TECHdodo

About a year and a half ago I wrote a couple of posts about RealDVD, a program made by RealOne that allowed people to make copies of DVDs for personal use. It seemed to me there were other programs that already did what it did, better than it did, but they were not exactly considered legal. For some reason, which I didn’t really understand, Real thought their program would somehow be different.

According to their new press release, Hollywood didn’t agree either. They apparently only sold 2,700 copies of the product, which was $29.99 when it was released. That is a grand total of only $80973. One and a half years later they had to pay the six Major Hollywood studios 4.5 million dollars to cover the costs of litigation and they have to refund the purchase price of the product to the people who actually bought it. Not to mention their own legal fees associated with the litigation, which are probably similar in scope.

I guess it wasn’t a good idea after all. What I can’t understand is who at RealOne thought it was, and do they still have a job?

During all the Buzz going on about Google Buzz and its privacy issues, Google has said despite their threats a month ago that they would pull out of China after experiencing a cyber attack from that country, that they will not be leaving China any time soon. I speculated at the time of their threat in this post, that they wouldn’t, because Google makes money by people seeing their ads, and there are a lot of people in China to look at ads.

When asked directly about why they were still in China, and why they were still censoring results, and how that related to the whole Do No Evil policy of Google, Sergei Brin responded with this.

Brin:

Perhaps people don’t believe this, but the [couldn't hear] discussion about entering China in 2006 as we did and including the announcement last month, our focus is really been what’s best for the Chinese people. It’s not … about our particular revenue or profit or what not. And I think there are many potential answers there. It’s a very difficult question.

That is why they are going to stay in China. Even though it puts them at risk, and even though they have to censor results, they are going to stay, but not for the money, no no, for the people, for the Chinese people, because Google feels they can make a positive difference in their lives. Of course they would have the exact same attitude even if there wasn’t any money to be made there at all. If Sergey actually believes this, and maybe he does, he is definitely at odds with someone who needs to have responsibility to shareholders. Not unusual actually for an entrepreneur’s creation to grow up and become something they no longer want it to be.

I was using my PC today when HP prompted me that I needed to install an update for my printer. The first annoying thing it did was shut down the PC autmatically when it was finished. It didn’t give me any warning or ability to delay until later. All of a sudden it shut down and restarted.  Once it was back up, My Firefox browser had a whole new look. Apparently HP decided to do me a favor and change it for me and installed their Smart Internet printing software. This is how my browser looks now. It takes up about 1/3 of the screen.

I don’t remember HP mentioning changing my Firefox browser, and I am not real pleased with the result. Now I have to go figure out how to undo it. So if you have an HP printer and it wants to install a software update to help you with smart printing, you might want to think twice about it.

So Apple finally announced their Internet tablet and it is the ipad. Finally the frenzy can end… or is it just beginning. It will still be 60 days  before it will be released so everyone can  get their hands on one. In the meantime everyone will have their say, so I guess I might as well have mine.

Based on what I posted earlier, the ipad is almost exactly what I expected it to be, but it is far from what I hoped it could be. I had hoped it would be a like a touchscreen netbook without a keyboard. Something along the lines of an Apple version of an Archos 9 tablet. I thought it was going to be more like a big ipod touch. Unfortunately it sounds like it is going to be much more like an ipod touch than it is a netbook.

It is being marketed as a media device for audio, video, and text. But in the demo, it didn’t have flash support, and the word on the net is since Apple doesn’t like flash, it probably won’t support flash, at least not at first, or not natively. Since I already have a few devices that don’t support flash, I can honestly say I would never buy a device intended primarily for Internet use that didn’t have flash support. It was a pain on my Nokia Tablet. It is a pain on the Wii tohave it, but not a recent version. It can play Youtube videos, but not Hulu. Now the Apple fanatics are already saying Flash sucks, who needs it, I won’t miss it, I am glad it won’t be supported so it won’t slow things down, etc. etc.  Just because it is supported doesn’t mean you have to use it, but if it isn’t supported, no one can use it. There are a lot of websites that use Flash and if you can buy a netbook for $200 that can use all those websites, or you can buy a $500 tablet that doesn’t, which will most people be more likely to buy?

It also doesn’t have a camera. I guess that means you won’t be using it for videoconferencing unless you plug in a USB camera…. but oh, it doesn’t have any built in USB ports, so you can’t plug in any external accessories. So you can’t plug in a keyboard or mouse, although it does have a proprietary keyboard dock you can use and USB adaptors for connecting to cameras, although it doesn’t really say if it will work with flash drives of not. Not having USB ports or memory card support built in is really odd.

It basically looks like they took an iphone, gave it a much bigger screen, and for some reason, expect people to buy it. If you have an iphone though, and you have a PC or notebook, what are you going to need the tablet for?

If it can’t play flash, doesn’t have a memory card slot or USB ports without proprietary adapters, doesn’t have a webcam, isn’t pocket portable who is the real target market?

It also has a very large border around the screen. What’s up with that? They could have either made the viewable screen larger, or the device smaller. It also doesn’t have a user changeable battery.

Yeah, I was hoping it would be more than it is. You can buy a netbook with flash support, with webcam, with a large hard drive, with USB ports, with keyboard, with built in memory card slots, with HDMI output, for the same price, or less, than the cheapest base model of the ipad. You can pick up netbooks in the $200 range that can do almost everything the ipad can, and a lot of things it can’t. Then of course there are the already existing Windows based tablets, like the Archos 9, which it would seem should be able to do almost anything an ipad can too, and then some. People were complaining that the Archos 9 was too expensive, but it seems more capable and better priced than the ipad. It should be interesting to see how things turn out.

Apple makes some nice looking stuff, but what they are really really really good at is marketing. They have half  the Internet just about peeing in their pants in anticipation of what their announcement will be today.

The general consensus seems to be that it will essentially be a big ipod touch. It will use the same operating system as the iphone, but will be larger. It sounds like it will be Apple’s netbook. Since they refused to get into the netbook space, they made their netbook with a touchscreen and no keyboard. Presumably it will be able to play other media like audio and video as well, which mean it will have to have at least as much power as a netbook as well.

All in all, it sounds like a good idea. I have been a fan of tablets ever since I got my Nokia N770. Since you can peer it with an external keyboard, a keyboard isn’t really necessary. I am sure Apple will sell a lot of them whether it is good or not. They will sell a lot of them just so all these people on the Internet can say we have one and it is so wonderful. They will have their apps store, and itunes to support it and from the sounds of things they have text book manufacturers on board too, so the educational market should be pretty big for them as well. It might put some pressure on the Amazon Kindle.

The thing is though, whatever it turns out to be, it is just another computer. Lots of other companies sell tablets, but they get no where near the attention or anticipation of what this has already gotten, and it hasn’t even been officially announced yet.  That is the power of Apple.

It is just a few hours now and the anticipation will be over. It must be like Christmas morning for these guys waiting to see what Santa Jobs is going to leave under the tree for them. Next up will be reading all the post they will make about waiting in line, or their total shock at the lack of lines, and what that might mean about the world at large, when they go to pick up their shiny new toys.