Blu-Ray: Still No Big Whoop

Will Apple release Blu-Ray-equipped iMacs for the holidays? Maybe–and it probably makes sense, since it’s been a while since iMacs got meaningful new features other than ongoing refinement of their industrial design. But to abuse a famous Steve Jobs quote, Blu-Ray still feels like a bag of boring to me. It’s one of the few high-profile examples of gadgetry I have no impulse to invest in.

Here’s why:

It’s not truly part of the digital world. These days, I’m less interested in getting better image quality, and more interested in doing stuff with content–sending it via wireless networking to multiple screens in my house, sticking it on my iPhone, storing it in the cloud. Blu-Ray doesn’t help with any of that. In fact, it’s designed specifically to prevent me from doing it.

The content isn’t there. At least not for me. I admit that I’m not representative of the Average American Consumer here, but I’ll never buy any blockbuster movie on Blu-Ray. I like obscure animation and box sets that aren’t going to sell by the million. For now, they come out on DVD, not Blu-Ray. That’ll change. Eventually. Probably. But if I bought a Blu-Ray player today, I’d mostly use it to watch DVDs.

It’s a stopgap. Like the 2.88MB floppy disk, Blu-Ray is ultimately an impressive (and pricey) improvement on a technology that’s going to go away. By 2012, it’s going to look almost as retro as VHS. Okay, it might take a year or two more than that. But no more.

I’m not saying that Blu-Ray will never show up in my living room or inside a computer I own. (Hey, I was a late adopter of DVD, too.) But I’d say the odds are less than fifty percent that I’ll ever get it–at least as a conscious decision which I’m excited about. (The day will presumably come when all computers that sport optical drives have it.)

But enough about me:

Windows XP Mode is Ready to Roll

Over at ZDNet, Mary-Jo Foley reports that Microsoft has finished up Windows XP mode, the Windows 7 feature that lets you run programs that are incompatible with Win 7 in a window that’s really a virtualized copy of Windows XP. Windows XP mode isn’t quite a feature: It’s an optional 350MB download that requires Microsoft’s Virtual PC and only works with Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Yes,the end result is similar to what you can already get via VMWare or Parallels (or Virtual PC), but if you buy one of the qualifying versions of Win 7, XP mode doesn’t require you to pay for virtualization software or a copy of XP.

I have a hunch that Microsoft devised it as much to provide cautious business customers with a security blanket as because it think that XP mode will be widely used. For every company that actually uses it, there will probably be several who are a little more likely to make the leap to Win 7 sooner rather than later because they know it’s available if they need it.

Your take?

The End of the Line for Landlines?

Ivan Seidenberg thinks that more and more people are going to decide that they simply don’t need a landline telephone anymore. Which is an interesting take on things given that he’s CEO of landline giant Verizon. Over at the New York Times, Saul Hansell has posted a story in which Seidenberg says he thinks the future of wired communications will be all about using FiOS connections to deliver video. If people dump their wired phones in favor of using their cell phones as their only phones, that’s OK.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story on Technologizer before, but I recently decided that the time was right for me to get rid of my landline and go with my cell phone full time (supplemented from time to time by Skype). After all, weeks go by when I don’t use my Comcast landline at all, and most of my incoming calls are wrong numbers or debt collectors looking for someone who apparently had the number before me. (I don’t ever give it out–in part because I can’t remember it.)

But when I called Comcast to cancel, the rep had news for me: The “triple play” bundle I subscribed to was such a fabulous deal that canceling the phone portion would…increase my monthly bill by four bucks. I’m still figuring out exactly how to respond to that, but for the moment I remain a landline subscriber and am trying to use it more to keep my AT&T minutes under control.

Anyhow, this is all leading up to a T-Poll (I did a similar one a few months ago, but I think things are shifting so rapidly that the results might be different this time):

Your Stance on Facebook

In a blog post yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network he founded now has 300 million members. That’s worldwide, but it also happens to be roughly the same number of people who live in the United States–give or take a few million. For a service that’s only slightly over five years old–and which has been open to non-students for less than three years–it’s a lot of people.

Facebook doesn’t seem to inspire the controversy, passion, and hype of oh, say, Twitter: It’s just part of the air that a lot of us breathe these days. The single thing that I like best about it is that it’s put me back in touch with old friends from every stage of my life, including pals I had before I was able to walk.

Which doesn’t mean that everyone’s on Twitter–I know smart folks who are still thinking it over, or who have intentionally steered clear–or that everyone who’s tried it is a fan. T-Poll time:

Does the Lack of Apps Doom the Zune HD?

Over at Wired News, Brian X. Chen has posted what’s probably not the only article we’ll see in the next few days that juxtaposes the words “Zune” and “failure.” Brian talked to a bunch of Microsoft-watchers, and the gist of their consensus is that the fact that the Zune isn’t a true software platform sets it up to bomb.

I don’t agree that it’s destined to tank–I’m guessing that Microsoft would be thrilled if it sold half as many Zune HDs as Apple sells iPod Nanos, and the Nano is even less of a software platform than the Zune. But yes, the iPod Touch is core to Apple’s future, and there’s no way that the Zune in its current form is core to Microsoft’s fate. Even in a best-case scenario, it’ll just be a neat media player that sells well.

(Speaking of the Nano, MKM Partners’ Tero Kuittinen has an interesting suggestion for Microsoft in Brian’s story: Lower the price of the Zune HD so it’s a cooler, more powerful alternative to the Nano rather than a more limited iPod Touch rival.)

Anyhow, I bring this up mostly because I’m interested in what you think…

More Apple TV for Your Money

I can’t remember if anyone onstage at Apple’s press event last week even mentioned the words “Apple TV.” It certainly didn’t announce any major news associated with it. But the product which Apple loves to tell us is a mere hobby is now a better buy. Apple has discontinued the 40GB model (the one I own) and cut the price for the much more capacious 160GB version from $329 down to $229, the price it had been charging for 40GB.

Depending on how you use Apple TV, you might or might not find the 4X jump in capacity for your buck to be a boon–if all you do is rent the occasional movie, store a typical music collection, and stream stuff from other computers around your house, 40GB was plenty. 160GB starts to sound like enough space for a sizable movie collection (although it’s still teensy compared to the space offered by pricier media services such as HP’s MediaSmart Home Server.)

Apple TV is a fun and well-designed product, but it hasn’t turned out to be an iPod-like transcendent hit. Then again, neither has anything else involving bringing the Internet into the living room. I find myself using Roku’s $99 box more than Apple TV, mostly because its Netflix Watch Instantly integration lets it provide all-you-can-view access to a ton of content for one low price. Other than video podcasts, most of Apple TV’s content is priced per title, making it impractical to gorge on movies and TVs as you can do with Roku. I wonder if Apple has ever considered offering some sort of Netflix-like subscription plan, at least for a subset of stuff?

Time for a T-Poll:

They’re Not Phones Anymore

Musing about Motorola’s announcement of MotoBlur and the Cliq yesterday, ZDNet’s Sam Diaz says that the telephone is no longer the dominant feature in today’s smartphones:

Call these devices smartphones if you’d like – but increasingly, the phone part of the device is just another feature, another widget on the home page.

He’s right, of course. The transformation of phones into pocket computers began with the arrival of devices such as the earliest Treos, and is now complete. These things are pocket computers that can make phone calls. Calling them “phones” is a little like calling a PC a “word processor.”

Sam goes on to wonder whether we need to come up with a new name. He brings up “handheld,” but says it doesn’t feel quite right. Me, I’ve been advocating for awhile now that smartphones are PCs, and that they day isn’t long off when everybody will think of them as such, But I’m not arguing that we should start calling them PCs (which could stand for either personal computer or personal communicator). At least not yet. For now, I’m comfortable calling my phone a…phone.

Here’s a quick T-Poll–and if you have any nominations for new names for phones, leave ‘em in the comments.

Apple Event: Big Whoop? Medium-Sized Whoop? Nonwhoop?

Today, Steve Jobs and company announced iPhone OS 3.1 (Genius mixes, ringtones); iTunes 9 (iPhone LP content, iPhone app management, fancier syncing, media transfers, new look); cheaper iPod Touches with more capacity; iPod Shuffles in new colors with a lower starting price point and a stainless steel version; a capacity bump for the iPod Classic to 160GB; and an iPod Nano in fancy new colors with with a video camera, FM tuner, voice recorder, and pedometer. It also gave a bunch of iPhone OS game companies a chance to show their new wares. Oh, and Steve Jobs returned to the stage and Norah Jones sang a couple of songs.

Seems to cry out for a T-Poll:

Would You Buy a Non-Windows, Non-OS X PC?

The IDG News Service’s Dan Nystedt has a report today that Taiwanese electronics behemoth Foxconn is planning to build “smartbooks”–even cheaper netbooks, basically–built around ARM processors. Their lack of x86 CPUs means they’ll run some flavor of Linux–perhaps Moblin (backed by Intel) or, eventually, Google’s Chrome oS. We know they won’t run Windows–not unless Microsoft comes up with a really cheap, ARM-compatible version of the OS.

I don’t think that Foxconn’s machines will be aimed at most of the people reading their post–they’re for folks in emerging nations for whom even netbooks are unaffordable. But all the recent news involving netbooks and netbook-like systems running Linux and variants thereof (as well as other alternative OSes such as Symbian) inspired today’s T-Poll.

For decades now, nearly all consumer PCs have run OSes from a grand total of two companies: Microsoft and Apple. (Yes, I know about the advances that Linux has made–I’m a Ubuntu fan–but the OS has yet to gain any permanent traction in the consumer arena and its market share remains tiny.) Either all this new activity relating to other OSes is going to amount to something, or the companies involved are wasting their time.

Queue the T-Poll:

Diebold Ditches E-Voting

Ars Technica is reporting that ATM maker Diebold is selling its e-voting machine unit to a competitor for a paltry $5 million. The move gets Diebold out of a business that accounted for very little of its revenues but caused enormous damage to its reputation, and means that the world will need to find some other company to associate with all the downsides of electronic voting.

Ars’ piece recaps some of the controversies surrounding Diebold’s machines, and notes that ES&S, the company acquiring Diebold’s e-voting unit, has had multiple problems of its own. It also quotes former Diebold CEO and George W. Bush supporter Walden O’Dell’s statement in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was committed “to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President,” which should have gotten him fired on the spot for gross stupidity if nothing else.

I make no claims to know much at all about the technical issues involved in implementing e-voting systems, so my take on the matter is that I accept the possibility that they’re a good idea in principle–but I have grave misgivings about their use in the real world. The companies involved in the field have an uncanny knack for damaging the reputation of the whole idea…

Which brings up today’s T-Poll:

Is RSS Dead?

I’m on a plane (without Wi-Fi, alas) and the flight attendants are about to tell me to close my laptop, but I didn’t want to go out of pocket for a few hours without throwing a topic open for conversation: Is RSS dead? Feeds have been a favorite geek tool for years; I check out scads of them every day, in part to prepare 5Words. But my friend Sam Diaz started a mini-tempest a week ago when he said that RSS is past its prime. He must have struck a chord, because  the debate is still going on.

So what say you?

TV in 3D: To Be or Not to Be?

I’m not at the IFA consumer-electronics exhibition in Berlin this week, but Sony Chairman Sir Howard Stringer is–and the Financial Times is reporting that he’s going to announce an ambitious initiative to build 3D products–everything from HDTVs to laptops. It’s the latest bit of 3D boosterism from an entertainment and electronics industry that’s increasingly gaga for the technology.

Me, I’m instinctively skeptical of anything that’s in 3D except the real world–the effect fails to work for me as often as it succeeds, and the glasses give me a headache. (I blame the fact that I wear glasses anyhow, and must jam the 3D ones over my normal specs.) I’ll believe it’s the next best thing when it stays popular for more than, oh, nine months.

But let’s use this as an excuse for a T-Poll:

Can You Trust Wikipedia?

Wired has an interesting story about Wikitrust, a new technology that will color-code material in Wikipedia in an attempt to indicate how trustworthy its author is. It’s an intriguing solution to a real problem, although like all articles on Wikipedia accuracy, Wired’s piece makes a reflexive-but-misguided reference to Encyclopaedia Britannica being the paragon of reference-work trustiness. (Which it isn’t–or at least wasn’t when my father reviewed it back in the 1970s and found some jaw-dropping errors.)

Anyhow, I feel a T-Poll coming on…

In Case of Emergency, Should the White House Control the Internet?

Cnet’s Declan McCullagh has a good story up on a Senate Bill sponsored by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) which would give the White House the power to disconnect private computers from the Internet in the case of a cyberemergency. McCullagh says that the bill, a revised version of one floated last spring, remains troubling to Internet and telecommunications companies and civil liberties groups, who say the the new version remains vague about the powers it grants.

Let’s take a T-Poll on it–and just to remove politics from the issue (and despite my silly piece of art), let’s make this question about a fictional President of the United States of unspecified political party, not the guy who happens to be there right this very minute…

Do You Want Your Books in Digital Form…or on Dead Trees?

The news about devices for reading books just doesn’t stop these days, from the good (Sony’s Reader is going wireless and is supporting the ePub format) to the bizarre and troubling (Amazon yanking back books people have already bought).

So today’s T-Poll takes your temperature on the whole notion of electronic readers. Are you an owner, a potential fan, or a naysayer?

Technologizer Community, Thy Word is Gospel

I’ve been having fun asking you guys daily questions in the form of T-Polls, and judging from the results, you’ve been having fun answering them. For the sake of posterity, I’ve closed voting on most of ‘em to date. After the jump, your final verdict on tech topics of all sorts, from whether browsers should have ad-blockers (the majority say yes) to the state of the U.S. patent system (bad!)…

Continue reading this story…