How Long Until Apple Does Away With Disks?

Can we all agree that Apple will be the first major computer manufacturer to stop using hard drives? I assume so, anyhow–although I’m still trying to figure out just when it’ll happen.

iPhone and Android Autobrightness: Buggy, Useless

My friend Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate technologies has a long and fascinating guest post up at Gizmodo. Bottom line: He did a ton of testing on the auto-brightness features on the iPhone and Android handsets that are designed to make the screens legible in varying lighting while conserving battery life. And his data shows they just don’t work.

The Appliance Age of Computing

My weekly Technologizer column for TIME.com this up. I wrote about the overarching message of last week’s Apple event–which, between the almost entirely solid-state MacBook Airs, the iPad-like new version of OS X, and the Mac App Store, is that Apple is trying to reinvent the Mac into something that looks a little less like a personal computer and a little more like an appliance.

Is that good news or bad? As with most change, it combines both upside and downside, and it’s Apple’s responsibility to pull it off in a way that works for its customers. (I like the first tangible results, the surprisingly iPad-like new Air, and will be writing more about it.)

Oh No, Not Those Kinds of Rumors Again

Which big company is Apple going to buy with the billions it has in the bank? None of them!

Sony Stops Making Cassette Walkmen

The original iconic Walkman–the one that took cassette tapes–is no more. (Actually, it sounds like it’s not completely dead: Sony is ending production, but subcontractors will apparently still make Sony-branded tape Walkmen for sale in some countries.) I never owned one myself–back when they were hip, I couldn’t afford much more than the cheapest Sanyo–but five years ago, I was one of the blue-ribbon panel that named the Walkman as the single greatest gadget of all time. Still seems like a good call.

Amazon’s Kindle: Selling Like an Even Larger Unspecified Number of Hotcakes

Amazon says the Kindle is selling better than ever–but it still isn’t disclosing actual numbers.

PSP Go Gets Price Cut, Still Pricey

A year after launching the ambitious but unsuccessful PSP Go, Sony has offered a price cut for the handheld gaming device.

The PSP Go now costs $200 instead of $250. That’s still $30 more expensive than the PSP-3000, which could probably use a price cut itself. Given the price of Sony Memory Sticks, the PSP Go no longer seems like a raw deal, but it’s still a tough sell compared to the $150 Nintendo DSi, or even the $229 iPod Touch.

The PSP Go is Sony’s attempt to get away from packaged media, thereby beating the used game market and piracy. Of course, those goals have nothing to do with what consumers want, and the Go’s perks over the PSP-3000 — a smaller, lighter build and and 16 GB of built-in memory — previously weren’t enough to justify a much higher price tag, lack of support for the physical UMD format and smaller downloadable game library. A $50 price cut might help.

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In Defense of iPad’s Orientation Lock Switch

When Apple updates the iPad to iOS 4.2 next month, it’ll be bittersweet. I’m dying to get some folders on the home screen, and multitasking will certainly be useful even if the implementation can be obnoxious.

But one thing I’m not looking forward to is the demise of a dedicated hardware switch for screen orientation lock. After the iOS 4.2 update, that switch will be used to mute the iPad. To lock the screen horizontally or vertically, you must double-tap the home button, swipe left in the task tray, tap a software lock button and double-tap the home button again to exit the tray.

There won’t be any way to restore orientation lock to the hardware, according to a supposed Steve Jobs e-mail relayed by 9 to 5 Mac. That doesn’t surprise me. Apple is quite particular about how iOS hardware functions, and flexibility is not its strong suit. Still, I’m delighted to see that I’m not alone in lamenting the change; 9 to 5 Mac’s comments section is flooded with people who say they’ll now jailbreak the iPad to get their trusty lock switches back.

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Every Kind of Reality But Real Reality

Last week, our Los Angeles correspondent Jared Newman dropped in on the first Immersive Tech Summit, a conference about virtual reality, augmented reality, and other attempts to make the virtual world a little more realistic–or, sometimes, the real world a little more virtual. He took pictures as he explored the show, and has put together a gallery of some of the exhibits he visited. (My favorite, even though I don’t quite understand it, is the fellow at right, who goes by the name Punch Bob.)

View Scenes from the 2010 Immersive Tech Summit slideshow

Scenes From the 2010 Immersive Tech Summit

Not everyone’s satisfied with TVs, projectors, and computer monitors as the be-all end-all of multimedia. Last week, these people converged in Los Angeles for the first annual Immersive Tech Summit. What is immersive technology, exactly? From what I could tell, it was a lot of augmented reality, virtual reality, and audio-visual installations that most consumers can’t afford, like this 50-foot dome-shaped theater. Read on for more scenes from this wild side of tech.

Technologizer, Now in Convenient Wood-Pulp Form

If you pick up the issue of TIME magazine that came out today–it’s cover dated November 1st, with the cover story “How to Restore the American Dream”–you’ll find a name you may know on page 75: mine. Actually, two familiar names, since it’s my byline appearing on Technologizer’s first appearance in print. (The article is an updated version of a TIME.com column I did recently on Internet TV boxes–Apple TV, Roku, Google TV, and the upcoming Boxee Box.)

As much fun as it is to write for the Web, it’s fun for the world of Technologizer to burst off the Internet and into a magazine, too–and I couldn’t ask for a cooler home than TIME. Buy a few copies and tell your friends!

Kindle to Get Lending

One of the key advantages that Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader has over Amazon’s Kindle is a lending feature that lets you temporarily transfer a digital book you’ve bought to another Nook owner. But Amazon says it’s readying something similar for Kindle users.

Drivers’ Ed at Home

Last Gadget Standing nominee: SimuRide Home Edition

Price: $75

Normally we want to focus on the gadget, not the software, but this one is worth knowing about. Teaching someone to drive a car ranks right up there with the Cyclone on the fear factor. The SimuRide Home Edition (SIMHE1) is a 3D PC driving simulation game (software CD) for beginner drivers. Used with any PC steering wheel device, beginner drivers can practice parallel parking, merging, passing, and other maneuvers in preparation for their driver’s license, featuring error alerts and reporting.

James Cameron, Eric Schmidt, and You: Win a Ticket to a Silicon Valley Event

James Cameron is the director of the two most successful movies of all time–Avatar and Titanic–and one of the film industry’s leading technologists. Eric Schmidt is the CEO of the biggest company on the Web, Google. This Wednesday night, October 27th, the Churchill Club–a cool Silicon Valley organization that sponsors events with interesting people from the world of technology and beyond–is presenting the two of them in conversation at the Fairmont hotel in San Jose, California.

I’ll be there. Better still, so can you–if you’re the winner of a drawing we’re doing to give away one complimentary ticket to the event (normally $99 for Churchill Club members).

What if you don’t live near San Jose? We’re also giving away a complimentary pass for a live Web stream of the event you can watch from anywhere. It’s a $9.95 value.

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Mozilla Chromeless Aims for Build-Your-Own Browsers

User interface is among the most important parts of any web browser, but lately they’re all starting to look the same.

Mozilla Labs’ solution? Chromeless, an experiment that will let people with knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript create their own browser interfaces.

Introducing the idea, Mozilla developer Marcio Galli asks, “What kinds of wild-eyed experimentation would we see if a new conception of browser UI could be prototyped in about the same time it takes to write a web page?” To illustrate his point, Galli posted a simple example that uses page screenshot thumbnails instead of tabs (pictured here).

I really like the idea of Chromeless. While browser interfaces have become highly-evolved, trimming unused menu space and consolidating clutter is not the same as introducing revolutionary new features. If the web browser has any more major leaps in store — something on par with tabs and omnibars — their chances of being discovered will greatly improve if lots of people can easily make their own prototypes. I doubt that any one remix would become popular on its own, but successful experiments could certainly find their way into major browser releases.

Chromeless is still in pre-alpha, and over the next few months, Mozilla will add APIs, security features, and eventually a software development kit for putting together genuine browser remixes. I’m excited to see what people come up with.

Flash on Macs: Birthright? Curse? Something Else?

I’ve been using a new MacBook Air which Apple loaned me for review–thoughts coming soon–and it didn’t take me very long to discover that it didn’t have Adobe’s FlashPlayer preinstalled. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether there was anything noteworthy about that–I couldn’t remember whether any Mac I’d ever used came with Flash, or whether I’d just installed it myself. In this case I did the latter (although–odd coincidence–going to the Flash download page got me an error message at first, and I had to come back later).

But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, the lack of Flash is a new twist in the Apple-Adobe squabble. Apple says that it’s still cheerfully supporting Flash, and that downloading it from Adobe is the best way to get the safest, most current version. Others, of course, may draw more conspiratorial conclusions. (The timing is probably a coincidence, but it’s an interesting one: The news is hitting right before Adobe’s big, news-filled conference MAX kicks off.)

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