Let’s be honest with each other, readers. The PS3 is expensive. Sure, it’s a Blu-ray player and there’s free online services, but it’s still expensive. It desperately needs a price drop to maintain its position in the market. But Euro Sony boss David Reeves said last month that we shouldn’t expect a price drop anytime soon. That didn’t stop Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey from proclaiming that a $100 price drop is coming. → Read More
A UK man named Mark Taylor had his Gateway laptop fried by an actual earthworm, which was believed to have crawled inside the machine’s air vent to escape the man’s cats. Taylor received an error message that his processor’s fan wasn’t working and, upon inspection by an IT professional, it was found that the five-inch worm had been “cooked” after wrapping itself around the CPU fan, which in turn broke the fan, causing the computer to overheat. → Read More
Disclaimer: The following information is based on “popularity,” as in not cold hard sales stats since that info is not made available by either mobile carriers or manufacturers (and therefore, the rankings below are subjective). The ranking information (below) is provided by AvianResearch L.L.C. and is culled from its Monthly Retail Store Survey where it surveys 100 service reps and store mgrs from across the four major U.S. wireless carriers (AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and T-Mobile) – though we’re not sure how asking 100 retail employees about their favorite phones is really indicative of anything. According to AvianResearch, these four carriers represent 85% of all U.S. mobile subscribers. → Read More
Sony Japan today announced the NW-S738FK and the NW-S736FK, two new portable media players that are part of the Sony Walkman series. Both devices feature a 2-inch TFT display and come with mini speakers and noise-canceling earphones. There is no word yet on a release outside Japan. → Read More
Infingement. That’s what Blount called Amazon’s text-to-speech feature.
Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Authors Guild, wrote an op-ed in the NYT today about the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech feature. Heavens to Betsy – we’re still talking about this?
I’m a writer. I’m writing a book. I want lots of sales and money. But I understand that technology is moving far faster than Blount and his buddies care to accept. The text-to-speech function on the Kindle 2 is just one of the features that will be included in an ebook reader from now until the end of time – it will never make sense not to embed one in the future. It doesn’t infringe on audiobook sales unless you’re crazy and dedicated enough to record the Kindle reading an entire book and then copy that MP3 file onto an iPod. At that point you can theoretically say you’re creating a homebrew audio book. → Read More
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed on a conference call yesterday that Window Mobile 7 indeed won’t be here until next year. Although Ballmer didn’t give an exact date, it’s thought that the OS will be sent to manufacturers in November of this year and will show up in consumer devices by April of next year as previously reported. → Read More
What good is that Optimus keyboard without World of Warcraft? None good, I say, which is why it brings me great joy to see this homebrew WoW layout. It was created by one of the blokes at an Optimus Keyboard message board—message boards are the new salons—and is primarily for Warlocks. → Read More
It’s been a long time since we saw the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic sneak into 10 seconds of The Dark Knight. At long last, Morgan Freeman isn’t the only North American who can get one. As expected, the North American model (with the proper 3G bands, of course) of Nokia’s first touchscreen has hit US soil. While it’ll likely trickle out to other retailers in the coming weeks, it’s available immediately at the Nokia flagship stores in New York City and Chicago. It’ll set you back 399 bucks before Uncle Sam throws in his fees. [via Phonescoop] → Read More
First we had Ning, which lets you build your own niche social network. Now we have Fliggo, which lets you build your own YouTube. Fliggo is the latest startup to come out of Y Combinator. It has been in private beta for a while, but is now open to the public.
Fliggo lets you create your own video-sharing site. It hosts and streams the videos, and provides “grandma-friendly” management tools to customize the site and monitor usage. Fliggo sItes can be private or public, and are geared towards groups, companies, or video bloggers who want more control over who can see and comment on their videos, and the ads placed against them. Fliggo takes the expense and custom-work out of building a video-hosting site. → Read More
Having used both Kindles 1 and 2, I thought it would helpful to list where the new Kindle excels and where it falters. The dead tree book will never die – I think it will even have more longevity and popularity than the boutique appreciation of vinyl records – but our generation will be the last to use “books” as our primary reading systems. Expect ebooks to hit colleges in perhaps five years and high schools and grade schools in about 7. That said, should you buy a Kindle now? Why and why not? → Read More
In case you missed Peter’s guest spot on Attack of the Show last night, we have it for you after the break so you can peep an Asian in flannel. → Read More
A few days ago, we found out that AT&T had decided to pull all of their Sidekicktastic Quickfire units from the shelves, citing a failure to meet “performance expectations” as the sole (and rather ambiguous) reason. While we’d gone ahead and assumed they’d come to the shocking revelation that the Quickfire was painted with pure lead or the radiation levels were causing people to grow extra limbs, the real reason isn’t quite as exciting: people couldn’t figure out how to plug in the charger properly, and jamming it in the wrong way caused the units to overheat. → Read More
There has been mumblings that Nikon was going to introduce a new, entry level DSLR to replace the aging D40/D60 lineup and that DSLR might just might launch next week at PMA. Besides the MP count, details really aren’t flowing but we’re hoping Nikon has a nice DSLR in the works. → Read More
At long last, one of the many 8-megapixel cameras to be announced in the past few months has made its way to a US carrier. But megapixel count isn’t all that matters here by a long shot – does the $249 Memoir carry itself well enough across the board to come at such a price? And, as I’d imagine most people reading this review are wondering: can it replace my traditional point-and-shoot camera? No, it probably can’t. But more on that later. → Read More
This morning, Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator is taking the wraps off its second Preview Release for Titanium, an open-source developer platform meant to compete with Adobe AIR and the likes for building rich internet, mobile and desktop applications.
Titanium PR2 comes with a number of new features that are worth taking a look at, like an extensible Module API and built-in support for Linux and a wide range of programming languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript in addition to C++. More technical details are outlined on the company blog Appcelerant.
The new release of the open developer platform, licensed under Apache Public License (version 2), can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux here. The release also includes a nifty tool dubbed Titanium Developer which groups a number of social media and communication services like Twitter, FriendFeed and an IRC chat module which is supposed to make it easier for the open-source developer community to connect and collaborate when using Titanium for building apps. Check out this screencast to see how it works. → Read More
The Network (that’s what I’m going to call all the “Crunch” sites from now on) covered the private beta launch of ZumoDrive last month, so there’s no need to get into details again, but we wanted to inform you that the service is now available to the public.
Update: Seems we jumped the gun on Monday, but everything is now live. Hit the jump for screenshots. → Read More
Mendeley, makers of a desktop and web application designed to make it easier for academics to manage and discover relevant research papers on any topic, has raised $2 million in early-stage funding from some high-profile investors, including Stefan Glänzer, early seed investor in and former Chairman of Last.fm, former Executive VP of Digital Strategy and Business Development for Warner Music Group Alex Zubillaga and ASI, the investment vehicle of Skype’s former founding engineers.
The connection with the popular social music network Last.fm doesn’t stop there, since the company is pushing to become the “Last.fm for research”, which means the startup essentially aims to enable academics to manage and sharing their research paper inventory and at the same time discover like-minded people and papers thanks to a recommendation and matching algorithm. → Read More
Panasonic, Philips and Sony today announced they joint forces to consolidate the Blu-ray licensing business. The aim is to offer a single license that not only covers patents for Blu-rays but also DVDs and CDs. If things go well, we as consumers could get cheaper movies, music or games in the process.
Full press release after the jump. → Read More
