The Next Version of iOS: Predictions, Please!

[UPDATE: I'm closing the survey and compiling the results. Thanks, folks!]

At 10am PT on Monday, June 6th, Apple will hold its WWDC 2011 keynote, with news about OS X 10.7 Lion, the next version of iOS, and something called iCloud. I’ll be there in person at San Francisco’s Moscone West  for Technologizer’s live coverage, joined by Ed Oswald and Techland’s Doug Aamoth for color commentary.

You can join us on Monday at technologizer.com/wwdc11, and I hope you will. (You can also head there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder.)

With less than 48 hours to go, time is running out to make predictions about what we’ll learn. We already know most of the details about Lion, and iCloud remains fairly enigmatic. So let’s focus in on iOS 5, or whatever the next version of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad operating system turns out to be called.

I’ve put together a survey that’ll let you make predictions about iOS 5 features and enhancements, (It’ll take you a minute or two to complete.) I’ll report on our aggregate predictions as a group before the keynote–and after Steve Jobs and company have spoken, we can see how accurate we were.

Click here to take the survey.  Thanks for participating, and see you on Monday.

Konami Has Its Own Plan for PSP-to-PS3 Gaming, And It’s Called “Transfarring”

At a pre-E3 press event Thursday night, Konami announced a couple of game compilations that will be playable on both the Sony PSP and the Playstation 3, with the ability to transfer your progress between both systems. And unfortunately, Konami is calling this gimmick “Transfarring.”

Strange name aside, Transfarring is a neat idea. You connect the PSP to the PS3, and your saved game transfers from one to the other. The first games to include this capability will be Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Zone of Enders HD Collection. Eventually, Konami wants to expand Transfarring to Sony’s next-generation portable.

If this all sounds kind of familiar, it’s because Sony announced a similar PSP-to-PS3 feature a couple of weeks ago. Konami stressed that Transfarring is a separate creation, although it’s not clear why the publisher has decided to go it alone. I suppose it doesn’t make a difference as long as both systems work well.

For now, I’m wondering whether people will have to buy two versions of each game to use Transfarring or otherwise pay extra for the privilege. I’m also curious how Konami will deal with the control differences on Sony’s large and small devices. The PSP, after all, lacks a second analog stick and has only one pair of trigger buttons. (Sony has said it will rework the controls for its own PSP-to-PS3 remakes.) As with most video game news that’s trickling out ahead of next week’s E3 expo, I’m hoping to get some answers soon.

More Windows 8 Musings

I like Michael Mace’s take on Windows 8–hey, I know it’s smart, because it’s an awful lot like mine. (We both end with exactly the same thought: this is going to be fun.)

Serendipity, Guaranteed

Serendipity is wonderful, but it doesn’t happen often. For every enriching coincidence – meeting someone who becomes a lifelong friend or lifelong partner, finding that fantastic hidden restaurant – we miss how many? Dozens, maybe hundreds of other lucky opportunities?

Now several tech startups are trying to increase the odds of connection.

How? By combining intimate knowledge of your comings and goings with understanding of your likes and dislikes – then connecting you with likeminded people and perfect places.

What do they ask in return? For most, an opportunity to push hyper-specific ads or discount offers.

Continue reading this story…

Mac Security Attacks: Keep Calm and Carry On

My TIME.com Technologizer column this week is a look at the recent Mac Defender trojan attacks, and how Mac users should respond to the first really meaningful security issue in OS X history.

Windows 8: It’s the Applications, Stupid!

Word for Windows 1.0, 1989

In the end, operating systems are merely a means to an end. Nobody runs Windows to run Windows, or OS X to run OS X, or Linux to run Linux. They run them to get stuff done, and they get most of that stuff done in applications.

I’ve been pondering that fact as I’ve been processing the news about Windows 8, which Microsoft showed in public for the first time this week at the D9 conference. It’s got both a radically new touch-centric interface and the one I already am thinking of as “Windows Classic”–a duality that brings to mind the days when most people ran both DOS apps and Windows 3.x ones.

Windows 8 is a giant-sized, risky, fascinating bet–but in the end, it’s the apps that are going to matter.

During the D9 demo, both Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher brought up Office. Would it be reimagined for Windows’ new look?  Windows interface kingpin Julie Larson-Green, as you’d expect, didn’t confirm or deny anything. She said “They may do some things in the future.” and ”I’m sure the Office team will look at what we’re doing.”

Continue reading this story…

OnLive Befriends Intel, Joins Facebook

OnLive made a couple announcements today that might help people discover and use the streaming video game service.

The biggest news is a partnership with Intel that will enable OnLive on all connected TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes that use Intel’s CE4100 embedded processor. OnLive expects to land on 25 million TVs by the end of this year, according to GigaOM. A new universal controller will work on any OnLive-enabled device.

This fits nicely with the idea of video games coming directly to televisions without the help of game consoles. OnLive processes and streams high-end video games from its own servers, so it doesn’t need fancy hardware on the user’s end to play modern games like Borderlands and Bioshock.

Continue reading this story…

Toshiba’s Android Tablet: Officially Official, a Little Ahead of Schedule

Toshiba wasn’t quite ready to share the full skinny on its Android Honeycomb tablet, which it first demoed back at CES in January. But Engadget managed to get its hands on the details, and rather than ignoring or denying the leak, Toshiba is fessing up earlier than it had planned.

The tablet will be known as the Thrive, and it’ll start at $429 for an 8GB, Wi-Fi-only version. As a child of the pre-iPad 2 era, it weighs in at a somewhat heavy 1.6 pounds and is on the thick side. But it uses its edge to good effect, with two full-size USB ports, HDMI, and an SD slot, making it feel a bit like a PC. (Makes sense for a tablet from Toshiba, no?)

The Thrive has a 10.1″ screen, the expected cameras front and back, and an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and runs Android Honeycomb 3.1. It’ll hit Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, RadioShack, and Amazon.com in mid-July.

Coming on Monday: WWDC 2011 Live Blog Coverage

On Monday June 6th at 10am PT, I’ll be at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote. It sounds packed, packed, packed–we’ll get our last big look at OS X 10.7 Lion before it ships, and our first big looks at the next version of iOS, and the long-rumored service now known as iCloud. And rumor has it that there are occasionally surprise announcements at these events. (I’m told Jobs likes to keep them until the end.)

I’ll blog the keynote news as it happens, with color commentary from special guest Doug Aamoth of Techland. Tens of thousands of folks attended our last Apple live coverage (the iPad 2 announcement), but we’ll save room for you. Join us at technologizer.com/wwdc11–and go there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder if you like.

Playstation Store Returns as Sony Hacking Continues

Sony just can’t get back on track. On Wednesday evening, the Playstation Store came back online, finally making the Playstation Network whole again after April’s devastating security breach.

But now, a group of hackers known as Lulz Security claims to have breached Sony Pictures’ website, stealing e-mails, passwords, addresses, birth dates and opt-in information for more than a million users. All of this information is now posted to the Internet.

To be clear, we’re talking about two different divisions of Sony. The hacking of Sony Pictures has no effect on the Playstation Network. Still, this is another embarrassing security breach for Sony, and a sign that the company isn’t finished fending off hackers. It’s not even the first attack since the breaches of PSN and Sony Online Entertainment in April. Other smaller attacks have included a leaked database in Japan and a phishing scam site on Sony’s Thai web domain.

On the bright side, the Playstation Network has remained relatively stable since online play resumed in mid-May. That’s the best way Sony Computer Entertainment can redeem itself, along with the ”welcome back” package of free games and other benefits that’s reportedly in its final testing stages.

But as a whole, Sony needs to show its customers that it’s taking security more seriously. Obviously, the entire company is now a target, and customers are the innocent bystanders. Perhaps it’s time for CEO Howard Stringer to change his tone.

If Cell Phones Cause Cancer, What About Laptops?

Cell phones are “possibly carcinogenic”? Potentially brain-cancer-causing? Comparable to pesticides and the stuff your car spits out? So sayeth the World Health Organization? The reputable science-minded subsidiary of the United Nations?

Bummer. Thank goodness I use ear buds, and don’t talk on the phone much—though when on the go, I do tote my iPhone in my pants pocket, where it’s usually pressed flush against my leg. So much for keeping the phone “as far as possible” from my body. Again, thank goodness I’m not “on the go” much.

My laptop’s a different story. Since I started writing full-time in late 2005, I’ve held laptops on my lap daily. And for the past eight months, I’ve been trying to have a kid. No luck so far, but then—all other things being equal—they say the odds of conception are still just one in four each month. I don’t blame my laptop, but I’m done taking chances. I recently opted for one of those “chill pad” coolers, to hold the machine an inch or so off my legs, and cool the all-aluminum frame—one guess what kind of laptop I own—with a fan.

Continue reading this story…

Fujitsu ScanSnap Giveaway: The Winners

We have winners in our ScanSnap scanner giveaway! Ruth Hiner won the ScanSnap S100. And Harvey Rogers won the ScanSnap S1300.

Thanks to Fujitsu for providing the scanners…and to everyone who entered here and on Twitter and told us about the paper documents in their lives.

How To: Record, Publish, and Manage “A Video a Day” of Your Child (Part II of II)

David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of the media consulting and production company Spark Media Solutions.  Spark blogs regularly at Spark Minute.

This article is Part II of a two-part series about how to record, encode, store, organize, and share via online and DVD a video of each day of your child’s life. The first part, over at Spark Minute, covers the basics of doing the recording and storing the video. This article covers the second part, which is the daunting process of organizing and sharing the videos.

A year ago I decided to take on a seemingly gargantuan task.

I began shooting a video of my son every single day of the first year of his life. As of today I’ve shot (with the help of my wife), produced, shared online, and printed on DVD over 400 one-minute videos (some days I produce more than one video).

When I tell people I’m doing this they can’t believe it, because they immediately think of how much work it must involve. But in actuality, given the tools we have, the cost of disk space, and just some good pre-planning and organizing (the most critical parts), it’s really not that difficult. You just have to commit to it, and do it. The trick is to not make it too difficult on yourself, so you can do it easily without it being a burden. If it’s too hard, you’ll just give up.

No matter how busy you are, there is a way to record  a video every day of your child’s life, and manage all that video. Just think how amazing it would be if your parents had recorded a video a day of you (heck, a video a year). Wouldn’t that be incredible? I’m hoping it’ll be the same for my son.

Continue reading this story…

Whither Mirasol?

One of my favorite tech demos back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 2010 was Mirasol, a new kind of display from Qualcomm that combined some of the virtues of LCDs (color, respectable refresh rates) with the single biggest virtue of E Ink (crazy long battery life).  I saw it in person, was suitably impressed, and waited for the e-reader which Qualcomm said to expect by the end of the year.

The e-reader didn’t show up, and I kind of forgot about Mirasol–until yesterday. Here at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, there was a press conference with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and  someone asked him about Mirasol. Which I wish I’d thought to do.

Continue reading this story…

Windows 8 is Windows 3.0, and Windows 7 is…DOS

Analyst John Pescatore: “Other thank cloud computing, what’s the riskiest bet you’re currently making?”

Steve Ballmer: “The next release of Windows.”

–exchange at Gartner conference, October 2010

Looks like Ballmer wasn’t just blustering. “Windows 8,” or whatever it ends up being called, has a radically new interface–a sleek, touch-centric look that draws more on Windows Phone 7 and general trends in phone and tablet design than it does on a quarter-century of Windows history. Anyone writing about the operating system at this point needs to insert a disclaimer that we’ve only seen bits and pieces of it in action for a few minutes; that’s way too little to come to any firm conclusions pro or con. But we do know that Microsoft is going to attempt something big here.

In my post yesterday evening, I said that Windows 8 looks like the most radical change in Windows’ interface since Windows 3.0. It’s possible that that’s understating matters. By providing both the new interface and apps to go with it, plus the old interface and apps, Microsoft is asking  users to live in two worlds in a way it’s never done before.

Except it has. This situation sounds a lot like the computing lifestyle that PC users lived with from 1990-1995 or thereabouts, when the commonplace state of affairs was to run Windows 3.x on top of DOS.

Continue reading this story…

Watch Out, Game Consoles, Here Comes Roku and Angry Birds

There once was a time when if you wanted to play video games on a TV, you’d hook up a video game console. But as televisions and set-top boxes become powerful enough to stream video and host their own app stores, they’re also becoming capable gaming devices.

The latest example is Roku’s announcement that it’ll get Angry Birds, among other games, on a new set-top box unit this summer. Angry Birds will get its own channel, with all the games plus animated shorts and merchandise for sale.

Yes, it’s Angry Birds overload, but that’s beside the point. What matters here is that game developers — particularly those who aren’t part of the traditional console business — are making their way to televisions without the help of Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. Instead, they’re just going straight to the source. A month ago, I was at a Panasonic press event where the company demonstrated Asphalt 5, a racing game that’s already popular on smartphones and tablets. It’s available on Panasonic TVs as part of a big partnership with developer Gameloft.

Of course, TVs and set-tops still need to solve the controller issue before they can become genuine game machines. No one wants to use a TV remote to play a racing game or a shooter (I chuckled when someone tried to do it at the aforementioned Panasonic event), and Roku hasn’t explained how it will approach this issue with its new hardware.

But that’s not an unsolvable problem. Already, smartphones and tablets provide a more natural input method for televisions, either through infrared or connected apps from TV makers. It’s not a stretch to imagine phones and tablets controlling video games as well. Once that happens, game console makers can really start worrying.