The Siri Story

Good all-encompassing story by Wade Roush of Xconomy about Siri, the cool iPhone personal assistant app that’s now owned by Apple…

Microsoft Kinect: What I’ve Gathered Thus Far

As Microsoft representatives handed out smooth white tunics — they called them panchos — to everyone who entered the “Project Natal Experience” event last night, I realized this would be an unconventional press conference. Yes, Microsoft revealed some details and a final name for its 3D motion-sensing Xbox 360 camera, now called Kinect, but instead of using casually-dressed executives and a teleprompter, the company brought in Cirque Du Soleil for an elaborate show of audio and visuals.

The idea is that Kinect is a natural evolution of gaming. By removing the controller completely and sensing the movement of arms, legs and torsos, Kinect liberates the body — and gaming — from its primitive state. Hence the acrobatic dancers, animatronic elephant and jungle setting that filled the stage of USC’s Galen Center. But when it was time to show the actual Xbox 360 games, there was clearly a disconnect between the substance of Kinect and Cirque’s dog and pony show.

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AT&T’s Other June Smartphone

Four days before the iPhone 4 goes on sale on June 24th, AT&T will start stocking the HTC Aria, which sounds like its first Android smartphone that a serious smartphone fan might take seriously. For $130 (on two-year contract after rebate) it’s got decent specs, a trackball, and what AT&T describes as an especially pocket-friendly size. It also runs Android 2.1 with HTC’s Sense interface (Google’s own Nexus One remains the only Android 2.2 phone, but please don’t call that fragmentation).

A Brief History of the Videophone

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made a famous phone call to his associate, Mr. Watson. Almost immediately, it occurred to folks that Bell’s gizmo would be even cooler if it had pictures. And for 130 years, people have been fantasizing about videophones, building them, and generally expecting that they’d eventually become pervasive.

Last week, Steve Jobs made a highly-publicized call–using the iPhone 4′s FaceTime video calling feature–to his associate, Apple design honcho Jonathan Ive. Tech historian Benj Edwards took FaceTime’s debut as an excuse to look back at the long, checkered history of the videophone–there have been a lot of attempts to get consumers to buy into the concept. Here’s his slideshow exploration of the subject.

132 Years of the Videophone: From Futuristic Fantasy to Flops to FaceTime

Last week, Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4 with FaceTime video calling capabilities brought the videophone back to the forefront of the media’s attention.  Steve Jobs’ keynote made it sound like FaceTime will bring video phone calls to consumers for the first time. But the idea of a two-way communications device that transmits pictures as well as sound is as old as the phone itself.

Economic factors have kept it out of the average consumer’s reach until the last few decades,  and the public has repeatedly greeted the concept–in stand-alone form, at least–with apathy. Still, inventors and dreamers keep coming back to the notion that the videophone is the way of the future.

Let’s take a stroll through videophone history to find out where things went wrong–and right–and how we got to the iPhone 4 and its rivals.

A Last-Minute List of E3 Thoughts

Video gaming’s biggest trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, doesn’t officially start until Tuesday, but already the industry is descending upon Los Angeles for the show better known as E3.

Tonight, the first event of news value is a press conference for Microsoft’s motion-sensing Xbox 360 camera, so far only codenamed Project Natal. I’ll be there, but before the sensory overload of video games galore begins, I saw fit to throw together a short list of what I’m looking for at the show:

Sequels galore. Check out Kotaku’s list of all-star E3 games and you’ll see lots of 2′s, 3′s and roman numerals. Not that the industry usually swings the other way, but the sheer number of heavy hitters on hand — Gears of War 3, Killzone 3, Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Rock Band 3, another Call of Duty, a Medal of Honor reboot, just to name several — suggests a particularly busy holiday season and early 2011 for well-known franchises. The upshot is that any completely original games will likely get glowing praise from a gaming press tired of the same-old.

Return of the handheld. E3 2009 was quiet on the handheld gaming front, with only a retooled PSP from Sony and no news from Nintendo or Microsoft. With Apple’s iPhone making big moves into gaming, the stage is set for retaliation. Nintendo’s expected to show off the Nintendo 3DS, which will have a 3D display, and there’s a rumor that Sony will reveal the PSP 2. I’m more interested to hear Microsoft’s plans for Windows Phone 7 as a gaming device.

E3 2010: The Year of Exercise. Physically, this show’s a lot easier to cover than the sprawling hallways of the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES, but that could change with Microsoft and Sony sporting new motion controllers. Don’t pity me, but expect me to look at the new creations with a skeptical eye. Cool technology? Sure, but I need to see some amazing games, and not just souped up versions of Wii Sports.

The dark horse of cloud gaming. OnLive and Gaikai are two startups that want to stream video games to your computer as an alternative to owning expensive game consoles or PC hardware. Neither were present at E3 2009, but I’m planning to try both this year. I’ve got my doubts about the business model of cloud gaming, but here’s hoping the technology impresses.

Web Services Are Like Countries

Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham is on to something: He says that Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, and other Web ecosystems are like countries with governments.

Goal! Goal! Goal! (World Cup Mobile and Online)

It’s that time of decade… FIFA’s World Cup competition is in full effect. And it’ll be one of the most watched events in human history – given the seemingly universal love of soccer (er, futbol), national pride, and widespread viewing technologies.

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Renewing Satellite Radio One More Year

About a month of terrestrial radio was all it took…

My XM subscription lapsed in March, but they kept the music flowing an additional month or so while leaving me regular voicemails to renew service before I experienced an “interruption.”

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The FTC to Investigate Apple?

There are multiple things about Apple’s recent behavior in relation to third-party development tools and ad networks that don’t thrill me. As a fan of free enterprise, however, I’m not thrilled with the prospect of the federal government possibly stepping in and telling the company how to run its business–at least not as long as the iPhone’s share of the smartphone market isn’t monopolistic. (Which it isn’t: It’s not even the best-selling handset.)

AT&T’s iPhone 4 Deals for Recent iPhone 3GS Buyers

If you’re reading this–and you are–I suspect the chances that you bought an iPhone 3GS in the last few weeks are close to zilch. Assuming that you wanted to buy an iPhone at all, you were biding your time with the expectation that the new iPhone would be available in June or July.

But there are such folks as people who buy the current iPhone immediately before the new one is announced. And AT&T seems to be making a good-faith effort to help them avoid buyers’ remorse. The logistics are a little complicated, but people who bought iPhones after May 7th will be able to upgrade to the iPhone 4 when it arrives on June 24th.

Even if you buy an iPhone 3GS right this minute–I’d advise against it–you’ll qualify for AT&T’s 30-day money back guarantee and could theoretically return it and get an iPhone 4 before your trial period ends.

Now that we know that, is there anyone out there who thinks that AT&T’s upgrade policies for the new iPhone are unreasonable?

Boxee Box: Later Rather Than Sooner

The Boxee Box–D-Link’s gizmo that brings the cool Boxee Internet TV service to HDTVs that don’t happen to have a PC or Mac handy–was announced last December. It was supposed to ship in the second quarter of 2010, which will end in a little over two weeks. But now Boxee is saying that it won’t be ready until November. The company says it needs until then to get the thing working properly.

As usual, I’m in favor of waiting longer for a better product. But it’s disappointing news to those whose appetites Boxee began to whet so long ago.

A Boxee Box that was available this month would have had a nice head start on Logitech’s Google TV-based set-top box and other Google TV hardware which is due in time for the holidays. Now they’ll debut more or less simultaneously–and it’ll be fun to watch them duke it out.

Hotmail Sans Self-Promotion

When I wrote about the neat new version of Hotmail last month, I failed to mention one long-standing downside of the service: It adds a text ad for itself at the end of your messages, which makes it a non-starter for business use and a tad cheesy even if you’re just e-mailing pals and relatives.

Now Michael Arrington is reporting that Microsoft will kill off that tagline, starting today. Good news. If I were Microsoft, I’d also contemplate tweaks to the ad panel in the Hotmail interface–I get that it’s the ads that make Hotmail free, but Microsoft’s giant, distracting display advertisements make Hotmail feel fundamentally less serious and professional than Gmail’s text-based ad links.

In Search of the Ideal iPad Office Suite

Venerable mobile office suite Quickoffice has landed on the iPad. Quickoffice Connect for iPad carries an introductory price of $9.99, does Microsoft Office-compatible word processing and spreadsheets, and sports a user interface designed with the iPad in mind. (For instance, if you touch and hold the right side of a document, you get thumbnails of all the pages.) It also has built-in support for document sharing via Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, and Mobile Me, plus simple file transfers to and from your computer over Wi-Fi.

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Monday’s Apple Keynote Wireless Meltdown

Wi-Fi expert Glenn Fleishman on the severe troubles Steve Jobs had with his WWDC keynote of the iPhone 4: They may have stemmed from both congestion caused by too many Wi-Fi networks in the room (as Jobs concluded) and buggy iPhone 4 software (unmentioned by him).

Meet a Web Publisher Who’s Okay With Safari’s New Ad Removal Feature (Me!)

Back in August, I blogged about an article that predicted that all Web browsers would eventually block all ads by default. I ended with a poll in which a plurality of  respondents said that sounded like a swell idea.

Ten months later, no browser has introduced sweeping ad-blocking. But on Monday, Apple introduced Safari 5, a new version of its browser with a feature called Reader. It’s not an ad blocker per se, but it does remove ads as part of what it does. And it’s the first significant development in built-in ad, um, discouragers since pop-up blockers became standard equipment years ago.

Like Readability and Instapaper, it examines a Web page with an article on it, strips out navigational elements, Flash modules, and other items other than  the story itself, then displays the text and images in a streamlined view that looks a bit like a word-processing document. When an article is broken into multiple pages, it’s also smart enough to stitch all the pages together without making you click on anything.

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