Apple’s September Music Event is Official

I just got an invitation to an Apple press event in San Francisco on September 1st. Here’s the art–either the company is finally making its long-awaited move into the guitar business, or it’s scheduled its traditional September iPod launch.

Sadly, I won’t be covering this particular Apple event in person. (I have a good excuse: I’m going to be in Berlin at the IFA tech show.) But I’m curious about just how significant the news will be. New iPods are a given, and there are rumors of an Apple TV replacement and a seven-inch iPad. As is my wont, I’ll ask you for formal predictions shortly before the event, but any initial guesses and/or hopes?

Google Mashes Up Gmail and Google Voice, Makes U.S./Canada Calls Free

I try to restrain myself from calling any new tech product or service a killer. But Google just announced that it’s integrating Google Voice into Gmail, turning its e-mail service into a fully Web-based Voice-over-IP system that lets you talk to people with landlines and cell phones all over the world. And…well, it looks like it could be an awfully compelling Skype alternative. Especially since calls to cell phones and landlines in the U.S. and Canada that you’d pay for with Skype are free.

The integration adds a cool new feature to Gmail, but as a long-time Google Voice addict, I’m even more excited about what it does for that service. Now those of us with Google Voice numbers can use it in a new way, and without burning through mobile phone minutes.

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Internet Explorer 9 and the New UI Homogeny

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley thinks she stumbled upon the user interface for Internet Explorer 9, spying a screenshot on Microsoft Russia’s press website. If this is the real deal, the next IE will look like the lovechild of Google Chrome and Firefox 4.

From Firefox 4, IE9 reportedly takes the oversized back button, translucent window and tremendous amount of wasted space above the navigation bar (seriously, it’s just an empty row with window management at the end, and the next Firefox is just as guilty). From Chrome, IE9 may derive the omnibar for search and URLs, and a series of menu icons on the right side of the screen.

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New Kindle is Here, Selling Like an Unspecified Number of Hotcakes

Amazon has announced that it’s started shipping its third-generation Kindle e-reader to customers.The new version is thinner and lighter, with a better screen and longer battery life, and it now starts at $139 (for a Wi-Fi version). Basically, it’s the most Kindle-like Kindle yet, rather than an iPad wannabee. I’m looking forward to seeing one in person.

In Apple-like fashion, Amazon likes to crow about how well the Kindle is selling. But unlike Apple, which frequently quotes sales stats in millions or billions, Amazon has never said how many Kindles it’s sold.

So the company always brags in a vague, self-referential way, which it’s doing today:

Amazon.com today announced that more new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch, making the new Kindles the fastest-selling ever.  In addition, in the four weeks since the introduction of the new Kindle and Kindle 3G, customers ordered more Kindles  on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product, continuing Kindle’s over two-year run as the bestselling product across all the products sold on Amazon.com.

Amazon long ago dedicated the best real estate on its site–the top of its homepage–exclusively to Kindle hype. So it would be astonishing if it wasn’t the best settling product on the site. And with the repeated price cuts the e-reader gotten, it’s not surprising that sales continue to increase.

There’s no doubt that the Kindle is an important product and a hit for Amazon, but unless the company discloses actual figures someday, you’ve got to wonder: Does it choose not to get specific because it worries that hard numbers would provoke a spate of “E-readers are still a tiny market compared to the iPod and other landmark gizmos” stories?

Roku Developer Content: The Deadline Nears

Quick reminder: Along with LeVar Burton, Michael Endelman, Jim Louderback, Anthony Wood, and Dave Zatz, I’m a guest judge for Roku’s developer contest. The company is going to give away $35,000 in prizes for channels created for its Internet entertainment box–categories include video, audio, photo, screensaver (which I’m judging), social media, and founder’s choice. The deadline for entries is September 6th.

THQ to Lessen the Blow of Used Game Crackdowns

To discourage people from buying used video games, THQ and EA Sports recently started locking away features, such as multiplayer, and requiring used game buyers to pay extra. Realizing that this practice will likely make people feel angry and cheated, THQ has plans to sweeten the deal.

Starting with WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2011, multiplayer unlock codes will include the game’s first batch of downloadable content for the same $10, Eurogamer reports. It’s a clever move because it entices — rather than forces — used game buyers to hand a little money over to the publisher. “So the used consumer feels they’re getting something for their money, not just a getting out of jail card,” THQ Core Games Vice President Danny Bilson said.

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Microsoft Office Web Apps Update

Good to see Microsoft’s Office Web Apps get some of the basic features whose absence mystified me when the first version came out: Word printing, Excel charts, and PowerPoint clip art.

I’ll Celebrate When Windows 98 SE Turns Fifteen

A post by Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle reminded me of a fact I would have had memorized if I were a serious tech historian: Windows 95 shipped fifteen years ago today. I certainly have memories of the launch–including running the beta for months beforehand and working on PC World‘s Windows 95 issue.  (That magazine remains the single best selling issue of PCW ever sold; I don’t think there’s a topic in tech today that would capture the imagination of such a high percentage of computer users all at once.)

Oddly enough, thinking back doesn’t leave me all that nostalgic. It’s not that I’m incapable of being fascinated by mid-1990s Microsoftian history–just a few months ago, I wrote a gazillion words about the fifteenth birthday of Bob. But Windows 95 didn’t capture my imagination in 1995, and it doesn’t do so today.

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Clicker Hits the iPhone

Clicker, the cool site for TV watchers that’s part Google, part TV Guide, and part virtual TiVo, is launching an iPhone app today. The company’s CEO, Jim Lanzone, told me that it brings much of the features of the site to the small screen, but it’s meant as a companion–there’s a lot less TV available on the iPhone than on the PC-based Web, especially since neither Hulu Plus nor Netflix have launched yet.

As with the site, the Clicker app lets you search for TV shows and get information about where they can be watched on the Web or on the iPhone (both for free and for pay); add shows to a playlist that alerts you when new episodes are available (and which you can get access to in your browser where everything’s available); and check out what your friends are watching.

After the jump, a few screens.

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Cable-Cutting Might Be Hard, But It’s Happening

A day after the New York Times wrote about the lasting appeal of cable TV, Hollywood Reporter notes that paid television subscriptions fell for the first time in at least two decades.

Cable, satellite and telco providers lost 216,000 subscribers last quarter, research firm SNL Kagan claims, the worst performance for these industries since the 1980s, when SNL Kagan began tracking this data. The firm expects web TV options such as Hulu to become the primary way of watching television for 3 million U.S. homes this year, out of 115 million TV households in the United States.

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Roxio Creator: Cheap n’ Simple 3D

Full disclosure: I think of myself as a 3D skeptic. On balance, I think its impact on the movie business is pernicious–sixty years after the first 3D boom, it remains a gimmick, not an artform. As for 3D TV, much of the enthusiasm I’ve witnessed so far comes from TV manufacturers rather than consumers, and the need to pay for all those pricey glasses still seems like an overwhelming gotcha.

Despite all that, I kind of like the approach to 3D in Roxio’s new Creator 2011, the new version of a venerable swiss-army knife package for creating, editing, and sharing media of all sorts. If you happen to be one of the few folks who own a 3D camera or camcorder, a 3D HDTV, or a laptop or monitor that works with Nvidia’s $200 3D Vision active shutter glasses, Creator ‘s new 3D features will work with them. But they don’t require any special equipment other than the pair of blue-and-red lens cardboard spectacles that come in the box, and you don’t need to know anything about 3D to give them a whirl.

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Iomega Portable Hard Drives Hit the Big USB 3.0

Do you own a computer with USB 3.0 ports? Probably not. You will, though–and when you do, you’ll want USB 3.0 devices so you can take advantage of the sizable speed boost.

USB 3.0-equipped peripherals, like USB 3.0 PCs, remain somewhat exotic. But here’s some good news: Iomega is announcing that it’s going to replace all its current USB 2.1 portable hard drives with USB 3.0 models. The transition starts with new versions of the company’s 500GB and 1TB eGo drives, due in October. It says its other models will follow suit, starting in the first quarter of next year.

Iomega isn’t announcing how much the USB 3.0 drives will cost, because it’s not sure what the going rate for portable drives will be in October. But it is saying that you won’t pay a premium for the USB 3.0 models over 2.0 versions. (It currently charges $114.99 for a 500GB eGo and $189.99 for a 1TB one.) The new versions will come with AES 256 hardware encryption standard, and are rated to survive a seven-foot drop–twice the industry average, Iomega says,

USB 3.0 drives work fine with USB 2.1 ports–at 2.1 speeds–so there’s no reason not to buy a USB 3.0 drive, even if you can’t take advantage of its speed just yet.

USB 3.0 portable drives aren’t new, but they’ve been nichey products at a premium price; Iomega’s move to replace 2.1 models with 3.0 ones at similar price points is a welcome development. If Iomega can afford to make USB 3.0 standard, it seems like a good bet that Seagate (which currently sells USB 2.1 drives that can be upgraded to 3.0) and Western Digital will do the same before too many months pass.

TiVo Gets QWERTY

TiVo has begun selling the $89.99 slider remote with a hidden QWERTY keyboard which it first showed off back in March when it launched its new Premiere boxes. Our friend Dave Zatz has tried one and mostly likes it. It has the signature TiVo “peanut” design, but is 25% shorter–presumably to allow for a keyboard with a width that lends itself well to thumbtyping.

The TiVo Slide uses Bluetooth to talk to all recent Tivos (the Premiere, HD, and Series 3), which means you don’t need to worry about pointing it at the DVR or whether there’s any furniture, pets, or children in the way; it comes with a USB Bluetooth adapter, which presumably helps to explain the pricetag. (The Slide costs almost a third as much as a Tivo Premiere itself–it would be nice if TiVo offered a Tivo-plus-Slide bundle at at least a modest discount.)

For as long as people have been entering alphanumeric text on TVs–which would be since home video games got high-score features, I guess–they’ve mostly been doing it via arrow keys and cumbersome on-screen keyboards. TiVo’s standard text-entry system isn’t bad, relatively speaking, but I’m always in favor of physical plastic QWERTY keys when available…

Chomp’s iPhone App Search Engine: Neat, But Not Yet the Google of Apps

The single best thing about the iPhone is that there are a quarter-million applications for it. And one of the single most frustrating things about the iPhone is how difficult it is to find anything other than the apps that make it to the front page of Apple’s App Store.

Enter Chomp, a startup that aims to do more than Apple has to date to help you find cool software for your device–the iPhone for now, and other platforms over time. The company’s ambitious goal is to be the Google.com of app search. They’ve done a number of things right, but I’ve been puzzled by some of the results I’ve gotten as I’ve played around with the app tonight.

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5 Gmail Features I Want to Go Mobile

Gmail recently added a couple new features that I’m pretty stoked about, as reported by The Next Web. The first is an extended time window of 30 seconds for “Undo Send” — a feature that’s not available in the mobile version — and the second is push notifications for mobile Gmail.

That got me thinking of how the desktop version of Gmail has a lot of features that aren’t available in the mobile version. Though I like HTML5 Gmail enough to use it instead of the Mail app on both the iPhone and iPad, I would love to see some more desktop features migrate to mobile. Read on for a short list of what’s missing.

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Two More Dirty Little Secrets About the Phone Business

“The Dirty Little Secret About Google Android.” That’s the provocative title of a TechRepublic post today by my friend Jason Hiner. Jason points out, correctly, that for all Google’s talk of openness, Android hasn’t done much to open up the experience of buying and using a wireless phone. In nearly all cases, you’re buying an Android phone that’s tied to a particular carrier–and oftentimes one that the carrier has preloaded with so-so applications, crippled by removing the ability to install unauthorized apps, or otherwise made worse, not better, than a phone with a virgin install of the operating system.

Android, in other words, mostly seems “open” to whatever decisions hardware manufacturers and carriers want to make. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

But even if Google used the OS as a battering ram to smash current assumptions about the phone industry, there are plenty of other Dirty Little Secrets standing in the way of an era in which we can all buy cool, crud-free phones from any manufacturer we like and use them with the carrier of our choice.
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