Google Voice on the iPhone–Finally!

Apple may still officially be “pondering” whether it should approve Google’s Google Voice app for iPhone,  but there’s finally good news: Google has released an entirely Web-based version of the service (at m.google.com/voice). It works on the iPhone as well as Palm’s Pre and Pixi handsets, and brings a large chunk of the functionality of the native Voice apps for Android and BlackBerry to your phone’s browser.

This new version, like mobile Gmail, is among the most app-like browser services I’ve ever seen, period, letting you dial from your Google contacts list or a keypad, read and listen to messages, send text messages, and configure the app right within mobile Safari. When you make calls using it, the person who answers sees your Google Voice number, not the “real” one associated with your phone: Google makes an outgoing call from the iPhone, then reroutes it over a line of its own.

There’s only so far that a Web-based telephony app can go. On Android and BlackBerry, Google Voice can insert itself as your default phone interface, and it gets access to the contacts stored on your phone. On the iPhone, it stays a secondary interface and can’t see your local contacts. (You can, however, use Google Sync to sync your phone’s contacts with your Google Account.) When you make an outgoing call, your iPhone confirms you want to do so and shows Google’s routing number rather than the one you’re really calling–kind of confusing. And while the interface for wrangling messages is a vast improvement on the rudimentary one in the old Web-based Google Voice, it still send you out of Safari and into QuickTime when you want to listen to a message.

In short, the new Web-based Google Voice is impressive–but it doesn’t eliminate the value that a true native Google Voice for iPhone might bring. I’m gloomily assuming that its arrive eliminates whatever remaining chance there was that Apple might approve the app, unless the FCC decides to weigh in further. But I’m also relieved that around 80% of the Google Voice experience–just to pick a number at random–has landed on my iPhone.

Here’s a video Google produced about the new version. A few screens after the jump.

Continue reading this story…

TechCrunch Hacked

Uberblog TechCrunch appears to have been hacked. At the moment, I’m getting either a blank screen or a “We’ll be back shortly.” message. Right before that, though, I got this (bad word censored by me, but I bet you can figure it out):

Dupedb.com looks like a porn torrent site or or somesuch–all I know for sure is that it looked so disreputable that I turned around and left within seconds of getting there.

And…the site’s back up. At least as of this moment. Details on what happened to come, I hope.

[FURTHER UPDATE, 12:20am PT: It's down again.]

[EVEN FURTHER UPDATE, 12:56am PT: Site's down, new message is up.]

Palm OS Isn’t Dead Yet. Not Quite, Anyhow

Engadget has taken note of the fact that Palm has seemingly removed the Treo Pro–the last Palm phone that wasn’t a WebOS phone–from its site. It’s the end of an era–the first decade and a half or so of Palm’s existence leading up to the announcement of WebOS and the Palm Pre a year ago.

Well, sort of. Palm hasn’t completely excised the Treo Pro from its Web site. It just removed the navigational links that help you find it. Google for “Treo Pro,” and the first link you get is to a page on Palm’s site where the Pro is apparently still for sale:

The Sprint link takes you to a page where the Pro is priced at $149.99–the same final cost as the Pre. There may be a rationale for buying the Pro–a phone that was sort of a nicely-refined dinosaur even when it shipped in 2008–over the Pre, but it’s escaping me right now.

Besides, the Treo Pro may have been a Treo in name, but it was a Windows Mobile phone. That meant it didn’t have the bloodline going back to the first PalmPilot. Even if it’s all been discontinued, it’s not a major moment in the history of Palm. The major moment came when the company’s final Palm OS device went off the market.

Or has it yet?

Google the word “Centro,” and you’ll find a Palm.page on the Centro, which I think was the final Palm OS phone:

While the page offers to help you buy a Centro, it seems to be a phantom–as far as I tell, the links don’t work. The major moment that was the passing of the final Palm OS phone came and went, and I didn’t even notice.

Except…the Centro isn’t quite gone yet. Sprint still sells it, for a final price of thirty bucks. I’m prepared to accept the possibility that Palm has stopped making the things and Sprint is blowing out the final production run, but it’s sort of endearing to see a Palm OS phone out there in the iPhone/Android/WebOS era. At least for a little while longer. And even though I don’t recommend buying it unless you really like the Palm OS, and maybe not even then…

Apple Beats Earnings Estimates

Ahead of Apple’s anticipated unveiling of its tablet device later this week, the house lights have turned on, and the opening band is playing. Apple managed to (temporarily) break through the hullabaloo by announcing its 1st quarter earnings today.

Apple posted a net quarterly profit (US GAAP) of $3.38 billion on $15.68 billion in revenue. That earned stockholders $3.67 per diluted share as compared to $2.50 per diluted share for the same period one year ago. Among the highlights are:

• International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
• Macintosh computer sales increased 33 percent over the year-ago quarter. 3.36 million were sold.
• Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones in the quarter (a 100% increase)
• Apple sold 21 million iPods in the quarter (an 8% decrease).

“We are very pleased to have generated $5.8 billion in cash during the quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2010, we expect revenue in the range of about $11.0 billion to $11.4 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $2.06 to $2.18.”

Doubtless to say, Apple’s tablet will affect its revenue into the foreseeable future – one way or another. We are also witnessing a shift to a product mix heavier in connected devices. One lingering question is: what is going to happen with Apple TV? Hopefully the company will answer more questions than it raises on Wednesday– the orgy of prognosticating is killing me.

Why Are We Talking About the Sony “Kill Switch?”

In what looks like an example of staggeringly bad journalism, the Telegraph ran a story on Sony’s mythical “kill switch,” or “Sony Timer” — a Japanese urban legend that says Sony products are timed to fail shortly after their warranties expire.

My problem with the article isn’t the urban legend itself — almost two decades old, the myth is fascinating in that it applies only to Sony products — but that it pretends to be a news story while offering no new information whatsoever. The story, by Hunter Skipworth, has not a single statistic, quote or recent piece of evidence to back its claim that “many” Japanese people still believe in the Sony Timer (and how many is “many,” by the way?). Nonetheless, Wired, Engadget and CrunchGear picked up the story without questioning its validity.

Much of the article is rooted in things that occurred four years ago, such as the 2006 recall of 4.1 million Dell laptops containing Sony batteries, and an issue with Bravia TVs that gave them just 1,200 hours of life unless patched. Skipworth says the rumor persists in manga comics and Internet message boards, but he links to no examples, recent or historic. He cites comments from Sony executives that date to 2006 and 2007, saying that the myth is hurting the company, but didn’t bother to get an update for 2010.

It’s also worth noting that an article on the blog Pink Tentacle, which predates the Telegraph article by nine days, has several of the same anecdotes. However, that article does not pretend to be news; the blog clearly states that the post is part of weekly series on Japanese urban legends.

I’m not disputing the urban legend’s prevalence in Japan, nor am I testifying for or against Sony products’ longevity. But the Sony Timer is a 20-year old myth that picked up legs four years ago thanks to a couple incidents. If you’re going to bring it up again and present it as new information, some actual new information is essential.

Tablet “Ad”

The fact that anyone’s giving even a nanosecond of thought to whether this might be a real leaked ad for Apple’s tablet is evidence that madness has descended upon us…

iPhone Everywhere?

Apple to let all major U.S. carriers sell the iPhone? This still sounds like it’s one for the jam-packed “an analyst speculates that it could happen, so it’s nearly a done deal” file…

Bill Gates Defends Chinese Censorship

Now Bill Gates has joined Steve Ballmer in seemingly contending that Chinese censorship of the Internet isn’t that big a deal:

You’ve got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in, or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there…

[snip]

The Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. It’s easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important.

You can certainly make the case that by staying in China, U.S. Internet businesses are more likely to bring about greater freedom of expression than if they refuse to abide by censorship laws and abandon the country. And Gates is right that the Great Firewall of China is easy to circumvent. But I’ve used the Internet in China–as, surely, has Bill Gates–and I wouldn’t call the censorship “very limited…”

Two Firefox 3.6 Tips (Fullscreen, Tab Placement)

I’m generally well ahead of the crowd when it comes to Firefox. In fact, I’ve been running pre-release versions as my primary browser since the days when the Mozilla browser was known as Firebird. However, early versions of 3.6 were particularly crashy (along with the Flash 10.1 beta) and buggy in inconvenient ways (couldn’t access my work email due to some sort of cert issue). So I’ve largely abstained. And thus, have been uninformed. Two updates in particular have impacted my workflow – one positive, the other negative.

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Mr. Edison’s Kindle

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” So said legendary tech visionary Alan Kay. He was absolutely correct. But he might have added that inventing the future is anything but a cakewalk. Even though everyone who does it has the luxury of learning from predecessors who tried and failed.

The brightest inventors on the planet keep coming up with ideas that never amount to much–even when they set out to solve real problems, and even when their brainchildren foreshadow later breakthroughs. And professional tech watchers have long proven themselves prone to getting irrationally exuberant about stuff that just isn’t ready for prime time.

Thanks to Google Books’ archives of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, LIFE, and other magazines that frequently reported on futuristic gizmos, we have a readily accessible record of technology that failed to live up to the initial hype–including random notions that never got off the drawing board, startlingly advanced products that didn’t find a market, and very rough drafts of concepts that eventually became a big deal. The best of them are fascinating, even when it’s not the least bit surprising that they flopped.

Herewith, fifteen inventions–not that all of them ever got built–that were at least a decade ahead of their time. They’re in chronological order, starting with the inspiration that gave this article its title.
Continue reading this story…

The Apple Tablet: What Will Be, According to You

Last week, I asked you to help me kill time until Apple (probably) announces its tablet by participating in an experiment: a group prediction about its features, name, and price. Nearly three hundred of you pitched in. Here’s part two of the project: aggregating your responses into one big collective guess. (Part three will come once Apple unveils the thing: We’ll go over our prediction and see how we did.)

The predictions are based on your answers to a series of multiple choice questions. In instances where you were allowed to select more than one answer, any answer that more than 51% of you chose counts as a prediction. In cases where you were only allowed to select one answer, the one that received the most votes counts as a prediction, even if it fell short of a true majority.

(There is, of course, nothing the least bit scientific about any of this. But given the lousy track record of professional Apple pundits, I figure it stands at least as good a chance of being accurate as any other method short of finding someone within Apple who knows what he or she is talking about and has very loose lips. )

Continue reading this story…

Can the Kindle Play Doom? Of Course Not.

With Amazon planning to open a Kindle app store later this year, Brad Nicholson at Destructoid asked developer Sonic Boom what sorts of games would be possible on the e-reader.

The answer, from Sonic Boom’s chief operating officer Josh Grant, left me scratching my head. Word, puzzle and card games are on the way, Grant said, and beyond that, they’re looking at book tie-in applications that “take advantage of the literary aspects of the device.” He avoided getting into the details of what exactly the Kindle is capable of.

Now, I’m not expecting that the Kindle should run Doom. Elsewhere, I’ve mused that Space Invaders would be awesome, but I’m not even sure that’s possible with the slow refresh rate of E-Ink displays and a processor originally intended for reading, not gaming. Still, it would’ve been nice if Sonic Boom shed some light on the matter.

It seems safe to say that if a game can be played on paper — or a product made of paper — the Kindle can handle it. But how far can and will developers take that ability? Will card games be limited to Solitaire, Freecell and their ilk, or will we see something as elaborate as online Texas Hold’em? (And would Amazon even allow that kind of bandwidth use?)

I’m also thinking we might see some board games. Electronic Arts, which Amazon has mentioned as a developer, already offers a bunch of Hasbro classics for mobile phones, including Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. Those certainly seem better suited for the Kindle than Madden NFL 10 or Need for Speed: Shift.

Of course, none of these potential offerings will be as robust as what you can get with a smartphone or — dare I say it –a tablet, but as long as they enrich the Kindle experience, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Digg’s “Drastic Changes” = Playing With Fire

Kevin Rose has gone on record saying the next version of Digg, due within months, will feature some drastic changes that in his own words will leave some of their users “shocked.”  It isn’t altogether clear exactly what Mr. Rose has planned, including navigation bar and Digg button changes, and a greater focus on “real-time” content.

Another big change is that there would be a greater focus on what those more closely associated with a user are digging rather than the user base at large. Previously, the concept of digging meant all users had a say in what content made it to the front pages of the site.

The switch appears to be a response to a overall paradigm shift when it comes to social networking. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have made consumers more apt to follow what their friends are doing rather than some random Internet user they may no nothing about.

Call me crazy, but I feel drastic changes like what seems to be proposed here are often perilous. Users are accustomed to one way of doing things. If you change too much of what has made you popular, you risk alienating and frustrating your loyal users. Will Digg’s changes do just that? It’s hard to say.

I’m just hoping here that they’re not planning to change too much of the user experience, or that could definitely spell trouble.

(Hat tip: Telegraph UK)

Ballmer on China Censorship

Did Steve Ballmer really call free speech laws in the U.S. “extreme” and draw parallels between anti-child pornography laws and China’s suppression of information relating to human rights? Or is Forbes’ account of his speech before oil industry execs an unfair recap of what he said?

Windows Mobile 7 to Debut at WMC 2010

You may have remembered our reporting about two weeks ago putting the future of Windows Mobile 7 into doubt, and pushing its release further into the future. Enter DigiTimes, who its refuting some of that reporting saying Microsoft is ready to debut WM7 at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona complete with a release date.

DigiTimes says that Microsoft will announce an OEM availability in September, translating to a retail availability by the end of the year or early in 2011. This would be for English and European languages: Asian translations will come later, probably in 2011.

So who’s right? DigiTimes is probably a more reputable source than whomever Bright Side of News is, but their track record in accurate scoops isn’t much better. Guess we will see…

The People Have Spoken

I’m not sure if this is expected enthusiasm for the iPhone or unexpected enthusiasm for AT&T or what, but when I asked you guys whether I should stick with my iPhone 3GS on AT&T or jump ship to another handset and carrier, a plurality of you told me to stay where I am. On the other hand, even more of you told me to switch to a Nexus One, on either T-Mobile or Verizon.

I didn’t give you one option that I probably should have: waiting until an iPhone is available on Verizon, and then switching. Wanna bet that a lot of you wold have voted for that?