Yes, that is Linus Torvalds in a Speedo. And yes, he got naked because he’s so excited about the Nexus One (that’s how I imagine things happening, anyway).

Actually, Torvalds just picked up a Nexus One. He’s notorious for his criticism of any and every cell phone, but he seems to love the Nexus One, so much he was willing to call it “a winner.” He doesn’t like that it’s a fun, rather that it has pinch-to-zoom capability and some GPS. Here’s what he said in his blog post:

I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody – now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the phone runs Linux. Official Nexus One sales: 80,001.

Wolfram Alpha recently released an update for its overpriced iPhone app. The update includes some new keyboards, graphics, and tables. The one thing it didn’t improve on was the price. The app still runs $50, back up from the $19.99 it cost during the holidays.

It’s not that the app blows everything else out of the water. An app called BarMax runs a full thousand dollars. But BarMax isn’t available on the web. Wolfram Alpha is. All of it. They removed the iPhone-optimized version of the site some time ago, presumably to encourage sales for the app. You can still get everything out of Wolfram Alpha, though, if you just visit the website on your phone. The only thing you’re missing is screen specific formatting.

If you really need that kind of formatting and have $50 laying around, maybe this is for you. Personally, I’ll keep my Wolfram calculations on my laptop.

Source: TechCrunch

The world’s first self-titled “superphone” isn’t posting super sales. Frankly, the numbers are terrible. Embarrassing. Worse than I ever would have expected. The Nexus One has only sold 80,000 units in its first month.

It’s hard to say where the problem lies. Sure, the phone wasn’t marketed very well, and what efforts were made were aimed a demographic that likely already has their smartphone of choice. It also launched shortly after the Droid, so Android fans had just picked up a new phone. There’s also the fact that it was being subsidized by T-Mobile, which just doesn’t have the kind of support Verizon’s got.

Whatever the reason, I was surprised by the number. The iPhone, by comparison, sold 600,000 units in its first month. The Droid sold 525,000.

Source: Wall Street Journal

In November of last year Apple released a new iTunes feature called iTunes Preview. The service allowed users to preview the music available in the iTunes store without launching or even installing the iTunes software. It was a nice move, long overdue, and it’s now been extended to include iPhone apps.

Basically, any time you click an iTunes link for an app, your browser will redirect to a page that contains the standard iTunes information. You get screenshots from the application along with reviews, pricing, descriptions and ratings. From there you can click to view the app in iTunes and go through your standard download process.

I’m just glad I can’t be fooled into clicking those damn links anymore. It was so infuriating to be on a site and accidentally hit a link on my touchpad only to have iTunes blow up and start loading the app store.

Verizon and Motorola announced a new phone today. Called the Devour, the phone looks like a mini-Droid, or as my title suggests, the Droid’s weird cousin. It’s got a smaller display, a presumably smaller keyboard (yikes) and runs Anroid, albeit through Motoblur, Motorola’s odd Android distro.

I would guess the phone is going to fall somewhere around the Droid Eris in terms of price. It’s not a bad phone for $100, but like the Eris, it seems like a waste for what you’d get if you spent another $99. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Motorola is so obsessed with the physical keyboard, either. The pad on the Droid sucks. It really sucks. Android’s software keyboard is just so much nicer, why not rely on that?

If Motorola is your thing, you can get the Devour in early March.

During News Corp’s quarterly earnings conference call, Rupert Murdoch finally revealed his true feelings about the deal between HarperCollins, which News Corp owns, and Amazon for ebooks in the Kindle Store. “We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books.”

That pretty much says it all. Now that the company has an option coming with the iPad, it no longer needs to succumb to Amazon’s demands. Things are just the opposite, in fact, thanks to flexible pricing options from Apple. The competition is forcing Amazon to renegotiate prices with publishers for fear of losing market share or publisher support altogether.

It’s tough to say that increased ebook prices actually preserves the value of the book, particularly after prices have been so low. Fortunately for publishers, the ebook reading population was small enough that the rest of the world might not know to care about the difference.

One of the big setbacks of 3D tech today is the glasses. They’re necessary in order for most audiences to get a good view, whatever their viewing angle. While there are autostereoscopic displays (no glasses required) in the wild, they typically only work from 8 or 9 viewing angles, which severely limits their functionality.

Sunny Ocean Studios in Singapore is hoping to change all of that. The company plans to debut an autostereoscopic set at CeBIT this year that supports 64 viewing angles on its 27-inch screen. That’s a huge upgrade from the current status quo. I have to wonder what the thing will look like, though. It has to take a significant amount of resources to produce the frames for 64 different viewpoints.

And how much is this thing going to cost? Armin Grasnick, founder of Sunny Ocean Studios, says he can do displays up to 100-inches both quickly and inexpensively. Something tells me that won’t keep the price tag from climbing.

Source: Engadget

When Apple announced the iPad you could almost hear world inhale, waiting for the onslaught of competitor products with such clever names as the youPad and the Padlet. Can you imagine a world without iPod knock-offs? I can’t. Acer can, though, and the company won’t be feeding the tablet flames, according to Engadget.

The news came from Scott Lin, president of Acer Taiwan, who said the tablet just doesn’t fit Acer’s business model. Instead, the manufacturer will be focusing on ultra-thin laptops, some as svelte as .7 inches when closed. It’s a smart move, one that could grab the interest of anyone scared off by that weird touchscreen keyboard. The company expects the thinner line of products to account for 20-30 percent of sales in the coming year.

Source: Engadget

OLED TVs will be the next big (small, really) thing to come to your living room. The tech will cost you, though. When Sony first announced it’s 11-inch OLED TV, the unit cost $2,500. LG wants to offer something bigger, though, and you can bet it will have a bigger price tag.

LG has previously shown off 15- and 19-inch models with hefty price tags, but it will introduce a 20-inch model later this year. Next year it will bump that up to 30 inches and in 2012 we’ll get a 40-inch OLED TV. As you can imagine, those things are going to be expensive. As the company’s VP, Won Kim, said, “They may be expensive, but it will be possible to buy a 40-inch class OLED TV in 2012.”

So if you want something that basically looks like you’ve hung some paper on your wall, albeit very high tech paper, and have $10,000 or so to throw around, LG just might have the OLED TV for you.

Source: Tech-On

Following a very public feud over ebook pricing, Amazon has caved to Macmillan, giving the publisher it’s desired $14.99 price point for ebooks. The switch came after Macmillan threatened to pull all future publications from Amazon’s Kindle Store if it wasn’t given flexibility with regard to price.

Amazon announced the news to its customers with the following statement:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

I can’t help but feel Amazon is making an irrelevant appeal to the Kindle consumer base. By and large these will be people with more money to spend on books, considering they’ve dropped a couple hundred bucks up front to gain access to the titles. If they really want one of the books, would the consumer base really not buy because of a $15 price tag, one that’s still far cheaper than the hardback option? Probably not.

As a writer, I’m reassured to see publishers taking the reins on this one.

Source: Amazon

It was a big surprise to see the iPad launch without a camera, front-facing or otherwise. The device seems perfect for video calls and could easily be used as a point and shoot in a pinch. But, as Engadget reports, iPhone OS 3.2 includes support for video calling, among other new features.

Some of those other features include file downloading with local browser storage and SMS support. Basically, the iPad launch was just the tip of the iceberg. As with the iPhone, this first release is likely just going to get the ball rolling, driving interest and presales among the truly fanatic. From there, it’s a matter of referral. In the first six months the iPhone was out every owner I spoke with was in love with the device, or at least were willing to say that were.

This is how Jobs works – he breeds a sort of elite fanclub around his latest device and builds on that kind of elitism to drive insane sales. Whatever the iPad is now, it’s going to be a whole lot different in the next couple years.

At some point yesterday Amazon pulled any ebooks from publisher Macmillan due to a pricing dispute, according to the New York Times. Apparently Macmillan wanted to raise prices from $9.99 to $15 and Amazon didn’t approve.

You might remember the same thing happening as iTunes was starting to get its legs. Apple used its massive marketshare to strong arm media companies to the $.99 price point, which most everyone felt was too low. Obviously that model has worked out in Apple’s favor, if not in the favor of most record labels, a few of which were able to strike more flexible deals.

There is one major difference – Macmillan has somewhere to go. Apple is just about to open the iBook Store for its new iPad, which, in all likelihood, is going to outsell the Kindle by quite a bit. Most estimates put the Kindle’s installed base around 3 million. The iPad could easily have that by the end of this year.

I would be pretty surprised, though, if Jobs was willing to give Amazon the price advantage in the ebook war.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/amazon-pulls-macmillan-books-over-e-book-price-disagreement/

Kindle sales are notoriously hard to track because the company won’t talk specifics. Amazon is also becoming famous for talking about the success of the Kindle in relative terms, making it basically impossible to nail down just how well the ebook reader and the Kindle store are performing.

The most recent statement from Bezos regarding sales came shortly after the iPad announcement. He says, “millions of people now own Kindles.” That means basically nothing. The device has been around for more than two years, and as the mother-of-all ereaders for most of that time, you’d hope it has a couple million in circulation.

Here’s Bezos on the performance of the Kindle store: “When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books…This is year-to-date and includes only paid books—free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.” Again, essentially meaningless. Of course the number of ebooks to real books will be higher in the case that ebooks exist for a given text, but is that really a good thing for the industry? Ebooks are much cheaper than hardbacks and even most paperbacks at release. It seems to follow that there could be people without a Kindle that still download the goods to something like an iPhone. It’s good for Amazon but pretty terrible for publishers, who are seeing profits slide in the wake of digital content.

Add to all of this the fact that the Kindle is a purpose-built device, a dying breed gadgets that seem to have decreasing lifespans as the years wear on. The iPad with its epub format and color screen is going to make the Kindle look like yesterday’s brown bag lunch that forces you to load it down with liverwurst sandwiches (may have taken that one a bit far). No thank you.

One of the biggest complaints about the iPad, and even the iPhone, is the lack of Flash support. It’s something Apple’s been reluctant to add because of the potential for a security breach on either device. In order to be considered truly excellent browsing devices, though, I think Apple needs to find a way to make Flash work for both devices.

For now, though, Adobe is willing to take up the cause. It announced a product for developers at the end of last year that would easily convert Flash apps into something the iPhone can use. The company now says it will offer the same support for the iPad.

Here’s an excerpt from the official platform blog:

“We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.”

It’s a decent workaround, but definitely not a fix. By this method you’ll have access to the cool Flash apps available on platforms like Android, but it’s not like you’ll be watching Hulu on your iPad (unless they release a special app). Stay tuned on this one – it’s going to be a hot topic over the course of the year.

The long wait is finally over. Today is officially tablet day, as Apple announced just moments ago. It’s an exciting day for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the way this device could shape the future of the digital word. Obviously that’s going to be a long process, but if we know anything about Apple, it won’t seem so long, and we’ll soon be wondering how we did without (don’t act like you don’t love your iPod).

Jobs kicked things off today like this: “We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical product today.” Tease of the century. He launched into a quick (thankfully) overview of the company, but it wasn’t long before we got to the meat. The iPad. That’s the official name for the long-rumored tablet device that Jobs calls “the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.”

Basically, it’s a big iPhone, with a really nice interface. The keyboard looks big enough to be typed on laptop style (Jobs demoed it this way) and it has that same great glass look that Apple is known for. For now, it runs iPhone apps, as in the apps can be downloaded as is and run either at iPhone resolution or doubled up for the iPad. There’s an SDK available for developers to get started.

As for hardware, there are a whole slew of options available. You can get everything from 16GB to 64GB flash storage, Wi-Fi and unlocked 3G support (yes, unlocked – thank you god), in whatever combination your heart desires. It runs on a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, so they aren’t dishing out any cash to Qualcomm for that dual-core Snapdragon. It is definitely fast enough to do some light photo/video editing on the fly, just like we would see from the iPhone. Really, though, I think I’d get the most use for watching HD video.

Of course the number we all care about is price. When Jobs said the base model would be $499 I was shocked. More shocked than by anything else about the presentation. That’s like buying an iPod. That’s…insane. You can get as high as $829 if you’ve got the highest storage level and 3G support, but for what you get that’s an amazing price in my mind.

This thing will be the topic of conversation on every blog today, including this one. More posts on iBooks and what this means for the Kindle. Check back soon.

Verizon said it would cut 13,000 jobs from its landline unit in a conference call today. The company missed sales estimates by less than one percent, which prompted it to axe approximately 11 percent of the land-line division’s workforce.

The company cuts are really to hedge losses in other divisions. Though the landline division was up almost 10% in sales over last year, enterprise and FiOS TV and Internet sales were down in the face of the poor economy. Most analysts predict that things will improve little in 2010. Verizon’s CFO is optimistic about the Apple tablet, though. “It will attract more and more data customers, more and more usage over the network,” he said. “Devices like that will be, long term, very positive for the wireless industry.”

Guess we’ll know more about whether Verizon is a part of Apple’s plan tomorrow.

Source: Bloomberg

We’re just a day away from getting a look at Apple’s tablet and the brass is as excited as anyone. More quotes from Jobs and his cronies have surfaced, which serve only to build the hype around still rumored device.

The quotes come from the press release regarding Apple’s Q1 earnings, a whopping $3.38b in profits. In the press release, Jobs was quoted for the following: “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.” It’s an odd thing to say about a quarter’s earnings in which the rumored device played no role. Obviously this thing is going to be big.

Apple COO Tim Cook was asked directly about the product unveiling during the earnings conference call, to which he said, “I wouldn’t want to take away your joy of surprise on Wednesday when you see our latest creation.”

The thing to take away from all of this is that Apple is excited, seriously excited from the top down, so much so that they can’t even keep from talking about it when it hasn’t been released.

With all the fervor surrounding this week’s Apple announcement, I thought it would be appropriate to begin the week with a quote rumored to come from one Steve Jobs himself. It goes something like this:

“This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done”

Now, that’s not confirmed, but it’s being reported on several sites today that claim Jobs is as excited about the tablet as he has ever been about an Apple product. And let’s consider what he’s saying. For Jobs this is more important than changing the face of the smartphone market. More important than pioneering the App Store model for the cellular world. He’s essentially relegated the iPhone to amuse-bouche status, a preparatory device for what we’ll get to see this Wednesday.

I’m excited.

I’m always a little put off by profanity filters. They are increasingly built into video games and seem to find their ways into all sorts of other applications. What I didn’t expect was a filter on a cell phone, and then Google did it.

Yes, the Nexus One has a profanity filter as a part of its speech-to-text engine. At first I was pretty surprised. It seems mighty presbyterian of Google to pull something like that without talking about it. The real reason, though, makes a lot of sense.

We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent.

So instead of something nasty when your four-year-old says ‘duck,’ all he’ll see is ‘####.’ Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to disable the feature, so you’ll have to write out that drunken text instead of just yelling it into your phone.

You’re probably thinking, “of course I can – they look completely different.” They do, you’re right. But they’re the exact same player. That Lexicon on top costs $3,500, whereas the Oppo is only $500.

It’s a strange story, one Wired picked up the other day. From what anyone can tell, Lexicon seemingly bought up a bunch of Oppo BDP-83s and packed the units into a new case. Yes, the whole player, chassis and all. Here’s Audioholics’ Clint DeBoer:

When we received the player the first thing we did was open it up to get a look at the inside. Imagine my surprise when I found that not only did the Lexicon share the same boards and transport as the Oppo – it was in fact AN OPPO BDP-83 PLAYER, CHASSIS AND ALL, SHOVED INSIDE AN ALUMINUM LEXICON WRAPPER.

There is one small difference – the Lexicon has a THX certification. The Oppo does not. How’s that for three grand?

Source: Wired