Did Tuesday’s $50 price cut on the HP TouchPad strike you as ho-hum? Perhaps this weekend’s $100 price cut will do the trick.
The instant rebate will be in effect from August 5 through August 7 on HP’s website, PreCentral reports.
The TouchPad debuted to lukewarm reviews, partly because there aren’t a lot of tablet apps on HP’s WebOS platform, and partly because the software was buggy and slow. HP has improved its software through a subsequent update, but the app deficiency remains.
India’s $35 laptop/tablet, a concept that I’ve been skeptical about since its announcement a year ago, is close to completion — as long as you ignore a few signs that it’s not.
According to the New York Times’ Bits blog, the Indian government will deliver on its promise of a dirt-cheap Linux or Android device in several weeks. “All the naysayers will be unpleasantly surprised,” said Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for human resource development.
But that’s pretty much all that Sibal is saying right now. Here’s why I still won’t believe it until I see it:
The last time I wrote about the $35 laptop, the Indian government had run into some financial misunderstandings with its hardware vendor. Meanwhile, one government source told India’s Economic Times that the device’s component costs alone exceeded $125, and Gartner analyst Vishal Bhatnagar estimated that $35 wouldn’t even cover the cost of a touch screen and microprocessor. Skeptics may also remember India’s earlier promise of a $10 laptop in 2009, which turned out to be, well, not a laptop.
I’d still love to see India pull this off — the whole point of the project is to sell cheap computers to students — but empty promises don’t inspire confidence.
Apparently Sony needs more time to prepare for handheld gaming’s last stand, as the Playstation Vita won’t launch until 2012 in America and Europe.
At a press conference in Tokyo, Sony Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai said the company needs more time to ensure a strong software lineup for the PS Vita. Sony’s not calling it a delay — the company never promised a 2011 release across all regions — but there’s no guarantee that the PS Vita will launch in Japan in time for Christmas, either.
In a first-person shooter landscape dominated by rehashes and regurgitation, one shooter that did things differently is getting a sequel of its own.
2K Games has announced that Borderlands 2 is in development, and will be released at some point in fiscal year 2013, which begins April 1, 2012. That’s a long way off, so there’s not a lot of details right now, but Game Informer magazine is supposed to have the scoop in its next issue.
The original Borderlands launched in October 2009, and at first I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game didn’t entirely deserve its plaudits. Its post-apocalyptic setting, while intriguing, never fleshed itself out, and nearly every mission followed a similar routine of flushing out a bunch of similar-looking bad guys, collecting some items and/or killing some kind of target.
But as I sank my teeth deeper into Borderlands during a dull stretch of 2010, I realized why the game became an unexpected hit: This is the first-person shooter equivalent of Farmville. Now seems like a good time to explain.
File away Electronic Arts’ “Season Ticket” as evidence that video game publishers are in no rush to bury brick-and-mortar retail game stores.
The $25 per year program gives EA Sports fans three days of early access to the label’s biggest games — Madden, NHL, FIFA, Tiger Woods and NCAA Football — via download, plus exclusive web content and 20 percent discounts on downloadable content. (Kotaku’s Owen Good has a nice explainer with all the nitty gritty.)
But here’s the catch: Once those three days of early access are over, the game’s downloadable copy self-destructs. Players’ progress through the game will remain intact, but to keep playing, Season Ticket holders will have to buy the game on a disc at full price. Incidentally, GameStop is the program’s official retail partner.
That’s not to say EA and GameStop aren’t separately planning their own disc-free futures. GameStop owns the Flash game portal Kongregate, the streaming game technology company Spawn Labs and the game download service Impulse, and has talked about getting into the tablet business. EA has pushed into smartphone and tablet gaming and recently bought PopCap, the maker of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. Surely, both companies know that Season Ticket, as it stands, isn’t built for the long haul.
But for now, if they can milk a few extra bucks from sports game fanatics who crave early access to Madden 12, more power to them. I’d rather see publishers encourage new game sales with perks like this than discourage used game sales by withholding features — although EA still seems interested in doing the latter.
If you’ve been waiting for an invite to Zediva’s cut-rate streaming video service, it might be time to give up. A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against Zediva on grounds of copyright infringement, which should lead to the site’s closure in about one week, CNet’s Greg Sandoval reports.
Zediva launched out of beta last March, with streaming rentals of new releases for $2 per night, or $10 for a 10-pack. It offered new movies before they became available through Netflix and Redbox, and didn’t pay a dime to movie studios. The trick was to let each individual user rent an entire DVD player, along with the disc inside, remotely over the Internet. Zediva argued that it was just like a brick-and-mortar rental store, but with a different delivery method.
Not surprisingly, movie studios disagreed. The Motion Picture Association of America sued Zediva and argued that the service’s rentals were actually performances, entitling studios to licensing fees. U.S. District Judge John Walter concurred, and has given Zediva and the MPAA a week to work out the wording of an injunction.
With Diablo III, Blizzard will attempt to legitimize a black market tradition of gold farming by letting players auction off virtual items and gold for real-world currency.
The feature, called Auction House, aims to wipe out sites like D2Items.com and D2Legit.com, along with scam artists and spammers. Blizzard says it won’t be selling any items on its own. Instead, the market will be determined entirely by the players, with Blizzard collecting a listing fee, plus a transaction fee if the item or currency is sold. Money from sold items will appear as credit in players’ Battle.net accounts, and players can convert that credit to cash using an unnamed third-party payment service. (Paypal’s my guess.)
A separate version of Auction House will use in-game currency for transactions, so players won’t have to spend real money on virtual goods.
Logitech is taking a beating for throwing early support behind Google TV. The company announced that it will cut the price of its Logitech Revue Google TV box to $99, which means each unit will be sold at a loss. And just in case there was any question of whether Google TV was a flop, Logitech offered an embarrassing statistic: The Revue saw more returns than sales last quarter.
This isn’t the end of Google TV. Google plans to revamp the software this summer with an interface based on Android Honeycomb, with access to the Android Market. But to make Google TV a living room powerhouse, Google and its hardware partners need to learn a few lessons from the first generation’s flop.
Nintendo has already admitted that sales of its 3DS handheld are lower than expected, so the company’s announcement of a Nintendo 3DS price cut isn’t a huge surprise.
But boy, is it ever a price cut. Starting August 12, the cost of a Nintendo 3DS will fall from $250 to $170, making for one of the sharpest price drops in handheld history. This also makes the 3DS a mere $20 more expensive than a Nintendo DSi, unless Nintendo announces discounts for its 2D handheld in the coming weeks.
Early adopters who paid $250 for the 3DS will get 10 free NES Virtual Console games starting September 1 and 10 free Game Boy Advance games by year-end.
ESPN’s app for the Xbox 360 is about to get a lot better, just in time for college football.
The app, which relaunches on August 25 according to Gizmodo, will let users watch two games at once in 720p, with the ability to pause, rewind and replay each game independently. The second viewing window will also be able to show scores from around the league and replays from the game you’re already watching.
