5Words: The European Browser Ballot, Revealed

Here’s Europe’s Windows browser ballot.

Great phones you can’t buy.

Sprint WiMax phone: this summer.

Apple: no smutty iPhone apps?

School district denies spying, apologizes.

Grand unified theory of n00bs.

Sneak peek at Dell’s tablet.

Google’s shopping app for Android.

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Hulu Figures Out Its Future

Most people who want Flash on the iPhone and iPad don’t really care about Flash–they care about the profusion of video, games, and other content that currently uses Flash. Near the top of that list is TV megasite Hulu. Will it come to Apple’s mobile devices, as well as other newfangled gizmos like TV boxes? It wants to, says All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka–but it thinks that consumers should pay for the privilege, and is trying to figure out the logistics.

Photoshop is Twenty

Adobe is celebrating Photoshop’s twentieth anniversary today. (The program, created by brothers John and Thomas Knoll, actually goes back to the late 1980s, but Adobe shipped its first version on February 19th,1990.) Here’s a fun video from Adobe with a 1990 clip on the whole shocking idea of digital photoretouching, and a new conversation between the men who made the app.

Sezmi Launches Into Retail in Los Angeles

Having piloted their “personal TV service” in Los Angeles since November, Sezmi is formally launching into the LA market today via local Best Buy outposts.
Last month at CES, I finally got a look at their product… which pulls together local other-the-air (OTA) programming, premium programming (such as CNN and SyFy) simulcast OTA in select markets, and Internet-sourced content including CinemaNow VOD and YouTube. Their vision is solid, and more holistic than most, likely embodying the future of home entertainment by aggregating multiple content sources within a personalized presentation for each family member (or housemate).
Continue reading this story…

WordPress Downtime

Earlier today, Technologizer was down for a little under two hours–as were millions of other blogs hosted by Automattic’s WordPress.com, including some that are a lot bigger than this one. WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg explains what happened here (it was by far the biggest disruption to WordPress.com in more than four years). My apologies to anyone who wandered by here and couldn’t get in.

Sony Attacks PSP Pirates, Hurts Used Game Owners

Sony’s PSP has a piracy problem. The company has complained about it, game developers fret over it and the download-only PSP Go exists partly because of it. But Sony’s newest scheme to prevent PSP piracy takes things too far, punishing players who’ve done nothing wrong.

IGN reports that SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, out this week, won’t play online without a voucher code that’s included with the game. If you buy the game used, you’ll need another voucher, which costs $20 on its own. I also wonder whether people whose PSPs are lost or stolen will have to pay another $20 to restore SOCOM’s online play.

The game costs $40 new, so until the used version costs half that, you won’t save any money on a used copy if you intend to play online. GameStop currently lists used copies of SOCOM 3 at $33, so it doesn’t seem that the extra expense for multiplayer is driving down used prices.

What Sony is doing isn’t novel. Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello is fond of saying he views illegal downloads as potential sales, in that people may decide they like the game enough to purchase some downloadable content. Sony’s approach is more sinister, effectively withholding a portion of the game from people who are technically paying for the whole thing.

I’m no pirate, which is why it pains me to see legitimate buyers become collateral damage in the piracy war. Sony’s director of hardware marketing, John Koller, won’t say whether the company will use this anti-piracy tactic in other games. It’s a trial run, he told IGN. Hopefully, the experiment is short-lived.

Exclusive: TheStreet.com’s Tech Exclusives Are a Crapshoot

TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz has an exciting exclusive: Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar has learned that Microsoft is working on a Microsoft-branded phone based on its Windows Phone 7 Series OS. It’ll be manufactured by HTC Asus, and software problems have postponed its release into 2011.

The story would seem to give new life to old rumors about a Microsoft phone, code-named project “Pink.” Except…Scott Moritz stories headlined as”exclusives”–usually crediting Kumar for the scoop–have a crummy track record of exclusively revealing stuff that turns out to be true. When I see them, my instinctive response is skepticism, not bland acceptance of anything in the story as gospel.

Shall we recap?

Continue reading this story…

Google Buzz Controversy: Enter the Lawyers

When a meaningful number of consumers get irritated over the behavior of a large company, it’s a safe bet that one or more class-action lawsuits will follow. Latest case in point: Google Buzz is the subject of a complaint filed on behalf of a Florida woman. It contends that the new feature within Gmail violated her rights by disclosing personal information–her most-frequent e-mail contacts–without her permission.

At this point, I suspect that just about everybody–including Google–agrees that Google erred in not explaining Buzz more clearly and erring on the side of privacy. The company has since tweaked the service multiple times to get things right.

But was the Buzz launch merely unfortunately rocky, or should Google face legal consequences for its actions?

MagicJack: Cheesy Ads, But Mostly Works as Advertised

Hey, Walt Mossberg likes the MagicJack…

Google’s Web Clipboard

Google has given its Docs Web-based suite a much-improved clipboard that lets you retain formatting when you cut and paste information between the apps. Very cool–and a reminder of just how far Web apps have to go before they get even all the features that everyone deemed essential in desktop software a couple of decades ago.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Google made its clipboard an open standard and invited Web-productivity competitors such as Zoho and SlideRocket and…even Microsoft…to support it, too?

Thrilling News! reMail is Going Bye-Bye!

Remember reMail, the clever iPhone app that let you store massive amounts of e-mail on your phone and search it instantly? Google was apparently impressed–reMail founded Gabor Cselle, a former Gmail engineer, has announced news he says he’s “thrilled” by: Google has bought reMail and he’ll be rejoining the Gmail team.

And then he shares news that doesn’t sound all that thrilling to me: Google has discontinued reMail and yanked it off the iPhone App Store. Previously-downloaded copies will still work, and users of the free version can get all the features of the paid edition. But Google will stop supporting the app at the end of next month, and there will never be another update. Starting today, reMail is a Dead App Walking.

Oddly enough, Cselle says all this on a blog with a profile that says that (A) reMail exists to radically improve mobile e-mail; and (B) it hasn’t launched yet. That’s out of date on both fronts: It did launch–in beta form, at least, to an enthusiastic reception–and it won’t be improving e-mail from here on out.

Cselle doesn’t explain why Google is killing reMail. It’s possible that the company remained impressed by Cselle and wasn’t interested in reMail itself. But it’s also conceivable that it sees reMail as the foundation of an ambitious Gmail app, and that everything that was cool about reMail will reappear at some point in a new form. We just don’t know, and Google doesn’t seem to be dropping hints.

The search-engine behemoth has acquired an infinite number of interesting startups over the years. In certain cases, that’s been good news for fans of the products those companies made–Google Earth (nee Keyhole 3D Earth Viewer) and Picasa spring to mind. (Oh, and YouTube.) And Google says that the neat Q&A service Aardvark, which it bought last week, will live on as a Google Labs project.

Unfortunately, though, what’s good news for Google and startup founders is often a bummer–at least in the short term–for everyone else who cared about the startup in question.

Outlook Gets LinkedIn (and I Get Frustrated)

Last November, Microsoft announced an add-on for Outlook called the Social Connector. At first, it only worked with new social networking features in the company’s SharePoint 2010 intranet platform. On Tuesday, it got interesting even for Outlook users who aren’t on SharePoint, as Microsoft and LinkedIn announced LinkedIn for Outlook, which uses the Social Connector to weave together the Outlook and LinkedIn experiences. (Microsoft says that similar features for Facebook and MySpace are on their way.)

Continue reading this story…

Opera on iPhone: Here But Not Here

Engadget’s Thomas Ricker is in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. He got a preview of Opera’s Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and was impressed by its speed. He was also confused by Opera’s unwillingness to let him share any images of it in action. And of course, there’s no guarantee that it’ll ever be available in Apple’s iPhone App Store. (Actually, the odds seem against it.)

Please, Apple, surprise us by promptly approving this app so we don’t need to waste any time or brain cells squawking about it…

Firefox on Android: Coming Soonish?

The browser wars have been one of the best things that ever happened to computer users–but so far, they haven’t spilled over from the desktop onto phones. (Yes, there are multiple browsers available for many phone OSes, but there tends to be one 800-pound gorilla and a bunch of obscure alternatives.) So I’m glad to hear that Mozilla says it hopes to have Firefox up and running on Android by the end of the year…

Twitter 1980s Style

I’m sorry, but I just can’t resist any news story involving Commodore’s fabulously feeble early home PC, the VIC-20. The Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario plans to celebrate its fifth anniversary this Saturday by using Twitter from one. And no, it’s not a VIC-20 that’s been modded for the purpose–it’s a stock unit with a whopping 5KB of RAM and a tape drive.

The VIC will Tweet using TweetVER, a software platform which the Museum hopes to port to other classic computers. (Me, I’ll be even more excited when it becomes available for the TRS-80 Model I, or at least the Atari 400.)

It’s not the first time that PC enthusiasts have used a very old machine for a very new purpose–here, for instance, is an Apple II browsing the Web. But there’s something particularly appropriate about Twitter being the subject of this stunt.

It’s one of the few popular modern services that really doesn’t need to be dumbed down for the VIC: The machine’s display shows 23 rows of 22 characters apiece, so up to three 140-character Tweets could fit on it at one time. And the system’s crummy graphics–176 by 184 with 16 colors–aren’t really an issue, because, hey, Twitter doesn’t let you post images. Twitter can be Twitter on a computer that’s nearly thirty years old; that just wouldn’t be true of Facebook, YouTube, or Gmail. Probably not World of Warcraft, either.

I’ve always said that Twitter isn’t that much different from the BBSs I was dialing into back when the VIC-20 was new. This is proof. I predict that there’s at least a fifteen percent chance that the VIC-20 will perform like a champ but that something will go wrong with Twitter itself during the experiment…

5Words: Engadget Explores Windows 7 Phone

Windows Phone 7 Series superguide.

The FCC’s National Broadband Plan.

Apple fixes busted Macbook drives.

Microsoft’s anti-Google YouTube videos.

Adobe CTO on Flash, iPad.

The Canadians: disgruntled over Buzz.

Use Buzz on WebOS phones.

You can’t force-feed users.

Redbox delays Warner DVD releases.

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