July 24, 2008
- New Switched On column posted: Net-enabled movies pit a blue ray versus a true way. http://snurl.com/34h9m #
- O’Reilly just pitched me “David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual Ebook” — promising, but I’d rather learn to use my iPhone than Pogue’s #
On the heels of MediaMax/TheLinkUp shuttering its doors, TechCrunch reports that AOL will close down two of the more well-conceived online storage experiences, XDrive and Bluestring. The former gave away five gigabytes of online storage space accessible via the Web as well as a Windows and promising Adobe AIR application. This may actually mark Xdrive’s second death as the original version offering free storage went down during the dotcom bust along with competitors iDrive, Netdrive and others. The latter was another personal media sharing site albeit one that provided automatic uploading of content folders to the Web for free.
What killed them? Storage is cheap but bandwidth is expensive. Microsoft is still offering a little bit of storage space in the cloud via Windows Live SkyDrive and of course there are a number of subscription-based backup plays like Mozy and Carbonite. And Cucku gets around the hosting problem by enabling consumers to back up their hard drives to a friend for free. But none of the online backup plays have very robust media sharing features yet.
Tags: Bluestring, Carbonite, Cucku, Mozy, online storage, SkyDrive, XDrive
I’m pleased to share that my esteemed NPD colleague Steve Baker, who has been an astute follower of the PC market for decades and has great insights into technology retail (he was an original employee at Staples), is now guest-blogging at TWICE.com. He joins a number of friends there, including the erudite Stewart Wolpin and his excellent grousefest Harmonic Distortion. Also, speaking of industry trades in the blogosphere, I recommend Audrey Gray’s blog at E-Gear. She posts only about once per month, but she makes the most of it.
July 23, 2008
Just wanted to take a moment to wish my friend Ryan Block well on his future endeavors now that he will be leaving behind. Yes, it’s well-known that Ryan really gets a lot of posts written at Engadget these days because he’s Veronica Belmont’s boyfriend, but some of us remember him from the days before he reached such heights of Stedman-like blogebrity.
Seriously, though, whether it was in the days where Peter and Ryan were the dynamic duo that dove Engadget’s early days or during his master stewardship of the site since becoming its editor-in-chief, it has been a pleasure working with Ryan throughout Switched On’s run. I am looking forward to continuing to work with incoming editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, who has written some of my favorite Engadget posts.
Tags: engadget, joshua topolsky, ryan block
If Apple’s MobileMe is “Exchange for the rest of us,” what New York-based startup Peek is attempting is the hardware equivalent for original Blackberry. Today, of course, RIM is scrambling to play the convergence game as well as anyone, tacking on touch screens, pitching development dollars, and beefing up media support., but for a long time it was not so. The Blackberry already had momentum when it operated on a two-way paging service and couldn’t even make phone calls. It was a mobile e-mail appliance.
And that will the exact tack taken by Peek, which seeks to simplify the way smartphone abstainers access e-mail on the go. A main target is what the company calls “family commanders” (sorry, no camouflage version among its three colors) — generally style-conscious moms trying to keep up with the latest missives sent throughout the day. For example, the sealed rubbery keyboard is designed to be fingernail-friendly. While Peek, which is the name of the company, service and the sub-$100 device, will use GSM, it won’t be distributed through carrier stores. It will require a flat monthly fee and a credit card but no contract.
Among its differentiators, the company sees its retail distribution, easy setup and single-purpose focus. SMS and instant messaging won’t be supported, at least not at first. Peek will seek greater success than previous attempts into the mobile consumer e-mail device space such as Ogo and the strange PocketMail Composer, a personal organizer-like product that used acoustic coupling to send and receive email using an analog telephone. (PocketMail’s site and even order form remain active, but the device is listed as out of stock. The company began in 1995 under the pun-embracing name PocketScience.)
I’ve long enjoyed the Pandora and Slacker Internet radio services for different reasons and the two companies have taken different paths to get their services playing on non-PC devices. I was really excited for a long time about the concept behind the Slacker Portable — a portable music player that gets loaded up with genre- and artist-driven music stations via Wi-Fi and can then be played practically anywhere with no monthly service fee required. However, the initial hardware execution left me a bit cold.
Pandora, meanwhile, has developed a simple but terrific free iPhone app that has become one of the most popular out of the gate. The main catch, though, is that since Pandora is only a streaming service, it isn’t available if you don’t have coverage. The Slacker service on the iPhone or iPod touch, though, would essentially be the best of all worlds, taking advantage of the device’s Wi-Fi, superior user interface and slim design while utilizing its storage for cached Internet radio stations that work where here is no connectivity.
I’m not sure how this would impact Slacker’s financials (the company pays a much higher licensing fee for the right to cache music locally on the device) or its strategic goals of developing a more cost-effective satellite radio competitor, but broadening device support to Apple’s mobile platform would certainly create a bigger pie from which to drive premium radio subscriptions. And competitive pressure may not provide many alternatives as it seems nearly every other Internet music site is developing some kind of iPhone presence.
Tags: iPhone, Pandora, slackerJuly 22, 2008
Gartner analyst Steve Prentice may just be being provocative if he is saying that the computer mouse will see a demise within the next five years. That is simply too short a window for a convention as institutionalized as the mouse to disappear as well as too short a time for some of the experimental alternatives he cites to go mainstream. Indeed, mouse R&D continues apace and it is the mouse — not the keyboard — that is driving the input peripheral aftermarket.
All that said, I was actually thinking of less dramatic challengers to the input staple a day or so before Prentice’s prediction made the rounds. How will mouse developers respond to multitouch? I suppose they could add buttons that would simulate certain gestures, but the trackpad is rapidly moving from a second-class input device to one that can circumvent many UI elements (such as scroll bars) originally designed for the mouse. Multitouch gestures are more “natural” than many mouse movements, although there aren’t necessarily intuitive.
Of course, neither is the mouse. I have an enduring memory of a computer novice circa 1990 encountering the computing appendage for the first time. She picked it up and tried dragging icons across the screen by touching them with the mouse. I wonder what she would think of a TouchSmart PC these days.
Tags: mice, mouse
Michael Arrington wants to buy some silicon champagne with beer money. The purveyor of posts on Web 2.0 companies, who has built an online family of sites including gadget blog CrunchGear, specs out an Internet tablet at a price point that has eluded some of the world’s largest-scale device manufacturers.
Products that have been roughly comparable have included the iPod touch and Nokia N800 (although this would appear to have a larger screen than those) and Smart Displays (such as those that were made by Viewsonic). Digital picture frames with Wi-Fi might come close, but they generally don’t have a battery and often lack touch screens. Their displays often offer relatively low resolution as well.
As many commenters have pointed out, getting good performance out of Adobe Flash on a low-end computing platform can be challenging, the technical rationale behind why the technology isn’t supported on the iPhone and iPod touch. And speaking of Apple, despite the original iBookish mockup pictured, he wants the device to be as thin or thinner than the MacBook Air. Sorry, but you simply fall off the realism meter when you start making substantive comparisons between your $200 fantasy and an $1,800 premium notebook computer designed by one of the best engineering teams in the business. It looks like this will likely become another in the short history of prominent blogger-designed, open source non-products such as Dave Winer’s podcast player. At least he didn’t expect it to cost $15.
Tags: Internet tablet
In a piece that casts doubt on the future of the (sigh) “netbook” market, Matt Richtel curiously provides quotes from Sony Electronics and Fujitsu, two of the more successful companies selling high-end ultraportables in the U.S., but doesn’t include any quotes from companies that have actually launched these products here, including HP and Asus.
It’s not surprising that Sony and Fujitsu would be relatively down on inexpensive ultraportables because their products are the most immediately threatened by inexpensive notebook PCs with small screens. Really, though, they needn’t worry, because anyone willing to invest $1,500 or more for a high-end ultraportable isn’t going to downgrade to this product.
In other words, at least in the UI.S., netbooks are about market expansion at a time when consumers are going more mobile. HP at least is thinking about these products in the right way, targeting students and other select demographics who need light computing on the go. Is that 10 percent of the notebook market for the next two years? Probably not. But as Tim Bajarin aptly notes in the Times piece, when you are at the scale of an HP or Dell, you’re not going to surrender shelf space or mindshare to an unknown Asian upstart.
It’s all well and good to pursue margin, but there’s no margin in a market that doesn’t yet exist. While we will see barebones Linux configurations for $300 or $400, more of the market is going to be closer to $500 or $600 where major manufacturers move plenty of Windows notebooks, many of which have at least some higher component costs.
This fall, we’re going to see a lot of activity in this market.. it’s going to get pretty bloody fast. And to be clear, the space between the smartphone and notebook PC has been a difficult one to fill. But it’s very difficult to ascertain the true potential of this device because their real opportunity is in a world of integrated, affordable broadband wireless access, an evolution of the explosive growth notebooks saw after Wi-Fi became popular.
Tags: mini-notes, netbooks, ultraportablesJuly 17, 2008
- 16-bit iHandheld Genesis plug and play lacks NTSC, After Burner. Fake “reviews” are a fail. http://snurl.com/305nu #
- Plug and Play Mega Drive also calls itself the “first Sega Megadrive Handheld Console”. Rememberest thou not Nomad? #
- CRN notes what a dismal failure the iPhone 3G has been. (Warning fanboys: Place tongue in cheek before reading,) http://snurl.com/309ag #
