Forget the iPods and Apple TV; David Pogue has the best news I’ve heard all week: Starting next year, AMD will make the stickers it slaps on laptop palm rests considerably less annoying to remove. They’ll peel off easily and leave no sticky gunk behind. Maybe other companies will follow suit, or better yet, get rid of those ugly advertisements altogether.
Author Archive | Jared Newman
Microsoft's Arc Touch Mouse Materializes
I, for one, was a little disappointed when the mystery product Microsoft teased last month turned out to be the Arc Touch, a two-button mouse with a touch-sensitive middle strip. Not that there’s anything wrong with touch-sensitive mouses, but all the hubbub seemed misplaced considering that Apple pulled off the multi-touch mouse a year ago.
Fortunately, touch sensitivity isn’t the really cool thing about Microsoft’s Arc Touch. Its most novel feature is shape-shifting. When in use, the Arc Touch is curved to rest comfortably in the hand, and to turn it off, you just pound the arch into a pancake, so it’s about 0.6 inches thick at its fattest point.
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Apple vs. Sony and Nintendo: The Smack-Talk Continues
It was all fun and games when Apple slung mud at Sony and Nintendo during last year’s iPod press event, but this year’s smear was just nasty, and not entirely accurate.
Before Steve Jobs introduced the new iPod Touch, he immediately started bragging about the device’s gaming dominance. He claimed that the iPod Touch accounts for half of the portable gaming market, with more sales than and outsells Sony and Nintendo’s handhelds combined.
A claim like that needs a bunch of asterisks. As I pointed out a year ago, fighting a console war means manipulating statistics to your favor, and Apple is guilty once again.
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Rumor: Amazon Wants Netflix-Style Streaming
Amazon reportedly wants to be more like Netflix, with subscription-based streaming of movies and television — if only Hollywood studios would play along.
The Wall Street Journal’s unnamed sources say Amazon has spent weeks, or perhaps months, courting major media companies, including NBC Universal, Viacom and Time Warner. Amazon has proposed all kinds of ideas, including a service bundled with Amazon Prime, which provides unlimited two-day shipping and other perks for $79 per year.
So far, the retailer isn’t getting much traction, the Journal suggests. It’s not clear whether any media companies are interested, and Amazon could put the plan on ice or give up entirely if there aren’t enough content providers involved. (Update: WSJ has filled out its story considerably since this post, and the tone isn’t as dreary. There’s no longer any language that says it’s not clear whether any media companies are interested, and instead cites two unnamed media executives who describe the program as a possibility. I’ve removed “Can’t Seal the Deal” from the headline here, since that seems premature.)
Even if studios were more liberal about licensing their content on a subscription basis, Amazon still has another problem: It’s woefully behind Netflix in the race for ubiquity.
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New Xbox 360 Controller Settles an Old Debate
Since the dawn of the gamepad, console makers had to make a tough decision with each new iteration: Disc-shaped directional pad, or traditional plus shape?
Microsoft thinks it can choose both with a new wireless controller for the Xbox 360. Like the existing Xbox 360 controller, the new model starts in a disc format, which is ideal for sweeping motions that connect one direction to the next. Players can also raise up the plus-shaped portion of the D-pad by rotating it, allowing for more distinct directional presses. This is intended to appease fans of fighting games like Street Fighter IV, who need the accuracy when stringing together button combinations.
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Xbox Live Price Hike: A Higher Cost for Microsoft
This wasn’t entirely unexpected, but Microsoft announced that it’s raising the price of Xbox Live Gold, effective November 1.
Yearly subscriptions will increase from $50 to $60, quarterly subscriptions will jump from $20 to $25, and monthly subscriptions will go up from $8 to $10. Before the price hike, Microsoft is giving subscribers a chance to get one more year for $40, effectively negating the new price until 2012. Joystiq points out that several retailers are also selling $40 yearly subscription cards, which you can stock up on now and use over a longer period of time.
The troubling thing about this price hike is not so much the $10 difference itself, but the feeling of powerlessness that it instills.
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YouTube's On-Again, Off-Again Relationship With Premium
Let’s play a game. Go to YouTube’s home page and try to find the premium content — the movies and television shows from big studios — without resorting to search. Come back here once you’ve given up.
A year ago, getting to that content was a lot easier. YouTube’s home page had a “Shows” tab that took you directly to a page filled with professionally-produced episodes and clips. The top of the page, as captured in July 2009 by the Wayback Machine, promoted clips from Jimmy Kimmel Live, manga from Funimation and full episodes of the Larry Sanders Show. Down below were clips from ABC’s World News With Charlie Gibson, and cooking tutorials from the New York Times.
YouTube’s “Shows” page still exists, but the emphasis on big stars and major media companies is gone. More importantly, you can’t get to this page directly from YouTube’s homepage. The latest redesign, launched at the end of March, removed a lot of clutter, but also returned prominence to the user-generated content for which the site is best-known.
With all that in mind, I wonder what YouTube will look like if it begins selling pay-per-view movies from major Hollywood studios. Financial Times says Google negotiating with studios to stream feature films at the same time as their release on DVD (same as iTunes and Amazon), and hopes to have deals in place by the end of the year.
It’s easy to see why Google would want YouTube to stream major motion pictures. A cut of each sale would provide revenue, and the timing would fit nicely with the launch of Google TV. But the shifting on YouTube’s home page between user-generated and premium content only points out how difficult it is to juggle both in one place. I just can’t imagine a big block of feature films being hawked alongside make-up tutorials and “Drive-By Pooping.”
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First With Add-Ons? A Fennec Fact-Check
The mobile version of Firefox, codenamed Fennec, was released in alpha today for Android 2.0-plus phones and Nokia’s N900.
Announcing the alpha, Mozilla’s Stuart Parmenter says that Fennec is “the first mobile browser to offer add-ons.” Oh really? Android’s Dolphin Browser HD, which launched in May, already offers add-ons, so let’s dig into this claim little bit.
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Lenovo's Ebox is a Kinect Clone — For China
Surprise! PC Maker Lenovo is making a video game console called the Ebox, and has no qualms about mentioning it in the same breath as Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360.
Like Kinect, the Ebox operates without a controller, instead using a camera that beams out infrared light to detect body shapes. “We are the world’s second company to produce a controller-free game console, behind only Microsoft,” Jack Luo, president of Lenovo’s spin-off gaming company eedoo Technology, told China Daily.
Lenovo plans to debut the Ebox in China this November, but the launch could get pushed to next year. Games for the console will have elements of Chinese culture, intended to appease a government that prohibits the sale of game consoles for fear that they physically and mentally harm the nation’s children. At launch, 30 games will be available, and 16 global game developers have reportedly signed on.
So, what are the odds that the Ebox becomes available stateside? IDG News reports that the console will launch throughout Asia sometime after the debut in China, with other overseas markets to follow, but I’m guessing those plans hinge on whether the Ebox is a success in its home country. The reported support from game developers is encouraging, but so far the lack of photo or video of actual games being played raises some skepticism.
Anyway, let’s see how Microsoft’s Kinect performs first, as it remains to be seen whether controller-free play is the future of gaming or just a passing fad. If Kinect somehow becomes an industry-changing force on par with Nintendo’s Wii, Lenovo’s Ebox won’t be the only clone to watch out for.
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Taking New Bets On the End of iPod Classic
With iPod sales down for the last two years, predicting the death of iPod Classic is now an annual tradition.
Business Insider’s Dan Frommer is the latest journalist to question the iPod Classic’s future, ahead of Apple’s September 1 music event. The usual arguments apply — without Wi-Fi, apps or a touch screen, the classic iPod is looking pretty stale — but his prediction hinges on whether Apple will introduce a 128 GB iPod Touch this year. After all, the current iPod Classic’s hard drive holds 160 GB of media, and retiring it doesn’t make sense unless another device can take the high-capacity throne with flash storage.
I’m with Frommer’s logic all the way, but I doubt that 128 GB flash drives will even be ready in time for the next iPod Touch.