Microsoft’s Game Room: The Arcade Reborn?

With the Game Room, Microsoft’s hoping to capture the old magic of video game arcades, minus the stale air, sugar highs and wasted quarters.

I got some questions answered on service, which will be available on Windows and Xbox Live this spring. Here are the important details (if you’re a retro game nerd):

-30 games will be available at launch, including Centipede, Lunar Lander and Night Driver (full list here), from arcade systems as well as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Microsoft says it’ll release 7 new games per week after launch.

-Games cost $3 each for either Xbox Live or Windows, and $5 if you want the luxury of playing on both. The arcade itself is open to any level of Xbox Live (no Gold subscription necessary).

-Unlike some of the classic games Microsoft released earlier this year, these are straight emulators with no boosts in resolution or graphics. Unfortunately, that means if there’s any overlap, you’ll have to pay for the Game Room titles again.

-Players build their own virtual arcades, with cabinets that mimic the hulking monstrosities of yesteryear. As your arcade grows, you get new rooms or entire new floors that can be decorated differently. But you don’t navigate these with an avatar — the camera simply slides between each room and cabinet.

-Other players can visit your arcade, and they’ll earn free play tokens based on how many games you have. They can also demo any game once, or can pay 40 Xbox Live points (50 cents) for extra plays.

-Downer: You can’t directly play against another player online (so no head-to-head in Combat). Instead, online multiplayer consists of high score or other challenges you send to your friends. Two-player games will work locally.

The service seems promising, and I particularly like all the ways Microsoft will give players to try games. It’s like we’re getting allowance all over again.

Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus

At last year’s CES, Palm stole the show with the introduction of the Pre–one of the most spellbinding demos I’ve ever seen that didn’t involve Steve Jobs. No repeat this year, but the company did have a press conference at which it announced the Pre Plus (with some improvements to the keyboard, navigation, and build quality, plus a Touchstone-compatible inductive-charging back cover as standard equipment) and the Pixi Plus (with Wi-Fi).

Maybe the best news about these models: They’re on Verizon Wireless. Exclusively, Palm says–starting January 25th.

Swype: Splendid!

Here at CES, I just visited with the folks behind Swype, the touchscreen input technology that knocked my socks off in canned demos I’ve seen, and which recently shipped on its first phone, Samsung’s Omnia II. I finally got some hands-on experience, and…I’m not only impressed, I’m more impressed than before, because the learning curve is small and the accuracy is remarkable.

Watching it in action remains the best way to understand it:

The only thing I don’t like about Swype: The company’s strategy is to get it built into as many phones (and tablets, and other devices that need a touch keboard) as possible. So they’re not selling it as a stand-alone app. If by some miracle this technology were to become available on the iPhone, it would be a great day indeed.

More E-Reader Impressions: Skiff

Unlike Plastic Logic, new e-reader arrival Skiff isn’t showing off its stuff on the show floor. But it’s demonstrating its reader–which it’s only saying will arrive sometime in 2010, at an unspecified price–in a private room. I got a sneak peek, and came away intrigued.

Physically, the Skiff reader looks a lot like Plastic Logic’s Que–it has a magazine-sized screen, a touch interface, and a thin case. Both readers use their extra real estate and resolution to render pages with more style and fidelity than is afforded by the smaller screens on the Kindle and Nook. But while Plastic Logic is pitching the Que as a business tool, Skiff is focusing on making magazines and newspapers easy to get and read. The demo I got involved digital versions of the Wall Street Journal and Esquire that maintained a newspaper and magazine-like feel, respectively, along with the typography, art, and layouts you associate with those two publications. They’re not exact replicas of the print incarnations, though–they’re scaled to the available screen space on the Skiff. And the ads provide some interactivity, such as a car one that lets you find a local dealer.

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Plastic Logic’s Que E-Reader: Revealed, Finally

Plastic Logic has been teasing us with previews of its e-reader–now dubbed the Que proReader–for sixteen months. This morning at CES, it formally announced the product on the show floor, complete with demos of the final version and full details on features, pricing, and availability.

As Plastic Logic has said all along, the Que is based on its proprietary plastic transistor technology (which allows for a large, lightweight, glass-free display), has a screen the size of an 8.5″-by-11″ piece of paper, uses a touchscreen interface, and is aimed at businessfolk who “need to read” rather than those who read for pleasure. It’s signed content deals with business-oriented media brands such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company (and my old employer IDG), it lets you drag and drop Microsoft Office documents and other business files from your PC to the e-reader, and it has extensive tools for annotating and organizing documents. It also lets you view your Exchange calendar and has a complementary BlackBerry app which lets you transfer files to the Que.

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This New Qualcomm Technology Gives E-Readers Color

It’s still early here at the Consumer Electronics Show–the halls bursting at the seams with exhibitors open later this morning for the first time. But if someone asked me what the most interesting thing is that I’ve seen so far, the answer’s easy: It’s the low-power color displays for e-readers and other gadgets from Qualcomm’s Mirasol division, which the company was showing off at the Digital Experience event Wednesday night.

Mirasol’s technology produces screens that look a lot like the E-Ink ones found on nearly every e-reader to date–they’re unilluminated and therefore look better in bright light than in dim environments.  But Mirasol’s displays, unlike E-Ink, do color and have decent refresh rates. If the shipping version of the display technology’s as impressive as the demo, that means that it’ll allow for e-readers with color pages, video, and slicker user interfaces. Here’s a photo of a concept device that doesn’t do the technology justice.

The Mirasol technology, which involves tiny mirrors creating colors by refracting light, doesn’t have anything to do with how E-Ink works, but it shares some of the virtues that make it a good candidate for e-reading devices, including extremely low power consumption. (Like E-Ink, it only draws power when the page is being changed, not when an image is static.) Actually, a Mirasol representative told me that it uses far less power than even E-Ink.

The tech demo at Digital Experience knocked my socks off, but Mirasol isn’t quite ready to go into consumer products yet. Qualcomm says to expect an e-reader incorporating the the technology by the third quarter of the year.

HP Does Android, Experimentally

Spotted Wednesday evening at Digital Experience, an unofficial press event here in Las Vegas during CES week: an HP netbook with Google’s Android OS, a touchscreen, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It bears a familial resemblance to HP’s Mini netbooks, but has been rethought in multiple ways–for instance, it lacks the row of function keys that’s standard equipment on all Windows PCs and Macs.

This machine’s presence at the show isn’t nearly the big deal it might be, for one simple reason: HP says it’s just experimenting with Android. This is a concept PC, and there’s no news about its chances of turning into a shipping product you can buy. Still, you gotta figure that if HP has gone through the bother of building this prototype, there’s a real chance it’ll commercialize it in 2010. Unless, that is, it decides to scrap the Android OS and begin over again with Google’s Chrome OS…

Patent Trolls: They Do Exist

Stanford University has announced a new service for analyzing and tracking patent lawsuits called Lex Machina. Its use of legal informatics has already led to some interesting findings about the nature of patent lawsuits in the US software industry.

The database helped Mark Lemley, the William H. Neukom Professor of Law and the director of the Law, Science Technology Program, determine that patent trolls account for nearly 30% of suits in the IT industry, depending on who is defined as a troll, he said. The clearinghouse data shows that trolls are “disproportionately owners of the most-litigated patents — the ones that show up in dozens of different lawsuits,” he added.

Lemley has conducted research to identify the characteristics of patent trolls, and has testified as an expert for the US Senate on the topic of patent reform.

“I do think [trolls] have a larger impact than the percentage alone would suggest, especially in the IT industries,” Lemley said. He added that the data will help dispel myths about patent litigation from who sues to who wins, and how much defendants have to pay. “We are giving the world access to the facts in a way they’ve never had before.”

Lex Machina is an outgrowth of a research project called the Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC). IPLC was developed to provide scholars, policy makers and citizens with open and instant access to data about intellectual property litigation in the United States.

The database grew so vast that Lex Machina was spun off as a separate venture to sustain development, according to Stanford. It now contains over 100,000 cases, over 10 million docket entries, and automates the parsing of that data. “The company includes more computer scientists than lawyers, and has people working at the very forefront of machine learning,” Lemley noted.

I applaud Stanford’s work, and hope that the IPLC database is used to drive patent reform, demystifying a complicated issue. Higher quality patents will protect investments in intellectual property while preserving the ability of start ups to do innovative things.

Apple’s Next iPhone Must Resurrect the Wow Effect

The arrival of Google’s Nexus One smartphone is like the Beatles following Elvis Presley. Elvis revolutionized music and retained his immortal status, but The Beatles were great in their own right. The technological advantage that Apple had when it introduced the iPhone is diminishing (think Fat Elvis). And so the next iPhone will need to be another game changer for Apple to remain on top.

With the original iPhone, Apple addressed the shortcomings that most devices in the category had with fresh, innovative ideas. Initially, there were many second rate imitators, but now, products including the Palm Pre and Nexus One match if not surpass the iPhone in numerous ways.

I love my iPhone, and couldn’t imagine life without my apps. However, there are great alternatives for people who have not yet upgraded to a smartphone or want to save on their monthly service fees.

Case in point: A few months back, a friend and I were sitting in an East Village bar waiting for a bossa nova show to begin. We both whipped out our phones (his was a Pre) and had the proverbial “size contest.” I couldn’t knock the Pre, and he is very happy with it.

Moreover, AT&T’s decision to carry five Android phones is prescient–Android has no place to go but up. While it’s still not fully mature, Android is a great operating system for device manufacturers that do not have their own OS, and that is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of Microsoft Windows.

What is Apple to do? It will do very well due to the strength of its brand, and dedicated users like myself, but those strengths will eventually decline into inertia. Even a phone that leaves the Pre and Nexus One in its dust will not be good enough–Apple must bring back the “wow” factor in order to maintain its leadership of the market (or cede and focus on another groundbreaking product).

I’m confident that Cupertino has enough tricks up its sleeve that it could leave the rest of the industry chasing the iPhone again. There is room to play as the smartphone category grows, but anything less than a revolutionary product simply isn’t good enough for Apple.

Nyko One-Ups Nintendo With Wii Wand+

Despite the Wii’s innovative motion controls, Nintendo’s Wii Remote is nothing special to hold, especially compared to the elaborate design of an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 controller. That makes fertile ground for Nyko, whose third-party Wii Remotes, or Wands, feel just as mediocre for $10 less.

At CES, Nyko is showing off the Wand+, which is the same size as a regular Wii Remote, but includes the functionality of Nintendo’s accuracy-boosting Wii MotionPlus dongle, no attachments required. Best of all, the Wand+ will sell for $40 when it goes on sale in late February — the same price Nintendo charges for a standalone Wii Remote (Nintendo’s MotionPlus attachment costs another $20).

There are some other nice design flourishes, too, like a soft coating and rubber backing that includes comfortable grooves over the rear battery pack. And it comes in partial or all black.

Nvidia Offers a Taste of Tablets to Come

Laying unceremoniously towards the end of Nvidia’s booth at a press event tonight was an early prototype of the Ultra, an Android 2.0 tablet developed by ICD.

It’s the same tablet (or slate — I’m as baffled as Harry by the terminology shift) that appeared briefly, of all places, on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, a 7-inch tablet with all the trimmings: Wi-Fi, 3G, Webcam, MicroSD slot, 4 GB of internal memory and, of course, Nvidia’s formidable Tegra chip. An Nvidia representative promised more and better tablets at the company’s booth tomorrow, but I had to take a stab at this one tonight.

The Ultra was a bit buggy, which explains why Nvidia wasn’t making a big deal of it. As soon as I picked it up, it crashed. Then it took a while to load up. Then the touch screen acted a bit dodgy. And yet, I walked away excited.

What most impressed me was the tablet’s speed and smoothness. Maybe it’s the iPhone effect, but lately I’ve become obsessed by this sort of thing. And because I’ve never seen Android running so smoothly — even the Nexus One phone on display elsewhere at the event showed some choppiness — using the Ultra was a pleasure. A 1080p version of Star Trek played without a stutter, and the e-reader function flipped nimbly between pages.

We don’t yet know what Apple has in store — or for that matter, whether Apple has anything in store at all — but even if it’s something completely surprising, I could get comfortable with Tegra and Android as purveyors of working class tabletslates. We’ll see what else is in store tomorrow.

The Beginning of the End of Memory Stick? Hope So!

In the great scheme of this, this is minor CES news indeed, but I kinda like it: Sony is releasing a line of SD and MicroSD memory cards. If it were any other company, I wouldn’t be writing this post, but we’re talking Sony–the company behind the venerable, eternally annoying, rather pricey, confusingly named, incompatible-with-the-rest-of-the-world Memory Stick format.

Sony, of course, would argue that Memory Stick is an argument in favor of buying its products. I’ve always found it a reason to decide against buying them–even though many of the products that take Memory Sticks, such as scads of Sony’s cameras, have been otherwise otherwise nifty. (I do admit to having a couple of them around somewhere, though–the one time I willingly used them was when I owned a Sony Clie PDA eons ago.)

Sony’s press release about the new SD cards stresses that Memory Stick is still a fabulous format and owners of Sony products should be grateful they have it. And I suspect that nobody within Sony even wants to deal with the possibility that its entry into SD is a first step towards winding down Memory Stick. I’d love to think that it might be, though. Anyone out there want to make the case for keeping the format, other than placating long-time Sony customers who have lots of cards stuffed in desk drawers?

AT&T and Android: Together at Last

AT&T, which has been the only major U.S. wireless carrier without any Android phones, is jumping on the bandwagon in a big way: Here at CES, it announced that it’s releasing five Android devices in the first half of this year, including models from Motorola, HTC, and…Dell.

Steve Ballmer to Demo Slate! Or Not!

When the New York Times’ Ashlee Vance blogged that Steve Ballmer would demo a “novel” HP slate computer at his CES keynote tonight, people got worked up and wondered if it was the semi-mythical Courier prototype. Now sentiment seems to be running against the theory that Ballmer will show off anything extraordinary. ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley thinks it might be a relatively prosaic new HP Windows 7 touch-enabled machine. Kara Swisher also says it isn’t Courier.

Sounds reasonable to me–Courier feels like something that’s most likely not ready to be a product just yet.

It’s amazing how quickly the tech world has stopped calling tablets tablets and begun referring to them as slates–a term that wasn’t bandied about much until rumors broke that Apple’s device might be named iSlate. Or can anyone explain to me what the difference is between a tablet and a slate?

Either way, I plan to be at the Ballmer keynote tonight. I’ll let you know what we see, or don’t see…

Boxee’s QWERTY Remote

The Boxee Box, the Internet TV gizmo that D-Link will be demoing at CES this week, has a remote control with a QWERTY keyboard on its backside. Makes perfect sense. Actually, come to think of it, isn’t it kind of bizarre that there are so many TV boxes today that expect us to laboriously click our way through on-screen keyboards to enter alphanumeric information?

Hands on With Google’s Nexus One: Questions and Answers

How long has the gadget-loving world been talking about the idea of a Googlephone? For at least three years–before there was an iPhone, let alone an Android.  The longer people talked about it, the more revolutionary it was supposed to be. Who better than Google, after all, to show what an Android phone can be and shatter people’s assumptions about how phones and phone services are sold while it’s at it?

On Tuesday, Google finally announced the Googlephone, in the form of the Nexus One–if you define “Googlephone” as a phone with Google software and Google branding, sold by Google on a Google site.  And…there’s nothing radical about it. Judging from the first few hours I’ve spent playing with one, it’s a good phone–a really good phone. The best Android phone so far, and (along with Palm’s Pre) one of the few phones worthy of being discussed in the same breath as Apple’s iPhone.

But everything that’s better about it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It’s a little bit better than Verizon’s Droid, which was a little bit better than HTC’s Hero, which was a little bit better than the MyTouch.  And considering that Verizon’s Droid spent just two months as the undisputed Android-phone-to-buy, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if the Nexus One was ousted by another little-bit-better phone by Spring. There’s also not nothing particularly remarkable about the way Google is selling the phone, although the company says to stay tuned for more phones with more hardware and carrier partners–including a Verizon Nexus One this Spring.

Bottom line: If Android-based phones are going to catch up with the iPhone–and they might–they’re going to do so in a series of baby steps, not through the Great Leap Forward that some folks expected this phone to be.

Like other journalists at Google’s launch event, I received one as a review loaner. Here are my first impressions. As is my wont, I’m going to provide them in the form of a FAQ.
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