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Apple is “Very Excited” About OnLive on the iPad (Says OnLive)

Posted by Jared Newman on June 8, 2011 at 1:00 pm

OnLive made a bunch of announcements before E3, but at the show, the streaming game service was showing something new: full, working versions of OnLive on the iPad and Android tablets.

An OnLive app is already available on the iPad, but only for watching other players and seeing what games are available. The unreleased app shown at E3 can run OnLive’s full library of games using the universal controller announced last week, and one game was even adapted to the touch screen. According to Joe Bentley, OnLive’s vice president of engineering, Apple is listening.

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Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 8, 2011 at 3:00 am

Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land with an SX-70 and an SX-70 snapshot in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office on November 1st, 1972. Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/Getty Images

What makes a gadget great? You might argue that it’s determined at least in part by how many lives the product in question touches. Back in 2005, when I helped choose a list of the fifty greatest gadgets of the past fifty years, we ranked the Sony Walkman as #1 and Apple’s iPod as #2. Fabulous gizmos both; I suspect, however, that they wouldn’t have topped the list if they hadn’t been bestsellers of epic proportions.

The SX-70–specifically, the SX-70 which I bought at an antique store in Redwood City, California in April of 2011.

But greatness isn’t a popularity contest–not primarily one, at least. Maybe it has more to do with the concept expressed by Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: making technology indistinguishable from magic. By that measure, I can’t think of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera, the instant camera that Polaroid introduced in April 1972. We ranked the SX-70 eighth on that 2005 list, but the sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name.

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8 Questions About Nintendo’s Wii U

Posted by Jared Newman on June 7, 2011 at 11:54 am

The crowd laughed at the silly name when Nintendo announced the Wii U at its E3 press conference, but their derision quickly turned to amazement when Nintendo showed what its upcoming home gaming system can theoretically do. The trick is in a controller with a 6.2-inch touch screen that streams video from the console itself.

We’re still a long way from the Wii U’s 2012 release, and Nintendo left a lot of questions unanswered, even as it injected a much-needed dose of buzz into the E3 atmosphere. So I’m going to take a page from Harry and tackle the Wii U announcement as a series of open questions.

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Sony Announces Playstation Vita, Stays the Course on PS3

Posted by Jared Newman on June 6, 2011 at 11:06 pm

Hand it to Sony for knowing its audience.

Although the Playstation 3 has become a multimedia powerhouse — Sony dropped the nugget that its console accounts for 30 percent of all Netflix streaming — Sony’s E3 press conference was almost entirely about games. The requisite parade of exclusives came first, followed by launch details for Sony’s next-generation portable, now known as the Playstation Vita.

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Ten Questions About Today’s Apple News

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 6, 2011 at 6:02 pm


Almost 38,000 folks turned out for Technologizer’s live coverage of Apple’s WWDC keynote this morning. We had a good time. But as the comments came in from attendees, there was clearly a serious contingent of folks who still held out hope that Apple was going to announce a new iPhone today–and who just didn’t care that much about software and services. For them, no new hardware meant that the event was a letdown.

On Twitter, I responded this way:

This was among the most news-packed Apple events I can recall, and in its own way it was one of the most wildly ambitious ones. Apple is finally making the iPhone and iPad into autonomous devices that don’t rely on a Mac or Windows PC. It wants to store vast quantities of data for us and be responsible for safeguarding it and getting it to the right place. It’s making iOS look more like OS X and OS X look more like iOS. It’s not yet clear whether all of this stuff will pan out, and people who already bristle at Apple’s approach to the world will like this new, more fully Apple-centric version less than ever. But if you think the event was a big yawn because there wasn’t a new iPhone that was a bit thinner and a bit faster, you live in a different world than I do.

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Microsoft’s E3: A Bang for Kinect, a Whimper for Live TV

Posted by Jared Newman on June 6, 2011 at 2:35 pm

Good thing Microsoft had a packed line-up of Kinect games to show at its E3 press conference, because last week’s big rumor about live TV on the Xbox 360 turned out to be kind of a dud.

Kinect, the motion-sensing, audio-detecting Xbox 360 camera that launched last year, dominated the discussion at Microsoft’s press conference. I counted 15 announcements for games that will either support or require Kinect, plus a revamped console menu designed for gestures and voice.

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An Embarrassment of Cool Blogs

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 6, 2011 at 2:21 pm

I’m a fan of an annual TIME.com feature called the 25 Best Blogs, but you won’t hear me praising this year’s edition. That would be vain–I wrote (almost all of) the story. And  I had an awfully good time doing so. (The picks are based on nominations from some of my TIME colleagues, and some recommendations from my Twitter followers made the list, too.)

The clever folks at TIME.com have also put together a Twitter list of feeds from all the blogs we chose, letting you follow all of them with one click–as I just did.

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Apple Makes A Commitment to the Cloud

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 6, 2011 at 11:53 am

“We’re gonna demote the PC and Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move the hub to the cloud.” That was Steve Jobs’ opening remarks as he debuted Apple’s newest service called iCloud. As you’d expect, this is essentially a reboot of MobileMe.

Jobs admitted that its launch of MobileMe wasn’t the best, and that the company “learned a lot” from the experience. It better: Apple is committing an awful lot to the cloud. Contacts, Calendar, and Mail have all become iCloud apps, with their information synced directly to the cloud and pushed out to all iOS/Mac OS devices.

Other apps getting the cloud treatment would include the Mac App Store, which would keep devices synced with apps purchased as well as the redownloading of old apps through a purchase history function that is curiously missing from the current iteration of the Mac App Store.

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