Still Use Windows XP? Take a Survey!

I’m happy to report that I’m working with my pals at PC World on some upcoming coverage of Windows 7. One of the great big questions about Win 7 is, of course, whether it’ll convince Windows XP holdouts who avoided Vista (and who are legion) to upgrade. Only one group knows the answer: Windows XP holdouts! So we’ve put together a survey for people who still use Windows XP as their primary operating system. (Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Windows 7 yet–we still have some questions for you.)

The survey will take just a few minutes to complete, and will help make our coverage better. XP users, if you can take it (and alert other XP users) we’d really appreciate it–thanks in advance!

Click here to take the survey.

Apple Music Event Coming in September?

[UPDATE: Yup, Apple is holding an event on September 9th. Technologizer will be liveblogging it--join us!.]

MediaMemo is reporting that music industry execs have been told that Apple is planning to hold a music-themed event next month, although details of what would be revealed were not given. Such news shouldn’t be all that surprising: Apple has typically over the past few years held some type of music-themed event in the month of September.

One company that’s probably not all that happy that Apple is swooping in during the month of September is Microsoft, who is rumored to be launching its Zune HD player September 15. Depending on the timing, any announcement or product release could overshadow Microsoft’s latest attempt at the mobile music space.

Some educated guesses on what could be released at the event are new Nano and Touch models with integrated cameras — long rumored to be added to either product line after photos of cases with holes for camera lenses popped up earlier this year.

MediaMemo is also guessing that since the music industry was alerted, Apple could release its “Cocktail” album format. This new format would expand the traditional digital album to include special features and interactive content.

5Words for Thursday, August 13th, 2009

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Sony adopts standard e-book format.

Obligatory Apple tablet rumor story.

And a fake tablet video.

Snow Leopard: later this month?

The Pre and location awareness.

Samsung’s cameras have two LCDs.

iGoogle adds social-networking gadgets.

Windows XP for your pocket.

Does the Zune HD Stand a Chance?

Microsoft has announced that the Zune HD is hitting stores on September 15th at prices that significantly undercut Apple’s iPod Touch, Microsoft has begun showing off the media player to journalists (not me, alas, but those who have seen it are enthusiastic). As before, it’s impressive from a specs standpoint, with 720p video output, HD radio capability, an OLED screen, and potent Nvidia graphics. In short, it’s promising. Does it have a shot at being what no Zune has been before it: a product that sells well enough to provide meaningful competition to the iPod?

I can’t provide a fully-baked take on that question until I’ve tried the Zune HD, but the most obvious and daunting challenge it faces is the fact that the iPod Touch piggybacks on the iPhone platform and therefore unlocks access to an amazing array of tens of thousands of applications. The Zune HD, if it lives up to its potential, will be what the iPod Touch was before Apple released the iPhone OS 2.0 software and opened the App Store: a slick media handheld with access to the Web via its browser.

I’m guessing, then, that for many follks who are drawn to the Zune HD’s hardware virtues and aggressive price enough to consider buying it instead of a Touch, the decision will boil down to this: App Store, or no App Store? It’ll be fascinating to see whether enough people don’t care about third-party programs to give the HD critical mass.

Apple has already inoculated the iPod Touch against unfavorable comparisons to the Zune HD to some extent through advertising that’s almost exclusively about the diversity of third-party apps–especially games. And we still don’t really know what the Zune-vs.-Touch comparison will look like, since Apple will almost certainly announce a new iPod Touch in September. It could be a little different from the current model or a major advance. (Side note: I think it would be kinda cool if Apple took the Touch on its own design journey over time rather than keeping it as “an iPhone without the phone”).

Then there’s the question of the Zune name. I sort of admire Microsoft for sticking with it–if nothing else, it shows persistence. The current Zune is a respectable old-school media player itself, but the Zune name feels permanently tarnished. It not only never acquired a tenth of the iPod’s coolness, but came to be associated (at least in the echo chamber of tech pundits) with failure. I still think it would make sense for the company to broaden the not-at-all-tarnished Xbox brand to encompass entertainment on devices of all sorts. But if that’s going to happen, it’s not happening now (even though there is evidence that Microsoft does want to broaden Xbox).

Of course, the best way to make Zune cool would be to release a cool Zune. What’s your take on whether the HD is, indeed, that Zune?

Outlook is Coming to the Mac in 2010

The business unit within Microsoft responsible for Mac apps (which Microsoft likes to call the MacBU) is as old as the Mac itself, and it’s never behaved like it had been fully assimilated into the Redmondian Borg. Office for the Mac has long been a distinctly different product from its Windows counterpart–sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. One of the most striking differences has been that Office for the Mac has never offered Outlook; instead, it includes Entourage, a sort-of-like-Outlook, sort-of-different application that got great reviews when it debuted but which has also suffered from iffy compatibility with Outlook and Exchange. It’s also faced increasing competition from within OS X itself, as Apple has beefed up its Mail and iCal apps (and moved to build compatibility with Microsoft’s Exchange server directly into Snow Leopard, the imminent OS X upgrade).

Today, Microsoft announced that it’s working on a new version of Office for the Mac for release by the holiday season of 2010–and that it will dump Entourage for the first version of Outlook for the Mac OS X [there was a previous version of Outlook I'd forgotten which never made it to OS X; this is the first modern one--thanks for correction in comments, Jeff] There was a time when the fact that Mac Office users got Entourage rather than Outlook was widely considered a pro, not a con, and I’m sure some Mac users won’t be happy with this development. But despite any remaining Entourage virtues, e-mail and calendaring are by definition functions which involve working with other people, and with so many Office for Mac users being small fish in large ponds inhabited mostly by Outlook users, consistency probably makes sense. (Although Microsoft said during today’s announcement that Outlook for the Mac will be distinctly different from the Windows edition; if it follows the pattern of other Mac Office apps, it’ll likely be a somewhat simpler program with fewer hardcore business tools.)

The news about the next version of Office for the Mac confirms that Microsoft isn’t planning to discontinue the suite out of lack of interest or desire to make trouble for Apple and Mac users–which isn’t really news, but which seems to be a persistent fear in the back of some Mac fans’ heads. (I’ve heard some worry that Microsoft intended to ditch Office for the Mac once it releases browser-based editions of the major Office apps next year.)

I’m still curious whether Office 2010 for Mac will include integration with the Office Web Apps, and whether it’ll adopt a full-blown version of Office for Windows’ Ribbon interface. (Office 2008 for Mac has a sort of halfway-there version of the Ribbon.) Microsoft didn’t say anything about these questions today. Me, I’d vote for a Mac Office that bore at least somewhat more resemblance to the Windows one, not just for consistency but because Office 2007′s interface is superior to that of Office 2008.

The company did announce some tweaks to the lineup of Office 2008 versions: On September 15th, it’s replacing the current standard edition of Office Mac with a new one called Office Mac 2008 Business Edition, which includes a version of Entourage with better Exchange connectivity; features to let Mac users work with SharePoint and Office Live Workspace services; and new business-oriented document templates. The Home and Student Edition is sticking around, but the Special Media Edition one that bundles its Expression Media graphics package is going away.

GamesCom, Where All Your Console Rumors Come True

So, E3 didn’t really pan out as the place to announce price cuts for video game consoles. The rumored PS3 Slim/$100 price cut remains a rumor, and the Xbox 360 is holding steady at $200 for the Arcade model, $300 for the Pro and $400 for the Elite.

Things will reportedly change at GamesCom, a conference in Cologne, Germany, which starts a week from today. While nothing matches the pre-conference hype of E3, we’ve got two rumors that could shake up the holiday gaming season if they come true.

First, Hong Kong gaming magazine GameWave brings word (via Joystiq) that the PS3 Slim will be announced at Sony’s press conference on Tuesday. An earlier report from French media outlet JVN said the same thing, quoting a “dealer specializing in video games” who said a price cut would accompany the announcement. Additionally, MCV wrote that PS3 stocks are drying up in the U.K., signaling a price cut.

We also heard from Kotaku today that Microsoft will discontinue the Xbox 360 Pro, replacing it with the Elite model at the Pro’s old price of $300. The Elite console has double the hard drive capacity (120 GB) and includes an HDMI cable. This rumor also comes from two places: a Meijer catalog due on August 30 and photos sent by Gamestop employees.

Neither rumor comes out of the blue. In June, a reliable source told Ars Technica that the Pro would be discontinued, and said some killer game and console bundles would help move the console off shelves. As for the PS3 Slim, there are simply too many rumors to mention here. Check out Joystiq’s PS3 Slim category tag to see them all.

What does all of this chatter leave us with? Nothing, of course, but I like the idea of GamesCom as the launching point for lower-priced game consoles. The holiday game rush gets its first legs in September, making an end-of-August price cut attractive to fence-sitters, especially if they’re tempted by the latest blockbusters. I’m generally not a fan of these price cut rumors, because they mostly just inflate our expectations with hot air, but this seems like the best possible time to expect things to happen.

Kaleidescape Loses in DVD-Copying Battle, Too

For years, the high-end consumer-electronics device known as Kaleidescape has provided good reason to  wish you were filthy rich. Starting at around $8,000 but mostly going way, way up from there, the systems let you store DVDs to hard disks and browse and watch them from multiple TVs around your house. But the DVD-copying aspect–which can be approximated with free software and a cheap network drive–was only part of the product’s appeal. What really made it interesting was the software, which sported one of the slickest, most thoughtful user interfaces this side of Cupertino. It’s like what Apple TV might be on an unlimited budget, if it let you enjoy the DVD movies you’d already bought rather than making you pay to download them again.

Now Kaleidescape has suffered a court defeat to Hollywood, just a day after RealDVD (which is a sort of poor man’s Kaleidescape in software form) did. Two years ago, Kaleidescape won a rare victory relating to DVD-copying in the digital age, but a California state appellate judge has overturned that decision. As I understand it, the Kaleidescape case doesn’t involve questions of fair use but whether Kaleidescape abused the license it obtained from the DVD Copy Control Association for CSS, the encryption standard used to lock up DVDs. But I’d still rather see products like RealDVD and Kaleidescape win in court than lose. The ruling won’t force Kaleidescape to pull products off the market immediately, and could be overturned.

Greg Sandoval’s piece on Kaleidescape and RealDVD at Cnet has one shred of sort-of-good news: Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who ruled in the RealDVD case, said that she wasn’t saying that consumers definitely don’t have the right to back up their DVDs under certain circumstances. But here’s a bit of big-picture optimism: The Betamax case which established fair-use ground rules for copied movies in the first place got all the way to the Supreme Court before Sony (and, indirectly, consumers) scored definitive victory over the studios. Let’s hope that both Kaleidescape and Real have plenty of fight left in them.

Bing Shows Signs of Life in the US

You might have noticed that Microsoft’s ads for its Bing search engine have become much more frequent on our pages as of late. I’ve noticed elsewhere a marked increase in advertisements for the service, which seems to imply that Microsoft may be staging another offensive in the war over search.

Data from StatCounter shows that Bing had an fairly impressive 13.2 percent share on Tuesday, its highest point in over two months — which was shortly after launch — and continuing a marked uptrend that began on Monday. It appears that Bing’s new-found traffic is generally coming from Google, as Yahoo has generally maintained its share throughout Bing’s rises and falls.

(That said, Google still dominates about 75 percent of the search market in the US, with Yahoo around 10 percent as of Tuesday.)

What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can hold onto these gains. Given its past history, it probably won’t, although it seems that its wild swings are beginning to smooth out over the past few weeks. This is probably a result of more web consumers settling into using Bing on a regular basis rather than flipping back and forth between its competitors.

Microsoft may also be noticing this stabilization, and may see it as a good time to attempt to pry more eyes away from Google, thus the increase in Bing ads once again.

In any case, the service still has a far way to go before it can be considered relevant in the search engine space. With Google so dominant, especially worldwide, Microsoft has a lot of work to do.

Note that worldwide Google has 88.6 percent of the market, dwarfing Bing and Yahoo’s shares which are roughly tied at 4.7 percent each.

Best Buy Doesn’t Want to Sell Me a 52-Inch HDTV for $9.99. Reasonable Enough.

Early this morning, Best Buy had a deal on its site that was not merely a best buy but a mindbendingly, impossibly cheap one: a well-reviewed, high-end 52-inch Samsung LCD HDTV for…under ten bucks. $9.99 to be exact. Here, I’ll show you:

Continue reading this story…

So What’s the State of the Patent System?

I’m not going to ask you to render a verdict in yesterday’s court case that involved a Texas judge telling Microsoft it’s not allowed to sell Word anymore because it violates a Canadian company’s XML-creation patents. Judgments on particular cases are most pertinent when they’re made by people who have read all the evidence in question and have an in-depth knowledge of patent law…which most of us haven’t done and don’t possess. We civilians are, however, allowed to have gut reactions to the the condition of the U.S. patent system, and whether pricey, long-running court battles (like the Word case and this one and this one) help or hurt the cause of innovation in this country. So that’s the topic of today’s T-Poll.

5Words for Wednesday, August 12th 2009

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Microsoft Office for Nokia phones.

Knol is looking pretty sad.

Hands on with Zune HD.

Hey, what is Facebook Light?

Unknown Apple product diner shoot.

How to end music piracy.

Nokia dumping Symbian for Linux?

iPhone keyboard vs. Android keyboard.

What If All Web Ads Were Blocked? Ten Speculative Scenarios

Last week, I blogged about a post over at Windows IT Pro that posited that all browsers would include ad-blocking as a standard feature within five years, and that it would be turned on by default. My post inspired some interesting debate both on this site and off it. I also included a poll: A plurality of the people who took it thought ads should be blocked by default, and a majority said browsers should include ad blocking as a standard feature.

I still don’t see any scenario under which the companies behind today’s widely-used browsers start blocking ads automatically. Google is the biggest company in Web advertising, Microsoft is spending a fortune to take Google on in that field, Apple is a major consumer advertiser, Mozilla and Opera make millions of dollars a year from the searches performed on their browsers’ home pages. They all simply have too much to lose on an ad-free Web.

Of course, something unforeseen could always happen. Maybe all these browsers will lose favor to one or more from one or more companies not so profoundly invested in Web advertising. Let’s engage in a bit of Twilight Zonesque speculation about what might happen if ad-blocking did become the default state of the Web. (At least for most folks–in a world in which some people will still be using IE6 in 2014, we’re not going to get to 100% ad blockage no matter what happens.)

As the proprietor of a Web site that’s mostly supported by advertising, I can’t claim to be a dispassionate bystander here…but I hope that at least some of the scenarios I outline below (not all of which are mutually exclusive) make clear that I’m not trying to prove a particular point.

Continue reading this story…

Court Bans Microsoft From Selling Word

In the latest apparent case of the U.S. patent system run amok, Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction on Tuesday preventing Microsoft from selling versions of Word that handle custom XML in the form of the .DOCX, .DOCM, and .XML file formats. Which would mean that Microsoft is now forbidden from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007. And since it also forbids Microsoft from testing such versions of Word, there would seem to be implications for Office 2010 as well.

The ruling responds to a suit brought by Toronto-based document management company i4i in 2007. Microsoft says it’ll appeal the ruling, which appears to require it to pay a total of $277 million to i4i.

I stuck an “apparent” in the first sentence of this story because I believe in the idea of patents, acknowledge that I’m not a patent attorney, and am willing to accept the possibility that a product like Word could indeed indeed violate a small company’s patent even though its removal from the market would cause massive headaches for millions of folks who didn’t violate anybody’s intellectual property. But the 1998 patent in question appears to be exceptionally broad, and XML is an open standard; if a company can prevent Microsoft from selling a word processor that uses customized XML to store documents, you gotta wonder if the company could use the precedent to kill off XML, period. Which would be simply nutty.

Of course, Word isn’t going away–not any more than BlackBerries vanished from the market as a result of the endless patent dispute between RIM and patent firm NTP earlier this decade. Microsoft has a 60-day window before sales must stop, and it could come up with any of a number of possible Hail Marys to resolve things–in fact, Computerworld’s take is that sales aren’t going to end at all. If Judge Davis’s ruling somehow sticks all the way to the Supreme Court, Microsoft would sign, grumble, and pay i4i a few cubic acres of cash to put the lawsuit behind it. (Actually, it would surely do a deal earlier in the process, and that’s presumably the outcome that i41 is hoping for.) That’s assuming that Microsoft can’t somehow rejigger Word or its file formats to preserve functionality and compatibility without patent problems; given that the suit was filed in 2007, it’s had plenty of time to work on that technical challenge.

In the short term, though, even a brief period of suspended Word sales is going to present massive hassles for vast numbers of businesses and consumers. What everybody’s going to do, I’m not sure–older versions of Word would XML capability wouldn’t be taboo I guess, nor would a version of Word 2007 with the XML features turned off. I don’t know enough about this stuff to know if WordPerfect and OpenOffice (both of which use XML) are at legal risk.

Me, I have a paid-for copy of Word 2007 and do much of my wordslinging in Google Docs and WordPress these days anyhow. But if PowerPoint (which also uses XML) is pulled off the market, I’ll panic…

Could Web Apps Help Save Nokia?

Certain pundits have opined that Nokia may be doomed, because its Symbian operating system and Ovi Store application store provide a far poorer user experience than Apple’s iPhone. I’m not one of the doom-and-gloomers. Nokia is betting that Web applications will catch on in the long run, and it could be right.

The long history of Nokia’s Symbian OS and the diversity of devices that Nokia sells have left it in catch-up mode, Web applications provide the company with a second chance to get ahead of the curve. Steve Jobs may have been right when he initially said that developers should write Web apps for the iPhone –he may just have been premature.

Nokia has laid the groundwork for a new crop of Web applications that will run on over two dozen of its Symbian S60 devices with a set of plugins called Nokia Web Runtime Extensions (WRT). It’s a pragmatic strategy, and probably the company’s only solution. Apple, by contrast, has had the luxury of dealing with one mobile platform.

The WRT plug-ins allow application developers to create standards-based Web applications with commonly-used development tools without requiring any specialized knowledge of Nokia technologies.

Nokia’s ultimate goal is to make it possible for end users to create their own widgets, said Craig Cumberland, director of Web tools and technologies at Nokia. The company is partnering with content providers to make that happen. In the meantime, it is betting that its flexibility will lure application makers.

WRT was built using the open source WebKit browser layout engine, which Apple and Google use as the engine for their Web browsers. WRT joins Qt, an open source GUI toolkit, as the two  core technology platforms that Nokia will use across all of its devices. The company has also localized WRT into eight languages, including Chinese (tradition and simplified), English, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. “The international market is our bread and butter,” said Cumberland.

It’s becoming a meme, but those technologies give developers greater openness–and since these apps run on the Web in the browser, there’s no App Store-like approval process to complicate matters. Web applications also cut down on application delivery time, and offer faster return on investment for developers, Cumberland added.

That means (at least in theory) there should be a variety of Web applications for end users to pick from within a short period of time. The applications will also blur the lines between the Web and device itself, which many iPhone applications already do.

To give the appearance of native functionality, WRT can integrate with device data and core services like address books. More advanced devices support more advanced applications that can access the touchscreen functionality of the 5800 XpresMmusic and N97, in addition to Nokia’s “home screen” user interface.

Nokia has laid out a clear vision, but its execution relies upon the ability of carrier to deliver fast, reliable data services. The applications will also be simple widgets, not deep, rich pieces of software–at least at first. Web applications won’t level the playing field overnight, but the long-term strategy makes sense to me.

RealDepressing: RealDVD Loses a Round in Court

The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that U.S. Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has ruled against RealNetworks in the lawsuit filed by the movie studios against RealDVD, its software for copying DVDs to your hard drive. Judge Patel granted the studios a preliminary injunction against Real selling the software, which seems like kind of a formality given that she stopped Real from selling it almost as soon as it went on sale last September.

RealDVD isn’t a tool for pirates. Actually, it adds an extra layer of copy protection to prevent you from doing anything except copying a movie to one hard drive for viewing on one computer at a time. (You can’t even put the movies on a shared drive to watch them from multiple computers on one network.) The court is apparently inclined to look askance at even a fundamentally hobbled (albeit easy-to-use) DVD copier.

Meanwhile, tools like Handbrake let large numbers of people copy DVDs without any of RealDVD’s measures against sharing the digital copies with friends or tossing them onto BitTorrent for the world to download. I also remain unclear on why Telestream’s Drive-in–which is, basically, a Mac version of RealDVD except that it also comes in a multi-user version–is still around when RealDVD is apparently too dangerous to be let onto the market while Real waits for a final ruling. Maybe it has something to do with RealNetworks being a relatively large company that might actually succeed in getting ordinary folks to use its software?

Meanwhile, the RealDVD site lives on in forlorn limbo, complete with a woman gamely smiling on the home page and a guided tour of the product. The site says the app is “temporarily unavailable” and that Real “will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use.” I hope that means that the company will soldier on with both this case and the countersuit it filed against six Hollywood studios on antitrust grounds. Whether or not you ever use RealDVD–or even if its limitations would drive you a little bonkers–any victories it scored in court would be great news for consumers. And if it loses, the message will be that there are absolutely no circumstances under which law-abiding consumers can make a copy of a DVD they’ve paid for in order to enjoy it in a new way.

Phil Schiller is Listening on iPhone Issues. That’s a Good Start.

Last week, Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller dropped a note to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on issues with iPhone app acceptance. It said, basically, that Apple isn’t perfect, but its intentions are good and it tries to learn from its mistakes. The e-mail didn’t resolve any outstanding issues, but it was encouraging to hear an acknowledgment that problems existed and Apple intended to do better.

Now Schiller has been heard from again: He e-mailed Mac developer Steven Frank, who is so disgruntled with Apple’s iPhone policies and practices that he’s boycotting the phone. Schiller told Frank that Apple’s listening to his feedback, and that rumors of a sweeping ban on iPhone e-book readers were false.

Strangely enough, I somehow forgot that I engaged in a conversation about iPhone App Store approval with Phil Schiller myself. Back at the iPhone 3.0 special event in March, I asked him a question during the Q&A about the controversy over app approval–which hadn’t yet peaked–and what Apple’s response was. Here’s Brian X. Chen’s liveblog summary from Wired News:

Harry McCracken asks if Apple will give developers clarity about what apps get approved or rejected.

Phil Schiller says, we have a lot of apps, we also want customers to feel comfortable about the quality of the apps they get.  96% approval rating is tremendous. There are some things we need to check and filter for. Simply that it technically works well.
That things don’t crash. Other things: we watch for profanity in applications. pornography. Things that try to violate a customer’s privacy. Those are things customers want us to watch out for. That’s in the developer’s agreement. There’s also stuff about content suitable for children. Parental controls will help manage that.

At the end of the day with 25,000 apps we have a great solution that’s working and we’re constantly making it better.

Basically, Schiller was courteous and made some reasonable points, but didn’t even address the controversy enough to sound defensive about it. His response now is quite different. The best way to judge Apple’s intentions is, of course, through its actions–let’s hope that the Schillergrams hint are a sign of things to come.