After covering Apple’s music event this morning, I met with Palm and got a hands-on look at the company’s new Pixi smartphone, which Palm announced early today
I was a bit underwhelmed by the actual phone, which will be the second to run Palm’s WebOS software. But the Pixi, which Palm plans to launch before the holidays, will have at least one new features that will be very cool.
I found a lot to like about Palm’s Pre, the Pixi’s WebOS predecessor. One of the features that I liked most was something Palm calls Synergy. The feature collects and combines address book information from a variety of sources and displays them all together.
After complaining repeatedly in my column, and to my friends and elsewhere about my Internet service, I’m finally switching providers.
Here’s the surprise: I’m switching to Comcast.
After writing a recent column about my frustration with Earthlink as my broadband provider and with my lack of other choices, I went around scrutinizing those choices more closely. Read the rest of this entry »
VentureBeat’s Paul Boutin reports today on a new smartphone sales report, but methinks he missed the real news.
The new data comes from IDC. Boutin makes much of the fact that according to IDC’s report — at least as quoted by him; I’ve only seen the press release, not the full report — the BlackBerry Curve was the top-selling smartphone in the United States last quarter, outselling the iPhone 3G S.
“Despite all the buzz, attention and money thrown at iPhones and anything to do with iPhones, the new iPhone 3G S came in second,” Boutin writes.
On Saturday, the Merc ran an edited version of my interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s chief game designer. Below you’ll find the full text of my interview, which took place at the E3 video game conference in early June.
(Note, although this is the raw interview transcript, a translator was in the room with Miyamoto and me. The answers were actually the translator’s English translations of what Miyamoto said.
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Q: What was interesting to me … It really seems that Microsoft and Sony have started to zero in on what has distinguished the Wii and why the Wii has become such a popular game device, and that is the natural movements that you can do with the Wii remote. The question I have is what Nintendo thinks about this new interest from Sony and Microsoft in trying to duplicate and possibly improve upon what you’ve done with the Wii remote and Motion Plus?
I’ll write a more complete review tomorrow, but here’s what I think of the T-Mobile myTouch 3G so far:
Pros
Good size. Much slimmer than the G1, the first T-Mobile Android phone. Fits more easily in the hand than the iPhone.
Virtual keyboard. This is something that was a big problem with the G1; you had to use its physical keyboard to enter text. With the latest version of Android, though, you get a virtual keyboard. And — a la the new iPhone OS — it’s available in landscape or portrait mode for most applications.
My colleague John Boudreau is feverishly writing a story about Apple’s earnings. But here’s my quick take:
1. Very good quarter for the Mac. Apple sold 2.6 million Macs in the quarter, coming within spitting distance of the most the company has ever sold in a quarter. Unit sales were up 4 percent from the same quarter last year.
That may not sound like much, but given the terrible economic environment in general and the slumping PC market in particular, the Mac results are solid. Read the rest of this entry »
I just received a review unit of the myTouch 3G, the soon-to-be-released Android-powered phone made by HTC for T-Mobile. I’ve been posting my first impressions of it on Twitter. You can read them in the widget below.
I’ll write up a longer, more complete first take/review later today.
That’s about all you can think after seeing the latest video game sales numbers from research firm NPD Group. NPD reported earlier today that U.S. retail sales of game merchandise fell 31 percent in June compared with the same month a year earlier.
The industry has posted year-over-year sales declines for every month since April. That fall-off has negated what started off as a fairly strong year, with sizeable growth through March.
I attended an intriguing dinner in Woodside last night.
The dinner was ostensibly to promote a new wireless router being launched by FON, a Spanish company. The router — dubbed the Fonera 2.0 — is somewhat interesting, adding some neat features that most comparable devices don’t have, such as the ability to upload files to the Internet while your computer is turned off and the ability to offer — and make money off of — a public hot spot without granting the hoi polloi access to files on you home network.
But the dinner was much more interesting for who attended than the product that inspired it. The guest list was a notable cross section of the digerati and tech blogosphere. Among those present: Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington; Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble; Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and more recently the founder of Gdgt, a new tech “community” site; Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a marketing manager at the social networking company; Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager; and Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC. Read the rest of this entry »
Google and T-Mobile this morning showed off the myTouch 3G, the second phone in the United States to run on the search giant’s Android operating system.
The companies debuted the phone at a small press event in San Francisco. The event started with a panel discussion that focused on the new phone, Android and the evolving role of carriers in an era of increasingly open phone platforms.
I got some hands-on time with the new phone and got a fairly favorable impression of it. The big difference between the myTouch and the G1, the first T-Mobile Android phone, is that the myTouch lacks a keyboard. Thanks to that, it’s slimmer, sleeker and seemingly lighter than the G1.
The new data comes from IDC. Boutin makes much of the fact that according to IDC’s report — at least as quoted by him; I’ve only seen the 
Good size. Much slimmer than the G1, the first T-Mobile Android phone. Fits more easily in the hand than the iPhone.
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