Is the Classic iPod a Goner?

Tumblr developer/blogger Marco Arment has posted his best guesses about what Apple will announce–iPodwise, at least–at its music event next Wednesday (Technologizer will be there to liveblog the news). Arment’s predictions seem logical enough–which doesn’t guarantee their accuracy, of course–and the most interesting thing about them is that he thinks that Apple will discontinue the iPod Classic, the high-capacity, small-screen, no-touch, no-apps model that’s the direct descendent of the original 2001 iPod.

In the era in which the iPod Touch is unquestionably the most exciting iPod and the Nano is the dominant “traditional” iPod, are there any reasons why Apple wouldn’t kill the Classic?

Continue reading this story…

Join Us for Live Blog Coverage of Apple’s Music Event Next Wednesday

If it’s September in the world of technology, one thing is pretty much a given: Apple will release some new iPods and update iTunes. I’ll be in the audience at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens next Wedneday at 10am as the company does that–I’m assuming–and maybe tells us other stuff of interest, too. (If you think it’ll announce a tablet, tell us now so you claim immense foresight, really good sources, or ESP if it does–most of the world has decided it won’t.)

I’ll blog the event as it happens, as quickly as humanly possible (courtesy of Cover It Live). If there’s a Q&A session, I’ll try to ask a question on behalf of the Technologizer community, so if you’ve got any queries right now relating to Apple and its music-related products, ask ‘em in the comments on this post or at the home page for our coverage. And join us on Wednesday right here, won’t you?

Loopt Does Background Functions on the iPhone. What’s Next?

It’s not full-fledged multitasking, but Loopt will be the first third-party app to send out information even when you’re not actively using it.

The location services program, which tells friends where you are and finds nearby points of interest, has announced an “Always-On” service that continues to update your whereabouts in the background. Here’s the catch: Loopt itself is free, but Always-On will cost an extra $4 per month on your AT&T bill.

Business Insider’s Dan Frommer writes that Loopt struck a deal with AT&T, allowing the iPhone to beam out its location even though Loopt itself is not actually running. As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, this is a server-to-server system, not an app that functions in the background.

The implications of the deal depend on what’s happening behind the scenes. If AT&T is simply providing a workaround for apps that want to send out information in the background, all this means is that other apps — more location services, mostly — could strike similar deals, as long as the app itself doesn’t need to function at the same time.

But let’s just speculate that AT&T has some sway over the iPhone’s inability to multitask. After all, any application that constantly sends and receives information equates to more strain on AT&T’s already inadequate network, so maybe the no backgrounding rule was a way to cut down on traffic. If that’s the case, we might eventually start seeing real multitasking, on the condition that iPhone users pay an additional charge when there’s a data exchange involved.

Given the uproar that would occur if customers started getting nickled and dimed on more monthly charges, I’m inclined to think deals like the one between Loopt and AT&T will be few and far between. But as much as it would irk me, I’d pay a little extra every month to listen to Slacker Radio while playing games or surfing the ‘net.

Happy (Almost) 10th Birthday, Sega Dreamcast!

Next Wednesday will mark the Sega Dreamcast’s 10th birthday, having launched on September 9, 1999. Less than a year and a half later, Sega discontinued the console, facing competition from Sony’s Playstation 2, the looming threat of Microsoft’s Xbox and some friction within the company.

1UP editor Jeremy Parish is celebrating a little early with a retrospective. He does a good job of looking back on Sega the Console Maker, explaining why the Dreamcast was an important product — it had great games, mostly — and what led to its demise. But what really struck me while reading was how much the game console business has changed and solidified over the last 10 years.

Ever since Microsoft launched the Xbox in November 2001, we’ve been playing consoles from the same three manufacturers, with virtually no outside competition. That was unheard of in the 90s, which saw a handful of console makers come and go. The 3DO, Atari Jaguar, TurboGrafx-16 and Neo Geo all took a stab at the home console market, but either failed miserably or didn’t produce any progeny.

Sega was a different case because, as Parish points out, it had been around. Even before the Genesis fiercely competed with the Super Nintendo, there was the Sega Master System, and before the Dreamcast came the Sega Saturn. Sega’s exit from the console market was significant because it made room for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to dominate.

I don’t see any of those three manufacturers bowing out any time soon. If the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the Wii all stick to their goals of a 10-year life cycle, we’ll be looking at 15 years with the same three brands. The only competitors I see on the horizon are cloud gaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai.

That’s not a bad thing as long as everyone’s innovating. It just underscores how console gaming is no longer a wild and unpredictable industry. By dropping the Dreamcast, Sega made the transformation possible.

Sonos Does Twitter

The Twitter Everywhere meme is popular this week, and Sonos joins in by announcing (via Twitter) that soon owners of the multi-room music streaming experience will be able to tweet from their Sonos controllers. The new feature empowers listeners to share artist tracks with one click, or edit automated tweets before publishing.

I love this experimentation phase for Twitter. I don’t know that I have any interest in regularly tweeting my musical tastes, or in accessing Twitter from devices that don’t give me the full conversational experience. However, the idea of using Twitter in broadcast-only or receive-only mode is certainly gaining traction. Like PiMPY, the tweeting washing machine, it suggests new possibilities for both lifecasting and automated data collection.

With regard to Sonos specifically, my guess is that the company’s customer base is music-obsessed and sophisticated enough to make the new Twitter function appealing. The application will work from both the new Sonos Controller hardware and and their iPhone app later this year.

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

iPhone Tethering: Soon Is in the Eye of the Beholder

On November 6th of last year at the Web 2.0 conference, AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph De La Vega told the audience that the company would soon let AT&T customers tether their iPhones to laptops as a wireless modem. I blogged about it and called it cheery news. And waited. In June of this year, Apple announced that the iPhone OS 3.0 software would enable tethering, and that a bunch of carriers would offer it immediately–but AT&T wasn’t among them. It just said it would offer tethering at some unspecified date.

Yesterday, the company said that MMS for the iPhone was finally coming on September 25th. But its intentions about tethering are vaguer than ever–it isn’t promising a darn thing:

As for tethering, by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect. We expect to offer tethering in the future.

Fair enough, I suppose–except for the part about the company president telling customers and prospective customers that tethering was almost in place ten months ago. I wonder how many people plunked down money for an iPhone based in part on the not-unreasonable belief that “soon” meant…soon?

Diebold Ditches E-Voting

Ars Technica is reporting that ATM maker Diebold is selling its e-voting machine unit to a competitor for a paltry $5 million. The move gets Diebold out of a business that accounted for very little of its revenues but caused enormous damage to its reputation, and means that the world will need to find some other company to associate with all the downsides of electronic voting.

Ars’ piece recaps some of the controversies surrounding Diebold’s machines, and notes that ES&S, the company acquiring Diebold’s e-voting unit, has had multiple problems of its own. It also quotes former Diebold CEO and George W. Bush supporter Walden O’Dell’s statement in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was committed “to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President,” which should have gotten him fired on the spot for gross stupidity if nothing else.

I make no claims to know much at all about the technical issues involved in implementing e-voting systems, so my take on the matter is that I accept the possibility that they’re a good idea in principle–but I have grave misgivings about their use in the real world. The companies involved in the field have an uncanny knack for damaging the reputation of the whole idea…

Which brings up today’s T-Poll:

1984 All Over Again

Back in July, Amazon.com endured a bout of bad publicity and inspired debate about the ethics of copy protection when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customer’s Kindle e-readers after discovering they were pirated. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized and called the action stupid. Now the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog is reporting that Amazon has e-mailed the Kindle owners whose books it erased and offered to restore the tomes (along with any notes taken) or issue a $30 gift certificate or check.

It’s not entirely clear why Amazon is making the restitution six weeks after the dust-up, but Digits notes that a class-action lawsuit was filed over the incident.

Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna–hey, was she an Orwell character?–but I tend to think that Amazon’s decisions and consequent humiliation served the greater good. Or at least I’d hope that other companies with the technical power to delete content from customers’ devices will remember the Amazon case and decide the bad publicity just wouldn’t be worth it.

Microsoft’s Patent Pipedream

Yesterday, Microsoft’s Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez called for a world authority on patents, and a single judicial body for litigation. The world needs to cycle more resources toward processing backlogged patent applications and to allow corporations to protect their intellectual property, he said.

“By facing the challenges, realizing a vision, overcoming political barriers, and removing procedural obstacles we can build a global patent system that will promote innovation, enrich public knowledge, encourage competition and drive economic growth and employment,” he added. “The time is now–the solutions are in reach,” he wrote.

After reading Gutierrez’s blog, I began to consider how many interests are vying to influence patent reform in the U.S alone. The politics of patents become infinitely more complicated internationally. Stanford law professor Mark Lemley mused that a standard global patent system may be a good idea, but then so is world peace, obviously making light of Guiterrez’s lofty goal.

Don’t look for this to happen in the immediate future, however.

Continue reading this story…

Windows 7 House Parties = Astroturfing

People are not lining up outside of storefronts at midnight to buy Windows anymore, but that won’t stop Microsoft from creating the impression that the masses are fawning over Windows 7. The company is asking people to host house parties when the OS launches on Oct. 22. The Potemkin village has become the Potemkin house party.

Microsoft has adopted a PR technique that many large corporations and interests groups use to advance their positions in the absence of any significant public support: astroturfing. Astroturfing is a PR technique that is used to manufacture the impression of grassroots behavior. There are many examples of it being utilized to affect public policy.

Taking a handful of launch parties, and making it seem as if they are a widespread phenomenon would be astroturfing. I would not be surprised if that is what Microsoft has in mind. Many reporters will fall for it.

Yikes, Yelp is Gaining on Citysearch

In the battle to tell people where to go and what to eat, Yelp is quickly turning the tables on the incumbent Citysearch.

TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld reports that Yelp’s U.S. traffic has grown 80 percent over the last year, to 8.6 million unique visitors in July. Citysearch is still ahead with 15.4 million unique visitors in July, but it’s not growing.

That spells trouble for Citysearch, because Yelp is only going to get better as more people use the site.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I see Yelp as the Wikipedia to Citysearch’s Encyclopedia Britannica. Sure, both sites contain user ratings and reviews, but Yelp is almost entirely powered by them (scandals aside), while Citysearch remains anchored by editorial hands. Visit a restaurant page on Citysearch, and the first description you see will be from “The Editor.” Go to Yelp, and you’ll get snippets of user reviews, highlighting the menu items that are mentioned most.

Yelp’s community focus provides an immediate impression of the business by consensus. Often times, I need only glance at a restaurant review on my iPhone to know if the place I’m standing in front of is worth going inside, and what item is the best on the menu. This experience only improves when more people are contributing to the discussion.

A restaurant reviewer might protest, arguing that consensus is no way to judge a restaurant or business. That’s a valid point, but Citysearch doesn’t provide in-depth reviews, either. (Who is “The Editor,” anyway?) The result is a lack of identity compared to Yelp’s strong sense of community.

Citysearch executive Kara Nortman tells TechCrunch that it’s got some new strategies in store, such as a “neighborhood platform” that will be filled with “trusted content.” I’m not sure what that refers to, but I’m guessing Citysearch will try to pride itself on information that’s more reliable than Yelp’s.

The only problem is that Yelp is growing more reliable every day. I don’t need a trusted advisor to tell me what to eat at a restaurant when there are hundreds of people who are already saying the same thing.

Hey Amazon and Sony! It’s Time for a Price Drop.

While the Amazon Kindle and to some extent the Sony Reader have ignited the e-book industry, analysts say that the market will not be able to grow much further without a serious price drop. Forrester Research studied the problem, and found the “magic price” where consumers would start considering a purchase was around $150.

It gets worse though: the actual price that consumers want to pay is much lower, sitting at around $90. This is nowhere close to the current retail prices of e-bookreaders: Sony’s somewhat close to the magic number with it’s cheapest at $199, but Amazon’s way overpriced in consumer’s eyes at $299.

Analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said that e-readers will likely never be a mass market device, however by getting prices down quicker they could exceed current sales targets easily. Consumers have an expectation that prices on technology can drop quickly (i.e. iPhone) and are expecting the same to happen here, she argues.

Component prices seem to be the major issue here, as the screens used to manufacture these devices are still somewhat prohibitively expensive. Regardless, Epps said she expects the prices of e-readers to drop about 20% in the next year.

That would put Sony near that $150 goal, but the Kindle would still remain well over $200, and above what most consumers would be willing to pay.

I agree that the pricing needs to come down on these units. If it comes to it, and the reason why the Kindle can’t get cheap faster is due to the EV-DO data included, take it out. Sell it as an option. I don’t know if Amazon would be willing to do that, but if they did that could be one way to lower prices faster.

Are you all in the market for one of these devices, and if so, what is your magic price for an e-reader? Let us know in the comments.

5Words for Thursday, September 3rd 2009

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Snow Leopard’s old Flash Player.

Another AT&T/iPhone angst story.

iPhone MMS coming September 25th.

Windows 7 parties across America.

The great Apple Store heist.

Amazon nonplussed with Google Books.

Pay-as-you-go Android.

New Sony Reader first impressions.

Is RSS Dead?

I’m on a plane (without Wi-Fi, alas) and the flight attendants are about to tell me to close my laptop, but I didn’t want to go out of pocket for a few hours without throwing a topic open for conversation: Is RSS dead? Feeds have been a favorite geek tool for years; I check out scads of them every day, in part to prepare 5Words. But my friend Sam Diaz started a mini-tempest a week ago when he said that RSS is past its prime. He must have struck a chord, because  the debate is still going on.

So what say you?

Oh, Just Tell Us the Xbox 360 Failure Rate Already!

Another day, another stab at the Xbox 360′s failure rate.

This time, the estimate comes from Square Trade (PDF), a third-party electronics warranty company. Based on customer reports, the company says Microsoft’s game console has a 23.7 percent chance of dying within two years of purchase. Half the errors reported to Square Trade involved the infamous Red Ring of Death.

Overall, the Xbox 360′s one in four chance of failure makes it far and away the most unreliable console on the market. By comparison, 10 percent of Playstation 3s were defective, and 2.7 percent of Wiis needed repair.

SquareTrade is the same company that in February 2008 said the Xbox 360 has a 16.4 percent failure rate, and we’ve seen other estimaes all over the map. In 2007, GamePro talked to some EB Games and Best Buy employees, who generally estimated that a third of all Xbox 360s had to be sent back for repair. More recently, Game Informer conducted a poll of readers, 54.2 percent of whom said they’ve dealt with an Xbox 360 hardware failure.

The funny thing is, you tend to be skeptical of such high estimates until the Red Ring of Death happens to you. My Xbox 360 kicked the bucket a few weeks ago, and suddenly I started realizing how many friends have gone through the same thing. If someone told me that 99 percent of Xbox 360s were bound to die within 10 years of ownership, I’d be skeptical of the claim, but not overly surprised if it turned out to be true.

Which is why I’d like Microsoft to come clean. Let’s clear the air of all these wildly speculative failure rate estimates and get some precise numbers and facts in order. If I treat my console right, can I expect it to last forever? If not, how long is it before every press of the power button is a crapshoot? And what are the odds that the Xbox 360 will outlast the three-year warranty that comes with every new console purchase?

Of course, I’d be foolish to expect such transparency out of the blue, but I doubt the truth could be much worse than third-party guesstimates and anecdotes. Or is it?

5Words for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

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Google explains the Gmail outage.

Of Google, outages, the future.

Nokia netbook: very neat, pricey.

Pandora upgrades its desktop app.

Twitter has a porn problem?

Sony’s thin, thin VAIO X.

Sorry, Google Voice: iPhone Vonage.

Xbox 360 is reliably unreliable.