The Commenting Question: Is it Really Blogging Without It?

There’s an ever increasingly spirited debate going on in the blogosphere among the technorati (starting with Joe Wilcox and John Gruber) around the subject of comments in blogs. In the simplest terms, the argument centers around whether the reader has a right to participate in the discussion that the blogger puts forth.

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AT&T Announces the Samsung Captivate

AT&T kept saying it was going to release a bunch of Android handsets in 2010, and it’s finally starting to feel that way. On Monday it announced the HTC Aria. And today, it’s revealed plans to start selling Samsung’s Captivate, with an oversized 4-inch AMOLED screen, a 1-GHz Samsung CPU, a 5-megapixel camera that can shoot 720p video, and something called the “Samsung Social Hub.” It’s the first AT&T Android phone that sounds like it might be a flagship of sorts, and it’ll go on sale same sometime in “the coming months.”

Hotmail vs. Gmail

Microsoft has begun rolling out its smart new version of Hotmail, although it’s doing so bit by bit. (It doesn’t plan to have flipped the switch for every user until later this summer.) Lifehacker’s Adam Hachis has a nice look at where Hotmail now beats Gmail–and where it doesn’t.

Report: Tablets Will Outsell Netbooks By 2012

Forrester Research said Thursday that it expects netbook sales to fall behind tablet sales within two years, having a lot to do with the dramatic success of Apple’s iPad device. While only 3.5 million are expected to sell this year, that number will jump to more than 20 million by 2015 and become nearly a quarter of all PC sales at that point, Forrester predicted.

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Droid Does 720p

“Retina displays” are so early June 2010.

[UPDATE: The Droid X's resolution is the same as that of the Droid, and Verizon has rescinded its claim that it has a 720p HD screen.]

IBM’s in “Jeopardy”

Computers beating humans at chess? Easy. Computers beating humans at Jeopardy? Unimaginably challenging–but an IBM supercomputer is now a really good (but not yet brilliant) Jeopardy player, and is gearing up to compete with human champions on TV. This New York Times piece by Clive Thompson on all this is among the best articles on technology you’ll read this year.

HP’s Windows Slate PC: Not Officially Dead, But Dead

I’m at The Big Money’s Untethered conference–an event about tablets and the future of publishing–in New York. One of the speakers this morning was Phil McKinney, CTO of HP’s Personal Systems Group. The Big Money’s James Ledbetter interviewed him about tablets, and he talked about the downsides of using existing operating systems for new types of devices. (He didn’t mention Windows explicitly, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about OS/2.) He also extolled the virtues of WebOS, which HP will own assuming its acquisition of Palm goes through.

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Music Games Get Real With Fully-Functioning Guitars

The race to successfully fuse a guitar video game controller with a genuine musical instrument is over, with two publishers showing off peripherals at E3 that double as real guitars — strings, frets and all.

For Rock Band 3, guitar maker Fender will sell a version of its Squier ax that can also play the game. A video from Engadget shows how the player can easily switch back and forth when the guitar is plugged into an amplifier. Lesser known, but also prominently featured on the show floor, is the guitar for PowerGig: Rise of the Six String. No need for a special edition here; even the default PowerGig guitar is a fully-functioning musical instrument.

I haven’t tried Fender’s Rock Band guitar, but I did play around with PowerGig’s peripheral at a pre-E3 event in Los Angeles. It is not a MIDI controller, like the YouRock and Gambridge guitars I played with at CES. The PowerGig guitar has six strings that run the length of the fretboard, complete with a sound pickup on the bridge and tuning pegs on the headstock. It’s smaller than a real guitar — a special full-size version is in the works — but it felt comfortable for playing the blues and noodling out solos high on the fretboard.

As for gaming, it’s just more fun when real strings are involved. When you want to play games with the controller, a small panel pops up on the bridge and mutes the strings. You’ll still hold down strings on the fret board as you would with Guitar Hero’s fat plastic buttons, and strum with your other hand, but any unwanted noise is silenced by the pop-up panel.

Best of all, both PowerGig and Rock Band 3 are using their software as music trainers. In PowerGig, advanced players can strum power chords, which require you to place a second finger on a different fret and string. Rock Band, according to IGN, replaces the game’s five lines of big colored button prompts with six strings and indicators of which fret you should hold down. Essentially, it’ll teach you how to play the songs you’re acting out.

Now, I could get on my high horse about how a music game won’t teach you concepts like groove or improvisation — or music theory — but whatever. This is some cool technology that finally bridges the gap between imitation and the real thing. PowerGig: Rise of the Six String is coming to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in October, and Rock Band 3 arrives this holiday season.

Want an iPhone 4? Get in Line

With recent Apple blockbusters like all the iPhones and the iPad, there’s been a useful secret shopping tip: If you wanted a product pronto but had an inexplicable resistance to waiting in a bizarrely long line, you could wait until early evening on launch day and then stroll into an Apple Store. By then, the throngs had dispersed, and the shelves were still well-stocked with shiny new gadgets.

(You could also order online and avoid a shopping trip altogether, of course, but I’ve always been impressed by the retail buyers who could resist temptation for just a few hours in return for hassle-free buying…)

With the iPhone 4, apparently, it’s not going to be like that. The phone is debuting on June 24th, but the black model is sold out for weeks, and the white one still hasn’t gone on sale at all:

Of course, it says the phone will ship by July 14th, so there’s some chance Apple will catch up with demand more quickly than that. But I wonder if it’s going to feel like there’s a great worldwide iPhone shortage for awhile?

YouTube Adds a Video Editor

It’s not going to replace Premiere, Final Cut, or iMovie anytime soon. But YouTube has added a very basic Web-based editor–and given that some of us mostly do very basic video editing, it sounds handy.

Memeo Connect’s Take on the GDrive

Memeo Connect, which my colleague David Worthington tried and liked a few weeks ago, is an app that lets Google Apps users sync their documents and other files to a PC or Mac so they can get access to them even when they’re offline. And as of today, it’s available in a beta of version 2.0, which lets you get at synced files not only in Memeo’s app but in Windows Explorer or the OS X finder, as well as in file open/save dialog boxes. The sync is two-way, so anything you drag or save into this repository gets moved back to Google Apps’ storage once you’re back online. And as before, Connect can handle files of all sorts and do conversions between Google Docs files and PDF and Microsoft Office formats.

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Mario Kart Blown Up By CTA Digital

Who needs motion control when you’ve got inflatable game peripherals? CTA Digital has built a reputation for wacky Wii accessories, but none look more fun than the Wii Inflatable Racing Kart, ideal for Mario Kart but suitable for any Wii racing game. It holds up to 300 pounds and includes a spinning wheel to hold a Wii Remote. Any external air pump will do.

I talked to CTA spokesman Osama Hashmi, who said the inflatable kart shipped this week to Best Buy and the Web sites of Target, Amazon and Walmart. Then, I hopped on board for a quick ride and felt like a kid, sitting there on the floor of E3. Then again, I suppose that’s sort of the point. Best part about the inflatable racing kart? The little bit of bounciness you get after leaning into a turn. Potentially worth the $40 asking price.

Privacy Groups Still Not Satisfied With Facebook

The issue of privacy has been nagging Facebook for quite awhile now, and it looks like advocacy groups are still not happy with the company’s progress in the space. In an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and eight other groups are asking the site to do more.

“We are glad to see that Facebook has taken steps in the past weeks to address some of its outstanding privacy problems,” the letter begins. Among the recommendations is to give users more control over exactly which applications may access their information, as well as more control over how their information is shared with external sites.

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AT&T Presses Pause on iPhone Presales

Despite yesterday’s iPhone preordering meltdown, a heck of a lot of people reserved phoness. AT&T statement:

iPhone 4 pre-order sales yesterday were 10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year. Consumers are clearly excited about iPhone 4, AT&T’s more affordable data plans and our early upgrade pricing.

Given this unprecedented demand and our current expectations for our iPhone 4 inventory levels when the device is available June 24, we’re suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders we’ve already received.

The availability of additional inventory will determine if we can resume taking pre-orders.

In addition to unprecedented pre-order sales, yesterday there were more than 13 million visits to AT&T’s website where customers can check to see if they are eligible to upgrade to a new phone; that number is about 3-times higher than the previous record for eligibility upgrade checks in one day.

We are working hard to bring iPhone 4 to as many of our customers as soon as possible.

Ten times as many preorders as for the 3GS? Amazing. I’m still not a believer in “AT&T is locking people in to deny them the option of a Verizon iPhone that will be announced any day now” conspiracy theories, but that’s a lot of folks who are planning to be on AT&T through 2012…

Swype for the Masses

One of the most essential pieces of software on my Droid is Swype, the astonishing–yes, astonishing–utility that lets you enter text by whipping your finger around the on-screen keyboard as fast as you can go. As long as your finger glides past the characters in the word you intend you’re good, and you don’t need to tap, tap, tap. But I’m one of the lucky few that the Swype folks have permitted to install the software: The company’s business model involves licensing the app to phone makers as a preinstalled feature.

Now TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is reporting that Swype will be available as a download for Android phones, starting today. Wonderful news–I don’t claim that every owner of an Android phone will find it as indispensable as I do, but I do think every Android user should try it…

Flock 3.0: The Social Browser Gets a Reboot

Half  a decade ago, a startup called Flock was formed to build a “social browser” of the same name–a Web browser aimed at people who like to use the Web to share stuff and otherwise interact with other people. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the road the product ended up taking has been uncommonly twisty.

The original preview version of Flock, based on the same Mozilla browser code as Firefox, debuted in 2005. (Back then, only students could join Facebook; Twitter didn’t exist, period.) The first beta, which appeared a leisurely two years later, was significantly different and better; I liked it so much it became my default browser. Version 2.0 improved on it further.  But version 2.5, which appeared more than a year ago, was instantly obsolescent: It was based on Firefox 3.0 even though it appeared only shortly before Firefox 3.5 did, and there were rumors that Flock’s creators planned to dump Mozilla and move to Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome.

Fast forward to right now. It turns out that the rumors were true: Flock 3.0, which is now available as a beta download for Windows, is built on Chromium. Pretty much by definition, that means it’s significantly different from any version before it. But it turns out that the company hasn’t even tried to recreate the old Flock. This isn’t so much an upgrade as a reboot–an all-new answer to the question “What should a social browser be in 2010?”

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