Posted by Bill

OK, I get that the tech and business media love covering every falling sparrow regarding Apple and/or the iPhone. It’s fun, many of them sincerely like the company’s products and it beats having to cover something else, like a political campaign where you’re expected to produce real news from time to time.

But seriously, this is how the nation’s top mainstream business news media is spending reporting and writing resources? Really? When on the very same beat this, this and this are getting the same amount of attention? Delays in the white model of the latest iPhone, the iPhone  4, are thought to reflect manufacturing challenges unique to the model, but so what? Apple says it’s already sold 3 million black iPhone 4 handsets and analysts believe delays in the white model will have no effect on the company.

Reality check: The iPhone already comes in white, in its earlier versions. Plus, if your iPhone is in a protective case, nobody can tell what color it is.

Posted by Rachel

Summer is here! And if you’re like me, you will be taking tons of pictures on your vacation, day hike or just around town on a beautiful warm day.

If you want to add a little more pizzazz to your photos, but don’t have a lot time or the software to do it, there some fun and easy options to get you started with photo editing. No prior experience needed!

Picnik lets you upload photos and edit them for free, so you can get the “I photoshopped this for hours effect” with two clicks of a button. Some of my favorite effects are “Orton-sih” which gives the photo and older, softer look and “Cross Process,” which enhances certain colors, giving the photo an artsy look.

PhotoFlexer is another free site, similar to Picnik. It includes tools such as auto fix, effects like “cartoon,” and “painting” along with “fix blemishes” and “smooth wrinkles.” I edited the photo below in less than two minutes to give it an older, vintage feel.

Both Picnik and PhotoFlexer are great for a quick photo fix or if you want to get creative with your photos.

Posted by Bill

It’s one of the oldest chestnuts in consumer product marketing: Give away the razor so people will buy the blades. Now we’re seeing that idea crop up in discussions about the new e-reader price war.

After Barnes & Noble and Amazon each cut the prices of their e-book reading devices earlier this week, some pundits resurrected the razor/blade analogy, noting how cheaper Nooks and Kindles – and wide availability of competitors such as Apple’s more feature-rich iPad — would significantly expand the mass market for electronic books, magazines and other material traditionally only offered on dead trees.

It’s not surprising e-reader prices would drop sharply; it happens with every new, desirable technology device (Remember how much your first iPod cost nine years ago?) But if these guys want to remain competitive and really expand the e-book market, they should avoid the razor/blade model. Think about it. The razor is now a commodity item, where the only innovation occurs on the “content” side of the equation: Blades, shaving cream, after-shave lotion, etc. As organizations that are retailers more than content innovators, do Barnes & Noble or Amazon really want to break even on the device side while having to compete against foes (Google, Apple) with storied expertise on both the device and content sides of the business equation?

Further, even cutting prices to seed the e-reader market could be a losing battle for Barnes and Amazon. Analysts in The Wall Street Journal estimate U.S. sales of about 6.6 million dedicated e-book readers this year; by comparison it took Apple about a month to sell its first million iPads in the same market.

A better model for the e-book purveyors might be the iPod, which Apple never has allowed to become a commodity even though its relative price has fallen sharply over the past decade. According to the Journal, Amazon and Barnes & Noble make money now from e-book sales. But they face unprecedented threats on the content side, where Google and Apple both have made major strategic inroads to their turf. Giving away the reader may win the short-term battle for price-conscious consumers, but could amount to a Pyrrhic victory if the booksellers don’t create any real value, either for authors or book buyers, that makes them the preferred choice for electronic reading content.

Posted by Joe

For video gamers it’s Christmas right now. E3 is taking place this week (June 15-17). To help get you prepared for the show, Wired has a video gallery of 10 Trailers for E3’s hottest games. Trailers include new Rock Band and Call of Duty games as well as Call of Duty: Black Ops.

It’ll be interesting to see what and if ACTIVISION says anything about Black Ops, being developed by Treyarch. ACTIVISION, of course, had the lengthy battle with Infinity Ward, which developed the popular Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games.

Besides the new games, it looks like motion control and 3D will be the big news coming out of the conference. Microsoft will have its Kinect system, which recognizes body movement, and Sony will showcase its PlayStation Move. The Move is supposed to be an upgraded version of the Nintendo Wii’s motion sensor controllers.

Unfortunately a lot of the E3 product announcements — Kinnect, Move, Call of Duty — won’t be in stores until November, so don’t get too excited.

Posted by Aurora

So by now you have probably heard about the new AT&T data plans. As it was stated it sounded like if you were currently on an unlimited plan, you could keep it, and AT&T will just consider you grandfathered in. Now here is where it gets interesting—after three years, AT&T has finally announced a tethering plan for the iPhone, which will go live with iPhone OS 4.0 is released.

However, if you want to use it, you have to leave your unlimited data plan behind, and instead move to the DataPro plan, which is $25 per month for 2GB of data, and $10 for each additional gigabyte of data used if you go over.

Now, read the fine print. AT&T is going to charge you $20 for the privilege of tethering. That $20 doesn’t get you any extra data usage—you are still relegated to the 2GB of data that you get from your $25 per month. In other words, AT&T is charging you a fee to use the data you already paid for.

From an outside prospective, that seems down right ludicrous! If you pay $25 for 2GB of data, and burn that 2GB on your iPhone, that is fine. However, if you pay $25 for 2GB of data and go through it while tethered to your computer, they expect you to pay an extra $20, even though you’ve only used 2GB of data—no more, no less—in both scenarios.

The fact that AT&T wants to charge you an extra fee just because you want to use the data that you’ve already paid for in a certain way just screams that they don’t understand true customer service. And here’s the real kicker, if you switch you can never go back to your unlimited plan once you leave it.

Posted by Rachel

Growing up, my parents always told me that watching too much TV can turn your brain into applesauce. Now research suggests that too much time with gadgets and the internet can have the same effect.

This week the New York Times published a story on the mental price of constant interruption from phone calls and emails. Besides the obvious side effects of our daily technology – such as car accidents due to talking or texting on mobile phones – the distractions can interrupt work and family life. Findings suggest that being constantly interrupted can decreases productivity and change the way we think, giving us less concentration because our minds are constantly stimulated and jumping from place to place when we’re online.

Another New York Times article, An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness, says that some studies have found that excessive dependence on cell phones and the Internet is comparable to an addiction. The article also points out that some studies show technologies can change our personalities, and not in a good way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Bill

With seemingly every every tech and news media outlet or blog sitting in rapt attention at the feet of Steve Jobs on June 7 as he unveiled the latest iPhone and mobile OS at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, it was noteworthy who wasn’t there.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, tech news blog Gizmodo.com wasn’t invited to the iPhone-fest in the wake of its legal dispute with Apple and Silicon Valley law enforcement over how it obtained – and later reported on in detail – a prototype of the new iPhone a month before its release. Gizmodo had sent several staffers to previous WWDC dates, liveblogging every pearl of information to fall from the lips of Apple’s CEO, so the lack of an invitation to Monday’s event was more than coincidental.

Apple clearly appears to be engaging in prior restraint against Gizmodo, which as any journalism student – and First Amendment attorney — will tell you is an act designed to have a chilling effect on the media that cover the company. That is, it was done to keep other media under control and scared of potential repercussions should they contemplate future reporting or other activity that Apple considers beyond the pale.

Yeah, Apple’s a private business and can do what it likes with its private events. But barring a media outlet this way is not a good thing. What’s next, barring media that decide to write negative reviews of Apple products?

It is, as they say, a slippery slope.

Posted by Michael

The Android operating system (OS) from Google continues to shake up the U.S. mobile phone market, topping Apple’s iPhone and challenging RIM’s dominance in the smartphone OS market, according to the latest figures.

Research from the NPD Group found that Android moved past the Apple iPhone to take the No. 2 position among all smartphone operating systems in the first quarter.  Based on unit sales to consumers, the Android operating system moved into second position, with a 28 percent share of the market, behind RIM’s OS (36 percent) and ahead of Apple’s OS (21 percent), stated the research company’s data.

Also, NPD Group found that first quarter smartphone sales at AT&T comprised nearly a third of the entire smartphone market (32 percent), followed by Verizon Wireless (30 percent), T-Mobile (17 percent) and Sprint (15 percent).

The NPD research and Android’s continuing momentum compelled CNN and Mashable’s Pete Cashmore to ask if the iPhone has “lost its cool.” I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment, but Cashmore’s column does provide some good insight into the rise of Android and the slow fall of Apple’s smartphone  product.

Posted by Bill

OK, I’ve got as much Apple vs. the media overload as anyone else…but there’s no e-mail flame war like a Steve Jobs e-mail flame war. Let’s reflect on why we enjoy following tech news so much as we revisit the recently released exchange Valleywag’s Ryan Tate had with the legendary head of Apple, shall we?

The setting was perfect: Aggressive new media journalist, admittedly fueled by a Stinger or two and employed by a media company that has a contentious history with Jobs, gets riled by a TV commercial billing the iPad as “a revolution” and fires off “a short-pointed question to Jobs’ well-known e-mail address.”

Jobs responds a few hours later – after midnight California time –  and the pair with gusto launch an email artillery exchange about Apple’s well-publicized refusal to support Flash animation on the iPhone or iPad, Apple’s idiosyncratic attempts to keep pornography out of iPhone and iPad apps and even whether at age 20 Bob Dylan, who was featured in Apple’s past “Think Different” ad campaign, would have considered the iPad to have “the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution.’”

It’s worth reading as a noteworthy addition to the growing panoply of Steve Jobs e-mail rejoinders. Seriously, can you imagine the CEOs of Goldman Sachs or GM getting into it with a journalist like this? Or the snit their corporate communications directors would have if they did?

Posted by Joe

So we all know what the new iPhone is going to look like thanks to Gizmodo. Even someone in Vietnam somehow got their hands on one, weeks before Mac fanboys like Stephen Colbert and David Pogue:

So in June, when Steve Jobs reaches into his jeans pocket for the new iPhone, don’t expect there to be much applause. In fact, Apple’s actions over the last few months are nothing to cheer.

In March, Apple sued HTC over phone-related patents. In April, police raided the home of an editor at Gizmodo. I wonder who sent them. Also, there was Steve Job’s rant on why he dislikes Flash. And doesn’t it always seem like there’s some feud going on between Apple and Google?

What I love about Apple is they try to portray a nice guy persona to their customers.

• Exhibit 1: Mac Guy commercials.
• Exhibit 2: The annoyingly helpful sales people at Apple Store.

Then there is the business persona we’ve seen over the past few months. I think Apple’s favorite son, Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, sums it best: “Apple’s one great weakness—they simply do not know how to play well with others.”

My hope is that after the dust settles from the hoopla involving the new iPhone, Apple can learn to play nice. Maybe we’ll see Flash on iPads. Maybe the lawsuits will magically disappear. Maybe Steve Jobs will grow hair.