CES 2010 Microsoft keynote: Not much Windows Mobile, but Project Natal for Christmas
If you believe the forecast, there does not appear to be much hint of Windows Mobile in the air tonight at CES -- this even though Samsung was among the smartphone manufacturers demonstrating new commitments to WM6. Whether or not Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talks about it tonight, the topic on many people's minds when he's through will be Windows Mobile. Where's the momentum? Is there any momentum? "Wait until March" will be as good an answer as "No."
8:11pm PT: "When something like Project Natal comes along, it rips up your rulebook and throws it away."
FCC to delay broadband plan report to Congress, says Commissioner
February 17 had been the deadline for the US Federal Communications Commission to deliver a report to Congress specifying the details of its national broadband plan -- a proposal that would require new federal regulations, and potentially new legislation. But a spokesperson for FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell told Betanews Wednesday evening that Chairman Julius Genachowski had personally informed him the report would not make the deadline.
"I am disappointed that the FCC's broadband team is unable to deliver a national broadband plan to Congress by the statutorily mandated deadline," reads Comm. McDowell's statement this evening. "At the same time, I appreciate that Chairman Genachowski shared the news of his decision with me Tuesday afternoon. Once we receive a draft plan, I hope the document will reflect the benefit of the additional time being prepared to prepare it."
iPhone to get FLO TV, needed a bigger battery to make it work
Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile digital television platform is finally coming to Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, but through an extraordinary and most unusual vehicle: a popular slip cover / battery pack combo that also doubles the unit's battery life.
It's an already existing iPhone add-on called the Mophie Juice Pack -- a slip cover that fattens the iPhone and iPod Touch a bit, but also lets it run long enough for you to watch a movie in its entirety, and leave some juice left over for conversations. At CES this afternoon, FLO TV announced an agreement with Mophie to integrate its service into Juice Pack.
Pioneer in-car multimedia center will leverage iPod, iPhone platform
At this moment at CES 2010 in Las Vegas, Pioneer is debuting an in-car entertainment platform designed to provide a full-color console and controls to users of Apple's iPods and iPhones.
It's called the "AVH" series, and Pioneer's top-of-the-line model (designed to replace the standard-size electronics consoles featured in some vehicles) is called the P4200DVD. Those latter letters are there for a reason: The system will playback DVD video, evidently using the audio system and layout of the automobile (if there's six speakers, it'll use them).
CES 2010: How soon will Nexus One be eclipsed?
The reviews are mixed on the Nexus One, the new smartphone -- or, as Google puts it, "superphone" -- announced by Google yesterday. It's an Android 2.1 phone for the T-Mobile network, for now, with availability on Verizon Wireless in April. On Betanews, the decision is split between whether Google has signaled the next revolution, and the revolution having already started without Google. The question today is, how long is Nexus One going to be the model of everyone's dreams, and by "how long," I mean, how many hours? That's the subject of my conversation this afternoon with Betanews contributing analyst Carmi Levy.
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Would anyone care for a 'superphone?' Google's platform play with Nexus One
The new Google Nexus One shows 'Live Wallpaper,' with its own interactive water puddle.
The trifecta that was Apple's iPhone introduction in January 2007 was on account of the successful introduction of a software platform and a truly revolutionary device, coupled with a massive surge in the functionality of iTunes -- a compelling device on an intriguing platform, which itself was on a respected and advanced platform. Matching that achievement quite literally may never be possible for a smartphone, but it may be possible for something else.
Bowling for smartbooks: Qualcomm's and Lenovo's bid for a new platform
The hope of small processor manufacturers like ARM, and connectivity platform makers like Qualcomm, is to carve a space for themselves in the price/performance spectrum someplace in-between the smartphone and the netbook, in an area some analysts have said is too narrow to start an empire. They hope to build an Web-enabled computer without the aid of traditional players such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, and they want to do it on their terms.
Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon chipset platform (actually just a single chip) just before CES 2009, with the intention of building CDMA-enabled smartbooks that run on batteries and power up through adaptors like cell phones, but can surf the Web, use Web apps, and play movies like netbooks. Snapdragon is centered around single-core ARM processors timed at around 1 GHz.
At first, Qualcomm mentioned Windows Mobile along with Android as the operating systems that would lead the way for Snapdragon-based devices. Indeed, WM6 provided the software platform for one of Snapdragon's first entries in January 2009, Toshiba's TG01. But since then, the Windows Mobile talk has died down; the next big entry for Snapdragon thus far has been the Acer Liquid.
CES 2010 Flashpoints: The platforms for the next decade in electronics
The world does not run on gadgets. Consumers purchase gadgets as investments in the functionality that they provide. Gadgets are handles to their underlying platforms.
Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show is a gauge of the directions in which platforms are moving, a barometer of the evolution of functionality. Sure, we see plenty of neat toys, many of which end up either being for kids or making us feel like kids. And sure, we hear plenty of loosely coupled metaphors that play to our need to be excited, like how a certain device unleashes connectivity or harnesses the power of disruption -- phrases that read like they were assembled using that word game you play with refrigerator magnets.
Nokia adds 14 patents to complaint, citing Jobs' 'Great artists steal' comment
Responding to Apple's vehement countersuit against Nokia, in which it leveled 13 patent infringement allegations against Nokia's 10, last December 29, Nokia added 14 more to the mix, including for concepts that may perhaps be as integral to the construction of modern telephones as power-conserving voltage-controlled oscillators, and a sensor that de-activates touchscreens while the phone is held against the ear.
The assertion made in Nokia's latest amended complaint is that Apple based the design of the iPhone around Nokia concepts, implying that Apple may have actively reverse-engineered Nokia's phones to do so -- rather than stumbling upon the same concepts accidentally in its own research. Upholding the notion that Apple would rather steal than innovate, Nokia cites a 1996 statement made by Apple's then-former-CEO Steve Jobs, in a PBS documentary by Robert X. Cringely entitled "Triumph of the Nerds."
The world does need a tablet, but not the one you're thinking
The problem with a manufacturer creating a new market is that it must demonstrate a latent need among a sizable plurality of potential consumers, for a product they don't know they need. No one ever needed an iPhone...until round about January 2007.
The current debate about the probable Apple tablet, or tablet-like, product, whose formal announcement is slated for January 26 in San Francisco, is really about whether another latent, iPhone-like need actually exists, or whether Apple may be tapping for oil where there is no oil -- something the company has done in its history, more than once. The debate was joined last week by our Betanews contributors: independent analyst Carmi Levy, who argued in favor of breaking through the smokescreen of hype and reassessing our priorities with respect to personal and business needs and wants; and former Jupiter analyst Joe Wilcox, who argued that Apple has not demonstrated a market need for the type of device that most reasonable speculation and analysis projects an Apple tablet device to be.
AT&T: The end of the wireline telephone is in sight
In an historic public response to the US Federal Communications Commission's request for comments regarding its forthcoming National Broadband Plan, due before Congress on February 17, AT&T acknowledged not the forthcoming obsolescence, but the current obsolescence of the wireline telephone system. Without shame, it even applied the once-degrading acronym "POTS" (Plain Old Telephone System), interchangeably with "PSTN" (Public Switched Telephone Network), to refer to the one-time marvel of technology that defined its predecessor, the Bell System, in the 20th century.
But the new AT&T went a huge step further than to denigrate its stepchild. In its filing dated December 21 and released Tuesday (PDF available here), the company called upon the Commission to begin consideration of a formal deadline for the transition of all wireline customers to a wireless system comprising broadband and IP-based connectivity -- refraining from referring to 3G or 4G services in a cellular context. AT&T's reasoning: Carriers can no longer afford to maintain the old network while simultaneously building out the new one.
Live poll: Is the cloud your business' next killer app?
0(online surveys)
The hosting of software and services in leased, private clouds is already a reality for many businesses worldwide. But the synchronization of confidential data is the next big step, and while technologists declare "the cloud" as something that is happening, like climate change, CIOs aren't always ready to take the plunge.
But services such as Microsoft Exchange synchronization are already among us. Is that a cloud app? Recently, Microsoft has been saying yes, as it rolls out its own leased Exchange hosting services to many classes of business, including SMBs. The difference between hosted Exchange and Exchange Server is that it's Microsoft that's doing the hosting. And in synchronization services such as those being constructed by Google and others, employees' data could follow them wherever they go, from their PCs to their Android phones and on the road. Almost like Eeyore, users wouldn't be able to escape the cloud over their heads.
Russinovich: A possible cure for exploitable heap corruption in Windows 7
The key to a huge plurality, if not a majority, of exploits that have plagued Microsoft Windows over the past two decades has been tricking the system into executing data as though it were code. A malicious process can place data into its own heap -- the pile of memory reserved for its use -- that bears the pattern of executable instructions. Then once that process intentionally crashes, it can leave behind a state where the data in that heap is pointed to and then executed, usually without privilege attached.
Yet it doesn't take a malicious user to craft a heap corruption. Multithreaded applications that make use of collective heaps become like multiple users of a single, distributed database. Without intensive methodologies to maintain vigilance, making sure one thread doesn't corrupt an application's heap for all the other threads, the app collapses into something more closely resembling the more colloquial meaning of the metaphor "heap." Microsoft would like to present its development environments and runtime frameworks as providing these vigilance services on behalf of the developer, so she can concentrate on her application. But in recent years, what developers don't know about what's going on under the hood, has come back to bite them.
Lessons learned by IT in 2009 #2: Microsoft sheds its 'Dr. Evil' costume
The personification of evil in the modern world: Dr. Heinz Doofenschmirtz, from Disney Channel's "Phineas and Ferb."
The problem with characterizing any kind of business, including information technology, as "war" is that it immediately polarizes the opinions not only of the war's practitioners but also of its observers. Once an enemy is formally declared, the concept of "If you're not with us, you're against us" becomes self-fulfilling.
Inevitably, since everyone's hands emerge equally bloodied, the original, unifying sense of polarity that marked the outset of the war, becomes lost. Any ethic or principal or qualitative substance that characterized one side from the other(s), is usually compromised. Before long, people forget what it was they were fighting for, or fighting against. And often, the war gets cancelled for lack of funds.
Firefox 3.6 RTM delivery in Q1 perceived as delay
Way back last August, the Mozilla organization's developers set their sights on November 2009 as a release timeframe for Firefox 3.6, the latest round of functionality improvements to the most popular cross-platform Web browser. That date had been unofficially bumped forward to December, but that was before the release of the earliest betas to the general public slipped past the original mid-October release window -- it ended up going live just before Halloween.
The delays in the development of Firefox happened then, not now. But with only three days left in the year, bloggers came to realize that general availability (GA) of 3.6 had slipped from its end-of-year targets set way back last summer. This despite obvious notices that a planning meeting on the subject of setting a date, was set for January 5.
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