I’m shocked that anyone wants to buy the Wii. But I’m even more shocked that so many people are doing it. Earlier this week, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter reported, based on his checks, that a little over 1 million Wii units were sold last month, putting the device slightly behind the Xbox 360 in overall sales during the period.
Gaming has long been Microsoft’s wildcard: while the company struggles to find its feet with Windows Phone, and faces a difficult tablet market when its Windows 8 slates finally appear, the Xbox 360 continues to sell strongly. Now Xbox TV has arrived to not only reassure 360-owning gamers that they made the right console choice, but broaden the 360′s appeal to a whole new segment. It’s not entirely fashionable to praise Microsoft, especially when it’s over something that, buried in the company’s history books, they’ve tried and failed at before. Smart TV has suffered the usual ignominies and from the usual flaws: sluggish hardware, confusing interface, dawdling internet connections. Now, with Xbox LIVE TV, all the pieces seem finally to be coming together.
Last year, when Apple released the next-generation Apple TV, I was happy. I felt that after all these years, the company finally understood just how important the living room was to its customers. And although I wasn’t blown away by the device’s functionality, I was confident that Apple would show me something new this year.
Over the last couple years, I’ve been a devoted Netflix customer, paying my fee every month to access the company’s streaming service. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s time for Netflix to go.
I came to that realization recently when I started accessing content on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video. I watched a few television shows, checked out a couple movies I hadn’t seen in a long time, and realized something: for $79 per year, I was getting an experience that matches what I get from Netflix for about $96 per year.
Samsung showed off what makes it special this morning, with the new Exynos 5250 mobile chipset getting official ahead of its debut in next-gen smartphones and tablets next year. A 2GHz dual-core – with what Samsung reckons is twice the overall grunt of the company’s current 1.5GHz dual-cores and four times the 3D graphics prowess – the Exynos 5250 is also interesting because, unlike NVIDIA, Samsung has opted for a pair of ARM Cortex A15 cores, rather than four A9 cores as in the Tegra 3. That’s going to raise plenty of questions about comparative performance, heat output and power frugality, but perhaps most importantly – in the marketplace, at least – it’s going to prompt an interesting marketing challenge for every company pushing a tablet or phone.
Over the last couple days, I’ve been playing Battlefield 3, a game that Electronic Arts said prior to its launch, could go head-to-head with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and win. But after playing through the majority of the single-player campaign, I can tell you without any reservation that it can’t do anything of the sort. In fact, Modern Warfare 3 has a much, much better single-player experience.
To say HTC is having a bad month is an understatement: share price ditching, outlook slashed and reeling from an embarrassing and unexpected defeat by Apple in the patent courts. The company that once led the smartphone segment has found its “Quietly Brilliant” message struggling to be heard above the crowd. The potential collapse of the S3 Graphics deal is just the latest stage of the company’s ebbing momentum, though it can’t blame the USITC entirely for investors’ loss of faith. HTC lost its common Sense some time ago.
Each time I pick up my iPhone, listen to songs on my iPod, or surf the web on my Mac, I think about the mark Apple has left on the technology industry. It’s amazing to me that a single company has been able to do so much in such a short amount of time. And it’s perhaps most amazing that no other company has even come close in many of the markets the iPhone maker competes in to matching it.
When I get thinking about that, I ask myself a simple, but not so solvable question: would the technology world be the same if Apple didn’t exist?
As of late, we’ve been hearing a lot about a possible Apple television. The latest rumors suggest the set will launch late next year or in early 2013, and could offer access to apps and iCloud, among several other features. As I noted on these pages recently, I’m excited by the prospect of an Apple television, and I can say without any doubt that I will be first in line to buy the set if and when it launches.
But what if Apple isn’t the only company thinking seriously about getting into the television space? What if Microsoft, armed with its Kinect motion peripheral, tries its luck at taking on Vizio, Samsung, and all other vendors in the TV space?
I’m here to make a confession: I buy technology products — from smartphones to tablets to video game consoles — not because I need them, but because I want them.
Let me take you on a brief recent history.
Whenever you talk to a Nintendo fan, there are two topics that are absolutely off-limits: Nintendo ditching its portable-gaming devices and the company bringing Mario to the iPhone. Upon even bringing up those topics, you can expect to be dealt some serious name-calling (“idiot” is usually a favorite) and a slew of reasons you’re wrong.
A technology Web site, PhoneDog.com, and one of its former chief editors, Noah Kravitz, are embroiled in a legal battle that could have fascinating repercussions for social networks. Kravitz is suing PhoneDog over contractual issues, but it’s the counter-suit that really has my attention. PhoneDog is suing Kravitz over the use of his Twitter handle. They claim that he improperly kept the Twitter name after he left the company, and that he owes them damages of $2.50 for each Twitter follower he took with him, for each month he held them after he left. At 17,000 followers when he left, and 8 months since then, that starts damages at $370,000. So, that’s not even the full value PhoneDog puts on the Twitter account, but rather the value that Kravitz took with him when he left. PhoneDog essentially believes a key Twitter account is worth half a million dollars per year.
