Two of the biggest sellers of smartphones—phones that can also check email and surf the Web—warned that their quarterly results were worse than expected this week. Palm on Monday blamed its poor quarter on weak demand for its smartphones; Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, said Tuesday night that it sold 300,000 fewer phones than it anticipated. Will you buy a Storm? The question: Are the slow sales a response to the economic downturn or a rejection of specific products? There’s still an “insatiable lust” for smartphones, says Ramon Llamas, an analyst with research company IDC. For example, RIM’s...
Looks like for once I am in agreement with The New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue, who eviscerated the new Blackberry Storm device in his review published earlier today. “But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud. The first sign of trouble was the concept: a touchscreen BlackBerry. That’s right — in its zeal to cash in on some of that iPhone touch screen mania, R.I.M. has created a BlackBerry without a physical keyboard. Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a...
While today is not officially Turkey Day, I will warn you in advance that it's going to be a theme running through today's column, like gravy through a poorly-constructed dam of mashed potatoes. So to speak. And yes, this will include discussion of the recent Sarah Palin video, but before we get to that, we've got other turkeys to deal with first. Ben Franklin notwithstanding (who wrote his daughter a letter suggesting among other things that the wild turkey was a more appropriate symbol for America than the bald eagle), the word "turkey" has come to denote, in a slang...
Just a week after the release of Glue from NY-based AdaptiveBlue, they have announced the launch of Glue for the iPhone. The iPhone version of Glue might even be more useful than the web browser version. The basic idea is that you can browse you favorites and your friend's Glue usage as well. There's also a tab to view popular items in a category which helps when your friends aren't around. What makes this app actually useful is the ability to be standing in a bookstore or movie rental shop, call up the Glue app and bingo, you get...
Filed under: Casting, Reality-FreeWhen family members appear on each other's TV shows -- if they're a show biz family, of course -- sometimes the results are great. And sometimes they're not. Jerry Van Dyke appeared twice on The Dick Van Dyke Show as Rob's brother Stacey, and he was terrific. (Much better than he was on My Mother The Car).Tyne Daly popped up on Wings, playing scenes with her brother Tim, and again, it worked out great. On the other hand, when Martin Sheen guested on Two and a Half Men in 2005, it was a dud. I don't know,...
When the highlight of the evening is Twitter CEO Ev Williams meeting faded hip-hop star MC Hammer, you know the night was a waste. Indie-music consultant Corey Dennis reports that the event "had ten actual music industry people there, tops." MySpace didn't have much to celebrate, either: It has yet to appoint a figurehead CEO to its MySpace Music faux joint venture. The only thing confirmed about Courtney Holt, the MTV executive widely rumored to be taking the job, is his gender. (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)...
If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business? I asked that question in Wired five years ago, and I still don't know the answer. Since then, eager-to-please Wi-Fi startups have gone the way of boutique ISP service. AT&T, once broken up by law for being an evil monopoly, has reassembled itself into the dominant telecom brand again — bad service and all. This morning, a press release out of Texas announced that AT&T will acquire privately held Wayport, which operates 10,000 hotspots at locations from McDonald's to the Four Seasons. For $275,000,000...
The Meizu M8, famous for essentially being a Chinese iPhone, will launch in China on November 30 and eventually trickle over to our shores for the holidays. The camera runs Windows Mobile and includes a 3-megapixel camera, FM radio, and EDGE. It will also have Wi-Fi in some areas and cost $348 and $421 in the 8GB and 16GB models, respectively. I’m totally done with Meizu. I’ve seen this lump in person and now that they’ve confirmed that it will run Windows Mobile, even deliciously improved to look more Apple-y, I can safely say this will be a dud....
When the iPhone 3G debuted over the summer and Apple simultaneously launched its App Store, more than 10 million mobile applications were downloaded in the first weekend. With Google’s G1 and accompanying Android Market launching last week, lots of analysts (and developers and carriers thinking of supporting the device) are wondering how it stacks up. While similar to Apple, Google is making it fairly difficult to figure out specific numbers, mobile ad network Medialets has done some analysis of the data that is available to provide us with some approximate figures and trends. Google reports the number of app downloads...
Filed under: Programming, Reality-FreePrimetime Wednesday seems to be the toughest night of all for TV programmers. There's not one network that seems to do particularly well in the 8-9 p.m. time slot, and the juggling has begun. Fox yanked Do Not Disturb weeks ago, admitting it was a dud. Now the Brad Garrett-Joely Fisher sitcom Til Death will be off the air for two weeks, effective immediately. In that time slot, instead, we'll be seeing more House, albeit repeats. Still, you watch, those reruns will do markedly better than the sitcoms did.Til Death, to be frank, has regressed this year....
