New Jersey. This would put it roughly a year ahead of its closest competitor — AT&T — which anticipates launching LTE service in 2011.

Trials will expand throughout the country later this year, and if all goes well, nationwide rollout would begin in 2010 in about 25 to 30 markets. The completion of the rollout is expected in 2015, according to chief technology officer Dick Lynch.

LTE promises super-fast speeds of up to 60MBps, although Verizon cautions that was in field trials and not in real life situations. The technology uses the 700MHz spectrum acquired in an FCC auction last year.

This is the same spectrum being used by analog television signals, so obviously a pushback in the transition to digital is obviously affecting Verizon’s plans (now you see why they were against it!).

If you want to take a look at Lynch’s PowerPoint presentation at 3GSM, Verizon has posted it online.

Finally, Another Android Phone

Part of the big news from day one at Mobile World Congress was that there was no big news involving Google’s Android mobile operating system: None of the scads of phones that made their debut ran it. On day two…Android news! Maybe not earth-shattering Android news, but significant enough: HTC, the company that made the first Android phone, T-Mobile’s G1, launched its second one, the Magic.

The Magic looks like a slimmer, sexier cousin of the G1: The latter phone tucks a slide-out physical keyboard under its touchscreen, but the Magic is all-touch. Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo tried one today and was mostly impressed, although he had his issues with the Magic’s on-screen keyboard.

The Magic, like most new phones at Mobile World Congress, will arrive in Europe first, sometime this spring: Vodafone will sell it in the UK, Spain, Germany, and France, and it’ll also be available in Italy. No word on availability in the U.S., although you’d think T-Mobile might want to add it to the lineup.

The phone’s announcement eliminates the possibility of an Androidless Mobile World Congress, but I think the lack of much tangible advancement for the platform is still one of the show’s major stories. Multiple manufacturers have talked about unveiling Android handsets, but only HTC has managed to pull it off. The whole notion behind the OS is that it’s open and customizable and therefore well-suited to powering a variety of types of devices. We know what HTC thinks an Android phone should look like, and the Magic looks to be precisely what you’d guess a no-keyboard HTC Android model would be. I’m hoping we’ll hear from other quarters soon…

Three Ways to Protect and Share Your Stuff

[An introductory note from Harry: Our visits from guest Digital Media Central bloggers continue. This week we're happy to host David Ponce, owner and managing editor of popular gadget blog OhGizmo. Welcome, David!]

It’s not that I want to sound like I’m repeating things that have been said endlessly over the last decade or so, but sometimes there’s no avoiding it. It’s pretty amazing to me just how radically the production, storage, and sharing of documents has changed since, say, grandma’s time. I mean, really, think about it. My own mom, only one generation back, still has these heavy stacks of cardboard albums with sticky pages, cellulose acetate covers, and fading Polaroids. My dad has trunkloads of Super 8 films in condition I can’t even imagine. I still own a pretty impressive collection of cassette tapes. Yet none of these materials is getting any sort of attention any longer simply because they haven’t crossed the digital divide.

We just live in a completely different world now, with different rules. I think it’s important to learn a new way of storing and protecting the new digital documents. While it might have been perfectly fine for my mom to keep her photo albums on a shelf above her racks of mothballed clothes, that won’t fly these days. It’s no longer necessary for grandma and grandpa to fly over from Miami to watch a grainy video of their grandchild splatter around in a pool. Or watch slides of their children’s Grand Canyon vacation projected on a white wall. They can stay at home and look at everything on their computer, easy as pie.

So, if we’re ditching the cardboard albums and dusty boxes, what are good ways of sharing and (maybe more importantly) protecting all the digital content we produce these days? First thing you need to realize is that hard drives fail. Really, they do. And often. So it’s really not safe for you to keep all your files on your PC drive, and expect them to be around forever. You need to back up. You can do this several ways: get an external hard drive and transfer everything there. Upload pictures to a picture sharing site, like Flickr. Transfer data to an online storage service, like Carbonite. Basically, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

While you’re doing this you’re clearly increasing the safety of your data. But you’re not making it particularly easy to share your files with family and friends. You’re even potentially fragmenting your collection, with files here and there. Another obstacle to sharing is large video files. You can put them on YouTube, but the quality will suffer. Of course there are sites that allow you to send large files, some of which rely on Peer-to-Peer technology (like YouSendIt), and they’re quite effective. But they do have their problems: you have to initiate the transmission, a notification email is sent to your intended recipients and they have to download the files. It works, but it’s not easy to use.

Then you have other more elegant solutions, like home servers and other forms of networked storge. They can become a central hub where all your media is stored, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. There are no limits on the amount you can transfer. They can also back up your files periodically, and since it’s just the one device, you solve the fragmentation issue. But they’re not perfect on they’re own.

If you ask me, I think the best solution is one that tries to get the best of all worlds.

- Use a PC as you normally would, offloading pics and videos and any other documents as usual.

- Use centralized storage to automatically back up your files and make them accessible worldwide.

- Send your files to one trusted offsite storage solution. A home server device is nice, but what happens in a fire?

And that’s it. All your data is redundant and accessible. With a little bit of effort and some discipline, your documents will stand the test of time and look a heck of a lot better than my mom’s 1972 Polaroids.

Red Ring of Death Nightmares Are Over, Says Microsoft

Are the Xbox 360-killing problems that cause the infamous Red Ring of Death gone? And will people who send in their consoles for repairs have to cycle through the process multiple times to get a real fix?

Over at Edge, Kris Graft put those questions to Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg, who said the console’s biggest technical woes have come to pass. “We’ve put the worst behind us on this, but we know there are a few lagging systems, and so we want to take those and make it right,” Greenberg said. Asked about the technical nitty-gritty of hardware updates, Greenberg wouldn’t answer, saying that Microsoft’s attorneys “would not allow me to say that.”

In the summer of 2007, Microsoft fessed up to an “unacceptable number” of defective systems. We’ve heard of failure rates as high as 30 percent — which I’m skeptical of — but the company never provided specifics. In any case, all console owners were given an extended 3-year warranty should any red ring problems arise.

Since then, new Xbox 360s received an upgrade. These so-called “Jasper” models feature a new motherboard and a smaller, cooler-running GPU. This is huge, because ATI’s original graphics card was at risk for overheating, thus warping the motherboard and putting undue stress on solder joints. Greenberg said the improvements that went into the new models also go into repairs.

In stores, different Xbox 360 models aren’t clearly marked on the packaging. If you’re considering a new console, look for “12,1A” where the power information is listed on the back of the box. Greenberg, always restrained when he’s talking about this stuff, told Ars Technica last month that Microsoft obscures that information because it wants customers “to buy with confidence,” he said. “They shouldn’t, you know, get hung up on the internal components of the device.” (Read: We don’t want them to worry that it’ll brick.)

Google Search for Barack Obama Reveals Racial Epithets

A reader tipped us off to the appearance of racial epithets in searches for Barack Obama on Google. When performing a search for our current president, on the first screenful you’ll be greeted with the N-word. Yep, that one.

Apparently someone went into the Wikipedia entry for President Obama at about 11:44pm ET last night, deleting the entire entry to read the epithet three times over. The wording was in such a position that Google’s crawlers picked it up.

The edit was quickly reversed in two minutes. However it apparently was not fast enough for it not to be crawled by Google’s servers. Below is the screenshot. As this is a family site, the front page version has been edited. A uncensored version is posted after the fold.

If anything, this goes to strengthen the argument which seems to be brewing lately over whether Wikipedia should become more stringent over who it lets edit its postings.

Incidents like this are a perfect example of why it should happen. If Wikipedia wants to be a reliable resource, it may be time for the site to start vetting its writers. It’s good that people want to help, but there’s people out there who have nothing better to commit than stupid antics like this.

I have a request for comment out to Google and Wikipedia on the situation, but I’m not expecting much other than a canned response.

Continue reading this story…

D’oh! Prosecution Stumbles Badly in Pirate Bay Trial

I think we all can agree that The Pirate Bay makes much of its living off of piracy. Well, if it wasn’t for the apparent ineptitude of Swedish prosecutors in the trial against the site, we might have that set in stone legally. Not so fast.

According to TorrentFreak, the prosecution’s weak evidence will lead to at least half of the charges against Pirate Bay being dropped. It has been ruled that the prosecution cannot use .torrent files as evidence of TPB’s wrongdoing, as there is no clear correlation between the site and the illicit files.

There is still charges of “assisting and making available” infringing files hanging over the site’s head, but any allegations of actually participating in the act will now need to be withdrawn.

Why is The Pirate Bay getting away with it? It seems that the prosecution built its case around the fact that BitTorrent’s “trackers” (a server that assists in connecting two peers to initiate and continue downloads) were reproducing the files, thus making them liable.

However, in building this evidence, they were not able to show that TPB’s trackers were actually being used. OOPS.

Wounded but still fighting, the record industry insisted the case was still not over, calling the dismissal of those charges a “technicality” and that prosecutors could now focus on the crux of the case, the fact that the site makes available illicitly copied files.

As for The Pirate Bay? Defiant as ever. “EPIC WINNING LOL” commented TPB admin brokep on Twitter this morning.

Sirius XM Avoids Bankruptcy – Barely.

Mel got his way, and kept EchoStar at bay (that unintentionally rhymed). Liberty Media, which owns and operates DirecTV, will invest $530 million in the troubled company in the form of several loans, including $250 million right away. That up front payment will help Sirius XM to pay off the $171.6 million of debt due today.

The rest of the funds would go towards funding the day to day operations of the company. The second phase of the loan would go to pay off debts owed by XM Radio, which has its own set of financial problems.

In return for the much needed infusion of cash, Libery Media would get seats on the board and enough stock to represent a 40% stake in the company. It also means that Karmazin has a much better chance of keeping his job.

“We are pleased to have come to this agreement with Liberty Media, particularly in light of today’s challenging credit markets. Liberty’s investment is an important validation of what SIRIUS XM has already achieved and a vote of confidence in what we will achieve,” he said in a statement announcing the deal.

5Words for February 17th, 2009

Except for phones, pretty quiet:

Facebook: Users control their info.

Pirate Bay escapes some charges.

One charger for every phone.

Nokia puts Skype on phones.

Satellite radio may sidestep bankruptcy.

Card counting’s easier with iPhone.

Toshiba buys Fujitsu drive business.

Canon sues over fake blogger.

Mobile World Congress: Resolution Revolution

I didn’t mention Toshiba’s TG01 in my roundup of Mobile World Congress phone debuts, since Toshiba avoided the rush by announcing the phone a few days early. I got a little hands-on time at Toshiba’s booth today, and while it turned out the prototypes on hand weren’t really ready for prime time–touch input was achingly slow when it worked at all–the phone’s screen resolution made a major impression.

The TG01 is one of several new phones at the show to sport a 480-by-800 display–others include LG’s Arena and HTC’s Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2–which gives it 2.5 times more pixels than the iPhone’s 320-by-480 screen. Toshiba also says it incorporated technology from its Regza flat-screen TVs into the TG01′s screen, and while I don’t know if that’s hype or mundane fact, the results are impressive.

What will more pixels bring to phones? Prettier interfaces, for one thing, since it’ll let typography look crisper at the same font size, for instance. And high-res phones will be able to fit more of a Web page or document on screen at once (although at some point it’ll be debatable if that’s a benefit–if text is too teeny-tiny it’ll cause eyestrain).

I’m not sure if any of the high-res handsets at MWC fully take advantage of the potential of the extra pixels–the iPhone has a slicker interface than the TG01 despite its resolution handicap. But I’m looking forward to what the technology will permit in future phones, and I’m wondering how long it’ll be until there’s an iPhone that matches it. Resolution is one of several ways in which the new phones at the show are leaping past Apple’s phone from a hardware standpoint–while continuing to lag it on the software front. More on that in a future post.

Oh, and when I do get a high-resolution phone it most likely won’t be the TG01: Toshiba doesn’t sell handsets in the U.S., and has no plans to bring this one stateside.

Mobile World Congress: One Day, Sixteen New Phones

Phones. More phones. Phones that look a lot like iPhones, except for the ones that don’t. Phones that may never show up in the good old US of A. Phones that are full of style, and ones that seem to be devoid of discernible personality. That, in short, was my Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where I spent the entire day bopping from press conference to press conference, learning about new handsets from most of the major manufacturers (as well as laptop titan Acer, which announced today that it’s getting into the phone biz).

I wrote about some of the day’s debutantes as I encountered them, but missed others. And while the show is teeming with journalists who are cranking out a surging sea of stories on all the announcements, I’m not sure if anyone’s trying to put as much as possible in one place.

So here’s a stab at a convenient, concise guide to nearly every new phone I encountered as of Monday evening (I left off a couple of far-off models which Acer mentioned only fleetingly and cryptically). Most of these phones have been announced only in GSM models, except for the two HTCs. Nobody revealed anything about American carriers today, although in some cases you might be able to make educated guesses.

The fact that a spec isn’t mentioned doesn’t indicate a phone doesn’t have it–in some cases, the manufacturers provided something less than full information, and I’m not trying to provide all the ones they did mention (all these phones have basic stuff like Bluetooth, and I stopped short of listing info like their dimensions and the media formats they support). If you know more about any of these models than I do, please speak up.

And one last note: Yes, I know that it’s increasingly tough to judge phones by their hardware specs. In the post-iPhone era, it’s the software that gives a handset much of its functionality and character. I didn’t get to touch most of these phones at all today, and certainly didn’t spend enough time with any of them to come to conclusions about the quality of their interfaces. But even today, specs and other basic facts mean something–and after the jump, I’ll give you plenty of ‘em to chew on…

Continue reading this story…

Acclaim’s Music Game Approach Could Please Labels

The massive multiplayer music game RockFree has been in public beta for a while now, and will launch for real in a few weeks. When that happens, players will get a taste of the revenue model that’s built to please record labels more than that of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, VentureBeat’s Evan Van Zelfden reports.

In those console hits, the publishers paid a flat fee to license each song, with Activision paying $20,000 per track. Naturally, the troubled music industry gets irritated when the game franchises then rake in millions of dollars, or billions in the case of Guitar Hero.

Acclaim won’t pay any licensing fees at all. Instead, CEO Howard Marks said his company will hand over 20 percent of the revenue from microtransactions to a song’s master holder and publisher.

The otherwise free-to-play game includes three playlist “slots” that can be filled with selections from an online library or uploaded by users. Players can purchase more slots at $1 a pop, and Marks expects that the average user who chooses to pay will fork over $14 per month for this privilege. Warner Music — whose CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr., called the flat fees for Guitar and Rock Band “paltry” — is in the database for RockFree.

I’m a little skeptical that RockFree will be more lucrative for record labels. At 20 cents for every new track, 100,000 transactions per song are needed to equal what Activision was paying for its Guitar Hero tracks. And the problem with that is, RockFree kind of stinks. Massive multiplayer perks aside, banging out guitar tracks on a computer keyboard doesn’t compare to wielding a fake plastic instrument — which isn’t as cool as playing a real instrument, but that’s another story.

This arrangement will probably work out nicely for the companies involved because it’s happening on a smaller scale. I don’t expect it to shake up how the bigger console franchises are doing business.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Phone News…Er, Make That Windows Phone News

Microsoft’s press conference at Mobile World Congress turned out to feature a bunch of stuff that had already been subject to previews, rumors, and/or leaks: Windows Mobile 6.5, the “My Phone” wireless backup/sync service, and an app store known as the Marketplace.

The company is also announcing that it wants people to call the phones that run its operating system just “Windows Phones,” rather than Windows Mobile ones, even though the OS is still known as Windows Mobile–continuing a long and proud legacy of confusing terminology and pointless name changes for Microsoft mobile products (anyone but me remember oddities such as “Palm-Size PCs“?).

It’s obvious to all that Microsoft lags so far behind Apple when it comes to next-generation phone OSes that it’s not even a race yet; it’s not yet even at the point where what it’s playing is catchup, and it’s going to take awhile to get there. And Windows Mobile 6.5 is, as the name suggests, a half-step towards a competitive modern smartphone OS, and it isn’t shipping until later this year. That said, it doesn’t look bad when judged solely as an upgrade to today’s Windows Mobile. It’s less of a shameless copy of the iPhone than most of what I’ve seen at the show so far, I like the revised home screen (with direct links to appointments, voicemail messages, etc.), and the new Internet Explorer looks like it gives Windows Mobile its first default browser that isn’t pretty darn dreadful. (And Microsoft bragged today that the new IE supports Flash, although I wonder if they meant the dumbed-down version known as Flash Lite–their demo involved a mundane rotating series of photos rather than video or interactivity.)

Windows 6.5′s interface is a somewhat uneasy blend of old-style Windows Mobile elements and more streamlined, touch-driven elements (although it won’t support multi-touch). Microsoft’s marketing message for the OS rests in large part on the notion that you want the familiarity of Windows on a phone, but Windows Mobile is now in an odd no-man’s-land in which it retains some Windows interface aspects that never works very well on a phone (like a menu bar full of tiny icons), but mixes them with stuff that has nothing to do with desktop Windows, thereby making the OS less than utterly familiar.

(Side note: When Apple brought OS X to the iPhone, it redid the interface from scratch to make sense on a tiny screen, and it doesn’t particularly play up the phone operating system’s kinship with its desktop brethren.  It’s the opposite of Microsoft’s strategy, and it seems to work…)

I also wonder whether hardware manufacturers are growing impatient with the state of Windows Mobile: The press conference included guest appearances by representatives of LG and HTC who waxed enthusiastic about version 6.5, but both companies also unveiled phones today that place their own touch-centric interfaces on top of Windows Mobile 6.5 (LG’s GM730 and HTC’s Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2).

Microsoft briefly showed My Phone–which looks more backup-centric than Apple’s Mobile Me, with the ability to schedule regular backups to take place wirelessly at odd hours when you’re not using your phone–and didn’t have much to say about the Marketplace store other than that they’re announcing it.

The tone of this afternoon’s press conference was humble,  and, at the end, a tad defensive–Steve Ballmer concluded by saying that he hoped anyone who questioned Microsoft’s commitment to mobile products was less “confused” after seeing the new offerings. I can’t see the company not making operating systems for phones–long term, it’s a more important business than OSes for traditional PCs–but it’s still not the least bit clear how it’s going to truly get back in the game.

After the jump, Technologizer’s exclusive fuzzy photos of Ballmer and some Windows Mobile 6.5 interface highlights…

Continue reading this story…

5Words for February 16th, 2009

Special Mobile World Congress edition!

Palm demos a GSM Pre.

Nvidia enables $99 Internet devices.

Intel’s doing Internet devices, too.

HTC reworks Windows Mobile interface.

HTC’s Magic: Like the G1!

TI sees tiny projectors everywhere.

China’s Huawei enters Android race.

ThinkPads grab e-mail from BlackBerrys.

LG’s S-Class User Interface Enters the Arena

After LG did its phone watch demo, it focused most of its Mobile World Congress press conference on its new Arena phone–especially its interface, which LG calls S-Class. It looks reasonably slick, and features innovative 3D navigation, with a rotating cube you can touch to…oh, let’s not pretend. The most striking thing about S-Class is the degree to which it mimics the iPhone, down to the rows of icons (some almost identical to iPhone icons) on a black backdrop. There are some places where LG may have introduced certain improvements to Apple’s idea–S-Class goes into landscape mode when you rotate the phone, and you can swipe one row of icons at a time to bring more into view–but it deals very heavily in the sincerest form of flattery.

S-Class is an interface rather than an OS: LG also announced the GM730, which runs Windows Mobile 6.1 but has the S-Class look and feel.

Hardwarewise, the Arena has a generous 800-by-480 pixels of real estate, both 8GB of fixed memory and the ability to take up to 32GB of MicroSD memory, and an FM radio, among other features. It ships in March in Europe (for US$600, presumably unsubsidized), and will show up in the U.S. eventually. Fuzzy photos I took at the press event after the jump.

Continue reading this story…