Peter Smith

Time to catch up with some of the latest next generation gaming console rumors.

This generation, particularly in North America, Microsoft has had the upper hand in the battle between Xbox and Playstation. But Sony dominated the last generation when the Playstation 2 was far more popular than the original Xbox. The tables turned when Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 before Sony could get the Playstation 3 out the door. Gamers hungry for new hardware jumped from the Playstation 2 to the Xbox 360.

It all started on February 9 when legendary (is it ok to call him legendary?) game designer Tim Schafer decided to turn to Kickstarter to fund a new Double Fine Adventure game. A lot of old-school gamers have very fond memories of the games Schafer created while working at Lucasfilm Games in the late 1980s and 1990s. Titles like Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. Witty adventure games: the kind of game that you don't often see these days; they're just not a good investment for the big development houses.

So Schafer started a project on Kickstarter, a site that lets enthusiastic fans kick in some money towards development of a future project. Think of it like pre-ordering something that hasn't even been created yet. Schafer set his goal at a more or less unheard of (for a Kickstarter project) $400,000. He had roughly a month to collect pledges towards that goal. If he made it, everyone who pledged would be charged. If he didn't make it, the pledges would vanish. That's how the system works.

I live in a tech bi-lingual household. My girlfriend uses an iPhone and an iPad, I use an Android phone and tablet. It worked for us. We were both content with things the way they were. She had her stuff and I had mine and we'd each politely nod and smile when the other felt compelled to show off some cool feature or app for his or her preferred platform.

That all changed when we got her one of the new iPads. She doesn't read tech blogs so she wasn't concerned that her new toy maybe ran slightly hotter than her old one, or that maybe it took longer to charge while she was fast asleep. She never noticed these things. What she noticed (and loved) was that new Retina display.

Here's an interesting rumor I haven't seen a lot of coverage on, but given Apple's event tomorrow there probably won't be room to talk Android for a few days. So let's go with this one even though I've only seen a single source.

The rumor comes from Android & Me and the story is that ASUS will be manufacturing a Nexus Tablet for Google. That alone is kind of interesting since Samsung has always been Google's go-to manufacturer for Android "reference devices," but what's really interesting to me are the specs. Android & Me's sources say it's going to be a Tegra 3 quad-core device with a 7" 1280×800 screen running pure Android 4. The price? $199. In other words, the same price as the dual-core Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7Samsung's Hankil Yoon, a product strategy executive for the company, gets up in front of a media roundtable at Mobile World Congress and says "Honestly, we're not doing very well in the tablet market." [Source: Cnet]. Ouch.

The next day we get word that Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.7 is hitting Verizon on March 1st for $500 with a two-year contract. Maybe Samsung needs a lesson on cause and effect.

We're on the cusp of a new year and you know what that means: New Year's Resolutions! Maybe your resolution will be to eat better or to get more exercise. A healthy body means a healthy mind, or so they say. But what about a resolution to give your brain more exercise?

That's my New Year's Resolution. It's a frightening thing when you get to be my age and you start to notice, particularly when you're around younger people, that the old synapses aren't firing quite as quickly as they used to. It isn't that I don't know the question to go along with that Jeopardy answer; it's just that I can't blurt it out as fast as the youngsters. It takes several tenths of a second longer than it did a decade or two ago.

Google is having a bit of a (self-inflicted) rough week, aren't they? They've rolled out three big projects: redesigns of Gmail and Google Reader, and a new Gmail app for iOS. Two of the three have justifiably come under fire from users.

I didn't even get a chance to download the Gmail app for iOS. The folks at TechCrunch did, and they found "the app is a mess. It’s unusable. It doesn’t even launch properly, displaying an error message upon startup." Yikes. It was so bad that Google yanked the app from the store. Hopefully by the time you're reading this a new version will have been deployed.

Netflix had yet another bad day yesterday as Wall Street, in after-hours trading, knocked an estimated 25 percent off the value of their stock, bringing it to below $90. This in response to Netflix revealing that it has lost 810,000 subscribers in the third quarter.

This was just the latest in a string of setbacks for the company. The bad news, of course, started when Netflix announced a significant price hike last July (as a worst case, some subscribers' rates rose 60 percent). Next came the announcement that the company would be spinning off the DVD rental service into its own company, called Qwikster. When customers reacted poorly to that idea, Netflix scrapped it, and Wall Street beat them up again for being indecisive.

So now that we all hate Netflix (that's sarcasm by the way, I don't hate Netflix), where are we going to get our streaming video media from? How about YouTube? No, not funny videos of cats in cardboard boxes (no offense Maru) or cringe-inducing home videos of kids wiping out on their skateboards. I'm talking about original, professionally produced content channels. The rumor mill (in this case, The Hollywood Reporter) has YouTube launching these channels early next year, with an official announcement coming later this month.

To be fair, this isn't really in response to Netflix's recent problems. Rumors of YouTube's new plan have been rolling around since last spring, but the talk got a bit more serious earlier this month when the Wall Street Journal reported on it, invoking pro skateboarder Tony Hawk as one of the star attractions. With Tony Hawk on board, how can it fail? (That, too, is sarcasm.)

Yesterday Amazon announcedthat Kindle books are now available from 11,000 public libraries across the United States. Getting ebooks from a library isn't anything new but my understanding is that the process up to now has been fairly old-school: you'd log into the library's website, download a file (usually in ePub format), then sync it over to your e-reader (which would have to support Adobe's digital rights management system).

Amazon has Kindle-fied e-lending, letting you download the books directly to your Kindle with no extra software required. What's more, you can take notes, highlight passages and so on, and Amazon will hold on to that information. If you return the book and then take it out again at some later point (or purchase a copy), all your info will still be there.

Have you heard these rumors about Nintendo's plans for the 3DS, their new glasses-free handheld gaming system?

Just to bring you up to speed, the device launched in March of this year at $249. After languishing on stores shelves for a few months, Nintendo slashed the price to $169 a few weeks ago. I think it's too early to say what impact the price cut has had; certainly there was an immediate uptick in sales but whether that was a blip or the start of a new sustained trend remains to be seen. My personal opinion is that the 3DS isn't selling because the software library is so weak, and over time that situation should be resolved. I expect sales to pick up during this holiday season and beyond.

Today's post is all about music, since the techno-fates have conspired to bring together three different music-related stories at once.

First up, let's talk about Magnifier, a music blog run by Google. Weird, huh? Of course there's an angle here. Magnifier is essentially a way for Google to promote its Music Beta service. It's a "real" music blog, though, edited by Tim Quirk, who I'm told Knows His Stuff (full disclosure: I'm no musicphile). Before Google, he was senior vice president of Rhapsody, so there's a pedigree in place.