Archive | May, 2011
Minecraft Brings Timed Exclusivity to Smartphones
For some time, I debated whether Minecraft’s exclusivity with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play gaming phone was a newsworthy event on its own. Don’t get me wrong, I think Minecraft is awesome, but the idea of one platform getting a game before others is not something I’d usually write about here.
Except, this particular timed exclusivity applies to smartphones. That’s something.
Google Mobile Payments: Don’t Get Too Excited Yet
25. May 2011
All bets are on Google launching a mobile payment platform with Sprint on Thursday, allowing people to pay for goods and services with their smartphones.
The mobile payment concept, which relies on technology called near-field communications (NFC) embedded in smartphones, has a lot of potential. In the long haul, it may eventually replace the need for credit cards. But I wouldn’t get too excited about this rumored announcement just yet — assuming that is what Google will talk about at a press event in New York on Thursday.
AT&T’s First LTE Cities
25. May 2011
AT&T has announced the first five cities that’ll get its LTE 4G data service. They’re Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio, and the company plans to roll out service this summer, with more cities in the queue for later this year.
Ad-Supported Kindle’s a Hit, and Now It’s 3G, Too
24. May 2011
Turns out, people will gladly stare at an occasional ad on their Kindles to save a little money.
Amazon’s Kindle with Special Offers, an e-reader that shows advertisements and discounts on its home screen, is now available with a 3G connection. Like the Wi-Fi model, the 3G Kindle with Special Offers is $25 cheaper than its ad-free counterpart, selling for $164. The Wi-Fi version sells for $114.
The New Yahoo Mail: Quite Nice!
24. May 2011
Yahoo has started rolling out the new version of Yahoo Mail it’s been beta-testing since last fall. I’ve been playing with it for awhile and mostly enjoying the experience. It’s a very credible Webmail client–similar in general feel and some particulars to Hotmail’s 2010 update. If, like me, you spend most of your time in Gmail (and aren’t 100% happy with the experience) it’s kind of refreshing to spend time in an alternative which is quite different in approach.
Apple Responds to Mac Defender Malware Mess
24. May 2011
Apple has published instructions for removing Mac Defender–the malware I encountered yesterday in its Mac Protector variant–and says that it’s working on an OS X update that will detect and remove it automatically.
Windows Phone “Mango” Pushes Apps Off the Pedestal
24. May 2011
As I read This is My Next’s liveblog of the Microsoft Windows Phone event today, one quote from Microsoft’s mobile president Andy Lees resonated: “The problem is that today smartphones only include basic communications — everything else is an app,” he said.
That remark sets the tone for nearly every feature that Microsoft will bring to the next Windows Phone upgrade, codenamed “Mango.” The gist? Apps aren’t everything.
Lark, the iPhone “Un-Alarm,” is About to Ship
24. May 2011
At last September’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, a startup called Lark unveiled Lark Up, a $99 wristband “un-alarm” that vibrated to wake you up, thereby avoiding disrupting anyone else who happened to be in bed with you. It came with a charging station that let your phone double as a bedside clock. And…it never shipped. Instead, the Lark folks found additional funding for their idea and decided to fast-forward to what would have been their second-generation upgrade. That version–called just plain Lark–was announced (re-announced?) at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York today, and will soon go on sale at Apple Store retail locations, which are adding health and wellness sections.
The new version of Lark retains the silent alarm feature, but it’s beefed up features for monitoring your sleep patterns, incorporating input from a Harvard instructor who studies sleep and making it more of a direct competitor to a gizmo called Zeo. The wristband transmits data back to your phone via Bluetooth, letting you can use your phone to log when you feel asleep, when you woke up, and just how restful (or restless) your slumber was. And a Lark Pro version provides you with a more detailed analysis of your sleep habits based on seven days of data, with advice about how to improve them.
The included dock recharges the wristband and lets you prop up your iPhone or iPod Touch as a clock. It doesn’t include a dock connector, but there’s a USB port in back that lets you charge your device by plugging in your own cable. It’s an Apple-only setup at the moment, but an Android version is in the works.
Opera Mini Hits the iPad
24. May 2011
Thirteen months after Opera’s Opera Mini browser became the first and only full-fledged Web browser that Apple allows to compete with Safari on the iPhone, it’s back in version 6.0 for iOS–and the big news is that the new version is optimized for the iPad as well as the iPhone.
Barnes & Noble’s New Nook Attempts to Out-Kindle the Kindle
24. May 2011
Barnes & Noble’s first e-reader was the original E Ink version of the Nook, which had its virtues but lagged far behind Amazon.com’s Kindle in terms of overall polish. Then the company released the Nook Color, which went off in an un-Kindle-ish direction: color, richly-formatted magazines, and Android apps.
Today, B&N announced another new Nook–and this one, it appears, is meant to take the Kindle on more squarely than either of its predecessors.It’s $139 (matching the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle, but not the ad-supported one). It looks like a Kindle, with a gray case and 6″ E Ink screen (and no color touchscreen strip, the most striking feature of the original Nook). It stresses great battery life–in fact, Barnes & Noble is claiming two months on a charge, vs. one month for the Kindle.
The Truth About Square
23. May 2011
There’s lots of talk today on mobile payment processor Square’s outstanding results. 500,000 readers shipped, 1 million transactions so far this month, $3 million in transactions per day.
That’s impressive. There really is a real need out there for the everyday consumer to have a method to accept good old plastic. I can tell you personally that I rarely carry cash anymore: it’s just so much simpler to swipe.
Square’s rates aren’t horrible (although not great either): 2.75% for each swiped card, or 3.5% plus 15 cents for manually entered ones. So its not surprising they’re doing well.
Landscape Tablet Users: You’re Holding it Wrong?
23. May 2011
Tim Bray, Google’s Android developer advocate, has stirred the pot by unequivocally declaring that portrait orientation makes for a better tablet experience than landscape orientation.
He notes that outside of tablets, tall and narrow is the natural way to convey information. Books arrange themselves into dual walls of text, newspapers are arranged in columns and windows on the computer screen tend to be tall and thin, or at least sliced into vertical panes. “So hold your damn tablet the right way up. That’s the way the information wants to be, anyhow,” Bray writes.
Windows 8 at D?
23. May 2011
Sounds like we might get the first actual peek at Windows 8 (or whatever it ends up being called) next week at the Wall Street Journal’s D conference.
Apple to Lodsys: Flake Off
23. May 2011
Last week, a company named Lodsys sent letters to a bunch of iOS developers saying their use of iOS features were violating its patents, and demanding royalty payments. Now Apple has sent a letter to Lodsys saying that the license Apple holds to the patents in question covers third-party developers as well. The story doesn’t end here–the companies which Lodsys is threatening still have to choose between coughing up money and facing protracted, expensive legal trouble-but Apple’s intervention is an encouraging development. I’d like to see Lodsys’s bid to collect royalties from users of Apple’s APIs fail decisively, if only so that other patent trolls don’t have an incentive to pull similar tricks on small developers.
Sony’s Bringing PSP Games to the PS3
23. May 2011
Finally, some good news out of Sony. The company announced that it’s going to remaster PSP games for the Playstation 3, with high-definition graphics, new content and possibly 3D support.
Best of all, the players’ progress in a game will be transferable between either platform, so you can pick up on the PS3 where you left off on the PSP, and vice versa. Japan will get the first PSP remaster with Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, a hugely-popular game in that country. It’s not clear what other games or regions are in the works, but hopefully the E3 trade show in June will bring some clarity.
Okay, Maybe This Mac Security Problem is Real
23. May 2011
“A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” I thought of that old wisecrack this morning when I encountered something I’d never seen before: a serious trojan attack on my Mac.
The attack in question was an instance of Mac Protector, a variant of the Mac Defender attack that’s been in the news this month (my friend Ed Bott has written about it repeatedly). I was browsing in Safari and suddenly got this window, looking a bit like OS X’s Finder and a bit like iTunes (click on it to see it at a larger size):
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