Sony’s New Readers: Better Still, Still Pricey

Back in 2006, before the world knew what a Kindle was, Sony released the first modern e-reader with a power-efficient, glare-free E-Ink screen. It’s upgraded them and added new models ever since–and it’s announcing improved versions of all its models today, a week after Amazon started shipping its newest Kindle. The company gave me a sneak peek last week.

As before, Sony is the only major e-reader maker that offers devices in three sizes: the 7″ Daily Edition, the 6″ Touch Edition (with a screen the same size as the one on the standard Kindle and on the Nook), and the 5″ Pocket Edition. Last year’s Touch and Daily Editions had touch-screen interfaces that worked with a fingertip (for general navigation) or a stylus (for note-taking and other precision work). The big news is that the whole line now sports touch, including the Pocket Edition–and Sony has come up with a way to implement technology without adding a layer to the screen. (Last year’s touch Sonys had murkier screens than the non-touch competition.)

In my brief hands-on time with the readers, the displays looked good. (I wasn’t able to compare them side-by-side with other e-readers, but they were noticeably more legible than last year’s Sonys.) The touch input worked reasonably well, too. But flipping pages didn’t have quite the effortless feel of e-reading apps on an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android phone, and I think the Kindle’s less fancy input system–physical buttons and a keyboard–works at least as well for the basics of exploring books.

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Your Apple Predictions, From New Products (Three) to Musical Guests (Fab)

What will Apple announce at its music event? By noon or so tomorrow, we’ll know all there is to know. Let’s wrap up the period of blissful ignorance, rampant rumors, and informed speculation with our traditional Technologizer community predictions.

As usual, I surveyed you guys and asked you to give your best guesses at what the news will involve. For questions in which you could choose only one answer, whatever answer got a plurality of responses counts as the prediction. For questions that let you choose multiple answers, any answer that more than fifty percent of you chose counts as a prediction. (I’ll note the percentage that chose each answer).

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Apple to Livestream Music Event: Good for Apple, Good for Apple Fans, and Good, Maybe, For Livebloggers

When I liveblog Apple press events, the number one question from attendees is…well, kind of irritating, once you’ve heard it for the four hundredth time: “Is there a live stream of this event?” Usually, the answer is no, unless you count the occasional unauthorized spystream from someone in the audience using a phone app like Qik. Unlike a number of its competitors, Apple’s practice has been to post video of its events later rather than to broadcast it live.

Not tomorrow, though: The company has announced that it’ll broadcast a live stream of its traditional September music event. And there’s an interesting twist: It’s using its HTTP Streaming technology, which works on Macs, iPhones, and iPads. And that’s it. Windows users are apparently out of luck, although I imagine they’ll still be able watch a playback version later.

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A Taste of WebOS 2.0

In the months since HP agreed to acquire Palm and its WebOS mobile operating system, the company has said that it plans to put the OS a tablet, in printers, and, yes, in new phones. But it hasn’t said much about WebOS upgrades or new features. Until now: The Palm site has some info on WebOS 2.0, which it’s beginning to prep developers for. Looks like some neat stuff is on the way, including an upgrade to the Cards multitasking interface that groups related Cards into Stacks, and a feature called Just Type–evolved from WebOS’s current Universal Search feature–that lets developers build apps that provide users with the ability to perform searches or “quick actions” by…just typing.

The upgrade will also allow developers to write apps that run when a WebOS phone is charging in Palm’s Touchstone inductive cradle.

Even though the Pre and Pixi turned out not to be blockbusters, they run the only smartphone OS that competes with Apple’s iOS in terms of user interface sophistication and polish. (There are a number of things I like about Google’s Android, but the intelligence of the interface isn’t one of them.) It’s heartening to see some tangible proof that it’s going to continue to get better. Here’s hoping that news of new handsets isn’t too far off either.

Rumor: Amazon Wants Netflix-Style Streaming

Amazon reportedly wants to be more like Netflix, with subscription-based streaming of movies and television — if only Hollywood studios would play along.

The Wall Street Journal’s unnamed sources say Amazon has spent weeks, or perhaps months, courting major media companies, including NBC Universal, Viacom and Time Warner. Amazon has proposed all kinds of ideas, including a service bundled with Amazon Prime, which provides unlimited two-day shipping and other perks for $79 per year.

So far, the retailer isn’t getting much traction, the Journal suggests. It’s not clear whether any media companies are interested, and Amazon could put the plan on ice or give up entirely if there aren’t enough content providers involved. (Update: WSJ has filled out its story considerably since this post, and the tone isn’t as dreary. There’s no longer any language that says it’s not clear whether any media companies are interested, and instead cites two unnamed media executives who describe the program as a possibility. I’ve removed “Can’t Seal the Deal” from the headline here, since that seems premature.)

Even if studios were more liberal about licensing their content on a subscription basis, Amazon still has another problem: It’s woefully behind Netflix in the race for ubiquity.

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New Xbox 360 Controller Settles an Old Debate

Since the dawn of the gamepad, console makers had to make a tough decision with each new iteration: Disc-shaped directional pad, or traditional plus shape?

Microsoft thinks it can choose both with a new wireless controller for the Xbox 360. Like the existing Xbox 360 controller, the new model starts in a disc format, which is ideal for sweeping motions that connect one direction to the next. Players can also raise up the plus-shaped portion of the D-pad by rotating it, allowing for more distinct directional presses. This is intended to appease fans of fighting games like Street Fighter IV, who need the accuracy when stringing together button combinations.

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Last Call for Apple Predictions

Five hours left to guess what Apple will announce tomorrow in our traditional experiment in crowdsourced prognostication (and get a shot at a $100 Apple Store gift card). Take your best shot here.

E-Reader Price Wars: Kobo Tries to Keep Up

When cool products cost a lot of money, there’s plenty of opportunity for other manufacturers to introduce less-cool competitors–or ones with fewer features, at least–at lower prices. But what happens when the cool products get radically cheaper? We’re seeing that entertaining scenario play out in the e-reader market.

When bookstore behemoth Borders announced in March it would start selling a basic reader called the Kobo for $150, it was $110 less than the Kindle and Nook. And even though it didn’t have a 3G connection–it made you buy books on a computer and sync them via USB–it was a deal.

But then Barnes & Noble set off e-readers price wars by cutting the price of the Nook from $259 to $199 and introducing a $149 Wi-Fi-only model. Amazon knocked the Kindle’s price down to $189 a few hours later–and last week, it shipped the third-generation Kindle in both a $189 3G model and a $139 Wi-Fi only one.

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Roku’s Preemptive Price Cuts

Internet TV box Roku is about to get scads of new competition–Google TV and Hulu Plus devices and the Boxee Boxfor sure, and maybe an all-new Apple TV. The Roku SD is now $59.99; the Roku HD is $69.99; and the top-of-the-line Roku HD-XR is $99.99. That reflects a $20 price cut for the SD and $30 cuts for the HD and HD-XR, all of which have built-in Wi-Fi networking. And it gets the basic box to a super-low price and the high-end one that should make sense no matter how much the new arrivals go for.

The company is also announcing an upcoming upgrade for the HD-XR model that will permit streaming of 1080p content (although most of the services it includes still top out at 720p).

The Roku boxes were already pleasing products at good prices; now they’re an even better deal. Would buy one? Well, I did get one last month, as a birthday gift. But at this point, unless time was of the essence, I’d wait a bit longer to see what the competition has in store. By December, we should have a good idea how the new gadgets stack up–and it’s possible that we’ll know a lot more about the future of Apple TV as soon as tomorrow.

Gmail Priority Inbox: A New Clutter-Taming Tool

Google is making one of larger changes to Gmail it’s ever instituted. It’s an clutter-taming feature called Priority Inbox, and the company is apparently pretty sure people will love it: Rather than rolling it out as a Labs experiment, Google is turning on the feature for everyone right away. The company prebriefed me last week and has let me try it out for the past few days.

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Xbox Live Price Hike: A Higher Cost for Microsoft

This wasn’t entirely unexpected, but Microsoft announced that it’s raising the price of Xbox Live Gold, effective November 1.

Yearly subscriptions will increase from $50 to $60, quarterly subscriptions will jump from $20 to $25, and monthly subscriptions will go up from $8 to $10. Before the price hike, Microsoft is giving subscribers a chance to get one more year for $40, effectively negating the new price until 2012. Joystiq points out that several retailers are also selling $40 yearly subscription cards, which you can stock up on now and use over a longer period of time.

The troubling thing about this price hike is not so much the $10 difference itself, but the feeling of powerlessness that it instills.

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Make Apple Predictions, Get a Shot at a $100 Apple Gift Card

Apple is holding its traditional September music event this Wednesday at 10am PT. As is my wont, I’m going to avoid making any predictions by asking you to do so. Click here to take our quick survey. I’ll aggregate everyone’s best guesses and turn them into shared predictions from the Technologizer community. (I’ll publish them before the event so you can score at home, and again after the event so we can reflect on how we did–your track record when we’ve done this in the past is not bad at all.)

When you take the survey, you can choose to enter a drawing for a $100 gift card from the U.S. Apple Store. The survey and gift card giveaway end at 2pm PT on Tuesday, August 31st. We’ll notify a winner by September 2nd.

Have fun and good luck!

[NOTE: Please take the survey rather than leaving comments on this post. Thanks!]

YouTube’s On-Again, Off-Again Relationship With Premium

Let’s play a game. Go to YouTube’s home page and try to find the premium content — the movies and television shows from big studios — without resorting to search. Come back here once you’ve given up.

A year ago, getting to that content was a lot easier. YouTube’s home page had a “Shows” tab that took you directly to a page filled with professionally-produced episodes and clips. The top of the page, as captured in July 2009 by the Wayback Machine, promoted clips from Jimmy Kimmel Live, manga from Funimation and full episodes of the Larry Sanders Show. Down below were clips from ABC’s World News With Charlie Gibson, and cooking tutorials from the New York Times.

YouTube’s “Shows” page still exists, but the emphasis on big stars and major media companies is gone. More importantly, you can’t get to this page directly from YouTube’s homepage. The latest redesign, launched at the end of March, removed a lot of clutter, but also returned prominence to the user-generated content for which the site is best-known.

With all that in mind, I wonder what YouTube will look like if it begins selling pay-per-view movies from major Hollywood studios. Financial Times says Google negotiating with studios to stream feature films at the same time as their release on DVD (same as iTunes and Amazon), and hopes to have deals in place by the end of the year.

It’s easy to see why Google would want YouTube to stream major motion pictures. A cut of each sale would provide revenue, and the timing would fit nicely with the launch of Google TV. But the shifting on YouTube’s home page between user-generated and premium content only points out how difficult it is to juggle both in one place. I just can’t imagine a big block of feature films being hawked alongside make-up tutorials and “Drive-By Pooping.”

Cover(s) Story

I don’t think that Wired and Scientific American coordinated their issue planning this month–they’re competitors, at least sort of–but the two covers sure make for a cool matched set.

From the magazine rack at my local Lucky supermarket:

How IBM Sold Tech in the Eisenhower Era

Back in May, we told you about some industrial films that IBM commissioned from the Muppets in the 1960s. The decade before that, the office-equipment giant was a major advertiser in glossy mass-circulation magazines such as LIFE. Today, those ads are a fascinating, evocative trip back to a world in which technology, work, and workplaces were radically different. Yes, there was a time when the typical piece of business correspondence was a snail-mail letter typed by a secretary on a typewriter which might or might not have been electric–and which had no provision for correcting errors.

View The Golden Age of IBM Advertising slideshow.

The Golden Age of IBM Advertising

Back in the 1950s, IBM was just getting into the computer business, many companies still needed to be convinced that electric typewriters weren’t a technological boondoggle, and slide rules were still essential equipment. And the American workplace–at least as depicted in magazine ads–had what we’d now consider a distinct Mad Men edge to it.

Mix yourself the cocktail of your choice, settle into your Eames chair, and return with us now to the era of mainframes and secretarial pools to rediscover these vintage IBM ads from LIFE and other publications.