Five Big Unanswered Questions About Windows 8

Today’s formal unveiling of the Windows 8 developers preview at Microsoft’s BUILD conference in Anaheim revealed a boatload of information about the upcoming OS, which will introduce so many innovations that attendees and journalists are still trying to formulate (and assess) a coherent big picture.

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Windows 8 Liveblog

Say, I’m liveblogging Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch at its BUILD conference right now. Join me.

Decide Tackles Phone Purchase Timing

When people ask me when they should buy a particular tech product, I have a standard answer: “Wait as long as you can without driving yourself crazy, but no longer.” That is, of course, a pat, one-size-fits all response.  A site called Decide tries to provide more sophisticated answers for specific products, by analyzing the chances that its price will fall or rise, and whether or not it’s likely to be replaced in the near future.

The company’s been doing this for laptops, cameras, and TVs for a while, and now it’s added phones to the roster. So far, its advice doesn’t appear to be comprehensive or completely up-to-date: It doesn’t seem to list the Droid Bionic and Triumph, two Motorola phones I reviewed last week. But it does have lots of models, and the recommendations I checked seemed sensible. For instance, it advises against buying an iPhone 4 right now, but says it’s safe to buy one of Apple’s recently-released MacBook Airs.

No matter how much data you have, timing purchases is tough–and whatever and whenever you buy, you need to be able able to deal with one of the eternal verities of the technology world: Better, cheaper stuff is always ahead. But Device looks handy. (Retrevo, which has some purchase-timing features of its own, is another handy resource.)

Fusion Garage’s Gets a Preemptive Price Cut

Whether Fusion Garage’s Grid 10 tablet is going to be any good remains to be seen. (When I saw it last month, it still felt like a very rough draft.) But it will be cheap when it ships in October: The price has already tumbled from $499 to $299.

Waiting for Thunderbolt

Over at Cnet, I wrote about a technology that I’m excited about, although it’s unclear whether any big players other than Intel and Apple are as enthusiastic as I am:  Thunderbolt.

Coming on Tuesday: Live Coverage of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Keynote

I’m in Anaheim, holed up in my hotel room next door to the Anaheim Convention Center, where Microsoft will be holding its BUILD conference this week. It’ll serve as the launching pad for Windows 8, and will give us our first opportunity to see more than glimpses of the OS. A new version of Windows 8 is still a big deal, so I chose to come here rather than attend any of the other tech conferences that are going on this week in other locales. (Boy, are there a lot of them: DEMO, TechCrunch Disrupt, the Intel Developer Forum, the Information Week 500, and the Tokyo Game Show.)

On Tuesday morning at 9am PT, Microsoft will hold a BUILD keynote that’s likely to involve lots and lots of new details about Windows 8, an operating system we still don’t know all that much about. I’ll liveblog the whole event at technologizer.com/win8. Hope to see you there–and stay tuned for other Windows 8 news this week as it develops.

Remembering 9/11, on the iPad and on the Web

Steve Rosenbaum's The 9/11 Memorial: Past, Present, and Future

On September 11th, 2001, the Web basically consisted of words, images, murky RealAudio sound, and a smattering of video that was a hassle to deal with, especially if you were still on dial-up. And tablets, in their modern, iPad-era form, didn’t exist at all. But a lot has happened in the past decade–and the tenth-anniversary coverage of the attacks and subsequent events include some remarkable creations which make use of today’s technology to do things that TV, books, magazines, and newspapers can’t.

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September 2001 Was a Long Time Ago in the World of Technology

I wrote about my memories of 9/11/01 a couple of years ago, on the eighth anniversary of the attacks. They involve me sitting at my desk at PC World in Boston and learning of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center when my colleague Denny Arar IMd me from San Francisco. (We both assumed it was an errant small-plane pilot, and both got e-mails from the organizers of a wireless conference scheduled to be held at Windows on the World reassuring us that the location would be moved if necessary.)

I remember trying to follow the news on the Web and discovering that major news sites were unusable, and then turning on the TV and attempting, sort of, to work as the day progressed. (By the evening, when my coworker Tom Spring and I had a beer and sat there in stunned disbelief, it felt like Tom, me, and the bartender were the last three people out and about in downtown Boston.)

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Techies to Follow on Google+

Pay no attention to the first person on this list of techies to follow on Google+, as compiled by TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner. But the rest of his choices are worth your attention.

Pioneering Videogame Journalist Passes On

I haven’t thought about Bill Kunkel, Arnie Katz, or Electronic Games magazine in years, but I loved it back in the day and was saddened to hear of Kunkel’s death in this New York Times obituary:

Mr. Kunkel and his friend Arnie Katz are widely credited with starting the first published gaming column, called “Arcade Alley,” which began appearing in Video magazine in 1978.

The column, a monthly look at new video game hardware and software, drew more readers as home gaming systems became popular in the in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1981, around two million home systems were in use in the United States.

To cater to those new consumers, Mr. Kunkel and Mr. Katz teamed up with Joyce Worley to start a monthly magazine, Electronic Games, which had a circulation of more than 250,000 at its peak. The magazine coined descriptive terms like “screenshot,” for a still image of a game, and “play mechanics,” for the way a game is played.

Hey, I’m Writing for Cnet!

As part of my ongoing efforts to be everywhere at once–or at least in several cool places–I’ve begun writing for Cnet, a site I’ve known as a reader and sometime competitor since it was founded back in the mid-1990s. I’m going to be contributing a new blog called Challengers, and my topic will be something that’s both quite specific and remarkably broad. The blog is about new things that aim to replace old things–products, services, companies, and technologies. I’ll write about ones that are full of promise and ones that have gotchas, and I’ll do my best to sort out the difference.

Here’s my introductory post over there; look for more stuff soon.

Watch: How Long It Takes to Boot Windows 8

Since I can’t turn on my laptop with the power of my mind, I guess I’ll have to live with waiting for it to boot up. You know, for eight seconds. It might be seven-and-a-half seconds too long, but since I can’t expect my phone to also cook, wash my clothes and let me travel into the future, I might have to recalibrate my expectations.

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Me, Elsewhere

I haven’t written as much here recently as I like to, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been hard at work writing for other sites. Three new stories are up today:

* At TIME.com, I reviewed two new Android phones from Motorola: the potent (and battery-hungry) Droid Bionic, and the basic (and thrifty) Triumph.

* TIME also asked me to try and make sense of the drama going on over at AOL and TechCrunch. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, but I tried.

* Over at AllBusiness.com, I wrote about a newish gadget that small businesses seem to be snapping up with the same zea they once adopted IBM PCs and PalmPilots. It’s called the iPad.

Whew! (And stay turned for another bit of related news in the not-too-distant future.)

Turntable.fm iPhone App? Sounds Good, But…

The Turntable.fm bug hit me hard about a month ago. Suddenly I was wasting hours DJing alongside my friends, hoarding points to upgrade my avatar and building a big database of cool music that I’d never heard before. All the while, my friends and I asked the same question: Where’s the Turntable.fm smartphone app?

Now, TechCrunch reports that a Turntable.fm iPhone app is coming soon, and the site has a handful of screenshots to prove it. (Co-founder Billy Chasen seems to have confirmed the rumor, writing in the comments that “We were saving this as a surprise for [TechCrunch's Disrupt conference] when I’m on stage.”)

That’s great news, but it also makes me wonder whether the free ride on this very cool music service is coming to an end.

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Everything (or at Least Some Things) I Know About Technology in the UK

The Huffington Post UK is launching a tech section, and asked me to guestblog. It’s a one-off item, not the start of a regular gig. But that’s probably for the best: I was able to share nearly everything I know about technology in the United Kingdom in one brief post.

Fox News Decries Video Games With Eco-Friendly Messages

I should know better than to get riled up by Fox News’ coverage of video games. The network has an awful reputation for sounding the alarm on anything remotely controversial, always with the refrain of how parents should be very, very afraid.

But this time, I can’t resist.

In a recent segment that appeared on Fox & Friends, T.J. McCormack, a conservative talk radio host, decries video games with eco-friendly messages. (The focus is mainly on Sim City Societies, a four year-old title that encourages players to develop green energy sources like wind power and soy farms.) Host Clayton Morris, meanwhile, wonders whether some video games are a form of “liberal fear-mongering” and “indoctrination.”

It’s a maddening television segment for a long list of reasons…

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