Such a Deal!

Can you spot the catch with this $10 Nexus S over at eBay?

The IronGeekiest of Them All

One of the last things I did at South by Southwest this week was probably the most fun and definitely the wildest and wackiest: On Tuesday afternoon, I competed against Joshua Baer, Larry Chiang, Amanda Coolong, Lydia Leavitt, and Nan Palmero in a tournament known as Das IronGeek. We raced around the SxSW show floor, competing in a typing test at the Das Keyboard booth, sifting through sand to find phone cases with Seidio, answering trivia questions provided by Triviatise, going head-to-head in air hockey over at MapQuest, and setting up servers for SoftLayer.

In the end, the contest wasn’t that much of a contest: Josh Baer, founder of the neat service OtherInbox, won the overall competition handily and beat me at air hockey like I’ve never been beat before. I went away happy anyway, having tied for second place, won the trivia round, and generally comported myself better than I did at last year’s inaugural IronGeek edition.

After the jump, a few photos I took of my fellow contestants.

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Visa Moves in On PayPal’s Turf with Payment Service

PayPal is about to get some competition from one of its own partners as Visa announced a new personal payments service on Wednesday. The offering would allow anyone from a participating bank to send payments directly to any Visa account, whether it be a credit, debit, or prepay card.

Visa said it needed to make some changes to its backend to allow its partners to accept incoming payments, as well as changes to the network itself. The creditor has partnered with CashEdge and Fiserv to handle the person-to-person transactions — Visa itself would not be directly involved.

To send a payment, the payer would need to know the payee’s 16-digit Visa account number, e-mail address, or phone number. Once sent, the payment would show up in the users account. This could be used in a number of ways — for example, making sure your child at college has money on his prepaid Visa, or that friend paying you back for that item you charged to your Visa credit card, etc.

Visa says the payment service should be available from participating financial institutions beginning in the second half of this year.

Hold It: Apple Shelving iPad 2s to Ease Inventory Pressure?

Let’s say you’ve arrived at your local Apple Store with intent to purchase an iPad 2, but alas, the salesperson tells you they’re out of stock. Tragic, right?

But what if they’re really in stock after all? What if the next time you’re politely turned away with one of those frowning smiles, there’s actually a stack of perfectly salable iPad 2′s nesting comfortably in the store’s back room?

Why would Apple (or anyone) hang on to iPad inventory? Well, because they’re Apple, and they work in magical-mysterious ways, but also–according to an AppleInsider tipster–because the company’s hoping to ease pressure on store inventory checkers, who’ve apparently been pretty stressed getting new iPad 2 shipments properly catalogued before they land on store shelves.

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The Trouble With iPhone Web Apps

Readability made a bold statement earlier this month by releasing a web app alongside its native news reader for the iPhone. With Apple taking a 30 percent cut of subscription-based services offered through the iOS App Store, the web route allows Readibility to keep all the money for itself and content owners.

But here’s the problem: Web apps on iOS may be plagued with slower speeds and an occasional inability to run offline.

The Register brought these issues to light in a recent report on iOS web apps. The report mostly emphasized the slower speed of these HTML-based apps — reportedly, web apps saved to the iPhone’s home screen don’t use Apple’s brand-new Nitro JavasScript engine — but the bigger issue in my mind is the fragile state of offline support.

Before Apple released iOS 4.2 and iOS 4.3, you could run some web apps offline by installing them to the home screen. Now, the free web game Pie Guy doesn’t work without a connection, and accessing queued Readability articles on an airplane or in a subway tunnel is a shaky prospect.

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Dear Samsung: Enough With the Tablet Teasers Already

We’re Up for Some Awards!

I’m tickled to report that Technologizer is a finalist in this year’s Maggie Awards, a sixty-year-old competition conducted by the Western Publishing Association, an organization of print and online publishers located in the western US states. In fact, we’re in the running in three of the Web categories:

Best Web Publication/Consumer (hey, we’re up against our friends at PCWorld here)

Best Web or Digital Publication Article/Consumer (for Fanboy! The Strange True Tale of the Tech World’s Favorite Put-Down)

Best Web or Digital Publication Blog/Trade and Consumer

The winners will be announced at an awards gala on April 29th in LA. I’ll let you know how we do.

The iPad 2′s Display: Nice, But Not Perfect

My friend Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies has reviewed the iPad 2′ screen, comparing it to the iPhone 4′s “retina” display. The news is mostly good–he likes the iPad 2′s display a lot and says that “retina” resolution isn’t all that important–but he also has some interesting technical quibbles which he says Apple could fix with a software update.

Zediva: Streaming New Movies for Cheap Through a Sneaky Workaround

Movie studios are skittish about giving their new releases to bargain rental services like Netflix and Redbox, but that’s not a concern for streaming video startup Zediva.

The service, which moves out of beta today, streams new movie releases for $2 a piece — half the price of new releases from iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Blockbuster On Demand. You can also purchase a 10-pack of rentals for $10 total.

Zediva shaves down its pricing by cutting movie studios out of the equation. Instead of negotiating streaming rights, the company buys up DVDs at retail and uses place-shifting technology to stream the video out of a Silicon Valley data center. Think Slingbox on a massive scale, but with DVD players instead of cable boxes. (I got a mental image of some guy running around, swapping out all the discs, but Zediva assures me that it uses a carousel mechanism to change movies.)

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T-Mobile Announces Sidekick 4G

After T-Mobile discontined sales of the iconic Sidekick smartphone last July, some wondered if the company had plans to keep the brand alive. There had been some rumors that the company was planning on a new Android-based version of the device — that appears to be true. The Sidekick 4G will hit the shelves later this spring, sporting a familiar design but fast HSPA+ data and manufactured by Samsung.

While the device will certainly look like a Sidekick, it willl have some key changes. The 3.5-inch display is now a touchscreen, and it will be tightly integrated with social media with built in Facebook and Twitter applications. Since it’s now a Android device, users will now have access to the thousands of apps from the Android Market.

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Twitter Enables “Always On” HTTPS

If you’re concerned with somebody hacking into your tweets, Twitter has just enabled an “always on” secure connection feature, according to a post on the company blog Tuesday. The feature can be enabled by checking the “Always Use HTTPS” check box in settings. This follows a similar move by Facebook in January.

iPad 2 Supply Levels Worsen, Queues Reappear

On Friday, I reported that just hours after the iPad 22 was made available though Apple’s online store, ship dates had slipped to two to three weeks. Stock has continued to dwindle, and on Tuesday the company pushed back ship dates further to four to five weeks.

The story at the company’s own stores and its retail partners was much the same. Many stores reported that they were completely sold out, with shipments only appearing at some stores Tuesday and not others. Yesterday, the Apple Bitch blog reported that some stores would open early — which they did in some cases — but many did not know until this morning whether the shipments they received included new iPads.

Anecdotal reports indicate that the reporting yesterday may have triggered some consumers to queue at various Apple Store locations (See the comments on this Macworld story, for example), typically much longer than the number of available iPad 2s. What does seem to be a repeated refrain is that even if stores receive shipments midday, they would not be available for sale until the next morning.

Unfortunately, the only recommendation if you’re still looking for one is to keep calling, and keep checking. Or wait until this all shakes out. One has to wonder if the iPad 2s international availability is again in jeopardy.

Google Looks To Test Mobile Payments in NYC, SF

Mobile payments using so-called Near-Field Communication have been a hot topic these days, whether it be the rumored addition of the technology to the iPhone 5 (or maybe not), or banks such as Bank of America looking to cash in on the trend.

Enter Google, which according to Bloomberg is planning to test the technology within four months in New York and San Francisco.

The search giant would pay for the installation of NFC-equipped cash registers produced by Verifone. To pay, the consumer would simply tap their mobile device on a unit equipped to read the chip built into the phone. It’s not entirely clear how the payments would be handled, but Bloomberg says a consumer’s banking account could be combined with loyalty and gift cards from the retailers and even coupons.

In any case, whether or not NFC actually catches on will be directly affected by whether or not the phone manufacturers themselves include the technology on the phone. AT&T and Verizon last year teamed up with Discover on its own system, which is expected to begin testing shortly.

BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has also said that it plans to build NFC support into its devices, and the Nexus S is one of the first phones widely available in the US with the technology. That said, a good majority of manufacturers have stayed mostly silent on their plans.

If NFC is to succeed, then this is most definitely going to have to change.

Nintendo 3DS Ad Grapples With 3D Marketing

With less than two weeks until the Nintendo 3DS launches in the United States, Nintendo is showing off its first commercial for the 3D gaming handheld. And in doing so, the company has raised a question that comes up every time someone tries to advertise 3D: How, exactly, do you market something that can only be witnessed in person?

In a way, this issue has dogged television makers for years. Back when tube televisions ruled, electronics companies had to convince us of HDTV’s visual fidelity through words or metaphor. That’s true with any incremental improvement in picture quality. But while it’s easy to believe that a new TV simply looks better than an old one, 3D has the challenge of selling the public on an entirely different way of viewing video. Take a look at how Nintendo handles it:

I think the visual effect of jumping into and out of the game is a valiant effort. If I were 20 years younger, I’d probably be flipping out over this stuff, and it definitely does a better job of selling the 3D concept than most 3D TV ads. (My personal least favorite is the one from Panasonic where a family gets sucked into outer space, accompanied by a voiceover from a creepy, whispering child.)

One other thing that strikes me about the Nintendo 3DS ad: the users. These people are my age, which is to say they fall into the stereotypical gamer demographic. In recent years, Nintendo’s made a killing by targeting everyone else.

IE9 is Ready to Go

Last night here at SxSW, Microsoft officially rolled out the shipping version of Internet Explorer 9. It’s available here for download, and very much worth checking out if you use Windows 7 (or, gasp, Vista). More thoughts soon, but it’s the best version of IE in years–and its release means that every major Web browser is a solid product. (In fact, in many ways they’re remarkably similar: Everyone’s settled on nearly identical browsers.)

If you try IE9, let us know what you think…

Apple’s iPad 2: It’s Still the One

When Apple unveiled the iPad back in January of 2010, the company’s competitors rightly saw a huge opportunity. Now that Steve Jobs & Co. had created the first modern tablet computer, other manufacturers could build on the ideas it originated. They could offer features that it didn’t. They could deliver more bang for the buck.

Almost fourteen months later, the promise of a tablet market is still mostly just that: promise. RIM, for instance, announced its intriguing BlackBerry PlayBook last September but still hasn’t revealed a ship date. HP says only that it hopes to have its TouchPad out by summer. Motorola’s Xoom, meanwhile, hit stores in February with so many of its theoretically iPad-crushing features yet to be implemented—4G wireless, Adobe’s Flash Player software, the memory-card slot—that it should have come with a wad of IOUs in the box. (Adobe says that Flash will be ready on March 18th.)

Clearly, this tablet stuff is tricky. There is, however, one company that’s managed to ship a model that’s unquestionably superior to the iPad. That company would be Apple–and the tablet is the iPad 2, which went on sale at Apple Stores and other retailers on March 11th. It’s not a profound rethinking of the first-generation iPad; plenty of things, in fact, haven’t changed a bit. But it’s a significantly more refined take on a device that was pretty darned polished in the first place.

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