I Visited a CD Store Today. (Remember Those?)

I was a frequent Tower Records shopper until that chain collapsed, and it’s only been gone since 2006. I went to the Virgin Megastores in San Francisco and New York pretty often, too, and they closed in 2009. That doesn’t seem that long ago.

But at the moment, I’m in San Diego for Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, and when I saw a Sam Goody music store in the same complex as my hotel, I wandered in–and boy, did what I found feel like something from another era.

Until I came across it, I wasn’t sure whether Sam Goody (which was founded in New York City in the 1950s by Samuel Gutowitz) still existed. Apparently, even Sam Goody is uncertain whether Sam Goody still exists: Wikipedia (which refers to the chain in the past tense) says it’s owned by Trans World Entertainment, which also owns FYE, the last bastion of big-time shopping-mall music stores. But the company apparently converted most of the remaining Goody stores into FYEs in 2008 and doesn’t even mention the chain on its corporate site. There is no such place as SamGoody.com anymore, either.

But this San Diego Sam Goody refuses to acknowledge its own fate, like a Japanese soldier hiding out on a Pacific island somewhere. (In this case, the island happens to be Horton Plaza, a sprawling open-air shopping center in San Diego’s Gaslight Quarter.)

The Goody store is a close cousin of the Tower Records and Virgin Megastores I’d once found worth my time, but I’d almost forgotten what they were like, and had to reacclimate myself to the whole concept of a great big retailer dealing primarily in discs with things recorded on them. As I toured the place, I took fuzzy photos with my iPhone.

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The WHO’s Cell Phone Cancer Report: I’m Not Panicking. But I am Paying Attention

What should you make of today’s news that the World Health Organization has declared cell phones to be a “possible” carcinogen? That’s a tough one–especially if you’re not a paranoiac, a denialist, or a doctor.

This much does seem clear: the report isn’t a massive new development in the ongoing debate over whether phones are bad for you. According to CNN, thirty-one scientists from fourteen countries were part of the panel responsible for the new report. But there was no breakthrough research that revealed something we didn’t know. Actually, there was no research–the report is based on existing studies. And saying that something is possibly carcinogenic falls far short of concluding that it causes cancer. All it’s saying is that phones aren’t in the clear. The only people who should find this news to be utterly staggering, therefore, are the ones who were absolutely positive that there was no chance at all that phones might be problematic.

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Engadget Reviews Ion’s iCade

Ion’s iCade may be an iPad accessory. But it’s an iPad accessory which I feel like I’ve been longing for since at least 1980.

Please, Call Them Ultrabooks

Intel’s plan to revitalize the thin-and-light laptop has been out in the open for over a week, but now the company’s going a step further and giving this product category a new name: Ultrabooks. These computers will measure less than 0.8 inches thick and cost less than $1,000 when they hit the market later this year.

For now, I just want to talk about the name. It’s snappy, as far as jargon goes, but it also leaves me feeling cold. The tech industry is littered with marketing buzzwords for new kinds of computers, but not all of them stick, and as history shows, you just can’t force this kind of thing.

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Nintendo DS Lite: Not a Goner Yet

In April, I reported on a rumor that GameStop was no longer getting shipments of the Nintendo DS Lite. Turns out, Nintendo’s still selling the handhelds, and they’ll drop to $100 on June 5.

Apple’s iWork Apps Arrive on the iPhone

WWDC doesn’t start until Monday, but the news is overflowing into this week. Apple has announced that its iWork iOS apps–Pages, Numbers, and Keynote–are now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch as well as for the iPad. All three apps are now dual-platform ready, so if you’ve already shelled out the $9.99-per-app price for the iPad editions, you can get them on an iPhone at no extra price.

They haven’t quite shown up in the App Store on my iPhone yet, but I’m looking forward to trying them and comparing them to the two big players in iPhone office suites: Documents to Go and Quickoffice. The best thing about the iPad version by far s is that the user interfaces are so nicely tailored to the iPad; I’m curious to see how Apple reworked them for the iPhone’s screen size and resolution.

The WWDC Keynote is a Go–and It’s About Software

We pretty much knew this already, but now it’s official: Apple’s WWDC event next week will begin with a keynote on Monday. The big news at the keynote will be OS X 10.7 Lion. And the next version of iOS. “And iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.” Steve Jobs will host the keynote. (Okay, that part we didn’t know.)

Last week, one site said that it had learned that Apple’s UK PR team was urging journalists over there to make the trek to San Francisco for the event. That site came to the “obvious conclusion” that Apple must have been planning to announce the next iPhone at the keynote. I never understood what was so obvious about that conclusion. New hardware is neat, but the biggest opportunity for any phone or tablet platform to make great leaps forward lies in in its software and services. So WWDC has the opportunity to be a huge deal even if not a single new device is announced.

I’ll have more thoughts between now and Monday morning, but in the meantime: What features would you like to see in Lion, the next iOS, and/or iCloud?

Call of Duty: Elite Will Offer Subscriptions, and That’s Okay

Inevitably, Activision is creating a subscription service for its Call of Duty games, called Call of Duty: Elite. Also inevitably, some people are upset about that.

I fail to see the problem. Call of Duty: Elite is an added service, on top of the multiplayer action that Activision includes for free with its popular first-person shooters. It will let players create groups with other like-minded players . It will host tournaments, in which players can compete for real-world or in-game prizes. It will offer a stat-tracker for studying strategies. Users will be able to access Call of Duty: Elite through their web browsers and smartphones, and they’ll get a career record that tracks their progress from game to game.

Some of this stuff might cost money — Activision won’t specify which parts, or say how much premium membership will cost — and some will be free. Premium members will also get exclusive content and all-inclusive access to downloadable content that non-members must pay for.

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Opera 11.50 Beta’s Speed Dial Gets Widgety

Opera Next–the auto-updating test edition of the next major version of the Norwegian Web browser–is out in a new version, 11.50. It has a clever addition to Speed Dial, the page of thumbnail links to favorite sites which has been widely imitated since Opera invented it: extensions. Rather than just depicting shrunken versions of sites you’ve saved, Speed Dial can now include widgety little applications, such as the weather one in the lower left-hand corner of the screen above.

Like most browser innovations, Speed Dial extensions will only be interesting if they gets embraced by developers, who’ll need to build them in large quantities. And it’ll be be most interesting if it turns into a standard, so that users of all browsers get to enjoy it, too. But if you like checking out nifty new Web concepts, it’s worth a peek right now. As is Opera in general–every time I revisit this browser, I wonder why it’s not more popular. (According to Google Analytics, only one percent of you use it to visit Technologizer.)

The Sidekick Story

I never owned a T-Mobile Sidekick, but I always admired the device–enough so that I heartily endorsed our decision at PC World to name it as product of the year back in 2003. (It wasn’t the first smartphone, but you can make a good case that it was the first modern Webphone.) The history of the device turned out to be rather bittersweet–it didn’t really live up to its potential, and Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger, its creator, led mostly to the infamous Sidekick data outage and to the Kin. And now GeekWire’s Todd Bishop has put together a neat retrospective of the whole Sidekick saga.

Home Computing in 1966? Pretty Much Like Home Computing in 2011

This futuristic clip–supposedly produced in 1966–pretty much nails what home computers would eventually give us: online shopping, e-mail, banking, Webcams, multiple monitors, printers, self-healing Internet, and all.

(Via By Ken Levine)

From the Vault: A Consumer Guide to Apple Rumors

With just over a week left to go until Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference, the rumors are going to come fast and furious. Many will likely be spurious; some stand a chance at being on. And it’s surprisingly easy to figure out which is which.

Back in February of 2009, I wrote a story called “A Consumer’s Guide to Apple Rumors,” in which I attempted to give advice on how to judge the possible veracity of rumors about the planet’s most rumored-about tech company. If I were tackling the topic today, I might use more recent examples…but I don’t think I’d change any of my fundamental tips. So here’s that story again.

And speaking of Apple rumors: what do you expect (or hope) to see at WWDC?

In the Tech Industry, Management Change Comes Slowly

Reuters’ Alastair Sharp has published a story saying that some investors are wondering whether it’s time for a change at the top of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, which is led by Mike Lazaridis (who founded the company in 1984) and Jim Balsillie (who’s been co-CEO since 1992). Sharp’s piece follows a flurry of debate last week about the future of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s president and CEO, who’s been with the company since 1980 and has been CEO since 2000.

I’m not making any predictions about what’s going to happen at either company–except to note that lack of change is usually a more likely outcome than change in these situations, at least in the short term. But the stories got me thinking about the durability of many of the top executives in tech companies. I decided to graph out the management of a few major corporations.

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3D Cooling Off?

Are audiences–in the US, anyhow–losing interest in 3D movies? I sort of hope so, and the New York Times’ Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply see signs that they might be.

Hey, Sony’s Thinking About the Playstation 4 After All!

Just a few months ago, the Playstation 4 was not even a thought on Sony’s collective mind — at least according to Sony Computer Entertainment head Kaz Hirai.

But now, a different executive has fessed up. Work on a future Playstation platform is already underway, says Masaru Kato, Sony’s executive vice president and chief financial officer. His comments came up when asked to explain higher research and development costs to investors, Eurogamer reports.

Sony’s next video console, which at this point has no name or release date, won’t require the kind of huge investment that made the Playstation 3 unprofitable for years, Kato said. With the Playstation 3, Sony invested in its own semiconductor facilities, but that seems unlikely this time around.

(UPDATE: Kato tells the Wall Street Journal that his remarks on research and development costs were actually in reference to Sony’s next-generation portable system, and that his other comments were a “general statement,” rather than an acknowledgement that the PS4 is in development. Sounds like spin to me, but whatever.)

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Using a PC? You Definitely Have Annoyances

Mac users must be sworn to secrecy; they rarely complain about their computers. A friend, plied with alcohol, reluctantly admitted that his MacBook suffered from random shutdowns. Like, no!

PC users, on the other hand, seem to be proud of their computing annoyances. Online bragging matches are common, with each participant trying to top all the other PC disaster stories.

You think I’m kidding about Mac and PC users? Try this on for size: Mac people vs. PC people: Top 5 differences. (Thanks to TechBite subscriber Gil.)

This week’s story is a collection (okay, a hodgepodge) of ways my PC annoys me, with, of course, work-arounds.

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