Dave's Download
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Breeze Cellphone Can Be Just That for Seniors
Continue reading… 3 CommentsAnother cellphone that's potentially good for seniors has hit the market. AT&T touts the Pantech Breeze as an uncomplicated handset with large buttons, large type on its screen, and easy-to-use menus.
But it's hardly as stripped down as others, including the ClarityLife, which was announced recently and is aimed directly at the older set. AT&T instead says the Breeze can appeal to any first-time phone user, including youngsters who still might want some of what today's wireless wonders can offer. That includes text messaging, the ability to download ringtones, and a camera that can also take video. Also, like some models under the Jitterbug brand, the Breeze includes a full keypad.
But like others aimed at seniors and juniors, the Breeze has dedicated buttons that can be programmed to call certain numbers. The Breeze includes three of the buttons for reaching loved ones or caregivers. They seem a great addition for melting the potential confusion caused by modern cellphones, whether someone is beset with an emergency or just easily muddled.
The phone is selling, after rebate, for $50 with a two-year contract and $125 without one.
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Google CEO: Get Ready for Cellphone Ads
Continue reading… 6 CommentsBrace yourself for ads on your cellphone. Google's CEO, for one, is predicting that ads on mobile devices will overtake those on the conventional Web in a matter of years.
Eric Schmidt told a German newspaper that not only will the market grow along with the use of mobile devices, but the ads can be better targeted. "The advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal," he says. "So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow."
At the same time, a survey suggests consumers are growing more open to getting ads on their cellphones. And again, the ads can be more valuable because they can be personalized to a phone and its owner, says Harris Interactive's vice president, Milton Ellis.
"No other advertising medium approaches the personal relationship consumers have with their mobile devices," Ellis says. "The key is to gain consumer interest by baiting the hook and providing them with something traditional advertising cannot."
The best incentive, of course, is straight cash. Some 80 percent of adults said the best reason to accept mobile ads was some sort of direct payment. Teens, on the other hand, could be bribed more than adults with free music downloads.
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New Windows Matches iPhone's Multitouch
Continue reading… 8 CommentsWith Windows Vista still under attack, Microsoft is trying to generate excitement for the next version of its ubiquitous operating system.
A Microsoft demo suggests the next Windows, to be released as early as next year, will feature a leap forward with multitouch technology. That's the two-finger, on-screen manipulation that made such a splash with Apple's iPhone. The feature is demonstrated here.
Moving photos and flipping objects with a couple of fingers is no doubt nifty. But few of us have expensive, touch-screen monitors. Maybe Microsoft is trying to breathe new life into tablet PCs, which are laptops with touch screens that haven't made a big dent in the market. Or maybe Microsoft is just trying to emphasize that it has always kept pace with Apple innovations. Microsoft reportedly has worked on multitouch software for at least as long as Apple.
But Microsoft hasn't gotten the feature into a popular product, as Apple did with its iPhone. And Microsoft has lost a bit of market share to Macintosh, whose latest Leopard version of Mac OS X won rave reviews while Vista floundered.
Has Microsoft learned anything? I fear not, judging from the multitouch demo. I'd feel better if Microsoft owned up to Vista mistakes and emphasized that the next version of Windows would be slimmer, faster, and friendlier to hardware. Instead, the software Goliath continues to emphasize new features, including one that few of us can now use. I'm yearning not for a multitouch Windows but for a Microsoft that's in better touch with its users.
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Money-Saving LED Lighting Is a Tough Sell
Continue reading… 4 CommentsThe latest wrinkle in LED lighting is a three-way bulb, much like might be used in a living room lamp. The EarthLED EvoLux R gets successively brighter as you hit the switch.
It's not cheap, though, at $100 for a version that's as bright as a 100-watt incandescent bulb.
Of course, maker Advanced Lumonics says the bulb lasts 11 years and touts the money you'd save by not replacing power-hungry incandescents. I'm all for energy savings that equate to dollar savings, but LED bulbs seem a tough sell.
For one, lighting aesthetics (color, for one) make all the difference. Consumers want to try one of these bulbs before committing to a houseful. But a $100 trial is expensive. (Advanced Lumonics does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.)
Cheaper versions include a 100-watt equivalent that doesn't dim at $80 and 60-watt versions at $40. Even the last one is a stiff entry fee. Plus, let's face it, most of us can't think in terms of decade-long savings when the initial cost is so high.
Something like geothermal heat, which also takes years to get payback, costs only about twice as much as a conventional system. And unlike geothermal heat, light bulbs get broken. Fatally. Especially in living room lamps.
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Americans Spend and Socialize on Wireless Web
Continue reading… 0 CommentsA surprise to me: The shopping and selling site craigslist grabs the most attention of Americans browsing with their cellphones, according to market analysts at M:Metrics.
Overall, we're spending much more time on handset browsing. In a year, U.S. consumers nearly doubled (up 89 percent) the time spent browsing with their wireless phones. Facebook and MySpace were the third- and fourth-most-popular sites for mobile browsing.
The second most-popular site behind craigslist for always-shopping Americans? Well, eBay, of course.
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Apple Poised to Take Over Our Digital World
Continue reading… 6 CommentsThere. Somebody said it: Apple will succeed at its ultimate goal of taking over our living rooms. That's living room as metaphor for the center of modern entertainment. A new report from market analysts at Forrester Research says Apple will become the "hub of the digital home."
That's precisely Apple's goal, which seemed brazen when CEO Steve Jobs first voiced it in 2000. But the company has moved with amazing success beyond its PC roots. Apple has captured leading positions in digital music and video as well as the wired and wireless devices for playing them.
Apple is now best poised to tame the mess of gadgets, cables, and software that befuddle digital music and video, write analysts J. P. Gownder and James L. McQuivey in their report, "The Future of Apple Inc."
"Apple intends to reinvent itself as a digital home provider over the next five years," they say. "Its goal, we believe, is to provide hardware, software, and installation services to create an integrated digital experience."
Expect, for example, that Apple will release a central device for storing and sharing all those digital music and video files that we have scattered around. Microsoft sensed the same need and is selling Windows Home Server, which reviewers (including me) much like.
Apple, however, will have the marketing sense to never use the word "server," the analysts say. Think about graceful Apple names like "Time Capsule" for what others stoop to calling "NAS," which is short for "network attached storage."
It's hard to disagree with Forrester's analysis, except for nitpicks. Forrester imagines that Apple will turn its retail stores and their "genius bars" into a launchpad for installing home electronics. That seems a stretch. It's a big change from running a few retail stores to rolling trucks with crews of well-trained techs. I still think the cable and telephone companies are in the best position to become our home integrators.
Then again, a van (gleaming white, of course) with that Apple logo would look so much more chic at the curb than some beat-up telco truck.
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Netflix Box Is Appealing, but Not Enough
Continue reading… 6 CommentsThe first Netflix box has appeared and looks promising. The online rental giant has teamed up with electronics maker Roku to release a $100 device that allows near-instant watching of movies and TV across the Internet.
The online videos are free to Netflix members, who typically pay $18 a month to get disks through the mail. But until now, the service was available only on PCs, or on the TVs of the few of us geeks who have connected one to a computer.
Initial reviews are positive, at least for how the device operates. One question is the video selection, which at some 10,000 titles is well short of what Netflix offers on disk. But we've used the download service quite a bit and think it's easy to find something good to watch.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch calls the service a compelling add-on for Netflix users: "Free is such a beautiful word."
But others point out that while the service is free to subscribers, getting it into the living room means paying $100 and installing another box. That's a formula for a flop, Thomas Hawk says in his Digital Connection blog.
I think the argument against Netflix's or other new boxes is a strong one. That's the biggest rip on Vudu, another device that downloads commercial video from the Internet.
The services need to get themselves integrated into other gadgets, such as game consoles, DVD players, and new, connected televisions themselves. Netflix has said it's pursuing those kinds of deals. It needs them—and with bigger partners than Roku.
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Come Get Your Microsoft Kick, er, Cashbacks
Continue reading… 0 CommentsMicrosoft said today it will pay cash from its ad revenue to shoppers who find and buy something through its product search engine. But other schemes to pay users from search ad revenue have hardly gone mainstream.
There just isn't enough money involved to be compelling, especially with the hassle of having to register and whatnot. Think coupons, says Henry Blodget in his blog: "Folks who clip coupons in the real world will be very excited about Live Search Cash Back and will likely use it religiously. But there's a reason coupons haven't taken over the world."
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Google Health Enables Data Downloads
Continue reading… 4 CommentsGoogle has launched its site for storing personal medical data, Google Health. And it's the first site I've visited that can download medical data from one of my providers, stirring my interest more than competitors have.
As with similar services from Microsoft, Revolution Health, and WebMD, the basic service at Google Health is a place to store personal medical data. But most of the sites depend on individuals to enter the data themselves.
All of them, like dozens of other health-related sites, also offer information, forums, and other tools on diseases and conditions. They also help manage wellness programs such as diet and exercise.
But Google and Microsoft appear to be the most aggressive in linking to data already stored by health providers, such as doctors, clinics, and pharmacies. Google, for example, launched with a number of partners, including the Walgreens and Longs drugstore chains.
My family fills most of its prescriptions at Walgreens. And it was easy to link my Google Health account to the Walgreens database, making a history of my medications an integral part of my Google-based personal health record. That's a nice first step.
A bigger fish, though, would be the insurers that already store much of our health histories. My insurer, Aetna, already offers extensive records through its own online service. Aetna is reportedly in talks with Google and Microsoft about sharing the data.
The prospect of links connecting all of them is exciting. It's also daunting, with a number of privacy experts warning that consumers could stumble into unexpected disclosures of health records—even assuming the best intentions on the part of Google, Microsoft, and others.
As a consumer, I could stomach what seem like small risks to my privacy for the sake of convenience. I'd at least like the option.
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Cable Outpaces Telco Broadband Growth
Continue reading… 0 CommentsIt seems clearer that the days of cheaper broadband are drawing to a close or at least a pause. Telephone companies, which had pushed down access rates, are curtailing their price-cutting to woo new subscribers, according to a new report.
As a result, cable companies are again beating telcos at adding broadband subscribers. The first quarter of this year was the first since 2004 that the cablecos added more broadband users than did the telephone companies, the report from Leichtman Research Group says.
AT&T, for one, has raised the monthly charge for many of its DSL plans. Some cable companies, including Comcast, have offered a smattering of lower-priced tiers, but they still remain generally more expensive than telcos' offerings.
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Movie Studios May Sell Downloads Before DVDs
Continue reading… 14 CommentsMovie studios are studying how they might undercut the disk business in favor of digital downloads, and there's a report from ContentAgenda.com that moviemakers may release movies to cable and satellite companies before they even appear on disk.
As it is now, a few movies make it to cable systems on the same day they are released on standard or Blu-ray DVDs. Warner Bros. has released movies on the same day to cable for on-demand viewing, and other studios are testing the same thing.
And big studios recently agreed to sell movie downloads through iTunes on the same date that disks go on sale. They had done the same thing earlier with other download services, such as CinemaNow and Movielink.
Selling downloads before disks would be a big step forward. DVD sales have flattened, so studios are willing to experiment. Plus, digital downloads cut out several middlemen.
Warner recently reported that its margins in selling to video-on-demand services run as high as 70 percent. That's several times the profit from disks, whose margins typically run 20 to 30 percent.
The studios want to explore deals with cable and satellite operators "to potentially create exciting new services for subscribers that will revolutionize home movie viewing," the Motion Picture Association of America said in a recent petition to federal regulators, according to ContentAgenda.com.
The new services would offer "high-definition digital movies to consumers for enjoyment in their homes sometime prior to release on prerecorded media such as DVD."
The MPAA is asking that the government first allow tighter copy protections on cable and satellite boxes.
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Mobile TV Broadcasts Could Start in December
Continue reading… 0 CommentsTo try to understand yesterday's news that digital TV is soon coming to hand-helds, we spoke with Jay Adrick, a vice president at Harris Corp., which makes broadcasting gear. Harris said yesterday that because South Korean manufacturers dropped their format battle, it would start selling gear to local stations as soon as November, even before a final standard is approved next year. Excerpts of the conversation with Adrick:
We already have portable televisions that we can carry around to get analog TV. Why is this a big deal?
The analog signals get turned off in February. The new digital signals were never designed to reach mobile devices. The digital TV standard was designed for fixed receivers, and there was an assumption there was an antenna involved.Society is very mobile today. Broadcasters want to reach those mobile viewers.
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Today Only: Free PCMover for Windows PCs
Continue reading… 1 CommentThere's lots of free software out there, thanks to the open-source movement. But there's none that can transfer programs, data, and settings to a new Windows computer as well as PCMover. And the $50 program is free to download today, if you've got patience to get through its website, which is very slow today.
Demand might ease this evening. The program's author, LapLink, is making the offer through midnight Pacific time to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
Or, I found the process much quicker if you're willing to also buy something from the LapLink store. That raises a bit of suspicion of a come-on, but LapLink is a credible company with servers that I'm sure are hammered today.
I found PCMover to be a good download if you're trying to set up another PC. That's true at its normal, $50 price—and even more so with today's one-time free download.
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Local TV Broadcasts Coming Soon to Hand-helds
Continue reading… 0 CommentsThis item combines two of my favorite topics, cellphones and digital TV. The two will merge sooner now that two South Korean companies have buried the hatchet and will merge their competing standards, opening the way for broadcasters to send their signals to cellphones and other mobile devices.
It's a potentially huge market. This is not the few preselected cable channels that are now offered on AT&T and Verizon phones. This would be local TV stations that you could carry in your pocket or watch in your car. And these would be the crystal-clear signals of digital broadcast, one benefit of the switchover from analog broadcasts.
LG and Samsung agreed to combine their competing standards for the new technology. That should make a final standard easier to achieve. Some equipment manufacturers won't even wait for the final standard and will start selling broadcasting gear in the coming months.
The two electronics giants apparently learned from the mistakes of their Japanese brethren, who helped stall sales of high-definition video disks with a long-running format war.
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Evidence Mounts That Blu-ray Will Struggle
Continue reading… 31 CommentsBlu-ray won't replace DVDs as the leading format for selling and renting movies to consumers, says Stewart Wolpin at Digital Tech Consulting. He says there just isn't enough juice in the new format for consumers to plunk down several hundred dollars to make the switch.
"DTC does not expect Blu-ray to represent any more than a third of all DVD devices sold five years hence," he writes.
His prediction comes on the heels of reports from NPD and ABI Research that sales of Blu-ray players are sluggish, despite Blu-ray's victory in the format war when Toshiba pulled the plug on competitor HD DVD.
Wolpin's bearish take has roots in past, failed formats. Historically, higher resolution hasn't been enough to replace a media format. Think S-VHS and digital audiotapes, as well as higher-resolution CD formats like SACD and DVD-Audio that foundered.
Those that did succeed offered more than just better resolution. Blu-ray doesn't bring more convenience or longer play, as did CDs over vinyl records and DVDs over VHS.
Many analysts, though, aren't ready to count out Blu-ray. Studios and retailers will push the format, particularly once players start selling for about half their current starting price of around $400. But most agree that if Blu-ray doesn't get rolling in the next year or two, it's unlikely to prevail over a rising wave of digital competitors.
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Linux Burrows Into Cellphones
Continue reading… 2 CommentsLinux, the open-source operating system, has yet to gain a real foothold on your desktop computer. But it soon will be in many cellphones.
The Linux phone movement got a boost today when Verizon Wireless said it would load a version on many of its handsets. Users probably won't notice much difference, as Verizon is likely to keep its standardized look and feel for phone software.
But users might find many more programs to download for phones running the Linux system from LiMo, an industry consortium that is promoting a Linux version. Verizon joined the group, which already included Vodafone, a European carrier that owns nearly half of Verizon Wireless.
LiMo is often seen as a competitor to Android, a Google-led effort to develop Linux for wireless handsets. Google views Android as a way to get its search engine onto mobile devices.
But Verizon said it may also use Android as the company opens its options. Most Verizon phones now come with software from chip-maker Qualcomm, although Verizon also sells smartphones with Windows, Palm, and BlackBerry systems.
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BlackBerry Is No Bold Answer to the iPhone
Continue reading… 15 CommentsA new hand-held joins the BlackBerry family, but we'll withhold the oohs and ahs despite the "Bold" name. The phone appears to be a good step forward—and not much more.
The Bold essentially soups up earlier BlackBerry models, adding a higher-resolution screen that has some reviewers singing its praises. And Kevin Micaluk at CrackBerry.com has a gushing review of the phone's look and feel, having scored one off eBay. The phone doesn't officially go on sale until this summer.
Besides its sharp screen, the handset works on high-speed data networks and includes Wi-Fi networking, both pluses. The camera captures a hefty 2 megapixels, and the media player syncs with Apple's iTunes software.
But unlike some, I don't see how the Bold alone can foil the Apple iPhone. That's more likely with a touch-screen model that Research in Motion is said to be developing.
For now, the BlackBerry Bold appears to be a great phone that will attract users who demand a real keyboard. For those who don't, it can't match the ease of the iPhone's touch-screen and software.
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Facebook and Google Tout Portable Profiles
Continue reading… 1 CommentThat didn't take long. Facebook says it will let users share their profile data with other websites, just a day after competitor MySpace had said the same thing. Some reports suggest that Facebook one-upped MySpace by saying its users can take photos, personal info, and other features to any other site on the Web.
Not to be left out, Google also announced its "Friend Connect" initiative to link social networking data across the Web.
So clearly, there's a rush to make it easier to network the social networking sites. The services understand that it's a hassle to maintain separate profiles on the multitude of social sites.
But none of the announcements would be the ultimate answer that will let users set up one profile and move, copy, or synchronize data on any site they want. MySpace, for example, is limiting the sites where its users can share data. MySpace's partners include eBay, Yahoo, and Photobucket.
The list notably lacked Facebook, and now we perhaps know why. We're awaiting more details on Facebook's and Google's initiatives. But I expect to be disappointed.
To truly open up, the sites would have to give up control over user data. That would mean giving up control over ad income that accompanies it. And that seems unlikely.
Google's offering goes live tonight here. MySpace and Facebook said their new features will be available in some weeks.
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MySpace to Open Profile Data to Other Sites
Continue reading… 0 CommentsFlitting about could get a lot easier for social butterflies on the Web if MySpace makes good on an effort to let users share their profile data with other sites.
Starting in a few weeks, the social networking site says it will be easy for users to designate which parts of their MySpace profile they want to share—and where they want to share it. "MySpace no longer operates as an autonomous island on the Internet," cofounder Chris DeWolfe told reporters.
By changing the photo they use on their MySpace profile, users would also and instantly change the photo used on other sites. Initial partners include eBay, Yahoo, Photobucket, and Twitter.
The data sharing could solve one of the biggest problems for Web socializing. Users quickly get frustrated trying to keep multiple profiles up to date.
It's a potential blockbuster move by MySpace, if it can get other sites to sign up. MySpace users could begin to view their profile there as sort of a central control panel for their presence on the Web.
But Facebook, which is MySpace's biggest competitor and gaining market share, was notably absent from the list of partners. That might be because, at least for now, MySpace will let the butterflies flutter in only one direction. Profile data from other sites cannot be posted to MySpace.
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Cablevision Joins Cable’s Wireless Effort
Continue reading… 0 CommentsCable companies are apparently serious about wanting a role in wireless. New York City's Cablevision said it is starting to build a Wi-Fi network across its market in and around New York City, providing broadband subscribers with a way to surf while on the move.
The word came just days after three other cable companies, including Time Warner and Comcast, said they would join a consortium to build a new, nationwide high-speed wireless network.
Competition is forcing the cable companies to round out their bundled offerings, which already include video, wired broadband, and phone service. They're trying to keep up with telcos, which already have phone, wireless, and wired broadband—and now are starting to offer cablelike video.
