War of the Firefox Extension Developers

Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul has posted a good piece on an alarming story: The developers of two popular and useful Firefox extensions, NoScript and AdBlock Plus, descended into an ugly squabble that involved each one attempting to interfere with the other’s operation–and which eventually led to NoScript having secret features designed to futz around with AdBlock Plus, if it was present. In a roundabout way, the ugly situation did Firefox users a service by making clear something which many of us didn’t know: Firefox doesn’t do enough to draw boundaries between extensions that prevent them from interfering with each other. The good news is that Mozilla is reacting to the tussle by establishing guidelines for what extension behavior is and isn’t kosher. NoScript’s developer has published an apology and agreed to follow the new rules. And I, for one, will be a tad paranoid from now on when installing new extensions–especially since the recent unpleasantness involved not obscure rogue add-ons but two of the best-known Firefox enhancers on the planet.

RIM Has a Winner with the Curve

Sorry Palm, there may be a device that can already take on the iPhone: NPD said Monday that in the first quarter, RIM’s BlackBerry Curve took the top spot in terms of smartphone sales. Half of all devices of this type sold in the quarter were RIM phones, up 15 percent.

Despite its problems, the Storm managed to take third spot, and the aging Pearl line still is holding on in fourth.

Overall, smartphones make up 23 percent of all cellular devices sold, up 6 percent from the year ago quarter. Analyst Ross Rubin said that even in the tough economy, consumers were still showing an affinity for fuller featured devices.

Apple and Palm’s share both fell 10 percent in the quarter. While Palm’s share could be expected to decline due to its product lineup issues, Apple’s fall is a bit surprising. It could be that those who want the device already have it, and that Apple must now give those on the fence or not considering the device a reason to.

Hmm.. so that’s why they are rumored to be talking with other carriers such as Verizon, or have additional iPhone models in the works? Based on this data, those reports now make a bit more sense.

Good news for T-Mobile also in this report: the G1 was the fifth highest selling device. With a new Android-based phone coming soon according to reports, T-Mobile may have a decent answer to AT&T and the iPhone for those anti-iPhone folks out there.

5Words for May 4th, 2009

Never assume RIM is toast:

BlackBerry Curve outells the iPhone.

Two trends conspiring against Microsoft.

11.6″ EeePC on its way.

Navigon exits North American market.

“Houdini’s” a great phone name.

MySpace formulates its turnaround strategy.

Myst for iPhone: It’s humongous!

WiiMotion Plus on sale.

The White House gets social.

The world’s lamest cell phones.

Take Wired.com’s 3G Phone Speed Test

Wired.com, which published an eye-opening survey of iPhone 3G users’ experiences with data last August, is doing it all over again–but this time, it’s expanding its scope to test the 3G networks of all the major U.S. wireless carriers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. It’s a public service, and whatever the results are, they’ll be interesting. This article explains how to participate, which you do by running interactive tests on your smartphone.

I’m going to do just that on my iPhone–hope you do, too.

Microsoft Seems Eager to Divorce Vista

Wasting no time, Microsoft appears set to stop sales of Vista as soon as Windows 7 ships.  Official support from the company would be provided through April 2012, however.

This would be a change from the last OS revision, where XP was sold long after Vista’s 2006 debut.

In a somewhat cryptic statement, Microsoft General Manager Richard Francis wrote in an internal e-mail that he was “not sure” if computer makers would be able to ship Vista after Win 7′s launch, PC World reports. That doesn’t make much sense, since Microsoft is in control of the OS reaching its manufacturers.

I might be reading too much into it, but it sounds to me like Microsoft is trying to carefully word a quick exit from Vista, without actually saying its dumping the OS. Everybody knows that in terms of success, Vista was just about as popular as Windows ME (we all know how well that one went over).

Add to this the fact that XP will continue to live on in netbooks until at least 2010, and it seems to further my supposition.

Coming This Week: A Giant Kindle?

[UPDATE: Amazon's announcing something on Monday--it's sent out invites to journalists for a press event in New York.]

The New York Times is reporting that Amazon.com is about to introduce a larger-screen version of its Kindle e-reader, tailored for magazines, newspapers, and, possibly, textbooks. If so, it would be an early entrant in what’s shaping up to be a bustling race of new e-readers that set out to save the magazine and newspaper industries. But my guess is that any Kindle variant that’s imminent isn’t going to be an industry-rescuing breakthrough.

Dozens of magazines and papers are already available on the current Kindle, and while that’s a good thing, the presentation and navigation are disappointing. You don’t get the original color layouts of the printed page or the interactivity of the Web. It’s hard to hop around between stories in anything but sequential fashion, and the Kindle’s sixteen shades of greenish gray can’t compete with the full color of the printed page.

If I had to make a call on which was the superior way to read magazine content–on the Web or in print–I’d need to think it over. But I do know that Kindle magazines, in their current form, lag behind both of those options.

A big-screen kindle that displayed magazine pages in their original layout at something close to full size would be an intriguing device, but without color, it wouldn’t be an exciting one. And there’s no way that even a large Kindle is going to show magazine pages in their traditional layout (although it’s an entertaining idea–maybe the screen could fold in half so you could fit the thing into a briefcase)?

Amazon’s not about to reveal that the E-Ink technology used in the Kindle can now do color, and my guess is that the company is unwilling to release a color-screen Kindle that can’t run for days on a battery charge. So any almost-here big Kindle likely uses the E-Ink screen, and does at least some reformatting of material. If it’s essentially the same Kindle 2 that Amazon sells today except that it crams more words onto the screen, it’ll be a relatively minor edition to the Kindle lineup. (I have a pretty long list of criticisms of the Kindle 2, but the amount of wordage per screen isn’t one of them.)

Maybe Amazon has come up with a way to make moving through issues and stories less of a plodding, front-to-back affair. If so, that would be a more significant step forward than any hardware it’s likely to announce–and I hope it would brings it to us owners of small-screen Kindles, too.

Hey, I’m a Twit Again

I’m happy to report that I’m going to be on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech on May 3rd (hey, that’s tomorrow–Sunday!). It’ll broadcast live at 3pm PT before it becomes a podcast. I know that one of the other guests will be the Houston Chronicle’s intrepid tech editor, Dwight Silverman.

I always have a good time on the show, and always come away impressed by how many smart folks are Leo fans. (It’s an honor when they discover Technologizer, too.) Hope you’ll tune in!

A Porcine Panic Button for Your iPhone

An iPhone application called Swine Flu Tracker–not yet enables users to track confirmed cases of the flu, check health alerts, and to learn about about its symptoms.

When the Black Plagues struck Europe during the middle ages, communication was poor, and pestilence spread rapidly before anyone had an indication of where it might strike next.

The 1918 flu pandemic was better understood, but the public was still largely in the dark save for newspaper reports. Nearly a century later, technology has made it possible to track pandemics from your pocket.

Web 2.0 technologies are being leveraged in innovative ways to monitor the spread of the flue. It’s an intriguing exercise of modern messaging platforms, and in the event of a real emergency, people could turn to the Web to help themselves, and more importantly, help each another. But reality is that most places in the world are not in a state of emergency.

I am not going to discount the public health threat posed by the H1N1 (Swine Flu) virus, and I deeply regret that toll it has taken on human lives. When healthy young adults are killed by their own immune response, it’s an even greater tragedy.

The overall public understands that the virus could mutate – that is why governments are taking serious measures to monitor it. Mechanisms are in place throughout the world to safeguard public health. In the United States, the Centers for Disease control even has a Twitter account (@CDCFlu) where relevant information is posted.

That said, my advise is not to install this application (assuming Apple gives its okay) unless you enjoy self abuse or want to be nominated as hypochondriac of the year. Want to track where the virus has spread? Try Google Maps.

Unless you are told otherwise by the authorities, please chill out, go outside, enjoy the weekend, and remember to wash your hands. If you think you may be ill, stay away from crowds like you should any other time that you are sick. Common sense isn’t rocket science, but you may need a rocket scientist’s salary to pay for anti-anxiety medications if you install this application.

Pachter: New Consoles in 2013, “If At All”

Remember when Technologizer wildly guessed that the next generation of game consoles would arrive in 2010 and 2011? Michael Pachter, the Wedbush Morgan analyst who routinely makes headlines with his predictions, begs to differ.

His latest newsletter, via Edge, states that the next console cycle won’t begin “before 2013, if at all.” That’s right, Morgan even leaves room for the possibility of an indefinite current-generation.

“We remain convinced that the publishers will resist the introduction of any video game hardware technology that requires a refresh of software, as the publishers have as yet to capitalize on the immense investments made in being competitive in the current cycle,” Pachter writes.

The flaw in this logic is that it’s not a new concept. As a rule, console makers love to cash in on their investments, letting software revenues roll in while hardware costs decline, and yet new consoles have been popping up on a five-year cycle ever since the 8-bit era.

There is, however, a wild card this time, and I’m surprised Pachter doesn’t mention it: Motion control. Nintendo tapped into previously uninterested markets with the Wii, and there’s no shortage of speculation that Sony and Microsoft are looking to get in on that. Rumors regarding a Playstation 3 motion controller have popped up as recently as today, and we’ve previously covered one possibility for the Xbox 360.

It all boils down to whether Sony and Microsoft get into motion control (or some other game-changing concept) in this generation or save it for the next cycle. I won’t predict whether that’s going to happen, but if it does — and if it’s successful — then yes, the next generation is a long way off. Otherwise, I’m sticking with my earlier predictions.

Am I waffling? Sure, but that’s why Pachter gets the big bucks.

Palm’s Foleo: Back From the Dead?

I was one of the few tech journalists who didn’t mock Palm’s Foleo device when founder Jeff Hawkins unveiled it at D two years ago–see my fuzzy photo to the left–and who chose not to tapdance on its grave when Palm decided not to release it after all. (Um, actually I may have been the only pundit who treated the Foleo, which was a sort of browser-in-a-subnotebook-that-talked-to-your-wireless-phone, with a shred of respect.)

So I like today’s rumor that the Foleo was not dead, but just resting: Analyst Trip Chowdry says that Palm has some iPod veterans working on a new version. If he’s correct, I don’t expect the blogosphere to formally retract all the nasty things it said in 2007. But it’s undeniable that the notion of a cheap, small computer that’s designed mostly to run Web apps rather than client software is no longer deserving of contempt: We now know the concept as the netbook, and it seems to be doing just fine in the market.

In other words, Jeff Hawkins wasn’t dumb, he was just ahead of his time–something which anybody who’s followed Hawkins’ career should have been able to figure out in the first place.

There’s actually every reason to think that Palm is indeed working on a new Foleo–because when CEO Ed Colligan killed the first one, he said it would be back, and it would be based on the platform which we now know is called WebOS:

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

Which doesn’t mean that I’m assuming Chowdry is right. He’s the same guy who said he believed that Costco would be selling $149 iPhones last January, and who saw Google losing its technical edge to search startup Powerset a couple of years ago. But in this case, I’m guessing that Chowdry, like Hawkins, has the right instincts–and the only question is whether he got the timing right,

Quicken for iPhone: Good, as Far as It Goes

Intuit, the company whose Quicken has been synonymous with personal-finance management for years, has brought the app to the iPhone. It’s not the first version of Quicken for handheld devices–I used an earlier one on my PalmPilot years ago–but it’s the first modern one. And as its name, Quicken Online Mobile, suggests, it connects directly to the Net to grab your financial details rather than making you sync with the desktop app.

Actually, it doesn’t work with the traditional application version of Quicken at all–it’s a companion to Quicken Online, the Web-based version which relaunched in a free version last fall. If you’re like me, you tend to associate use of Quicken with personal-finance nerds who have their acts together, track everything carefully, and are on the road to a happy and prosperous retirement. Quicken Online isn’t aimed at those people: It’s got relatively few features, is heavy on automation (like Mint, it downloads transactions from your banks and credit-card companies automatically), and most of what it does is focused on making sure that you’ve got enough money to get to your next paycheck. Quicken Online Mobile brings that approach to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and does a nice job at it. You can see what you’ve spent and what you’ve made, and the home screen tallies everything up and tells you whether you’re in any risk of running out of dough.

Continue reading this story…

5Words for May 1st, 2009

A happy May to you!

Swine flu tracking for iPhone.

The 240GB iPod upgrade option.

Twittering from the White House.

Apple’s next iPhone: Flip replacement?

Twitter administrator account gets hacked.

The military’s ultrasecure Windows XP.

Dell offers 120 laptop designs.

Android gets sued over trademark.

Are Kindle owners…kinda old?

Rumor (yes, again): cheap Macs.