Are These Microsoft Research Demos the Future of the Tablet PC?

Maybe the Tablet PC isn’t dead. Maybe it’s just resting.

If the marketplace is your yardstick, the machine Bill Gates once predicted would become the world’s dominant computing device by 2006 definitively flopped  years ago. But a few days ago during a Fox Business News interview, Gates said that Microsoft hadn’t given up on Tablet PCs and stylus-based input. Yesterday, I attended TechFair, a event the company held at its Silicon Valley campus to show off lab projects from Microsoft Research, which employees 850 researchers in eight locations around the world. Among the demos I saw was proof that it’s still investing in the idea.

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Breaking: Nokia Sues Apple Over iPad

Nokia has just announced that it has sued Apple in Federal District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin, claiming that both the iPad and iPhone violate five patents held by the electronics maker.

“The patents in question relate to technologies for enhanced speech and data transmission, using positioning data in applications and innovations in antenna configurations that improve performance and save space, allowing smaller and more compact devices,” according to a statement from the company.

Although the wording is of course somewhat vague, the suit appears to hit the heart of what has made applications on the iPad and iPhone what they are. Positioning data in applications has become a central feature — most of the major ones carry some type of location-aware technology.

I’m not sure what Nokia means by “enhanced speech and data transmission,” and have asked the company to clarify exactly what those specific patents do cover.

Nokia’s suit surely comes as a surprise to the tech community, as it had not publicly made any indication that it believed its intellectual property rights had been violated. That said, it’s not the first suit between the two companies: a suit last year involved GSM, UMTS, and Wi-Fi standards. A request for comment has been sent to Apple, however no response has been received as of press time.

More details to come as we receive them.

Oh Christ, “Free iPhone 4G” Offers

Back in February, I wrote about “Free iPad” offers. They dangled a product that wasn’t available yet to get people to sign up for a gaggle of marketing schemes. But at least the dangled product was real.

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Xbox 360 USB Stick Honors the Tradition of Overpriced Storage

Well, of course the official Xbox 360 USB stick from SanDisk is outrageously priced, at $35 for 8 GB and $70 for 16 GB. That’s roughly double what you’d pay for comparable SanDisk drives, sans Xbox branding.

Microsoft started allowing external storage on the Xbox 360 last month. Although any flash drive or hard drive will do, Microsoft promised its own solution was forthcoming, and pretty much everyone assumed correctly that it wouldn’t be cheap.

In exchange for the hefty markup, you get a month of Xbox Live Gold (an $8 value) and plug-and-play support, which means you don’t have to format the drive using the console’s interface. I’d take the money.

But don’t blame Microsoft for thinking its brand name commands a premium. This is an industry tradition that predates the current console generation.

For instance, NewEgg sells a two-pack of 8 MB memory cards for the Playstation 2 for $34. A single, $30 card from Intec holds four times the data of both official cards combined. When I was in high school, I remember getting a similar deal on Nintendo 64 memory, with a third-party memory pack that cost roughly the same as the official model, but with four times the capacity.

Console makers aren’t the only ones who charge more than they should for storage. A 4 GB SanDisk Memory Stick Pro Duo for the PSP costs $35 at GameStop. The same exact product is $24 on Amazon and $19 on NewEgg. GameStop also plans to charge an extra $5 for the 8 GB Xbox 360 USB stick.

If you’re reading this blog, I have a feeling you’re tech-savvy enough to shop around and avoid the games industry’s storage shenanigans. Microsoft did good by allowing non-proprietary memory on the Xbox 360, but the availability of cheap USB sticks highlights the silliness of charging high premiums for branding.

Scribd: Goodbye Flash, Hello HTML5 (and Google Docs)

Jared Friedman, cofounder and CTO of Scribd–the site that lets anyone upload almost any document and publish it to the Web–was among the last keynote speakers at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco today. And he had big news (teased yesterday on TechCrunch): Scribd is dumping Flash and converting the millions of documents it hosts to HTML5.

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Your Chance at a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive

On Tuesday evening in San Francisco, we threw a party we called SpringThing at a cool art gallery called 12 Gallagher Lane. Our cohost/sponsor was Seagate, which gave demos of its just-announced line of FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drives. The folks in the photo above (by Ken Yeung) all look so attentive because they’re watching the giveaway drawing we did for five GoFlex drives. We can’t recreate the whole nifty SpringThing experience online, but here’s the next best thing: we’re replicate the giveaway drawing.

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Central Desktop: Office Collaboration Without Office 2010

The biggest selling point for the soon-to-ship Microsoft Office 2010 is its new features for storing documents online and editing them with coworkers. At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week, Central Desktop, whose business collaboration service competes with Microsoft’s SharePoint, was previewing a new service with an intriguing proposition: Get Office 2010-like collaboration without Office 2010.

Based on technology from OffiSync, Central Desktop for Office works with Office 2003 and 2007 as well as 2010. It’s a plug-in for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint which lets you open files saved on Central Desktop’s servers, edit them within the Office apps, manage changes from multiple colleagues, and save merged documents back to the cloud.  It certainly doesn’t eliminate the need for Office 2010–for one thing, it lacks anything like Microsoft’s new Office Web Apps file viewer/editors–but it’s worth a look if you’re allergic to big upgrades. (Unlike SharePoint, Central Desktop is hosted; unlike Office 2010, it offers team editing in Excel as well as Word and PowerPoint.)

Central Desktop for Office is due for release next month. Some of its features will be built into Central Desktop plans at various prices, and full access will cost around an extra $2 per user per month.

Indies Band Together For More Pay-What-You-Want

For a short time, you can get five computer games for a dollar, or $10, or $100 if you wish.

A group of independent game developers are selling the “Humble Indie Bundle” until Tuesday, May 11, allowing buyers to set their own price on the five-game package. The bundle includes World of Goo, Gish, Lugaru HD, Aquaria and Penumbra Overture. All games are available for Windows, Mac or Linux, and are DRM-free.

There’s also a charitable angle: Buyers can allocate all, part or none of their purchase to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play.

Radiohead popularized the pay-as-you-wish model with their 2007 album “In Rainbows,” released as downloadable MP3s before the CD launched. It was a successful experiment, as the band made more money before “In Rainbows” went to hard copy than they made in total for their previous album, “Hail to the Thief.”

Last October, World of Goo developer 2D Boy tried the idea themselves. The combination of media exposure and love for the game resulted in more than $100,000 earned. 2D Boy also surveyed buyers, and most said their contribution was all they could afford, or that they liked the pay-as-you-wish model and wanted to support it.

The folks behind “Humble Indie Bundle” are sharing statistics in real-time. So far, the developers have raised more than $300,000, with an average contribution of just under $8. One anonymous benefactor spent $500 for the bundle, whose actual value is $80. Another fun statistic: The number of Mac and Linux buyers are roughly equal, and about half the number of Windows buyers.

I don’t think you’ll find any consumers who don’t like pay as you wish, as long as it works for the seller. All these games are more than a year old, so the bundle seems like a great way for developers to build up cash and attention for their next indie undertakings.

Google’s New Look is Mobile, Too

I’m still waiting for the new Google interface to show up as my default. But here’s an interesting side note: Google is rolling out a mobile version at the same time, with pretty much the same sidebar of filtering options. On phones, though, there’s less real estate to work with, so the sidebar appears only when you ask for it, and shoves the results over to the right.

I know I’ll use this at least occasionally, since I tend to use Google on phones much the same way I do on a computer. (When I have the yen to research something, I just do it on whatever device I have handy.) In theory, though, teeming masses of smartphone users aren’t that interested doing the sort of sophisticated searching that the sidebar enables–you have to be pretty serious about your Googling before you decide to restrict search results to a specific date range. I wonder just how often folks will use these features?

Threadsy Goes Public

At last fall’s TechCrunch50 conference, my personal best-of-show was probably Threadsy. It’s an integrated inbox that gives you access to multiple e-mail accounts, Twitter, and your Facebook inbox all in one place–and weaves them together, so, for instance, you can view a bio, updates, and photos for the person who sent you an e-mail message. (That feature reminds me of the Outlook plugin Xobni.)

Back then, I called Threadsy an intriguing first draft. Now it’s addressed some of my initial concerns: For instance, it supports folders (Labels in Gmail parlance), making it a plausible full-time or part-time replacement for your current e-mail client rather than a severely limited compliment. And Threadsy finally moved from private beta into general availability yesterday, so anyone who’s interested can give it a try.

Threadsy could still use some more polishing (it has a neat photo viewer, but I’m finding the photos are sometimes partially obscured by misplaced text). And it’s still impossible to be a better Gmail than Gmail (when I’m in Threadsy, I miss features like the Google Calendar widget and the ability to open up attachments in Google Docs). Overall, though, it’s inventive and useful–if you try it out, let us know what you think.

Roku to Get a Nicer Netflix

Netflix may be among the most widely-available Internet video services on gadgets like set-top boxes, game consoles, DVRs, and TVs themselves, but what you get has been a Netflix player–you’ve had to find, queue, and otherwise manage stuff you want to watch in a browser on a computer.

Now Internet  TV box maker Roku is offering a sneak peak at a software update which will give Roku users apparently comprehensive access to Netflix on the TV, no PC required. Looks pretty slick. (Bonus: I assume that this interface shows only Watch Instantly titles, removing the clutter of movies and TV shows that are available only on DVD.)

Roku says the new Netflix experience will be ready in June; it’ll ship on new Roku boxes and will be a free update for current owners.

New HP Notebooks: Envy Updates, Posher Pavilions, AMD (Almost) Everywhere

HP announced scads of new notebooks today. I’m not going to try and cover every detail on every model. But here are a few notes on items I found interesting. (I was briefed by the company and saw the new systems in person.)

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Social Networking Users Naive About Privacy?

A study from Consumer reports that appears in their June issue seems to show that a significant number of social networking users are exposing details of their personal lives that could put them at risk. The study found that one out of every ten users had experienced a problem as a result of information on their profiles.

This is probably because a quarter of users have little or no understanding of the privacy controls available, Consumer Reports wrote. You might remember my article awhile back on finding out the hard way about the information I was sharing on my own profile: it looks like by far I’m not the only one…

Google’s New Design Gets Official

The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that Google is rolling out a new version of its search results with a left-hand sidebar today and tomorrow. It’s the final version of a design it’s been experimenting with for a long time, and bears a general conceptual resemblance to the sidebar at Bing, although the execution is quite different. I’m not getting it as my default yet, but wrote about a test version I stumbled across in March.

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Ellen Teases Apple, Apologizes

What, Apple can’t take a (mild) joke?

The Problem With PlayOn’s Subscription Model

When someone I know buys a video game console, sooner or later I ask if they’ve tried PlayOn. The Windows software essentially tricks the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 or Wii into thinking that Web video content is stored on your local network, letting you watch Hulu, ABC.com and more on the big screen while your computer quietly handles the streaming.

One of the main reasons I’ve advocated PlayOn to fellow Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 owners is that you only pay $40 for the software once, and then you can use it forever. That’s about to change on May 20, when PlayOn moves to a subscription model: $40 for year one, and $20 per year after that.

PlayOn swears that the money will be put to good use by funding “continued development and support.” The subscription product will be dubbed “PlayOn Premium,” and will include a couple more sources for online video, a “Gold” version of Wii support and a promise that PlayOn will add more features over time. But do you feel comfortable paying for a promise?

The problem is that PlayOn subscribers aren’t paying for the delivery of content, or even the content itself.  They’re only paying for the continued right to use software, which would technically still function even if PlayOn’s owner, MediaMall, folded tomorrow. This would be like Microsoft demanding yearly payments from Windows users to fund updates and future versions. It just doesn’t work that way when software isn’t tied to a tangible, recurring service.

I’m glad PlayOn will let existing owners continue to get basic functionality for free, including Hulu. PlayOn’s even offering one year of premium service to existing users for $5 instead of $40. But it would make a lot more sense for PlayOn to build the new features first, then charge users a la carte to add each one — kind of like an app store. It beats paying PlayOn a yearly allowance and hoping it’s spent wisely.