Technologizer

I’m at the Googleplex this morning, where Google is showing off Chrome OS for the first time. More details to come, but I’m tweeting the news fast and furious at the moment–follow me at Twitter to see the news as fast as I learn it.

If you’re brave enough to want a Sidekick from T-Mobile after last month’s data loss fiasco, wait no longer. The carrier has resumed sales of the device, even throwing a price cut in for good measure. The older Sidekick 2008 is $49.99, and the fancier Sidekick LX will retail for $149.99, both with a two-year contract commitment. The meager price drops (about $25) may not be enough for many to take a chance on the company, however.

At least two states, California and Washington, are in the process of suing the company over the data loss. T-Mobile itself has done a little damage control by giving $100 credits to unhappy customers. All in all, October was a month the carrier would like to forget. Let’s just hope this time they have a backup…

Back in September, I was asked to watch a Webcast with Wired’s Chris Anderson and tweet my thoughts as I took it in. I had fun, so I was happy when I was asked to serve as a greek chorus for another Webcast hosted by HP. This one’s an interview with George Halvorson, CEO of health insurance megacompany Kaiser Permanente, and it’ll cover technology’s role in reforming health care in this country. (Timely, no?)

The Webcast is this Wednesday November 18th starting at 2:30pm ET; you can find it here. Stop by if you have a chance–it’ll feature tweets selected from everyone in the audience, and you’ll be able to submit questions for Halvorson via Twitter…

When Nokia failed to generate enough buzz with its gaming phone offerings under the N-Gage name, it switched gears in 2008 to offer the platform instead as a gaming service. It now appears that strategy was a failure as well: N-Gage is set to be phased out in 2010.

Games would be able to be purchased through September of next year. The community site attached to the N-Gage platform would stay online through 2010, Nokia said. A complete exit from gaming is not happening however: the manufacturer said its Ovi service would still offer a selection of games.

Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that Microsoft is now stripping crudware off Windows 7 PCs and selling them with its own lower-impact software suite. Here’s evidence of why that makes sense: British computer magazine PC Pro has published “The Crapware Con,” an ambitious report on the third-party software that PC manufacturers pile on top of Windows. Thanks to such apps, the slowest PCs took more than twice as long to boot up as the fastest ones, and PC Pro is skeptical of the quality of much of the software that PC makers add. (Me too: I’ve lost track of how many Windows machines I’ve used with proprietary Wi-Fi utilities that don’t seem to do anything except make it harder to connect to a network.)

More news from the Web 2.0 Summit: Search honcho Marissa Mayer just previewed Social Search, a feature the company plans to launch as a Google Labs experiment. It’ll place user-generated content–blog posts, photos, and the like–at the bottom of search results. And that content will come from your circle of friends, which includes both people you have a direct connection with via services such as Gmail and Twitter and people those people have a direction connection with. (It’s all opt in–folks must agree to participate.)

Conference cochair John Battelle also asked Mayer about Google’s deal to put items from Twitter into its search results. She clarified the company’s plans a bit, saying it sees Tweets as a useful way to get some information on breaking news into search results before the definitive news article or blog post on the subject has been written.

Good news for those of us out there affected by the Sidekick data mess: Microsoft on Monday said that it was continuing to work “around the clock” on the problem, and was making “steady progress” in attempting to restore data. The first of the user content to be restored would be user contacts (probably the most important for most of us), with photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores to follow later.

No exact time frame has been given for the full restore. However, for those who have been affected by the issue (I actually met somebody over the weekend that lost nothing, so it’s not everybody), this is now two weeks after the initial data loss. You have to figure that many have recovered most of their data through other means, so a restore is becoming less and less useful.

This sounds neat: The Wi-Fi Alliance is announcing Wi-Fi Direct, a new standard that will let Wi-Fi-enabled gizmos talk directly to each other, without a home network serving as middleman. Applications would include jobs like letting a camera send photos directly to a TV set, no cables required. And the capability could be added to gadgets that already have Wi-Fi, such as phones, cameras, and printers, via a firmware upgrade.

We’ll see if it actually takes off. Wireless USB sounded neat, too, but so far has failed to go much of anywhere…

I had fun guesting on CNET’s Reporters’ Roundtable today, talking about tablets with host Rafe Needleman and fellow visitor Ryan Block of Gdgt. For some reason I’m having trouble embedding the video, but you can watch it here.

Shameless self-promotion: This Wednesday (that’s September 30th) at 3pm PT, Wired’s Chris Anderson will be conducting a videocast (aka a “Thoughtcast”) on how disruptive technology is changing business. As author of The Long Tail and Free, the guy knows what he’s talking about.

The Web cast will be held at HP’s Input|Output site, and I’ll be watching and–here’s the sef-promotional part–tweeting my thoughts as part of the event’s official Twitter stream.

If you’d like to check out the event, head here. Hope to see you there…

Gizmodo is certainly on a roll–after publishing what seems to be a Microsoft video of a dual-screen concept tablet PC, it’s dug up photos that supposedly show two Windows Mobile smartphones which will be cobranded by Microsoft and Sharp. One looks a lot like a Palm Pre, one looks kind of like a Sidekick, and neither is inherently exciting. Then again, it won’t be hardware designs that will make any upcoming Windows Mobile phone a big whoop–that’ll only occur if Windows Mobile 7 turns out to be a great leap forward. At the moment, at least, almost all smartphone hardware isn’t much more than a container for software–even with the iPhone, maybe fifteen percent of what makes it interesting is the hardware, and the rest is the iPhone OS.

While I’ve been at DEMOfall in San Diego, Intel has been holding its equally newsworthy Intel Developer Forum conference back in San Francisco. Today’s big announcement was the mobile version of the Core i7 quad-core CPU (code-named Clarksfield),as seen in such new laptops as Toshiba’s latest Qosmio. Laptop Magazine has benchmarked a Core i7 notebook provided to it by Intel, and found it to be smoking’ fast–but with iffy battery life. As usual, there’s a limit to the conclusions you can draw about a processor from tests of one computer–especially one supplied by the chipmaker in question. But as more machines ship from major manufacturers–including, eventually, Apple–expect some really powerful systems, starting at a relatively reasonable $1000 or so.

Almost exactly four years ago, I attended a press conference in San Francisco at which Bill Gates and Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced that Palm was going to start selling Treo smartphones running Windows Mobile. It was one of those decisions that made rational business sense at the time but which was all wrong emotionally: It was just plain sad that Palm, one of the greatest mobile software companies ever, had to adopt the not-very-exciting Windows Mobile to appeal to business types. (I tried to like the WinMobile Treos: I even bought an unsubsidized one to replace my Palm OS-based Treo 650. But it was neither a great Treo nor a great Windows Mobile device, and I ended up selling it after a few months.)

Today, Gearlog’s Sascha Segan notes that current Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein said during Palm’s earnings call today that the company won’t be making any more Windows Mobile phones–starting with the Pre and Pixi, it’s betting everything on its own WebOS. Which isn’t the least bit surprising given Windows Mobile’s diminished state. This time around, the hard-nosed business move is also the one that feels truest to Palm’s character as a company.

Um, some of them will star grownups, right? Even so, it’s nice to see a Windows ad that’s actually about Windows…

(Via Joe Wilcox.)

One of the things that makes Twitter Twitter is @mentions–the use of an @ to indicate you’re mentioning another Twitter user in a tweet. Now Facebook is getting @mentions, in a somewhat different form:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

Sounds useful (it’s rolling out over the next few weeks and isn’t live for me yet); also sounds like yet another example of Facebook drawing inspiration from Twitter. I like the idea of @mentions being a convention across the Web–as they seem to be in Technologizer comments already.

TechVi broke this news, which is now official:

Any Sprint customer on the base $70 / month plan, which includes unlimited data, text and MMS messages, and 450 minutes, will be able to call any other cell phone on T-Mobile, Verizon, or AT&T without using plan minutes.

That’s not unlimited calling, but for some people, it would be darn close. I wonder what percentage of the average American’s cell phone calls are to another cell phone, and how that figure has changed in the last decade