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Is Browsing a Catalog More Fun on a Tablet?

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:34:16 +0000

Unsolicited catalogs take up a frustratingly large amount of space in my snail mail, and I can’t remember the last time I ordered from one. Yet there’s something relaxing about sitting down and flipping through colorful, glossy pages to admire an ensemble from Anthropologie, read a recipe from Williams-Sonoma or catch up on trends at Nordstrom.

[ See post to watch video ]

Catalogs are ideally suited to a device that encourages people to sit back and relax while using it: the tablet. And in the past year, digital versions of catalogs—and more specifically, apps that pull together many free catalogs in one place—have found a home on iPads, Android tablets and Kindle Fires.

This week, I tested three free catalog-aggregating apps to see how well they replaced paper: Catalog Spree by Padopolis for iPad, which includes fast navigation tools; Google Catalogs for iPad and Android tablets, which offers the most content; and TheFind’s Catalogue app for iPad and Kindle Fire, which has the cleverest way of opening a Web page when you’re ready to buy something. In these digitized catalogs, there are direct links from items to the websites that sell them.

New tablet apps like Google Catalogs let users browse many catalogs in one place.

Each digital-catalog app excels at something different. Catalog Spree lets you clearly mark favorite items and their descriptions with yellow circles—as you might do in a physical catalog. Google Catalogs lets people create collages of various items that can be shared with friends via email or publicly with others who use the app.

The Catalogue app displays weekly email offers along with a brand’s catalog and offers a Visualizer tool that virtually places an item in the viewfinder of your iPad camera, showing how a room might look with, say, a new mirror on its wall.

Visualizer worked well when I used it to see how a mirror looked on a blank wall in my living room. But a shelf that I tried in my bedroom looked a little fake.

Google Catalogs currently has the most content, with over 200 brands, compared with 113 in Catalog Spree and 70 in Catalogue. But Catalog Spree and Catalogue have two upfront advantages: Both were recently updated to look better when used with the new iPad’s screen, and both enable sharing with Facebook.

A Google spokeswoman said that a Google Catalogs update for the new iPad is coming soon and that social elements are a priority and on the road map.

All the catalog apps have smart ways of opening brand websites right within their apps, making it easier to buy things. I particularly liked the way TheFind’s Catalogue app did this: Users slide a window shade-like “pull” tab up to reveal the Web page where they can buy the item.

One of my favorite hidden design features in the Catalog Spree app was a quick way to see all catalog pages as thumbnail images when I pinched my thumb and pointer finger together. This helped me quickly see the contents of the entire catalog so I could go directly to the page I wanted, saving me time when I was looking for something specific.

The Visualizer tool on TheFind’s Catalogue can virtually place an item from a catalog in the viewfinder of an iPad camera so users can see it in a room.

Though these apps are free, the catalog brands can learn how people use them—though this data is aggregated and not tied to specific users. For example, an app knows if you linger on the Frontgate catalog page with the glass-inlay chaise table or open the SkyMall catalog five times in a month. If you’re nervous about this, you can use the apps without signing in, though extras like saving favorites or bookmarking pages won’t work.

The fact that a catalog is digital doesn’t solve the same old supply problems you might encounter with paper versions. I used Google Catalogs to find the Spring 2012 Look Book for a jewelry company called Stella & Dot, but when I tapped on a stylish pair of stone earrings, a message said they were no longer available. The same was true for the next two items I tried.

These apps keep digital catalogs available for viewing regardless of whether the items in them are sold out. Google has a policy of keeping catalogs in the app forever, allowing people to look back at past issues. Catalog Spree and Catalogue keep catalogs in the app for as long as a brand requests, though a spokesman for TheFind, which runs Catalogue, said it may pull a catalog based on content and season if a merchant doesn’t specify an expiration date.

I preferred browsing catalogs on full-size tablets with 10-inch displays, like the iPad or some Android tablets. That’s when it felt the most like paging through paper catalogs, and the items appeared larger. When I used the seven-inch Kindle Fire running Catalogue or the 5.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note running Google Catalogs, the experience wasn’t as rich.

To de-clutter the coffee table and ease online shopping, tablet catalogs are the way to go.

Write to Katie at Katie.boehret@wsj.com

As Skype Skips Through Approvals -- What's the Deal With the Deal?

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:50:17 +0000

As expected, the European Commission approved Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype late last week.

Next, the deal for the popular Internet communications company — which had previously been cleared by U.S. regulators — is likely to officially close later this week (paperwork!), said several sources close to the situation.

Now, of course, comes the hard part — which is whether Microsoft can successfully integrate the more nimble Skype into the belly of the software beast and allow it to thrive.

Some key questions:

How smoothly can Microsoft integrate Skype into its existing products, such as its unified communications platform, Outlook mail and Hotmail, Office, Messenger and Xbox Live? And, perhaps most of all, Windows Phone devices?

That said, will Skype also get to do what it needs for its own success beyond Microsoft? That includes working with mobile rivals Apple and Google, who now dominate the smartphone market, as well as many others. It has already managed to buy GroupMe group messaging start-up for $85 million, just months after its own acquisition in May.

And can the division — which will be led by Tony Bates, Skype’s CEO and now a Microsoft president — operate successfully located mostly away from the power center of Redmond, Wash.? Skype has a substantial office in Silicon Valley, as well as key engineering units in Estonia and Stockholm.

In that vein, will Microsoft be able to hold on to new talent like Bates and Skype’s geek squad, all of whom have substantial choices elsewhere? Like a lot of large tech companies, Microsoft is not known for being able to hold on to those who come in from the outside, in large part due to its insular culture of longtime execs.

In other words, how big a welcome will Microsoft’s other powerful presidents — such as Windows division head Steven Sinofsky — give Bates and company?

Viral Video: Netflix Pricing Becomes Conjoined Twin Drama

Kara Swisher — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:06:51 +0000

The CGI imps at Next Media Animation of Taiwan are at it again, with their unusual take on the controversy over Netflix’s recent pricing changes and its splitting of its video streaming and DVD-by-mail business (now called Qwikster).

Somehow those two businesses are portrayed as mutant Siamese twins. I have no idea why, but it works.

Enjoy:

A Tablet With a Keyboard

Walt Mossberg — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:52:13 +0000

I am going to purchase a tablet computer. I was thinking of buying the Asus Transformer tablet, as it has a keyboard add-on. What are your thoughts on this tablet?

I haven’t reviewed it, but the Transformer’s optional keyboard, which costs $150, is really a docking station that includes an extra battery and various ports.

If you just want a separate keyboard, you should know that other Android tablets, as well as Apple’s iPad, can connect easily to simple, less expensive wireless keyboards.

Is it true that Apple has stopped including iDVD, its longtime DVD-creation app, on new Macs? Has the program been killed?

Yes and no. According to the company, new Macs with the Lion operating system no longer come with iDVD or another former standard program, iWeb. However, both programs are still included in the $49 iLife suite, which is sold separately. Apple defends the decision to drop iDVD on grounds that more people are sharing photos and videos online and not on disks. The company also has dropped DVD drives from some of its popular laptops.

You provided instructions on how to delete old email addresses on Gmail. I have the same problem with Apple Mail, only the old addresses aren’t in the address book but still appear when I type their names in the To field. How do I delete these?

Apple Mail suggests previously used email addresses even if they aren’t in your address book. To get rid of one, accept it, so it appears in the To field. Then select it and click on the downward-pointing triangle at the right. A menu will appear. From that menu, choose “Remove from Previous Recipients List.”

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columnsat the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Here's What a Display Ad in Your Gmail Looks Like

Peter Kafka — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:15:02 +0000

It looks like any other ad you’d typically ignore on the Web!

This screenshot comes from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land, who got Google to acknowledge that yes, it is indeed playing around with conventional-looking Web ads in its mail service, which typically only offers text ads: “We’re always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content.”

Sterling’s post sent many of us Web/ad nerds scurrying to our Gmail accounts to see if we could find evidence of Google’s experiment, but I have yet to see any others. If you find one, please pass it along to me at (peter@allthingsd.com) and I’ll share it with everyone else.

Here’s another example, courtesy of Shyam Somanadh. His pithy description: “First image ad in my Gmail right panel. I had a sudden Hotmail moment there.”

And a broken ad, from Nicholas Wilhelm’s phone:

And one from Hunter Hebert:

And Jeremy Day:

And Rob McAninch:

Don't Want to Sign In to Yahoo? That's Okay, Use Your Facebook or Google ID.

Liz Gannes — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:12:52 +0000

Yahoo this week will begin allowing users to participate on its properties without signing in to a Yahoo account. It’s a significant move for the company, which had for a long time incessantly popped up login screens (as pictured) whenever visitors tried to do seemingly anything on the site.

Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

What Facebook Messages Means and Why You Should Care

Liz Gannes — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:18:57 +0000

Facebook yesterday launched an interesting product that tries to get at the heart of how highly connected people communicate casually. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others from the company reiterated over and over again (see my live notes; the repetition is excessive) that the product is “not email.”

In large part, that’s because if Facebook Messages were evaluated as an email system, it would look terrible. There’s no incorporation of IMAP so you can access your mail from other clients, there’s no way to save drafts, there’s no way to cc people, there are no folders.

Even more jarring, there are no subject lines or time stamps, and you only ever have one continuous conversation with a contact. Instead, like instant messaging, when you type a message and press enter, it gets set loose to your contact.

But maybe Facebook has a point, and we don’t need all that cc, bcc gobbledygook for personal communications. Maybe we just want to more casually correspond with each other. And some of these email conventions have probably outlived their usefulness. Facebook says prior to the change its top three subject lines were blank, “Hi!” and “Yo.”–if that tells you anything.

The problem is, the way Facebook Messages works is a bit complicated and unfamiliar. You can see why the company is rolling it out very, very slowly–it’s the kind of new experience that aggravates people and makes them whiny.

Facebook Messages treats the correspondence between you and another person as a single conversation, whether it’s by IM, within the Facebook Messages interface, received as an email or as a Facebook-delivered SMS. Often those channels overlap. Messages that are not from Facebook members, and those from entities other than individuals, get shunted to a second-tier inbox.

Yesterday I was playing with the new Messages, first within the Messages interface on the Facebook Web site, then on IM on the Web site, and then via text message when I closed my computer. A few things confused me–for instance, chat is disabled and disappears when you go into Messages. I guess it’s redundant to have the same conversation in two places. But as someone who felt like I was in an IM chat, it was super weird.

Another thing that’s odd is that those life-time conversation threads only really work for one-to-one relationships. Group messages seem like a little bit of an afterthought; for instance, group threads show a split-screen image of two of the participants’ profile pics, no matter how many people participate. The system is prejudiced against people who email you from outside Facebook (say, your mother emails your @Facebook.com address from an @Yahoo.com address), until you explicitly say you want to see them in your main Facebook inbox. If a person sends you messages from two email addresses, Facebook doesn’t allow you to help it understand that they are the same person.

While I will probably acclimate to the Messages experience over the next few weeks, one thing that’s going to continue to be very annoying, and accentuated by Messages, is redundant Facebook notifications. Already a problem for those of us who use Facebook on multiple platforms like the Web and a phone app, redundant notifications run rampant in Facebook Messages. Say someone sends you a message from the Web site and checks the box to send it to your phone. Without changing any defaults, you could get a text message from Facebook, an email message from Facebook, a new IM on the Web site and a flag that you have a new message in the Facebook nav bar.

I spoke to Messages product manager Dan Hsiao yesterday, and he said the team had thought carefully about trimming down notifications but decided it would be worse if users weren’t alerted to the fact that they had a message.

Hsiao said that his mantra in building the product was to make it “email compatible but not email complete.”

I think there will be two main outcomes from the new Facebook Messages:

Other Web mail outfits will (and should) better integrate their email and instant messaging conversations, based on Facebook’s example. Folks like Gmail can go one better, and incorporate additional forms of communication like voice messages. Facebook is right–there’s no reason this shouldn’t all be condensed and scannable.
Provided the Facebook Messages product doesn’t have major usability issues, it will continue to supplant email, especially for young people. There will be a bigger distinction between formal, especially corporate, correspondence via email and personal messages. If you think about it, we all already make a distinction between messages from people and messages from mailing lists, and Facebook is right to say the ones from people are more important.

The thing is, Facebook Messages splits out a part of the communication experience that is, for most, a part of other tools and services.

Facebook Messages won’t replace email for people who use email for professional purposes, people who prefer desktop mail clients or people who firmly associate themselves and their archive of emails with an existing address.

Rather than killing Gmail (and its much larger competitors Hotmail and Yahoo), Facebook Messages will probably have the biggest impact on usage of IM services like AIM and GChat. The only thing the new product will fully replace is the previous version of Facebook Messages–which, by the way, has 350 million active users, and four billion messages sent per day.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Is My Email Address My Identity?

Liz Gannes — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:46:31 +0000

Google and Facebook may act like toddlers fighting over a toy, but there is a lot more going on in their recent too-public spat about user emails.

Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen.

But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here. Facebook has arrangements to share user email addresses with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Google has in the past impeded Orkut users from exporting emails to Facebook. The reason this is playing out this way is because of the contentious relationship between Facebook and Google, and Google’s planned competitor to Facebook, a.k.a. Google Me.

As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?

If you peel back the back-and-forth, the substance of Facebook’s argument is that Facebook users are on the service because it’s a social network, not an email application. When you use Facebook, your friends are identified by their (usually real) names, and you hardly ever see their email addresses. From Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal’s comment on TechCrunch:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network.

Facebook has a privacy setting that lets you decide who specifically can view your email address. But that’s just within the centralized system of Facebook; you don’t (yet) get to choose where your email address can be shared. Plus, as we all know, Facebook’s privacy settings can get rather complicated, and both we users and the company change them over time.

Say I have a business contact I don’t want to share my personal email with, and she goes and exports her Facebook email contacts so she can fill out her Yahoo Mail contact list. Those settings need to carry over. And even if they do, spam and invasions of privacy are pretty much inevitable.

But am I my email address? As someone who’s very recently changed jobs, I know firsthand that link can be broken. I registered for so many of the sites I use with my old work email, and my whole address book was locked up there too. Now I have to reconstruct those relationships with a new identity. But I can do it. I’m still myself, after all.

Probably all of you reading this have more than one email address, and often multiple people use the same email address or the same computer. There’s not a one-to-one link between self and email, and the overlaps are often confusing and annoying.

Besides email, other options for an identity token might be your phone number, your social security number, your Facebook user name or your fingerprint.

But email seems to be the agreed-upon best proxy for Web services. Companies like RapLeaf run their businesses on connecting and aggregating information about people based on identifying their valid email addresses (and incur concerns about the implications of getting all that data in one place and selling it).

The stakes in this battle are increasingly high. Both Facebook and Google want to be our identity on the Web. I stay logged in to Gmail and Facebook all day from my laptop, and reap the benefits of those services being integrated with other ones, whether it’s a related service like Google Calendar or a new doodad that I can use Facebook Connect to register for.

Both Facebook and Google are striving to do two things:

Represent us best by collecting our connections and experiences
Be our token to bring that identity the rest of the Web

So think about where this is going. Facebook last week introduced a single-sign-on feature for phones (first on select Android apps and soon iOS). The way this will work is when you open a participating app, you have the option to connect to Facebook and bring your identity and friends with you. So the first time you use the app, it knows you and your context. You can imagine if this were to extend to Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, and you were to get a phone that out-of-the-box got your Facebook account and then automatically set up your contacts, preferences, apps and anything else you want or need. It’s powerful stuff.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

No Facebook User Emails for Google–But Yahoo and Microsoft Already Have Access

Liz Gannes — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 02:06:47 +0000

Facebook and Google are hardly friends these days, and they’re having more and more trouble containing their dislike. (Maybe they should take a hint from Jimmy Kimmel and his National UnFriend Day campaign.)

Background: Last week, Google stopped allowing Facebook to help its users find their friends by importing their Gmail contacts list. Google said the move was about data portability and liberation, calling Facebook a “data dead end” because it wasn’t giving its users’ email addresses to Google.

Facebook yesterday found a workaround to re-enable Google contacts importing, and Facebook engineering lead Mike Vernal commented on TechCrunch at length under his own name, charging Google with hypocrisy for disallowing contact importing for Orkut last year and “limiting user choice.”

What’s funny, though, as sources have pointed out to us, is that Facebook actually does allow email importing, specifically to Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail (we checked AOL mail too, but couldn’t find it there).

This is no secret; Yahoo launched its Facebook email contact importer in March of this year. In a blog post at the time, senior product manager Rick Pal said,

Importing from Facebook is super simple…After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

Update: Microsoft confirmed through a spokesperson that its Windows Live users can import both Facebook and Gmail contacts, and said some nice stuff about its commitment to customer choice.

Access to user emails isn’t something Facebook gives just anyone. In fact, only a few partners can hook into them while the rest have to rely on users’ Facebook-formatted information available through Facebook Connect. That includes Google. The difference, according to a source, is that Yahoo and Microsoft asked nicely.

Please see my disclosure related to Facebook here.

Netflix May Let You Drop the Disc for the Web [UPDATED]

Peter Kafka — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 02:33:17 +0000

Netflix is still apologizing for things it said and did in Canada. It’s a cursed place! But the company’s latest mea culpa, via a blog post from CEO Reed Hastings, has a cool Easter egg: Netflix may offer customers a Web-only option soon.

“We are looking at adding a streaming-only option for the USA over the coming months,” Hastings writes. And that’s all he writes about the subject.

But that’s interesting, and likely inevitable. Hastings has been clear that Netflix (NFLX) is tranforming from a DVD-by-mail company to a Web service that may give you discs if you really want them.

It’s not a slam dunk, though. Netflix can give you just about any movie you want if you’re willing to wait for a DVD to show up in your mailbox. But its Web catalog has just a small slice of its physical catalog, perhaps 20 percent.

That’s fine, apparently, for people who signed up for the disc service at $9 a month–anything you get on the Web is gravy. But even assuming that Netflix charges Web-only customers much less per month, it’s hard to imagine how it can make a compelling offering–for now.

Then again, if it keeps paying out big money for licensing deals like the $1 billion Epix deal it inked last month, things could get more interesting, soon. UPDATE: Like this morning, for instance, when Netflix announced a new deal with NBC U that adds both network hits like Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, plus cable favorites like Battlestar Galactica, to its lineup.

If you have eight minutes, you can can get a summary of Hastings’s worldview and general plans, via an edited version of my interview with him at CES last January:

[ See post to watch video ]

IPad vs. Kindle. Who Wins?

Sarmad Ali — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:00:22 +0000

Steve Jobs said Wednesday that while Amazon (AMZN) has gone a great job with the Kindle, Apple (AAPL) plans to “stand on their shoulders” with the iPad’s e-reader functionality.

Bloggers quickly began speculating as to which device is better, with many pro-Kindle reviewers calling the reader less distracting, while the Apple camp cites the iPad’s multi-purpose nature as a selling point.

An iPad “does so much more–games, photos, videos, email,” wrote Fred Vogelstein in Wired. “I might eventually ditch my laptop for it too.”

GigaOm also sees the Kindle as a defunct device. “The Amazon Kindle is dead thanks to the rich media capabilities of the iPad as well as the full software-based keyboard,” Stacey Higginbotham wrote.

But are those bells and whistles distracting to those who just want to curl up with an e-book? Brad Stone wrote on Bits that the Kindle “will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period…when you read a book, you just don’t want to have email, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Apple iPad Event Liveblog

John Paczkowski — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:00:40 +0000

After months of feverish speculation and as many years of wishful thinking, Apple uncrated its tablet computer–the iPad–at an invitation-only event in San Francisco this morning.

Liveblog

9:13 am PT: Quite a scene here this morning; the queue for media credentials is nearly as long as some of the iPhone 3G launch lines I saw a few years back. Moments ago, an Apple PR rep slipped through the doors of the Yerba Buena Center to ask that the press waiting outside take two big steps back. The last time that happened to me, I was at a Jesus Lizard show.

9:54 am: The doors open and the press enters the event hall. Initially, at least, the scene is pretty crazy. “This is like the subway in New York,” an attendee behind me jokes. More like the subway in Tokyo, I think to myself.

A Bob Dylan soundtrack plays as media and guests file in. It’s momentarily interrupted by a “please take your seats, our event is about to begin” announcement.

10:00 am: Interesting stage set-up today: Instead of an empty stage or a simple table, there are a black leather chair and side-table. Lights are dimming….

And Steve Jobs takes the stage to a standing ovation.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical product, but first a few updates….A few weeks ago we sold our 250 millionth iPod…I didn’t want to let that moment pass without recognizing it.”

10:05 am: Jobs offers a quick overview of Apple’s retail operations and some of the new stores it has opened recently before moving on to the iTunes App Store. “A few weeks ago we announced that three billion applications had been downloaded from the App Store–that’s in 18 months…amazing.”
He notes, as he did in the company’s earnings release the other day, that Apple is now a $50 billion company.

Apple is a mobile devices company, says Jobs, “the largest mobile devices company in the world now. Larger than Sony’s mobile device business, larger than Samsung’s and, astonishingly, Nokia’s as well.”

10:07 am: A quick historical overview now. Jobs touches on the first PowerBook, introduced in 1991. He moves on to the MacBook and then the iPhone.

“All of us use laptops and smartphones, now. And the question has arisen lately: Is there room for a device in the middle?…We’ve pondered this question as well.”

This “middle” device, says Jobs, must be better at doing certain tasks than either the laptop or smartphone. If there’s going to be a third-device category, it must be better at browsing the Web, video, photos, music, etc.

“Some folks say this device is a netbook…. The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

10:10 am: But we have something that is, says Jobs, “and it’s called the iPad.”

Photos of the device appear on the giant screens. Very thin. Very slick. “IPad offers the best Web browsing experience there is–way better than laptops.” There is no camera that I can see. That’s not going to go over well with folks hoping for a device that supports video iChat.

10:13 am: Further details: The “iPad is a dream to type on,” Jobs says, pointing out its life-sized onscreen keyboard. It’s also an awesome way to enjoy media. iTunes, iTunes University and YouTube HD support are built in.

10:14 am: Jobs sits down to demo the device: “Using this thing is remarkable. It’s so much more intimate and capable than the laptop.” He loads Safari and surfs over to the New York Times (NYT). The iPad loads quickly and Jobs is able to easily navigate the page, loading stories and zooming in on articles.

10:15 am: Demonstrating landscape and portrait now. “This device adapts to the way I want to use it.”

Definitely an impressive browsing experience. Fast and elegant.

Now, an overview of Mail. Also elegant. Nice split-screen presentation. Hit compose, and a nice onscreen keyboard pops up. Jobs types out a message to his colleagues at Apple. Seems relatively easy.

10:19 am: Moving on to iPad’s photo capabilities. It supports iPhoto’s Events, Faces and Places features. It also offers built-in slideshows complete with soundtracks and transitions.

Running a slideshow demo, Jobs pauses and looks out at the audience with a Chesire Cat-wide grin. He’s clearly relishing this moment.

10:22 am:: The iTunes experience on iPad is much as you would expect. Similar, if not identical, to what the software currently offers. Calendar and Contacts apps are also nice and, again, similar to what you’d find on a MacBook or iPhone.

10:24 am: Demoing Google Maps now. The iPad supports Google Street View and the implementation is very slick.

10:25 am: Moving on to video. Jobs calls up an HD clip from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube and displays it in both portrait and landscape. That finished, he fires up iTunes and loads “Star Trek” to demo the device’s video features, scrubbing, etc. Then he shows us a clip from Pixar’s “Up.” Tap to go full-screen. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

10:27 am: Watching that is nothing like actually having one in your hands, says Jobs.

iPad is one-half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and comes with 9.7 inch IPS display–“very high-quality display”
Full capacitive multitouch
16GB-64GB flash storage
iPad is powered by our Apple’s custom silicon–“We did it inhouse and it just screams,” says Jobs.
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, accelerometer, compass.
Battery life: 10 hours.

“And in addition to 10 hours of battery life, iPad offers a full month of standby time,” Jobs notes. “It’s also a good environmental citizen,” he adds, noting that it’s a very green device.

10:31 am: Jobs invites Scott Forestall to the stage to talk about apps on the device.

“We built the iPad to run virtually every app in the App Store right out of the box,” Forestall says.

Evidently, a built-in pixel-doubling feature automatically scales iPhone apps to full-screen iPad apps.

10:35 am: Forestall runs an unmodified racing game from the App Store. He first demos it in the screen size of an iPhone. Then, using the pixel-doubling feature, he blows it out to full screen. Very slick.

“So you can buy the iPad, take it home, hook it up and download all your iPhone apps and run them with no problem at all,” he says.

Forestall announces a new iPhone software development kit specifically geared to the iPad. He notes that iPad-specific applications will be featured “front and center” in the App Store.
He then invites Gameloft’s Mark Hickey to the stage to demo some new games the company has developed using the new SDK.

Hickey notes that the iPad’s additional screen space is a boon for developers, particularly those building games. He demos a first-person shooter that showcases this. “We’re now able to interact with the game world in ways that we weren’t able to before.”

10:40 am: Next up, the New York Times. Martin Nisenholtz takes the stage to talk about its iPad effort.

After talking up the Times iPhone app, Nisenholtz segues to the the paper’s new iPad app: “We think we’ve captured the experience and essence of reading the newspaper.”

The app is largely what you’d expect. Tap to resize text, zoom, breaking news updates, video. “This is everything you love about the paper and everything you love about the Web.”

10:44 am: Now, a painting application called Brushes that was famously used to create a New Yorker cover.
The app is impressive enough on iPhone; it’s even more so on the iPad. It supports “playback” of paintings, and as the presenter notes, brings us one step closer to a real virtual painting studio.

10:46 am: EA’s Travis Boatman take’s the stage. The topic of his presentation: Need For Speed.

“Building for the iPad is a little bit like holding a high-def TV screen a few inches from your face,” he says.

The iPad version of Need for Speed boasts a number of touch-activated enhancements: Tap on the car to view its interior, tap on the rear-view mirror to look behind you.

10:52 am: Up next: MLB.com’s Chad Evans. He demos the outfit’s iPad-optimized app, which uses the device’s additional screen space to display video excerpts and MLB TV.

MLB TV can be streamed like and enhanced with onscreen stats and data. “This big display really allows us to create a much more immersive experience,” Evans says.

10:52 am: Forestall returns to the stage to make another brief plug for the SDK before Jobs takes over for him.
“Let me show you another one of our apps that we’re very excited about,” Jobs says. “An e-book reader.”

Behind him a photo of Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle appears. “Amazon did a great job with their reader and we’re standing on their shoulders here….Today we’re announcing the iBooks store,” says Jobs, adding that it will be supported initially by Penguin, Simon & Schuster and a number of other big publishers.

The iBooks Store interface begins with a simple bookshelf view. Tap the screen and it loads a more iTunes-like view. Purchase a book and it’s added to your bookshelf with a slick little animation.

The reading experience seems very appealing. Much more book-like. From where I sit, the pages look like they’re written on paper.

“We use the e-pub format, the most popular open-book format in the world,” says Jobs. “We think iPad is going to be a very popular e-reader not just for bestsellers, but for textbooks as well.”

10:58 am: And here’s another new product announcement: A new version of iWork tweaked for use on the iPad. Jobs invites Phil Schiller on stage to demo it.

“We have a completely new version of Keynote, a completely new version of Pages and a completely new version of Numbers–all optimized for multitouch.

Schiller demos Keynote first. Creating presentations appears intuitive and simple–a slide navigator on the left, tap to load individual slides in the main window, drag to rearrange.

Nice use of multitouch gestures to enhance the app. Pinch to resize photos, tap to insert animations and transitions. These are all fairly advanced techniques and the device seems to handle them well.

11:05 am: Moving on to Pages now. Also impressive, though creating a written document on a tablet device like the iPad seems like it might be a drag. A nice tool for editing, though. Simple controls.

11:07 am: Moving on to Numbers. This application also makes good use of multitouch gestures and boasts a data-entry keyboard along with some 250 built-in functions. The software’s gesture capabilities makes Excel look antediluvian.
Powerful and fast.

So what’s Apple going to charge for iWork? $9.99 each, says Schiller, who notes that all three applications are compatible with their Mac versions.

Jobs returns to the stage, grinning. “Isn’t that great?” he asks for what’s easily the 10th time. iPad, he says, will synch to Mac or PC via USB.

11:14 am: Evidently, there will be two iPad models–one with Wi-Fi-only and one with Wi-Fi and 3G. The 3G device will come with two plans: 250 MB per month for $14.99, unlimited data for $29.99.

And who’s the carrier? AT&T.

A small groan ripples through the audience.

Jobs allows that AT&T is also throwing in free Wi-Fi at its hotspots. He follows that up by noting that there are no contracts for the iPad. You can cancel at anytime.

All iPad 3G models are unlocked and they use new GSM micro SIMS, so chances are they will just work, Jobs says, after noting that Apple hasn’t yet worked out international carrier deals.

11:16 am: Now a quick overview as a wrap-up. Jobs touts the overall tablet experience along with the new iBook app and iBook Store. “This is an amazing product with tremendous breadth. What should we charge for it?…When we set out to develop the iPad we not only had aggressive UI goals, we had aggressive price goals, because we wanted to put this in the hands of as many people as possible….IPad pricing starts not at $999, but $499,” Jobs says to a huge round of applause.

$499 for 16GB base model.
32GB for $599.
64GB for $699.
Adding 3G requires an additional fee.

Apple will ship Wi-Fi models in 60 days and 3G models in 90.

11:20 am: Apple has created new accessories for the iPad: A standard dock and a second dock with a keyboard attached to it. “Keep one of these in your den and you can write the next “War and Peace” on it.” The final accessory, a new case that doubles as a stand.

Running a video now. It features a number of Apple execs enthusiastically talking up the iPad.

11:25 am: Let me circle back here for a moment to pricing. Adding 3G to iPad requires an additional $130. So we’re talking $629 for the 16GB model, $729 for the 32GB and $829 for the 64GB version.

Designer Jon Ives on the iPad: “In many ways iPad defines our vision, our sense of what’s next.”

11:32 am: Jobs returns to the stage and recalls the “middle device” scenario he mentioned earlier today. “Can we create this new category? The bar is set pretty high, but we think we’ve got the goods.”

“This is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” he adds. “The reason the iPad is going to be so great is because Apple has always strived to be at the junction of technology and liberal arts.”

And with that he concludes. Lights go up and Dylan begins playing over the speakers again.

View the slideshow

PREVIOUSLY:

Apple’s Tablet: A $2.8 Billion Business?

Apple’s Tablet: MacBook Airbus?

Apple Announces Jan. 27 Special Event: “Come See Our Latest Creation”

Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Wednesday, Jan. 27

Apple Pitching Tablet to Publishing Industry; Spring Launch Expected

Time (Finally) for the Tablet? Apple Developers Supersizing Their Apps for January Event.

The Apple Tablet Is Delayed? So What?

$1.9 Billion in Capex? What’s Apple Planning?

Apple’s Tablet: Read Different?

Imaginary Demand for Mythical Apple Tablet Exceeds All Estimates

Apple Tablet Coming to AT&T?

New From Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster: The Apple iPad

Rumored Apple Netbook Actually an E-Book?

iTablet: Apple’s Killer App for Higher Ed

iFugly

Almost Famous: Ethan Beard of Facebook

Drake Martinet — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:48:19 +0000

In a feature of “Almost Famous” that we’ve dubbed “Need to Know,” All Things Digital talks with top players inside tech companies–much as we talk to emerging entrepreneurs–who are perhaps not as prominent as their influence suggests, but who should be.

This week: We friended Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network, and had a sit-down with him at the social networking company’s Silicon Valley HQ to talk about–of course–the importance of platforms.

Who: Ethan Beard

What: Director of the Facebook Developer Network

Why: After stints in investment banking, Viacom (VIA) music service MTV Networks and most recently, Google (GOOG), Ethan made the move to Facebook almost two years ago.

Where: Facebook Developer Blog (Web site); @ethanbeard (Twitter); Palo Alto, Calif. (analog place)

Who Else: Everyone has been trying to spread social graphs deeper into the Web, but Facebook dominates.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I worked one summer for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail at a post office in Bangor, Maine. Yeah, that was pretty bad. Basically, it was just endless piles of mail that you had to sort into different little holes. And you’d have, like, your timed break, 10 minutes every couple of hours or something. You’d deal with these unionized people who’d been working at the post office forever, who would smoke cigarettes and play cribbage during their 10 minutes and then back to sorting.

Has a Geek Crush on: In the tech world, I’m a big fan of Alan Kay, both because he’s super geeky and super thoughtful.

Gadget of the Moment: Well, when I was at Google, I worked a lot with early Android stuff, so I’m very intrigued by the Nexus One. I’d like to get my hands on one, but haven’t yet.

What Do You Hope the Upcoming magic Apple (AAPL) Tablet Will Do?: Respond to my emails. Or at least delete some of them.

Fails At: I’m a miserable snowboarder. That’s not a good answer though. My wife would say that I never seem to stop working.

Bio in 140 Characters

Hails from Winterport, Maine. Got schooled at Wharton and NYU. He did time at an investment bank. Left for MTV, Google and now Facebook.

The Five Questions

We’ve heard “It’s not just a Web site, it’s a platform” before. What is Facebook offering today that sets it apart?

The Facebook platform is actually very different than many platforms that have come in the past. The app platform is actually a lot more like standard platforms. It’s a development environment with lots of different UI elements you can integrate and build this experience. But really, what we’ve done with Facebook Connect is change Facebook platform to make it cross-platform.

Facebook platform is on Facebook.com, but it’s on lots of other Web sites: It’s on mobile devices; we’re pushing into gaming consoles. It’s less about a place you can build an application and more about features and functions you can add to any platform. We want to give users the tools and technology that allow them to connect with anything they care about, anywhere they are.

What industries haven’t caught on yet, or could be using social connection tools much better than they are today?

I’d point to two things. I think the media consumption space is changing very rapidly, like the TV industry is changing very rapidly. I mean, NBC is being sold not for NBC, but for all the cable assets in it. The printed news businesses is just being turned on its ear. I think there are some really great opportunities for layering in the social graph that could affect consumption habits. It can bring a different lens to what is news. Also, I’d love to be able to go to Pandora and see the stations my friends are listening to. I have some specific friends who are great at picking music. What we want to do with Facebook platform is tie those two together, so I can connect with that friend who always picks great music.

I think the DVR is a good example [of the possibilities]. I would like to be able to see what my friends are watching and interact with them based on that.

Yeah, let’s talk music for a second. I looked at your Facebook profile and saw all these bands and said to myself, “Either this guy has a music-savvy intern in his office who went to college in the 2000s and made this profile for him or he is a legit music fan.” Which is it?

I’m a big fan of music. A huge fan. I don’t really remember what’s on there. Probably Radiohead, the Decembrists, the Killers, maybe Sufjan Stevens. I like to stay current. I just bought a Sonos music player. I love having it all at my fingertips, with a little touchscreen.

Lots of big-time geeks have some strong memories of early experiences with technology. Do you have an “ah-ha” tech moment like that?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, when I went to college–this is a couple of decades ago now, pre-Web–my father, who worked at a university, gave me a 1200-baud modem when no one had modems. You’re probably going to read some deep-rooted psychology into this, but he was like, “This is how we’re going to communicate–we’re obviously not going to see each other and don’t expect me to talk on the phone with you. You should be sending me email.” And so, in 1990, I had this modem, and there wasn’t anything you could do with it except like log on to university computers.

There was Telnet and FTP. I didn’t need to go to the lab. I could log into Michigan’s computer from right here in my dorm room at two o’clock in the morning, which is what I tended to do. I’d log on and try to download some random shareware at two in the morning at 1200 baud, which basically meant leaving your computer on overnight, getting up in the morning, seeing that it had failed and trying again.

You’ve seen all kinds of arenas tap into the social space. What has been the sleeper hit for Facebook?

I’m gonna say the games. They didn’t catch us by surprise, but their size, success and the success of the gaming companies wasn’t something that we all saw coming. That was one that, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense, but wasn’t one that we all saw coming. Currently, I’m addicted to Bejeweled. It’s like crack on the iPhone, it’s 60 seconds long, and you’ll look at the score and realize that your mom has a higher score than you. Its not like FarmVille, where you can just say to yourself, “Well, she just has more time to farm.” It’s the same 60 seconds, so its just about how good you are.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Opening a Window on the Mac

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:13:05 +0000

‘Tis almost the night before Christmas, and plenty of households are hoping Santa will slide down the chimney with a new computer in his pack. For longtime Windows users who receive new Apple (AAPL) computers, the unfamiliarity of the Mac operating system could leave them pining for their old PC.

I’ve put together a quick and dirty guide for new Apple users that explains some of the ways the Mac operating system differs from Windows. It’s true: The way you’ll quit programs is different, the keyboards are set up a little differently and even the mouse is different. But once you adjust to these changes, you’ll be fine. Here’s some help:

[ See post to watch video ]

Key to the Keyboard

Your keyboard is missing a Backspace button, so just use the Delete button, which is set up by default to work as the Backspace button does on a Windows keyboard.

If you want to delete forward on a Mac laptop or a new iMac, hold the Function key (FN) while pressing Delete. And for keyboard shortcuts like pressing Control+C to copy or Control+V to paste on a Windows keyboard, use the Command key, which has a flower-like symbol, in place of Control. Likewise, use the Option key rather than Alt to type special characters.

If you miss Control+Alt+Delete, you can end frustratingly slow applications on the Mac by pressing Command+Option+Escape to force programs to quit.

Mousing Around

The mouse on a desktop Mac looks like it has only one button, and the trackpad on most Mac laptops has no visible buttons at all—the whole pad is a single, large button. These designs send people who usually use two-button mice into a tizzy about how to right click.

Never fear, right click is still near! On Mac laptops, right click by placing two fingers down on the trackpad (it’s easiest with your pointer and middle fingers) and click the trackpad with another finger (like your thumb). New MacBooks also will right click when you place two fingers on the trackpad and press down. Using a one-button Apple mouse, just press Control and then click to see the same right-click functionality. On the Mighty Mouse, enable right-click functionality in System Preferences, then just touch where the right-click button should be and it will work.

If you’re sick of these new shortcuts, just plug in a mouse with a real right-click button and it will likely work on the Mac.

Scroll up or down on any screen by placing two fingers anywhere on the trackpad and motioning up or down. New MacBooks have a large, glass trackpad that responds to iPhone-like multi-touch gestures like pinching to zoom in or out on a screen. Four fingers on the trackpad initiate one of three gestures: Swiping up clears everything off the screen to show the desktop; swiping left or right opens the application switcher view so you can select which application you want; swiping down launches Exposé, which shows all opened windows.

Maximize, Close, Quit

In Windows, users can hit one button in the top right corner of each window to maximize the window; Macs have a small green circle in the top left corner that makes a window larger, but not maximized, so this can be irritating.

Windows lets users close an application by hitting the “X” in the top-right corner; the Mac version of this is a small red dot in the top left, but clicking it only closes a window rather than quitting the application. To do that, you’ll need to press Command+Q or choose to quit from the application menu at the top left of the screen.

Where’s My Stuff?

Rather than opening My Computer as you would on a Windows PC, double click on the desktop icon representing your hard drive to see all files, folders, applications and software programs. Spotlight, located in the top right corner of all screens, can be used to search for anything on your Mac. The Dock, located by default at the bottom of the screen, replaces the taskbar to hold applications, folders and files.Items can be dragged into the dock for quick access. Applications are located on the left side of the Dock; Stacks are on the right and these enable instant folder access from the Dock.Two built-in Stacks come pre-loaded for Documents and Downloads.

The Apple menu, represented with a small apple icon in the top left of any screen, works like parts of the Windows Start menu.

System Preferences in the Mac Dock works much like the Control Panel on a Windows PC. Here, you can change your screensaver, desktop picture, mouse and keyboard settings, energy-saving options, parental controls and network setup.

An optional Mac version of Microsoft Office runs Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs that are compatible with Office files from Windows PCs. Instead of Outlook, Microsoft (MSFT) includes in Mac Office a program with similar functions called Entourage. Macs come out of the box with Apple-produced programs that include Mail, Address Book and iCal. Mail works with a range of email services.

Where’s Internet Explorer?

Instead of Internet Explorer, Apple comes loaded with its own Web browser called Safari, represented in the Dock by a blue and red compass. Browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox or Google (GOOG) Chrome will work on the Mac if you want to download and install them, but Internet Explorer still runs only on Windows.

Ejecting Hurts

On a Windows PC, anything inserted into the computer—from memory cards to USB flash drives—can be pulled out almost anytime with no repercussions. On a Mac, you must first eject these items before you yank them out. Ejecting can be done by dragging the icon representing that item from the desktop into the Trash, Apple’s version of the Windows Recycling Bin, or by selecting an Eject button beside its name. If you delete something on your Mac, it’s tossed into the Trash, and an option in Trash will empty it just as you can empty the Recycling Bin in Windows. Macs offer a Secure Empty Trash command in the Finder that securely deletes files so no part of them can be recovered.

Ask at the Store

If you buy a new Mac, Apple retail stores will recycle your old computer free, and if you buy Apple’s $99-a-year One to One membership, you can take your PC into an Apple retail store to have its data transferred to the Mac or to get personal tutorials. Stores also offer free workshops. More information is at apple.com/findouthow/mac.

–Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

VC-Backed Company Pushes Envelope With Postmarked Email Service

Tomio Geron — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:04:40 +0000

With more people emailing and fewer people sending physical mail in recent years, the U.S. Postal Service is taking steps to move into the digital world–and using a venture-backed company to do so.

Goodmail Systems Inc. has partnered with Epostmarks Inc. to launch a product, Postmarked Email, that has the approval and protection of the U.S. Postal Service.

The deal will essentially make emails handled by this service the legal equivalent of physical mail. That’s important for businesses that are seeking to cut the costs of physical mail while also improving communication with customers and become more environmentally friendly.

Goodmail, which has raised about $45 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, DCM, Emergence Capital Partners, Omidyar Network and Softbank Capital Partners, isn’t the only venture-backed company working with the postal service. Earth Class Mail Corp. covers different terrain–it doesn’t deal with email, but it provides users with access to their physical mail online. Earth Class Mail has raised more than $20 million from Ignition Partners, Alliance of Angels and Keiretsu Forum, according to VentureWire archives.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Netflix Investors Inexplicably Emptying Their Queues

John Paczkowski — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:05:30 +0000

Evidently, Netflix is as recession-proof as Hollywood. Reporting third-quarter earnings after market close Thursday, the DVD-by-mail pioneer posted net income of $30.1 million, up 48 percent from a year earlier, on revenue of $423.1 million. That’s 52 cents a share. Analysts had been expecting 46 cents a share on $419.9 million in sales.

And get this: Netflix (NFLX) added a net 510,000 subscribers during the period, 95 percent more than in the same three months last year. In fact, in the past year, Netflix has added 2.4 million subscribers, the most it has signed on in its 10-year history.

“Our business momentum is strong and our third-quarter performance keeps us solidly on course for a record 2009,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement.

Given that and the fact that Netflix beat estimates, it’s odd to see investors dragging the company’s shares down. Netflix fell 4.39 percent to 47.45 in after-hours trading.

HTC's Hero May Be Your Scene

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:02:02 +0000

Super-smart phones based on Google’s Android operating system have been relatively slow to take off since the first one appeared a year ago. Despite Google’s iconic brand, they have yet to develop the strong bond with U.S. consumers achieved by the Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry or the Apple (AAPL) iPhone. And, after a year, Android has less than 10% of the 85,000 apps the iPhone now offers.

[ See post to watch video ]

But Android is beginning to blossom in the market for this class of device, which is really a hand-held computer that performs many laptop-like functions.

In August, T-Mobile began offering a new $200 myTouch Android phone. Motorola (MOT) will shortly launch a new $200 Android model called the CLIQ. And, on Oct. 11, Sprint (S) will start selling perhaps the most unusual Android phone so far, the $180 HTC Hero. I’ve been testing the Hero, a touch-screen phone without a physical keyboard that has some important distinctions from earlier Android models. In general, I like the Hero and can recommend it to Sprint customers, or others looking for something powerful, but different.

HTC, a veteran Taiwan-based maker of phones, has altered Android more than anyone else so far. It has been gradually developing its own signature software layer that sits atop phone operating systems. With the Hero, it has applied this software for the first time to an Android phone, and that’s what sets the Hero apart from its Android brethren. The latest, beefed-up, version of this HTC software is called “Sense.”

Sense includes handsome, large widgets with extra features that go beyond the vanilla Android experience supplied to everyone by Google (GOOG). So the Hero looks and behaves somewhat differently. For instance, a contact page in the address book application consolidates that contact’s Facebook and Flickr accounts. The music player and photo album look better, and the Hero with Sense can use Microsoft’s Exchange service to synchronize mail, calendars and contacts.

Sprint’s HTC Hero

Sense also offers something called Scenes—entire collections of sets of screens and apps, either canned or customized, that can change the phone software’s look and feel. With just a couple of clicks, you could switch between a work-oriented “scene,” that prominently features apps such as a stock tracker and your work email, and an entertainment-oriented scene filled with the music player, photo album and other apps.

As with Sprint’s Palm (PALM) Pre, the Hero’s price is a bit deceptive. To get the phone for $180, you must remember to mail in a rebate form worth $100. At purchase, you have to put up $280. On the other hand, Sprint’s monthly fees can be much cheaper than those for other carriers. You’ll have to pay at least $70 a month to use the Hero, the same minimum fee that AT&T charges iPhone owners. But Sprint’s fee, unlike AT&T’s (T), includes unlimited text messaging and unlimited free calls to any mobile number on any network.

The Hero’s hardware isn’t especially beautiful. It’s a dull grey, noticeably thicker than the iPhone, with a smaller screen and six buttons plus a trackball, which adds another navigation option to the touch screen. It’s the same length as an iPhone, but is a bit narrower and lighter. It comes with just two gigabytes of memory, compared with eight gigabytes on the $99 iPhone and 16 gigabytes on Apple’s $199 model, though the Hero’s memory, unlike the iPhone’s, is expandable via a hard-to-reach slot under its removable back cover.

One big drawback is battery life. Sprint is only claiming up to four hours of talk time for the Hero, versus five hours for the Pre and iPhone. But, unlike the iPhone’s, the Hero’s battery is removable. Another drawback: I sometimes found the touch screen unresponsive, requiring multiple pokes at an icon.

On the plus side, the Hero has a much higher resolution camera than the iPhone’s or Pre’s—five megapixels versus three megapixels.

It also functions as a video camera, and in my tests, both still photos and videos I took looked very good. Phone calls, even on speaker phone, were clear and strong, and the phone has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in addition to Sprint’s high-speed network, which in my view is better than its reputation. Web browsing was adequate.

HTC’s Sense gives the Hero seven screens on which to place apps, versus Android’s standard three screens.

And, in addition to the standard Android apps and the 8,000 downloadable apps from Android’s Market app store, there are a variety of large, beautiful HTC “widgets” you can use. The downside of these is that they can occupy an entire screen.

The most impressive widget is called People. It’s an address book in which each contact’s page features a scrolling bar at the bottom with icons that allow you to see that person’s most recent Facebook status, photos from Facebook and Flickr, plus emails and text messages she’s sent to you and recent calls between you. This is somewhat similar to Palm’s Synergy feature, which is also based around people.

Overall, I found the HTC Hero to be the best Android phone I’ve tested, and a worthy competitor to the iPhone, the BlackBerry and the Pre.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

What's in Netflix's Queue? 10.6 Million Subscribers.

John Paczkowski — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:21:12 +0000

The econalypse has done great things for Netflix, sending recession-addled customers running to embrace its way-cheaper-than-cable DVD-by-mail and streaming-movie service.

The online DVD-rental pioneer said Thursday that its second-quarter profit rose 22 percent on revenue of $408.5 million. It earned $32.4 million, or 54 cents a share, easily surpassing Wall Street’s expectations of 50 cents per share.

Netflix’s (NFLX) subscriber base finished the quarter at 10.6 million, up 26 percent year-over-year and at the high end of the company’s own forecasts.

“We continued to execute very well in the second quarter and are on track to deliver a record 2009,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement. “As our subscriber base and disc shipments continue to expand, and as we offer more opportunities to watch instantly via the Internet, we believe we are striking the right balance between growth, investment and earnings.”

What's in Netflix's Queue? 10.6 Million Subscribers.

John Paczkowski — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:21:12 +0000

The econalypse has done great things for Netflix, sending recession-addled customers running to embrace its way-cheaper-than-cable DVD-by-mail and streaming-movie service.

Netflix’s (NFLX) subscriber base finished the quarter at 10.6 million, up 26 percent year-over-year and at the high end of the company’s own forecasts.

Chrome OS, Huh? Will It Be Based on a Google Analytics Kernel?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:35:07 +0000

So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.”

It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google (GOOG), which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience.

The privacy implications are, of course, horrendous. And while Google will inevitably dismiss such concerns as paranoid and argue that any data the company might collect at the OS level will be used only to improve its services and benefit users, it should still give us all pause. Because when it is finally launched, Chrome OS will be yet one more deep well of consumer data to which Google will have access.

There are already quite a few such wells, including Google Search and Chrome, that profile user interests and surfing habits: Gmail, which gives the company access to our email conversations, and Google Voice, which gives the company access to our spoken ones. Add to this Google Street View and Latitude, a service that tracks the physical location of its users, and mobile and desktop operating systems and, well…that kind of consolidation of Internet-based services around a single dominant company should give us all pause.

Lest we forget, Google is in the behavioral targeting business. Why would people ever use an OS developed by a company whose business is based on meticulously recording and analyzing their online behavior? Because they enjoy using its other services, I suppose. But there is a privacy-vs-ease-of-use tradeoff here. And with Chrome OS, it is unprecedented. Further, while Google might tout its “don’t be evil” motto as reason enough to trust the company with our data, there are other entities that don’t always share that sensibility. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that the federal government tried to force Google to turn over user search data to the Justice Department…

“Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. “It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.”

Jeff Chester, executive director of The Center for Digital Democracy, echoed Rotenberg’s concerns. “Google’s new OS has to be placed under the data collection X-Ray by US and EU privacy regulators and advocates,” he said. “Any expansion into the marketplace by either Google or Microsoft should generate intense scrutiny, especially for the privacy implications. These two are engaged in a global data collections digital arms race, which has far-reaching implications for consumers and their information.”

Bam! Google Goes Right for Microsoft's Gut.

Peter Kafka — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:23:59 +0000

Can Google’s boldest attack against Microsoft succeed? Absolutely. Even if it flops.

The newly announced Google Chrome OS won’t show up until the second half of 2010, when it will first appear on lightweight netbooks. Eventually, it’s supposed to run on full-sized PCs. But Chrome OS will start working long before consumers start booting it up next year as it forces Steve Ballmer and company to open up yet another front in their long-running war against Google.

In its blog post announcing the move, Google (GOOG) explains that Chrome is supposed to address the shortcomings of existing operating systems: “Computers need to get better.” This could even be true. But what Google really wants to do here is vex its rival.

Google has been on this path for years as it systematically rolled out products that compete directly with Microsoft (MSFT) franchises: First mail, then a full suite of office software, then a mobile operating system, then a browser.

All of them are free or practically free. All of them launched without the full array of bells and whistles that their Microsoft rivals boasted. None of them produces any significant revenue for Google. And so far, mail is the only one that has generated mass adoption.

But all of them have succeeded just by existing: The chief aim here is to force Microsoft to defend its existing business, which makes it even harder for the company to attack Google’s search franchise. Now comes a full-fledged OS, the core of Redmond’s business.

As Techflash points out, Microsoft has been gearing up to roll out its newest operating system, Windows 7, as early as next week. That launch has already been a challenge, given that Redmond disappointed everyone with its last effort. And now Windows 7 doesn’t just have to compete with the ghost of Vista, but with the specter of an OS that doesn’t even exist yet.

iPhone 3.0 @ 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:05:08 +0000

10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT.

That’s when Apple (AAPL) is expected to roll out iPhone 3.0, an update that will bring a number of long-anticipated features to the iconic device. Among them: voice memos; a landscape keyboard for Mail, Messages, Notes and Safari; a phone-wide Spotlight Search; push notifications; the long-overdue cut, copy and paste; and MMS and Internet tethering–neither of which is currently supported by AT&T (T).

Let’s hear it for carrier exclusivity!

iPhone 3.0 @ 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:05:08 +0000

10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT.

Let’s hear it for carrier exclusivity!

Mind if I Pay These Late Fees With a Few of My Blockbuster Shares?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:51:05 +0000

“We do not intend to file for bankruptcy….We have lots of plans to grow our business.”

– Blockbuster spokesperson Karen Raskopf, March 3, 2009

Blockbuster in a Monday filing told the Securities and Exchange Commission what anyone who’s observed its fast-declining fortunes has known for some time now: The company isn’t sure it can stay in business much longer. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers assessment included as part of its latest 10-K, Blockbuster (BBI) acknowledged that its financial situation raises “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern” and said it may have to close its doors if its financial situation doesn’t improve in the near future. Seems that $250 million revolving loan Blockbuster announced last week is conditional, and the video rental chain says there is “no assurance” that it can meet its requirements.

An unfortunate turn of events for Blockbuster, but far from an unexpected one. The company did not fare well in its battle against DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix (NFLX), and its recent efforts to stay relevant have been head-shakers at best. A $1.3 billion gambit for an electronics chain that would go bankrupt less than a year later? A weak (and costly) set-top box offering that would later be made redundant by a deal with TiVo (TIVO)? A vending-machine program with partner NCR (NCR) that, like its entry into the DVD-by-mail market is late to a game it’s already losing? And all these things conceived and launched amid a challenging macroeconomic environment and constrained capital markets. Sad, really. Hard to imagine that 10 years ago Reed Hastings was doing all that he could to convince Blockbuster to buy Netflix…

TiVo and Blockbuster Join Farces

John Paczkowski — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:50:33 +0000

Blockbuster says it has big plans to grow its business. But if inking a video-on-demand deal with a declining DVR pioneer is one of them… well, that’s not much of a plan, is it?

I suppose when your financial statements look like Blockbuster’s, I suppose you cling to life however you can (Blockbuster shares have fallen about 80 percent over the last 12 months). And so, beginning in the second half of 2009, the company will make its Blockbuster On Demand service available to TiVo subscribers. The agreement also calls for Blockbuster’s brick-and-mortar stores to sell TiVo DVRs. “We are excited to be teaming with TiVo, the company that created the DVR, to make Blockbuster’s entertainment content readily available to their millions of subscribers,” said Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes. “Ultimately, our vision is to work with TiVo so that their subscribers can access movies not only through our On Demand service but also from our stores and through our by-mail service as well.”

For Blockbuster (BBI), the deal is a means of capitalizing on the rising popularity of on-demand video. But to really do that effectively, the company needs alliances with more electronics manufacturers than just TiVo (TIVO). After all, the DVR pioneer isn’t in the greatest of health these days. And Netflix (NLFX) already delivers online video to TiVo and PCs, Macs, Xbox 360s, and selected LG and Samsung Blu-ray players as well. Clearly, Blockbuster is as late to on-demand as it was to DVD-by-mail.