New York City, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area will be the next WiMAX deployments to go live, Sprint and Clearwire announced today. Before the end of 2010, the nationwide WiMAX network constructed by Clearwire and Sprint will be activated in four more major metropolitan areas, including Denver, Miami, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.

At the end of 2009, Sprint and Clearwire had about 30 WiMAX deployments open to the public in a dozen U.S. states, with plans to have more than 80 completed by the end of 2010.

Continue reading →

Last week, Sony, Dolby, and Netflix announced that the PlayStation 3 would be getting an all new native Netflix app today that supports 1080p streams and 5.1 channel audio without the need for a disc, as it turns out, the Nintendo Wii today has gotten a similar app update.

With a software update today and a free app from the Wii Shop Channel, the Nintendo Wii can stream Netflix Instant movies without a disc, too. Though the console supports neither High Definition nor surround sound, this update has much further-reaching consequences than the PlayStation 3's.

Continue reading →

Since the launch of the Apple iPad last January, print media has been reinventing itself for consumption on touch tablets. Magazines such as Glamour, GQ, Gourmet Traveller, The New Yorker, People, Popular Science, Vanity Fair, and Wired have all debuted subscription apps for iPad. E-books have also found a home on the iPad with apps from Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.

But in June, a huge splash came from the iPad app Flipboard. Heralded as "publishing revolution" by tech pundit Robert Scoble, and backed by high profile investors such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, Flipboard showed how the iPad could take Web data and make it into something more like a magazine.

Continue reading →

Audiogalaxy is back. But it's not the same service you knew a decade ago.

Audiogalaxy was one of the most elegant peer-to-peer filesharing services of the early 2000's, pairing a robust P2P client with a Web-based search and indexing system that made Napster look sloppy by comparison.

Continue reading →

Following last week's debut of "Kindle Singles," a new shorter-form publishing format exclusively for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, book retailer Borders has announced its own blogger-centric e-reader publishing platform called "Borders -- Get Published."

Powered by BookBrewer, "Get Published" will let independent authors publish and sell their e-books through the Borders e-book store in a quick and easy fashion. Borders is specifically targeting bloggers with this service, promising "Blog to e-book in 10 minutes."

Continue reading →

Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions.

Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software's global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera's competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already.

Continue reading →

"Extreme On" and "Extreme Off," off and on

"Total Media Extreme" bats an 0.333 in the name department. There is nothing particularly total or extreme about it, any more than a wall-based light switch provides "total illumination extreme," or a spoon provides "total cuisine extreme." In terms of functionality, it has less than your average 1990s VCR (countless numbers of which I somehow still own). With it, you get a preview window of the video signal from the STB (the tuner). You can start or stop recording from that window, and you can set a timer ahead of time to do the same; but it records whatever the STB happens to be tuned to at the moment.

Continue reading →

Netflix and Dolby Laboratories today announced that Netflix Instant streaming will be enabled with 5.1 channel surround beginning on October 18.

The first consumer device to support the higher quality audio will be the Sony PlayStation 3, but Netflix says the feature will eventually come to more hardware, like the many connected HDTVs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, video game consoles, and mobile handsets supporting Netflix streaming today.

Continue reading →

It's a follow-up question to another question posed in late August: "Is Apple the real U.S. PC market share leader -- or soon will be?" I ask both questions based on another: Is iPad a personal computer? I assert "Yes" based on function, but neither Gartner nor IDC, which both released preliminary third-quarter PC shipment data late yesterday, classify iPad as a PC. Right now, iPad isn't really counted anywhere, despite generating $2.17 billion in new revenue during the launch quarter. If iPad is counted as a PC, then based on analysts' projected tablet shipments and IDC's Q3 data, Apple could rank as No. 1 in the United States. What is iPad then?

Even without counting the tablet, Apple had a great quarter. In the United States, Apple shipped 1.999 million (why isn't it rounded up to 2 million) Macs during Q3, according to IDC. U.S. Mac shipments grew 24.1 percent year over year reaching 10.6 percent market share, up from 8.9 percent in Q3 2009. IDC put Apple at No. 3 in the United States, but Gartner asserted No. 4, with 1,831,664 units to Acer's 1,848,511 for a difference of 16,847 units. Gartner had U.S. Mac shipments growing 13.7 percent year over year with third-ranked Acer falling 21 percent. Apple's market share was 10.4 percent, according to Gartner. Either Apple sold a helluva lot of Macs during Q3 or the company stuffed the retail channel with stock; Gartner and IDC only measure shipments into the channel not out of it. Given Apple's usually tight inventory management, I'd wager on sales.

Continue reading →

Verizon Wireless and Apple today announced that the iPad will be available in 2,000 Verizon Wireless Stores on Thursday, October 28th.

But don't jump out of your skin just yet, it's not a CDMA iPad.

Continue reading →

Mountain View software company Intuit has launched a new version of its Quicken personal finance software that offers a slick new interface that comes from the Mint.com product engineering team the company acquired one year ago.

For the 20th anniversary of Quicken, Intuit has taken big steps to make the software more approachable for new users, more in tune with online financial services, and better at automatically categorizing transaction data it receives.

Continue reading →

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user's circle of friends into Bing's search results.

In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends' opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the "likes" of a user's friend list into search results.

Continue reading →

Apple was awarded a patent on technologies that would allow for the control of content sent and received to a mobile device, essentially filtering out any objectionable content within text messages. With "sexting" becoming ever more prevalent, a read through the patent which was published online Tuesday has lead some to call it the "anti-sexting" patent.

Parental controls are added to the device, which allows the administrator to choose how content is filtered. The filtering occurs as the message is typed, blocking certain text from being entered before it is sent. It could even be blocked altogether depending on the settings. In any case, the filtering occurs before the text is either sent or received.

Continue reading →

On 10/20/2010 at 10am Pacific, Apple will be hosting an event that promises to take a look at the Mac OS platform, which has been suffering a decreased amount of attention since iOS became a multi-device platform for Apple.

In typical Apple fashion, the press invitation, shown above, gives a clue as to the subject of the event. This time around, it's a picture of a Lion peering around the Apple logo. This image fits into Apple's OS X nomenclature, which has included Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.

Continue reading →

Surely that question isn't unexpected. Last week I asked "Will you buy Windows Phone 7?" and the majority of Betanews readers responding by e-mail said they will buy, while some said they will not. You've had two days since Windows Phone 7's official launch to explore the features and learn about the nine handsets that will be available later this month (across Europe) and next month (in the United States). Now it's time for you to share with the world which phone you will buy or would buy if available on your carrier. Please answer in comments or e-mail joewilcox at gmail dot com.

Fred Schultz was among the Betanews readers who wants to buy a Windows Phone 7 handset but won't because there is no device yet available for Verizon (in the United States, AT&T and T-Mobile initially will carry WP7 smartphones). Last night he e-mailed: "OK, now after seeing it I am obsessed, and a little PO'd that Verizon doesn't have it. I would buy it on day 1!" I asked: "Whoa, are saying you'll switch carriers and buy on November 8th, Fred?" To which he replied: "Too complicated, family plan, 5 cells, Fios TV and Internet at home, but I will threaten."

Continue reading →