As predicted, Sony Ericsson’s great announcement for September 21st was underwhelming; it was so underwhelming, in fact, that I forgot all about it. I didn’t even think to look for it until today when I saw a drawing that vaguely resembled the creepy dude from the original website.

So what was the big announcement? Earbuds controlled by your ears! If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. One big confused mess that reminds me just how out of touch tech companies can be. The new headphones, called the MH907, work by sensing how many buds are in your ears. Plug in two headphones and your music starts playing. Unplug one to pause your music. If you get a phone call you can take out both earbuds and then plug one back in to answer. To hang up, pull an earbud out, then put both earbuds in to start the music back up.

I think everyone has the same question here: why invent a product that requires a string of gestures to replace one-click functionality. You know what I do if I’m listening to music on my phone and I need to pickup an incoming call? I press “Answer Call.” Just once. To start my music back up, I press “Play.” That’s it. No plugging and unplugging. No pointless ad campaign to point out a worthless product. Just one of those button things we’ve been hearing about for so many years.

We can pretty much guarantee this latest marketing campaign from Sony Ericsson will end in all sorts of fail. It starts with a web campaign, apparently called “Put Your Ears In Control.” The site features a goofy looking animated character with just one sentence across the screen:

Come back here on the 21st of September to see how the way you listen to music changes forever.

I know this sort of language isn’t exactly rare in the tech world, but give me a break. Forever? Hell, changes? This would have to be something truly radical to make the kind of impact the webpage suggests. I literally have no idea what Sony Ericsson could be talking about. Even if Sony put all the power of the Walkman behind whatever device will probably be launched, it still wouldn’t change much, and most certainly not the way I listen to music or the forever of that hobby.

Check back on the 21st for more of me mocking Sony Ericsson for making ridiculous statements about an underwhelming device.

According to a Bloomberg report, Sony’s Walkman outsold the iPod in Japan last week for the first time in four years. It’s likely no small coincidence that Apple’s media event, the one at which they’re rumored to unveil a new line of iPod Touch and iPod Nano models with cameras, is just a week away.

One analyst thinks the shift came from consumers looking for less expensive devices. I’m calling bull on that one. It looks to me more like market forces aligned to give Sony the .9 percent jump over Apple in the week ending August 30th. Sony had recently released the W series Walkman, which got some good reviews, and again, Apple is almost certainly launching a new line.

I don’t mean to sound so vehemently fanboyish, but let’s be realistic. Sony has done anything big enough to really take back the market. Sure, the W series is one of the best looking devices they’ve designed, but you don’t just win back market share with a pretty device because it costs marginally less than the dominant competitor. I hope that analyst isn’t getting paid much, if at all.

When Howard Stringer took over at Sony four years ago, they charged him with a hefty task: revitalize the company and resuscitate the brand. He’s been struggling to do so ever since.

Today the New York Times reported the number Sony has put to Stringer’s troubles: $388 million. In the red.

Now it’s no secret that Sony has been struggling. They’re getting pmeled in the video game market and soundly beaten with just about every other product they meant to sell competitively. Sony’s bright light is that they’re a world class company and they’ve made their name on innovative products. They can come back from what’s really a mild slump in their massive sales.

Thing is, they need to turn things around yesterday. I can’t say if that means getting rid of Stringer but Sony needs to take advantage of the fact that everyone is struggling and use their massive resources to turn the brand around.

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary once called the netbook market “a race to the bottom.” Apparently it’s a race his company intends to join (and quite possibly lose if they stick to that price). Today Sony announced the Vaio W – their very first netbook at a very un-netbookish price.

First the specs. The Vaio W runs with the netbook standard 1.6GHz Atom processor, 10-inch screen, 160GB HDD, and 1GB RAM. In the details you’ll also get Bluetooth support, an ethernet jack, a wireless card, some USB ports and (I really like this one) an SD slot that reads Memory Sticks! I know it’s unreasonable, but I really fear that every new Sony computer is just going to stick us with a Memory Stick reader. Glad they keep proving me wrong.

The Vaio W makes one other “improvement” over many of the netbooks today. The W screen abandons the 1024 x 600 resolution for a 1366 x 768 display, meaning the text on your already limited screen just got smaller. Not bad for people with decent eyesight. Could be trouble for the rest of the world.

And then there’s the price. The Vaio W comes in at a whopping $500. Okay, so it’s not much more than the top-of-the-line (does that even work with netbooks?) models from Dell and Asus, and it does get that nifty SD slot (oh right, all Eee PCs have one of those), but $500 is getting to be a little pricey for a barebones PC.

If price doesn’t bug you, though, you’ll have your choice between white, pink, and, ahem, chocolate brown. If I were you I’d be looking elsewhere for my netbook, but maybe that’s just me.

We already know the PSP Go is a ripoff. It’s essentially a minor upgrade over the current hardware at a premium price. In the UK things are even worse. Our friends across the pond are looking at prices as high as £230 (approx. $380), which is nearly double the price of the current generation mobile gamer.

Whether it’s the price, the hardware, or just an utter lack of interest, UK retailers are showing zero, yes, zero pre-orders, and they’re not happy. The problem comes with the margins on hardware retail, which are historically small. Now that the PSP no longer supports UMD drives, the only justifiable revenue stream comes in the form of Playstation Network cards, which can be purchased in $20 and $50 increments in the US, but remain unavailable in the UK.

Sony’s banking on mobile software delivery for games instead of your typical physical media with the PSP Go, and it’s already got retailers wondering if they should bother with the new device. Seems like a lot of people share that sentiment where Sony is concerned. Will they listen, or just continue to frustrate retailers and developers out of doing business together?

When you’ve taken a company from $10 million yearly revenues to nearly $200 million quarterly revenues, you can pretty much say what you want. If your new company also happens to be worth some $16 billion, you can also say those things to whomever you like, even if it happens to be Sony.

That’s exactly what’s happening between Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard’s President and CEO (that would be the $16 billion company), and Sony. Kotick has apparently been frustrated with the fees Sony charges for what he thinks may be a dying platform.

“I’m getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don’t make it easy for me to support the platform. It’s expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation,” Kotick says. “When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support [PS3 and PSP].”

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s next year. As in, six months from now. And if Activision sees fit to pull the plug, who’s next? Other developers have voiced issue with Sony licensing fees and the difficulties of developing on their hardware. Would EA see fit to cut ties?

As compelling a case as Kotick might put together, he seems a bit blind when it comes to ideas for saving Sony. In this same interview, Mr. Kotick suggests Sony consider things like the upcoming skateboard controller for a new Tony Hawk title. Are peripherals really what’s slowing the company? I could be wrong here, but how does adding a peripheral, which will probably be available on the other two consoles, help PS3 sales? How does that cut back the fees Kotick so loathes? And what of development? PS3 will still cost more per title for the same game, so where’s the benefit?

In running Sony into the ground is my guess. Kotick’s suggestion leads one direction – further marginalization of the PS3. If they keep releasing the same games and the same peripherals as everyone else, they’ll keep getting beat, for all the reasons Kotick cites early on. Then he doesn’t have to make the tough decision because every developer would leave with him.

For now you can rest assured Activision is still making plenty of money off Sony, but I’d bet other developers share some of Kotick’s thoughts, if not his fervor for making them public. Will Sony respond, or is Kotick just a blowhard? Sound off in the comments.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s Project Natal announcement, Sony entered the motion capture battle with their very own…Wiimote? In fact, yes, and from the looks of their demonstration, it’s a pretty slick little device.

The presentation wasn’t groundbreaking, and reused a lot of the “motion is the future of gaming” hype, but Sony did highlight the main difference between their wand and Project Natal: buttons. In a shot across Microsoft’s prow, Sony said, “buttons are needed for some experiences.” They followed up by showing off the motion capture games we all expect: tennis, swordplay, baseball, and painting. Control looked pretty solid, and offers some benefits (like the ability to grab) over Natal (along with the aforementioned buttons), like the ability to control your game when you’re outside Natal’s viewing area.

According to CEO Jack Tretton, Sony’s version of the Wiimote, which seems to still be nameless, will be available in Spring of 2010. I’m surprised it’s so late. Though the tech seemed solid, and the level of control impressive, releasing it so late gives plenty of time for people to get entrenched with a Wii Motion Plus. And though it is hard to imagine a game without buttons, it was also hard to imagine a game without analog sticks, or a traditional two hand controller, and look at the device Sony’s announcing – a deviation from those conventional forms of control.

Can Sony win the future of motion control, or will they just be a Wii with excellent graphics?

Image: Electronista

It’s two days before Sony’s official press conference at E3 and it seems like we’ve already got their best news (and really, it’s not all that good). Their new handheld, the PSP Go, is bouncing around the intarwebz through leaked pics and video. I’ve weeded through the spec list and have to say, I’m completely unimpressed.

- smaller than the psp 3000 (43% lighter)
- 16GB of built-in flash storage with memory stick micro slot
- no UMD drive
- 3.8in widescreen
- single analog stick
- wi-fi support
- bluetooth support
- PS3 integration
- multimedia support

So there you have it – an incredibly lackluster list of features for Sony’s big E3 announcement. Did it surprise you as much as it did me? There have been plenty of devices that missed my expectations, but not always in a bad way. Sometimes they even made sense. The PSP Go, however, falls short on almost every count, size being the one exception so I suppose we can start there.

The size, when the device is closed, looks to be about perfect. Small enough for a pocket. Thin and extremely light. That’s just what I want. Open it up, though, and suddenly my hands are in the very wrong place for working a d-pad (I have fairly big hands) and you can forget about that analog stick. I have the same problem with Jessica Alba – there’s only one and she’s way out of reach.

Storage doesn’t seem bad, but if they want to get serious about downloadable content, 16GB is probably a bit small. Until Memory Stick Micro is equivalent to microSD in price, I’m going to be pretty grouchy if forced to buy one.

No UMD is so dumb I hardly need to say it. People will be pissed they can’t play their old PSP games. Really, really pissed.

The one change I can get a little excited about is the bluetooth tethering mentioned in the Qore video. By tethering the Go to a 3G phone you could theoretically access online games and your PS3 content from afar, even when you aren’t getting wi-fi. Neat, huh?

Sure, but it’s not enough. I think everyone can see us hurtling toward the megadevice – the ultimate smartphone/camera/gamer/gps/everything device we’d never leave home without. So why is Sony so convinced it needs a dedicated handheld gamer with some multimedia features as an afterthought? Why not open their handheld to developers? Why not see the success of the Apple App Store and Android and make PSP development as much a culture as PSP gaming? I can think of 40 million people who would be much happier if they did.

March saw a surprising decline in sales of video game hardware and software, despite hardware growth over last year for the Xbox 360. The Nintendo Wii is still the most coveted hardware on the market, but even Nintendo’s cash cow was struggling.

At first I was a little surprised, but as far as life cycle goes, the current generation of consoles is heading toward a mid-life crisis. There are certainly enough peripherals now to extend the life of any console, but as games like Resident Evil 5 show, developers seem to have caught up with the hardware, producing games that can start to truly tax the machines we love.

My question, then, is who goes first? Sony, whose PS3 is looking like the Gamecube of last generation, could desperately use some new life. And though the Wii is still selling out of…everywhere, there could definitely be improvements on graphics and game design. As for the 360, well, do you really want to see the next Bungie App on the same console?

If you’ve been to a gym in the last decade you’ve witnessed at least one great human struggle – how to get music to my ears without ruining my workout. As iPods continue to shrink, it’s easy to strap one on your arm and forget about it. That is, unless you want to move. At 6′3″ I have yet to find a pair of headphones that will both stay in place while I’m biking and remain tangle-free while I work my dumbbell sets.

Enter Sony’s latest Walkman, the NWZ-W202. Sony took the bright yellow radiophones of yesteryear and slimmed them down to an ultralight 1.3 ounces, replaced the FM receiver with a 2GB mp3 player, and added a rechargeable battery that lasts up to 12 hours. The best feature (you almost sold me, Sony) is easily the quick charge, which yields 90 minutes of playback from a 3-minute charge. Now I don’t have to postpone my workouts while I wait on my iPod to charge. So why won’t I be buying a pair?

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