Are Cameraphones Killing the Point-and-Shoot? Not Yet, Not Hardly

Over the past few days I’ve had fun taking photos with a couple of neat new cameras…that happen to be phones. They’re the iPhone 4 and Verizon’s upcoming Droid X, and their cameras are the best in any phones I’ve ever used. So much so that they left me pondering the future of point-and-shoot cameras that aren’t phones.

Phones have already killed traditional PDAs dead. The best ones also render media players such as an iPod largely superfluous, and the days of standalone GPS handhelds are clearly numbered. Are we nearing the moment when a meaningful number of people will skip buying a separate camera in favor of snapping photos with a phone?

Some thoughts on that in a moment–but first, my impressions of the photographic capabilities of these two handsets. When I had plenty of natural light, I liked most of the photos from both phones quite a bit…although even the nicest portraits I took looked slightly out of focus and lacking in detail. In murkier environments, the iPhone performed better than the Droid X, although the LED flashes on both phones aren’t very useful. (They only made a noticeable difference when there was very little available light, and even then tended to produce unflattering, fuzzy portraits.)

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More E-Reader Price Cuts

Sony finally responds to the price chops by Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com with new, lower pricetags for its trio of Reader e-readers.

Spellbinder?

Mark Evanier on word processors he’s used over the past quarter century: Word, Wordstar, and one even I don’t remember–Spellbinder.

We Need Real Answers on Playstation Plus and Hulu Plus

Sony’s customers are still in the dark on whether the premium Playstation Plus service will be required to watch Hulu Plus on the Playstation 3, even as more unverified information comes in.

Last week, I discovered that Hulu Plus on the PS3 may require a Playstation Plus subscription ($50 per year or $18 quarterly), based on some code hidden in one of Hulu’s Web pages. I e-mailed Sony and Hulu for a response, but heard nothing. Sony later dismissed the report as “rumors and speculation,” which is an odd thing to say given that Hulu’s own website provided the evidence.

Now, Playstation Lifestyle reports that PS Plus will only be required during Hulu Plus’ preview period. Invitations for that preview are going out in batches, but there’s no word on when the service will be available to all.

But Playstation Lifestyle’s story doesn’t come straight from Sony or Hulu, either. The source may actually be a Reddit commenter who reached out to Hulu’s generic support line. By Sony’s rules, we can dismiss the second-hand response as “rumors and speculation” as well.

This isn’t the first time Sony has gone dark, letting unverified information fill the news vacuum. At the end of February, owners of non-Slim Playstation 3s discovered that their consoles weren’t working, and they risked losing data just by turning on their consoles. Sony didn’t warn people about the data loss until 16 hours after first acknowledging problems. Meanwhile, PS3 owners were left to fend for themselves in Internet forums, attempting to answer many of the questions Sony never did.

The Hulu Plus situation isn’t as urgent, but with Playstation Plus up and running, subscribers shouldn’t have to get their information from the rumor mill. Sony should explain Hulu Plus pricing to its customers, either by confirming what we’ve seen and heard or acknowledging that the details are still up in the air.

Search Query Driven News Debuts at Yahoo

With its background in search, it should not be a surprise that Yahoo’s news division plans to use search queries to drive another portion of its business–news. However, what is surprising is that it will basically be the first major news provider to do so.

Yahoo’s search users would in essence become the assignment editor. Whatever topics appear frequently in those queries would then be passed on to the company’s team of editors and bloggers, and stories would be written based on those findings.

The blog will be called The Upshot, and would be launched Tuesday (editors note: the previous link won’t work until then). According to the New York Times, Yahoo hopes this would result in a news blog that would be catered to what their users want to read.

Is it a risky experiment? I’d say yes. Depending on the hot news of the day, you could be seeing news on the oil spill one day, and the latest on Lindsay Lohan’s never dull social life the next. I’m hoping however that those mining the Yahoo search queries will help to smooth out the obvious shifts in our collective mindset to provide a less schizophrenic look at the news.

At the same time, that data could also give Yahoo a leg up on the competition in seeing trends on what potential readers may look for which isn’t being covered in the media. I’m curious to see if it works. If it does, and other news outlets pick up on the idea, are the days of the assignment editor numbered?

Opera and IE 9 Performance Tested

DailyTech ran browser speed tests on Opera 10.6 (released last week) and the current version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 technical preview–and was impressed in both instances.

Smartphone Screens: The Big Question

The San Jose Mercury News’s Troy Wolverton prefers sharp smartphone screens (like those on the iPhone 4 and Droid Incredible) to big smartphone screens (such as the ones on the EVO 4G and Droid X).

Samsung’s Galaxy S Phone: Wireless Freedom of Choice

Now that the proverbial dust is starting to settle around the Samsung Galaxy S and its six known variants for major US wireless networks, how does the latest smartphone stack up against its many Android rivals–and against Apple’s iPhone 4, for that matter?

It all depends on who you ask. With smartphones getting announced in such rapid-fire succession, it seems to take less time than ever for opinions to start flying. Samsung only officially launched the Galaxy last week, at a press event I attended in New York City. Granted, a lot of details had already leaked out even before the launch. Already, though, the phone is getting analyzed and compared across every conceivable dimension.

In a presentation at the start of the launch on Wednesday, J.K. Shin, president of Samsung’s Mobile Communications Business, tried to keep things simple by citing three key differentiators for Samsung’s phone: screen, speed, and content. If onlookers were asked to put together the same list, they’d undoubtedly come up with all kinds of answers.

Personally, I’d keep the three factors Shin mentioned on my list, because the Galaxy S does have merits in all of these areas. But I’d also add two other factors–freedom of choice in wireless networks and smartphone form factors–and I’d place these two way above the other three.

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Frash Could Be Apple’s Flash Waterloo

An enterprising developer has proven that with a little work, Flash will work just fine on the iPad and iPhone, as long as you’re comfortable jailbreaking your device. Yes you will have problems–Flash is intended for use with a mouse, and not touch-based input methods. But certainly it gives hope that enterprising developers can be able to force Apple’s hand.

The program is called “Frash,” and will work in Safari Mobile through a compatibility layer. The program is actually a port of the official Adobe Flash plug-in that is already available for Android devices. Performance is actually pretty decent–sorry Mr. Jobs, there goes your trademark excuse for not allowing Flash at all.

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Goodbye, EyePhone

Hey, what happened to Futurama’s funny iPhone spoof?

Kin: The Autopsy

Over at Engadget, Chris Ziegler has a good piece on the unfortunate circumstances which led Microsoft to kill its Kin socialphone a couple of months after launching it. I dunno whether his account gets it all right, but isn’t it manifestly obvious that the misbegotten Kin shows how dangerous it is to have the resources to pursue pretty much any project you want?

(And just to join the chorus: The one thing that was unquestionably neat about Kin was the Studio Web site which automatically replicated most of the stuff on your phone in online form. Hope the idea makes it into Windows Phone 7.)

Pressure-Sensitive Drawing on the iPad

If you like to use the iPad to create art, you want this.

Apple TV Will Evolve, Someday, Somehow

Nick Bilton of the New York Times has talked to sources that say Apple is cooking up a new version of Apple TV–but the scuttlebutt is pretty darn vague at this point.

Twitter Failwhaling Following Brazil Upset

Twitter is having some serious problems in staying up following the Netherlands’ 2-1 come-from-behind upset of World Cup favorite Brazil Friday. The social networking site has found it hard to stay up during the event, frequently coming down following the final whistle of major matches.

On the company’s status page, Twitter acknowledged the problem, but didn’t lay the blame on the World Cup match. “We’ve received reports of elevated error rates for users; we’re currently investigating,” it reads. The last time Twitter’s Failwhale was making a regular appearance was on the 23rd of June, the day of Algeria’s match with USA that catapulted it into the first knockout round.

Dear Apple: Thanks For Writing, But I’m Still Confused

So Apple has finally issued an official response to all the chatter about the iPhone 4 seeming to lose signal strength when you hold it by the lower left-hand corner. The gist of Apple’s letter to iPhone 4 users: There is no reception problem. Instead, the iPhone 4–all iPhones, actually–sometimes displays more bars than it should, leading users in areas with poor coverage to think that reception is better than it really is. The company will fix this in a software update.

Well, okay, except…I think this will do little or nothing to end the controversy. There are numerous bits of data on the Web that involve the iPhone 4 dropping calls or suffering dramatic slowdowns when held by the lower left-hand corner, not simply displaying a signal meter indicator that may be overoptimistic.

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David Pogue Doesn’t Like Swype

The New York Times’ David Pogue has blogged an addendum to his review of Verizon’s Droid X, in the form of a post about Swype, the ingenious alternate keyboard that comes with the X and other phones. David isn’t a Swype fan. In fact, he confesses to not quite getting why anyone would be a fan of the keyboard, which lets you trace out words without lifting your fingertip from the screen. He says it doesn’t seem like it would be any faster than using a standard smartphone onscreen QWERTY that makes you tap, tap, tap.

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