Pssst: Batteries Are a Commodity

Which batteries should you buy? DealNews did some scientific testing and says that the answer is easy: the cheapest ones. (There is one exception.)

The Movie Studios Think Zediva is Illegal. Shocking!

Last month, Jared wrote about Zediva, an online movie rental service with an absurd technological approach: Its founders have banks of DVD players and stream individual DVDs across the net at $1 a pop–including movies that are out on DVD but not otherwise available in any even theoretically legal form.

Shortly after Zediva launched, it discovered it hadn’t built enough infrastructure to handle the demand, and stopped accepting new members. Now it has a worse problem: The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the company on behalf of the major studios, saying that it’s illegally distributing movies. Oddly, the MPAA doesn’t appear to agree with Zediva’s “Hey, we’re just renting a DVD, like Blockbuster–we just happen to be doing it over the Internet!” theory.

I suspect that Zediva’s improbable technological approach would have done the company in sooner or later no matter what. But with the studios ganging up against it, now I’m wondering whether it’ll ever get fully up and running in the first place.

Sprint to Go it Alone With Mobile Payments

Sprint was the odd man out when the other major wireless carriers–Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile –announced a partnership with Discover to support wireless payments on mobile devices last year. However with that system possibly not ready until 2012, there may be an opening.

The company told Bloomberg that it is already working on a system with payment vendors and handset makers, and it plans to have it in place this year. While so-called near field communication (NFC) support would likely not be enough to attract customers to the brand itself, it certainly would give Sprint some bragging rights.

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Court Throws Out Verizon, MetroPCS Suits Over Net Neutrality

A federal judge has thrown out both Verizon and MetroPCS’ suits against the FCC over net neutrality, but don’t get your hopes up just yet. The decisions appear to revolve around a technicality: that both companies just filed way too early.

In order for the FCC to be sued over the rules, it must be in the 30 days following its publishing in the Federal Register. That has not happened yet. While the carriers attempted to deal with this issue by saying it was a move to protect its spectrum rights, the court just did not buy that.

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Fifty-Six Percent of Developers Can’t Be Hallucinating, Can They?

Android fragmentation? That issue which Google insists doesn’t exist? Fifty-six percent of developers think it’s a real problem.

iOS 5: What Should Be

MobileCrunch’s Greg Kumparak has a personal wishlist of features he wants to see in Apple’s iOS. It’s remarkably similar to my personal wishlist. Do you have one?

Firefox 5 Preview

Speaking of glimpses of major software upgrades to come, Conceivably Tech has some stuff on Firefox 5.

Windows 8 Rumorfest

GeekWire’s Todd Bishop has a good roundup of the tidbits about Windows 8 that are starting to slip out.

Cablevision Opens the (iPad) Firehose

Leave it to Cablevision… True to form, they’ve thrown caution to the wind and have launched the full fledged STB replacement iPad app we’ve been waiting for:

More Shopping For Bargains on the Internet

A Look at Windows 8′s Welcome Screen

This leaked welcome screen for Windows 8 isn’t itself a huge development, but it does offer some hints about where Microsoft is headed with its PC operating system.

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Time Warner Drops Channels from iPad App, But Adds More

Last week, I wrote about Time Warner Cable’s increasingly bitter battle with cable operators over its new iPad app. Today comes news that while the company acquiesced to some demands, it still seems intent on providing live streaming of cable content to its subscribers.

Time Warner’s most vocal critics were Fox, Viacom, and Discovery Communications. On Thursday, the company removed their channels from the service, about a dozen in all — except for Fox News. Even though it took those steps, it added 17 new channels on Friday, thus increasing the overall number of networks available through the service to about three dozen.

Consumers are responding positively to the app: the company reports some 300,000 downloads in just the first two weeks of availability.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, the networks are NBC World, CSPAN, CSPAN2, CSPAN3, Chiller, Disney XD, ESPNnews, G4, HSN, IFC, Jewelry, QVC, Sleuth, SOAPnet, Style, Golf Channel and WeTV. It also included its local news and information channels NY1 News and YNN Austin in those markets.

It’s clearly a sign that Time Warner has no intention of backing down, meaning that we’re probably heading for a showdown between the cable provider and the networks. What remains to be seen is whether Time Warner’s move emboldens other providers to do the same. There’s always power in numbers.

HTC Thunderbolt: iPhone Killer?

HTC’s Thunderbolt has gotten a good deal of positive coverage from the tech press, and now we may have some anecdotal evidence that those good words could be translating into success for the device. According to data from research firm BITG, checks at 150 Verizon Wireless stores indicate that in some cases the Thunderbolt is outselling the iPhone 4.

According to the comany’s data, 61 percent of the stores said they were selling equal numbers of both devices, and 11 percent more iPhones than Thunderbolts, apparently mainly in the southeastern US. But 28 percent were selling more Thunderbolts, seemingly indicating that at least on Verizon, the iPhone may have met its match.

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How the Twitter Grinch Stole April Fool’s Day

I don’t like being fooled, but I’ve always had a soft spot for April Fool’s Day. For the tech companies and publications that play practical jokes on April 1, it’s a chance to let loose and show that behind every gadget — and every story about that gadget — there are actual people.

If you’re with me on this, the worst thing you can do on April Fool’s Day is hang out on Twitter. At least in tech circles, the hive mind has deemed that your best option on April 1 is to take a day off from the Internet.

I’m not a natural-born prankster. I have no gags of my own to defend. But jokes like Gmail Motion, the branded Roku Remote and Richard Rosenblatt’s $40 million yacht, The AdSense, bring a smile to my face. Instead of crying out in anguish on social networks, perhaps the haters should lighten up and stop being so gullible. I dunno — maybe I just haven’t been burned badly enough yet.

Read on for some samples of rain on the parade, but be warned: foul language follows, because that’s the kind of bitterness this day brings out in people.

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Osborne!

Notebooks. Netbooks. Smartphones. Tablets. In 2011, the default state of personal computing is mobile–traditional desktop PCs are still with us, but they’ve become the outliers.

It wasn’t always so. In their earliest days, in fact, PCs weren’t primarily deskbound; they were entirely deskbound. The notion that you might be able to carry one wherever your work took you was a radical thought.

That changed on April 3rd, 1981 when a startup called Osborne Computer Corporation announced the Osborne 1 at the West Coast Computer Faire at San Francisco’s Brooks Hall. It was the first true mass-produced portable PC and one of the most popular computers of its time. That makes this Sunday, April 3rd, 2011, as good a day to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of portable computing as any–and to remember Adam Osborne, the company’s founder.

Today, Osborne is most famous for having failed. The conventional wisdom is that his company nosedived into bankruptcy after he announced new computers before they were ready, leading customers to stop buying the Osborne 1–a blunder that’s known as “the Osborne Effect” and which comes up to this day when tech companies announce upcoming products prematurely (or, like Apple, refuse to do so).

The conventional wisdom about Osborne Computer’s demise is wrong–more about that later on–but it is true that the company went from being described as possibly having “the steepest sales slope of any company” by analyst (and eventual Compaq chairman) Ben Rosen to bankruptcy in slightly over a year and a half. It remains one of the most sobering case studies in Silicon Valley history.

But while failure is part of the Osborne story, it’s not the whole story. It’s not even the most significant part of it. For one thing, the details on Osborne Computer Company’s rise are at least as interesting as its fall. For another, Adam Osborne did a lot of stuff besides name a popular computer after himself. He founded the first significant company devoted to publishing books about microcomputers. He was a hugely influential tech pundit. And after Osborne Computer fell apart, he founded another company that also collapsed–but not before helping to pioneer the idea of really cheap software.

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