Latest Technology News

I risk being tagged a curmudgeon, but I'll say it anyway: 3D television isn't ready for prime time. It isn't ready for your living room, either (or any living room, frankly).

Headlines claiming 3D TV to be the greatest thing since the creation of 2D TV, are sadly more than a little hyperbolic, and I wish the industry would ease back on the PR push to get us to replace our still-new LCD and plasma televisions with 3D versions.

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Now that buzz about Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC has quieted a bit, I'm ready to pipe in with some contrarian analysis. I agree with other pundits suggesting that the lawsuit is competition by litigation, where Apple hopes to scare off mobile manufacturers from licensing Android. Surely some handset manufacturers will pull back, but they would be foolish to do so. For other existing and potential Android licensees, the lawsuit is a get out of jail free card. Apple's patent case should embolden, not restrain them. There may never be a better time to license Android than now.

Apple claims infringement of 20 patents related to iPhone's user interface. Engadget's March 2nd patent breakdown is a must-read clinical analysis. But there's more to competition by litigation than the actual patents. Lawsuits often aren't so much about what's right but what lawyers think they can prove; often the winner tells the more believable story, even in patent cases. Similarly, much strategy goes into lawsuits -- how they're presented, where they're filed and when. Then, of course, there is whom. In this case, Apple took on HTC and not Google. Now why is that?

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One of Microsoft's major justifications for the Yahoo search deal is scale. CEO Steve Ballmer has repeatedly asserted that greater scale would allow Microsoft to improve search accuracy. Just last week he told Search Marketing Expo West attendees: "The ability to put together Yahoo's volumes and Microsoft's volumes and use that in a way that improves the experience more, let's call it all involved parties, we think is absolutely fantastic."

But the scale argument presumes that Microsoft and Yahoo would combine search share. The deal is in place but not fully implemented, and already Microsoft's Bing is taking away search share from Yahoo -- not Google. In February, Bing's US search share reached 11.5 percent, up from 11.3 percent month over month, according to ComScore. Yahoo share declined to 16.8 percent from 17 percent during the same time period. In June 2009 -- the month before announcing their search deal -- Yahoo search share was 19.6 percent and Microsoft 8.4 percent. But Microsoft already was rising, because of the Bing launch and millions of dollars in supporting advertising. For perspective, Google search share was 65.5 percent in February and 65 percent in June 2009.

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Last week, I wrote a little article about Microsoft's four-color approach to QR black-and-white barcodes, the still-in-beta Microsoft Tag, which was also related to the company's first official Android application.

I only briefly touched upon the many things that are being done with QR codes: advertisements that you scan with your cell phone camera to pull up related content on the Web, business cards that you can scan for an instant call to the card's owner, or boxes that you can scan for an instant Web-based list of contents.

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A permanent injunction against Microsoft selling versions of Word that contain XML editing ability effectively remains in place today, after a shot-in-the-dark appeal by Microsoft of its appeals loss last December was shot down Wednesday by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Although Microsoft is no longer distributing versions of Word or Office with an XML editor that a jury found infringed upon the patents of former development partner i4i, it made a face-saving effort to change the record of history. Such a change would have shown that Microsoft did not borrow the ideas behind a Word plug-in that i4i demonstrated, for its own purposes, knowing that i4i held a patent on those ideas.

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Despite the fact that game console manufacturers still drive studios toward exclusivity for individual titles, so that a popular Xbox 360 game isn't available for PlayStation 3 and vice versa, developers within those studios are insisting more and more upon cross-platform flexibility and portability. While they may be restricted to one console, they don't want those borders to extend to computers or to handsets.

For this reason, the Khronos Group has become more and more important to developers, and OpenGL is no longer being perceived as some kind of fallback standard, as in the phrase, "Your graphics use only OpenGL. Today, OpenGL is developers' ticket to portability between PCs, consoles, and handsets, and it's the only technology shining a ray of hope for cross-console portability should it ever become politically feasible.

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Namco, one of video gaming's most iconic brands, today announced a new cross-platform game engine called UniteSDK, which will let gamers play with one another irrespective of the platform they're playing their games on.

A user playing a UniteSDK-based game on their iPhone, for example, will be able to play against a PC user, who will be able to play against a Mac user, and so forth.

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With just six days to go before the National Broadband Plan is due before Congress, the Federal Communications Commission today launched a pair of consumer tools -- an app for iPhone/Android, and a Web-based reporting tool -- to help inform both consumers and the Commission itself about broadband conditions across the US.

The mobile application bundles the Ookla Speed Test (a.k.a., Speedtest.net) and Network Diagnostic Tool together into a single package simply branded "FCC Test." Users can check their downlink/uplink speeds and network latency against different US-based servers, and can then export the results as a .CSV file. The FCC says it may use the data collected from the Mobile Broadband Quality Test to analyze coverage and quality on a geographic basis across the US, but it does not endorse one particular testing application over another, so there may be more tests rolled into the app in the future.

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The nice thing about the Internet, or so I've been told, is that it has all this information. Perhaps you've noticed this lately, but the big problem has been that there's no one way to get at this information with any kind of consistency.

Supposedly Google is the "portal" for most of the world's information, which may be why so many people find Betanews by typing "Betanews" in Google. In one respect, you might expect Google to have an interest in creating that consistent methodology for getting at information. On the other hand, given that so many folks depend on Google Search just as it is now, you could see how Google might very easily come to the conclusion that there's no new benefits to be gained through improving its software, just to keep the user base it already has.

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Following up on last week's beta release of Opera Mini 5 for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, Opera software today launched Opera Mini 5 for the Android platform.

With Mini 5, Opera Software has managed to make a cross-platform browser that provides an almost uniform experience across all the operating systems it runs on. Today's release on Android feels almost identical to the version I tested last week.

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So it's been a few weeks since Google Buzz launched, and because I'm a good little geek-soldier who eats his own (figurative) dog food, I've invested lots of time to learn how it works and, more importantly, how it can work for me. Although I'm doing my best to be an optimist, I can't seem to warm up to Buzz. Yes, folks, I think I'm falling out of like with Google's new social media darling service.

Or, to be blunt, Google Buzz sucks.

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The danger with waging a populist political war is in potentially boiling down one's message to such a degree that it ends up insulting and patronizing the very people the message is targeting. The case in point could not be made clearer this afternoon in Washington, DC, as The Hill's Kim Hart first discovered: A handful of otherwise unnoticeable protestors outside the headquarters of the National Association of Broadcasters erected an 18-foot inflatable pig, bearing the message, "Fair Pay for Musicians."

The pig has become the mascot of the MusicFirst Coalition, the performers' rights agency that collects and distributes royalties. For the last few years, MusicFirst has campaigned extensively against the decades-old exemption of terrestrial radio broadcasters (as opposed to Internet radio) from paying performers' royalties. Stations continue to pay royalties to rights holders, which in the end, include many of the recording industry institutions also represented by MusicFirst.

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FileMaker Pro 11 left beta testing for general release on Tuesday, adding a host of new capabilities for better productivity in database use, faster database creation, and easy production of eye-catching charts.

Now updated for Microsoft's Windows 7 and Apple's Macintosh native Mac OS X "Cocoa" platform, FileMaker Pro is the only software in its category that runs on both Windows and Mac, noted Ryan Rosenberg, vice president, marketing and services for FileMaker, Inc., in a briefing for Betanews.

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Yesterday, Samsung launched its 2010 line of 3D TVs, which includes LED, LCD, and plasma screens between 46" and 65", with prices that start at $1,999 and go up to $6,999. Today, Panasonic added its products into the mix at a launch event in New York City with partners Best Buy, 20th Century Fox, and DirecTV.

The event marked the debut of a 3D home theater package that will sell exclusively at Best Buy that includes a 50" Panasonic Viera 3D plasma TV (VT20- $2,499), a Panasonic 3D Blu-ray player (BDT-300 - $399) and one pair of active shutter glasses for 3D viewing. It's comparable to the package Samsung announced yesterday, except that it comes with one fewer pair of 3D glasses. The whole package will go for $2,899, starting today.

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Windows Mobile phones continue to bleed US subscribers, with Android devices picking up most of the lost subscriber share. Can you say free falling? Today, ComScore released standard handset and smartphone data for the three-month period of November 2009 to January 2010. ComScore designates the platforms by vendor. Microsoft smartphone subscriber share fell to 15.7 percent from 19.7 percent three months earlier. Meanwhile, Google rose to 7.1 percent from 2.8 percent during the same time period.

What about iPhone, for which American bloggers and journalists are seemingly obsessed? If Apple is gaining smartphone subscribers, it's not substantially showing in the data. Subscriber share rose from 24.8 percent to 25.1 percent, which is statistically negligible. Meanwhile, Research in Motion slightly climbed -- to 43 percent from 41.3 percent.

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