My latest TIME.com Technologizer column: Why Google’s new search/social mashup, Search, Plus Your World, is so unsatisfying. At least to me.
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Reminder: Motorola is Not Part of Google
I keep forgetting that Google, which agreed to buy Motorola Mobility last August, doesn’t yet own it. In fact, anti-trust regulators in both the U.S, and Europe are still going over the deal. Which means that we still don’t know what the implications will be of Google owning one of the largest makers of Android-based devices.
It is, by the way, fascinating how many sites reported the merger as a done deal the moment it was announced in August. Nope. Months later, it remains a proposed deal, and the chances that t won’t go through, while not huge, are more than zero.
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My First Few Questions About Apple’s Education News
Judging from the turnout for our live coverage of Apple’s education event–which was much sparser than for something like the iPad 2 announcement–a lot of tech enthusiasts lost interest in today’s news when they figured out that it didn’t involve any new hardware. That’s a shame. The news–a new textbook-friendly version of iBooks, a free book-creation tool called iBooks Author, and a spiffier version of the iTunes U courseware app–has as much or more potential to make its mark on the world as any new iPad or iPhone could. Everything looks really, really cool.
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Join Us for Live Coverage of Apple’s Education Event
At 10am ET this morning, I’ll be at the Guggenheim Museum here in New York for Apple’s education event, liveblogging the whole thing at technologizer.com/appleeducation. Doug Aamoth of TIME will join me with color commentary–and I hope you’ll be there, too.
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The Times of Kodak’s Life
So Eastman Kodak has declared bankruptcy. Right now, Twitter is like a wake for this most beloved of American companies. I refuse to speak of Kodak in the past tense, though: bankruptcy protection is not a death sentence, and when it says, as it does in its press release, that it intends to “emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company,” I’m rooting for it to do exactly that.
But like everyone else who grew up shooting Kodak film–often in a Kodak camera–I’m feeling wistful about the brand and what it’s meant to me and the world. How about watching a few vintage commercials, including two versions of the once-famous tear-jerker “Turn Around” and ones starring the Nelsons, the cast of Bewitched, Michael Landon, and Bill Cosby?
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The Lumia 710 is Free, But Don’t Panic
The tech blogosphere’ collective head is spinning as Wal-Mart has dropped the price of Nokia’s first commercially available Windows Phone device in the US — the Lumia 710 — to free. Immediately, people began swing that this was a sure sign that the release is a bust: surely a device selling well wouldn’t be available for nothing so quickly? Or would it?
Look, it’s Wal-Mart were talking about here. Land of “Always Low Prices, Always.. Something tells me that we shouldn’t make judgements on the success of a device merely on this retailer’s pricing strategy. It could simply be that Wal-Mart wants to sell more phone. Let’s also consider the competitive landscape.
With the absolute glut of Android phones out there, there are quite a few devices on the market at that “free” price point. Wal-Mart has many of these devices because they fit into the demographic of their consumers: budget-conscious. The Lumia 710 is a great midrange phone, and is similar in functionality to those free devices.
Also look at Best Buy and T-Mobile: both still sell the device for $49.99 with a two-year contract. While Wal-Mart’s decision may accelerate their plans to discount the phone, they certainly are in no rush to join Wal-Mart in the race to the bottom. Nokia has only offered that these phones are selling “well”, so we really have no clue how things are going.
So take a breath, and let the market judge whether Nokia’s gamble was a smart one.
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Alienware’s Mini-Gaming Machine with Rotating Logo
I’m not in the market for a desktop PC. In fact, I don’t expect to buy another desktop PC, ever. But if I were, this new Alienware box would be tempting.
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AMD Readies Ultrabook Competitor
Think that Ultrabooks–which generally go from $900 to $1400–are too pricey? AMD wants to bring the price down to $800, says Digitimes’ Monica Chen. (Machines based on its chips will have to be called something other than “Ultrabooks,” though–that’s Intel’s moniker.)
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Fortune on Apple’s Education Event
Wait! Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune says that Apple’s education event isn’t about “a GarageBand for e-books” at all:
MacInnis also mentioned GarageBand in our interview. But what he was describing was a sample iPad textbook, produced in-house and packed with pedological bells and whistles, that would serve as a reference design for textbook publishers, much in the way GarageBand for the iPad showed iOS developers what the new platform could do.
MacInnis does expect Apple to unveil new tools for creating iPad textbooks, along with a new content repository to make e-textbooks easily available to teachers. But the tools are not a “GarageBand for e-books.” And according to MacInnis, they’re designed to support the textbook industry, not to do an end-run around it.
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Ars on Apple’s Education Event
Chris Foresman of Ars Technica says that Apple’s education event–which I’ll liveblog at 10am ET on Thursday–is about a “GarageBand for e-books.”