DEMO 08 Highlights, Sidelights, and Lowlights

As usual, technology executives stood onstage and claimed that their products--many of which will ultimately fail--will change the world forever. Many of the presentations were glitchy. (The best presentations may win awards called the DEMOgods, but I saw no Steve Jobs-like gods at work.) And a higher percentage than usual seemed to involve products that won't be available for awhile--or which, in some cases, are clearly still rough drafts at best.

But I still had a good time at DEMO 08--which, like PC World, is part of International Data Group--and saw several things that I know I'll want to put through their paces when I can get my hands on them. Herewith, some of the show's highlights--and a few lowlights and sidelights:

Harry's Unofficial Best of Show: The single thing I liked best at this DEMO was Sprout, an entirely Web-based tool for building and distributing widgets that can live on any Web page. It's the best browser-based interface I've seen for content creation of any kind, and a great advertisement for the power of Flash. (Both Sprout itself and the widgets it lets you create are Flash-based.)

Potential Best of Show--If It Lives Up to the Demo: I also really liked the Blist online database. Unlike with Sprout, though, I haven't had a chance to try it yet, so my enthusiasm is based entirely on a cool demo. Like Sprout, Blist really shows off the potential of Flash to let Web developers build applications that are at least as powerful and usable as their desktop-bound predecessors.

Potential Best of Show--If It Actually Works: SkyFire's browser for Windows Mobile was spectacular--I felt like weeping with joy when I saw how good PCWorld.com looked on it, and how quickly it loaded. In the back of my mind, though, I wonder how well the proxy-based approach to browsing will work when there are more than a handful of phone users hitting SkyFire's servers at once.

Silliest Thing I Liked: The excellently-named XtraNormal lets you create little animations starring characters who look like Lego people, with either real voices or synthesized ones.

Best Idea--If the Industry Buys In: Green Plug has a technology for a universal power adapter that can work with gadgets of all sorts, if their manufacturers decide to support it. If they do, you might travel with just one Green Plug power brick, which would be both kind to the environment and a whole lot less cumbersome than packing multiple adapters.

Not the Best of Anything, But Entertaining Nonetheless: I liked Hubdub, a Digg-like aggregator that adds the twist of letting you bet on predictions relating to each story. Will Jennifer Lopez deliver a baby in January? Will the Dow close up on 1/31/2008? Will Jesus return by the end of 2008? I don't know, but I can make my guess, with "Hubdub Dollars" at stake.

Also Just Plain Interesting and Worthy of Further Investigation: Delver is a search engine that searches your social-network buddies rather than the Web.

Most Unglamorously Useful Service: TimeDriver is a free service that lets people add a Web-based self-service scheduling widget to Web pages and e-mails. It's not a new idea, but the interface and integration with Outlook and Google Calendar look extremely slick.

Most exuberantly excessive claim: The PC Mobilizr exec who demoed a useful remote-control service that lets you access your Windows PC from a BlackBerry described it as being fairly easily to use--a rare moment of humility on the DEMO stage. Which was appropriate considering that the tiny size of a phone's screen presents basic usability problems when it comes to controlling a PC with a high-res display. But the "DEMO says" squib about Mobilizr on the DEMO site seems to say that PC Mobilizr will eliminate the need to take a notebook when traveling. If anyone associated with the conference intends to dump his or her laptop in favor of BlackBerry-based remote control, I'd be dumbfounded.

Best Toy: LeapFrog's Tag, a neat pen that can read words aloud when you use it with special books. (Actually, it was the only toy at the show--or at least the only one meant for kids rather than grownups-but I liked it anyhow.)

Cutest Irrelevant Moment: The demo by Sterna Technologies involved the executive's dog fetching his master's slippers and remote control. I'm not sure what it had to do with the product, but as DEMO producer Chris Shipley noted, the pup fared better onstage than many of the human presenters.

Most Unexpected Celeb: iVideosongs, which offers online video training for musicians, brought John Oates onto the DEMO dais--yup, the mustachioed half of yacht rock legend Hall and Oates. (Actually, 2008-model Oates has lost the 'stache.) I felt kind of bad for him when I wandered past the iVideosongs display later in the show, and there were no throngs of fans (or, actually, anyone) waiting to talk to him.

Most-Used Adjective: "Liquid," which was part of three startup monikers: LiquidPlanner, LiquidTalk, and Liquidus.

Most-Used Demo Meme: On Tuesday, YouChoose did a parody of Apple's "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads and got some chuckles. I felt sorry for the folks from Squidcast when they used exactly the same idea the next day.

As I write, the final company has had its time onstage. The show wraps up tonight with the DEMOgod awards, the official best-of-conference honors. Whether they'll overlap at all with my picks, I have no idea...

Should Windows XP Be Saved? Take Our Survey

Microsoft is planning to discontinue most sales of Windows XP on January 30th--effectively ensuring that just about any Windows machine you buy from July 1st onwards will run Vista, whether you want it to or not.

Lots of folks would prefer to maintain the XP option. And our colleagues at InfoWorld have set up a clever site called SaveXP.com to serve as a gathering place for XP supporters. It's got a save-XP petition which more than 70,000 folks have signed, articles, podcasts, links, and a lot more.

Head over there to check it out and, if you so choose, put your name on the petition. Or take our little survey on XP and its fate--I'll report back on the results once a quorum of folks have voted...

DEMO 08 Day One Wrap-Up

We're about to begin the second day of product demos at DEMO, so I oughta mention some noteworthy products from yesterday that I haven't gotten around to mentioning.

First, there's LiveScribe's Pulse, the latest of a long series of attempts to create an electronic pen which lets you convert notes-on-paper to digital form. (Here's one earlier attempt; here's another.) I'm instinctively skeptical about the basic idea here--I think the number of people in the world who want to see their handwritten notes onscreen is limited (as witness the failure of the Tablet PC), and Pulse, like some of its predecessors, requires that you write on special paper that's been imprinted with a tiny grid of dots, so the pen can figure out where it is on the page. And while some of the things it can do are very, very clever--you can write a word, then touch it to hear a spoken translation into another language--I have a hard time summoning up all that many real-world scenarios where they'd be more useful than other solutions involving devices I'd probably have with me, such as a cell phone.

But if nothing else, Pulse is easily the least-clunky digital pen so far: It's not that much bigger than a good-sized fountain pen. And it uses built-in and external microphones to record audio that's synchronized with the notes you take; when LiveScribe demonstrated Pulse to me at PC World's offices awhile back, the sound quality was impressive. So as a guy who attends a lot of meetings, I'm intrigued by the pen as a sort of superpowered digital audio recorder.

If the crowds around the LiveScribe booth are any indicator, Pulse was the hit of day one at DEMO. It's scheduled to ship in March, in 1GB ($149) and 2GB ($199) versions.

Another debutante from yesterday with good buzz is Sprout, a Web-based tool for building embeddable widgets that you can put on any Web page. (As far as I can tell, Sprout just calls the things it lets you build "Sprouts"--but widgets they are. The Sprout-building interface is implemented in Flash, and while I ran into a few glitches, I'm impressed by how slick, easy, and powerful it is.

Here's a very basic Sprout I built in a few minutes:

Lastly, I liked TimeDriver, a service that lets people whose work involves around appointments offer a self-serve, Web-based method for folks to schedule meetings with them. TimeDriver syncs with Outlook and Google Calendar, and while it's a completely unglamorous idea, the execution looked really well done.

More notes from DEMO later today...

Blist: A Database For the Rest of Us?

We're through most of day one at DEMO 08, and even though an unusually high percentage of the demos have been bedeviled by technical glitches, there's been some good stuff on display. Among the more impressive things I've seen is Blist, a Web-based database.

The Blist folks claim it's "the world's easiest database" and "a database for the rest of us." When I think of statements like that, I think of Filemaker Pro, which Blist looks like it resembles, at least in a general way--it's got a grid view and a form one, and can incorporate items like images as well as traditional database data types. But unlike Filemaker, Blist is browser-based, so everything you store is available online.

Seems to me there's a good opportunity for somebody to come up with the definitive Web-based database--Google Base sure didn't turn out to be it--and Blist could have a shot at earning that honor.

Like most of the Web debutantes at this year's DEMO, Blist is not yet in public beta. But I'll try to wrangle an invite...

LeapFrog's Tag Book-Reading Pen

One of the first products in the spotlight here at DEMO 08 was Tag reader, a new product from LeapFrog, the folks behind the LeapPad and Fly educational toys.

Tag looks to be a bit like the popular LeapPad in that it involves a pen-like device which, when you use it with special books, lets you touch the pen to the page to hear words spoken out loud and otherwise interact with the book's text and images. But while LeapPad involved a pen tethered to a notebook-like plasticky case you put books in, Tag puts all the intelligence in the pen itself. It looks educational--and, more important, fun.

LeapPad will release original books, and ones featuring known properties such as Olivia and Pixar's cars. Tag will cost $50 and is due this Summer.

Curiously enough, one of the folks behind earlier LeapFrog products is also here at DEMO with a product aimed at adults that uses some of the same technology as Tag. I'll blog about that once it's been demoed...

SkyFire: Full-Blown Browsing on Phones?

It's still early on the first morning here at Demo 08, but so far, the product that's intrigued me most is Skyfire, a browser for Windows Mobile phones that promises to bring real PC-based browsing with all the trimmings to the phone.

I say "promises" because it would be a mistake to come to any firm conclusions about it based on a demo. But it does look pretty cool. In the demo, Skyfire execs went to ESPN.com, Facebook, and YouTube, and everything they showed worked. The experience looks a little like the iPhone's version of Safari--you see shrunken versions of full Web pages, then zoom in on sections of the page until you can read the type--but unlike Safari, Skyfire claims to support any sort of rich media and any sort of interactivity you might come across on the Web.

The DEMO demo didn't touch on how Skyfire accomplishes this. But this Webware post by Rafe Needleman talks about how Skyfire does what it does. It's a proxy browser: When you go to a site, Skyfire grabs it on a server, crunches it down, then sends a miniaturized version to your phone. Done well, that would mean that big fat Web sites might perform adequately over a wireless connection, and that the phone browser could replicate media experiences without having to explicitly support every plug-in out there. But it's not a given that Skyfire will be able to do it well (Rafe rightly points out that if the service gets a lot of subscribers, it won't be a cakewalk to make it work well for all of them, since it'll involve intensive server-side work.)

Proxy browsing is an old idea--the original version of the Palm Blazer browser did it years ago--but Skyfire is the first attempt I've seen to do it in a way that's built for modern phones with good screens and reasonably high-speed connections. Even in the demo, it wasn't flawless--YouTube video was much choppier than on an iPhone. And I'm curious whether something like Google Apps would be even remotely usable. So I'm very curious about trying Skyfire out for myself. (And asking its inventors how they plan to make money and when the software will go into public beta--other topics which they didn't address in their demonstration.)

More details once I have them...

At DEMO 08

I'm spending the next couple of days in Palm Desert, California at DEMO 08, the latest installment of the long-running showcase for new tech products and services. (Full disclosure: DEMO, like PC World, is part of International Data Group.)

I'll be posting about some of the more interesting things we see--starting in a few minutes...

Share Your PC World Memories as We Turn 25

PC World is about to do what very few brands have ever done in the technology realm: celebrate our silver anniversary. Our first issue didn't mention a specific month--maybe we weren't that confident there would be a second--but as best we can tell, it was the equivalent of what we'd consider the March issue.

So the March issue of PC World--which, in confusing magazine fashion, will reach subscribers in early February and hit newsstands in the middle of that month--is our special anniversary issue. (That's its cover above.) It includes some nostalgia, but also a lot of just plain useful stuff, and some thoughts about where technology is likely to go over the next 25 years.

(Side note: PCW was formally announced on November 29th, 1982, at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas. And it was kind of big news at the time, since our founding staff consisted of almost everyone who worked at another publication called PC Magazine. So in a sense, we're already 25--but we like to count our days on this planet beginning from when we first existed in tangible, dead-tree form.)

We have countless memories of our first quarter century of life, some of which we're going to share in a story for PCWorld.com. But we'd also like that story to include memories from you, the folks for whom we do what we do.

If you have any thoughts about PC World--whether you're someone who was there in 1983, or a PCW newbie--we'd love to hear them. Post 'em in a comment on this blog post, and we might use them in our feature. (Or, if you're not a registered member and don't feel like joining, feel free to e-mail me your memories--I'm harry_mccracken@pcworld.com

Where the Heck is my OLPC XO Laptop?

Back on November 12th, I was one of the first in line for the One Laptop Per Child foundation's "Give One Get One" program, which let me donate $400 to pay for two XO laptops: One for a deserving child in a developing nation and one for a child in my life myself. I got several e-mails telling me that as a first-day donor, I was first in line to receive an XO, with scheduled delivery by December 22nd.

Then on December 22nd, I got a note saying that I wouldn't get the laptop by Christmas but that I should expect it to show up by January 15th. Meanwhile, other folks I knew who who'd donated after I did got their machines.

January 15th came and went. No XO. I went to LaptopGiving.org and found that the "Track Your Order" feature actually just pointed to a page of general information on when shipments were expected. That page told me I'd probably already received my my system.

On January 17th, my colleague Matthew Newton poked his head into my office. He'd also donated, and was also impatiently waiting for his XO. He told me that he'd just spent an hour on the phone with OLPC customer service, and had been told that they didn't have his shipping address, as a result of some glitch relating to the fact he'd paid via PayPal.

I too had paid with PayPal...but I didn't have an hour to spare. So I checked the "Track Your Order" link and entered my e-mail address and tracking number. That sent me to a page saying I'd probably received my XO, with...confusingly...a link to a page that it said would let me track my order. I clicked on that link, and got a page not found error.

Today, I happened to be in the office early, so I called OLPC support and turned on my speakerphone. Thirty-five minutes later, the call rang through to a rep. Who told me that they didn't have a mailing address for me. (Like Matthew, I paid via PayPal.)

I gave him the address and asked when I might expect the laptop. He told me that OLPC doesn't tell them when machines are going out...but that I might have good news in February. I'll believe it when I see it.

As I've mentioned before, I feel a twinge of guilt each time I get annoyed over all this. The most important XO laptop I paid for was the one that was meant for some child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda, and if it indeed got there in a timely fashion, I'm happy. But if Matthew's experience and mine are any experience, OLPC's fulfillment house lost the addresses of at least some of the people who made donations through PayPal. And I can't figure out why they didn't e-mail those people early on to put things right. (In my case, at least, they instead repeatedly suggested that my XO would show up real soon now.)

My colleague Tom Spring is working on a story on this; he's talking to both OLPC benefactors who haven't received their XOs, and to folks at OLPC. I'll let you know when his piece is up...

Farewell, Uli Diehlmann

We at PC World received awful news last week when Uli Diehlmann, our Test Center director since 2000 and a PC World staffer since the lab's founding in 1992, died after a long battle with cancer.

Uli was a key force in building the Test Center, where we evaluate PCs, digital cameras, monitors, printers, HDTVs, and other products in an objective and consistent fashion. We'll remember her for her huge contributions to PCW, but even more as a friend who was kind, funny, and passionate about making our content as good as it could possibly be. Which means that if you've ever used a PC World review, she was your friend, too--whether or not you ever knew her name.

We've posted a story with more details about Uli's life and work, and memories from some of the many people who respected her so much, and enjoyed the fact that they were fortunate enough to spend their workdays in contact with her. And here's a slideshow with some images of her from over the years.

Uli's funeral service is this Saturday, January 26th, at 11am at the Christ the King Church in Pleasant Hill, California. Many of us from PCW will be there. It'll be the saddest of days--but I know we'll feel a bit better as we spend time thinking about all the ways she made our lives richer.

Anyone who knew Uli knows she loved dogs as much as she did her fellow human beings--especially Rottweilers. I know that I'll never meet a an example of that breed without thinking of Uli, and smiling...

Customer-Friendly Windows Vista Virtualization Licensing--Finally

Here's a bit of good news, via All About Microsoft's Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft is about to loosen the licensing restrictions on Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium that forbid users from running virtual instances of those operating systems via utilities such as VMWare and Parallels.

At least it appears that Microsoft is about to do this. Back in June, the company told some journalists that it was going to make virtualization legit, and then changed its mind at the very last moment. I blogged about that flip-flop at the time, and had griped about the license restrictions in an editorial a few months earlier.

Why the switch, finally? Microsoft had said that it forbid virtualization of Home Premium and Home Basic because of concerns that virtual operating systems might open up security holes that hackers could take advantage of. Mary Jo's report quotes Microsoft as mentioning a vague "maturity" in the market that makes virtualization acceptable. But if there's been any technological change that eliminates the security concerns that Microsoft brought up in the first place, I don't know about it. Although back when I was reporting on the virtualization restrictions, I had trouble finding anyone outside of Redmond who considered virtualized operating systems to be more dangerous than ordinary ones, and Microsoft itself offers a free virtualization product whose Web site makes no mention of scary security dangers.

Of course, the hubbub has always been about software licenses rather than technological limits--operating systems don't know that they're being virtualized, so Microsoft wasn't able to prevent anyone from installing virtual copies of Home Basic and Home Premium. It simply told customers that doing so would violate the terms of the Vista software agreement.

It's good to know that we can now do so without fear of being accused of being crooks. I may upgrade the version of Windows on my MacBook from XP to Vista Home Premium. Although, come to think of it, the XP installation is running so well that I may leave well enough alone...

Fun With Windows in Public Places

I'm at the United terminal at JFK (coming home from my second trip to New York this week), and when I checked out the great big display of arrivals and departures, I learned that it was running on a Windows machine. Which I could tell because multiple Windows errors messages were covering up the flight info (all fuzzy photos in this post taken with my camera phone):

Looking more closely, I saw that a program had hung, which had generated one of the error messages:

And it looked like that message had brought the Windows Taskbar to the front, so it showed up and a message alerting us that the computer in question wasn't running a firewall was visible:

The no-firewall question brings up an interesting question: Are the PCs that generate airport information displays on the Internet? I kinda hope not, if it's true that the one in question here was indeed running without a firewall.

The errors I saw were far from being unheard of--in fact, Google around, and you'll find zillions of sites showing Windows going awry at airports around the world. (Here's just one.)

Now, you could make the case that the errors I saw weren't really reason to mock Microsoft--it looks like a third-party program may have crashed, spawning the glitches that were visible on-screen. You can write buggy software for any program. But they weren't exactly an inspiring advertisement for the Windows platform. I bet I'm not the only person who saw them and thought "Boy, I hope the air-traffic control computers are running some other operating system."

Speaking of advertisements, the most prominent ads you see here once you pass security are ones predicated on the notion that everyone loves Windows so much that being able to buy a phone that runs the OS is a highly desirable proposition:

MacBook Air: Less Than a Complete Computer?

My thoughts on the long list of features the MacBook Air doesn't have, and whether it's a problem...

Steve Jobs Keynote: The MacBook Air

Steve Jobs is onstage at Moscone, saying Apple is releasing the world's thinnest notebook--the MacBook Air.

He's running through existing thin notebooks: They weigh three pounds and are 0.8-1.2 inches thick. They have small displays and miniature keyboards. And they're not fast because they can't support fast processors.

Apple looked at all this. It liked the three-pound weight. But there was too much compromise on thickness, size display, and keyboard, and on CPU power.

Sony's subnotebook is .76-.16" thick, compared to Sony's 1.20"-0.80". "The thickest part is thinner than the thinnest part of the Sony."

He's removing the MacBook Air from a manila envelope--and it is, indeed, remarkably thin looking."

"Let's go explore this in more detail...its the world's thinnest notebook."

13.3-inch LED-backlist display. It saves power, is bright, and is instant on.

It has a full-sized backlist keyboard and a big touchpad with gesture control. You can do iPhone-like multitouch manuevers to browse photos, etc.

The Air has an 80GB hard drive; 64GB solid-state storage is optional. It uses a special Core 2 Duo CPU, designed for Apple by Intel, that's 60 percent smaller than the standard one.

Intel CEO Paul Ottelini comes onstage. He's talking about the impossible thinness of the Air, and how tiny the Core 2 Duo inside it is. He's giving a CPU to Steve as a souvenir.

Steve: "This is awesome technology...thank you Paul, thank you Intel."

The Air has an iSight camera, Magsafe adapter, USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, headphone jack, etc. But no Ethernet, apparently. You can buy an optional external optical drive for $99. But Steve doesn't think most people will miss it. "The MacBook Air was built to be a wireless machine.

People need optical to watch movies, install software, make backups, and burn CDs. But Steve is explaining why iTunes movie rentals, Time Machine, etc. make that obsolete.

A new feature on the Air called Remote Disk will let you use another computer's optical drive wirelessly.

2GB of RAM is standard. The whole package "is just $1799." Applause. It's shipping in two weeks. "We're starting to take orders today."

Here's an ad for it. And Steve is explaining multiple ways in which the Air is environmentally friendly--aluminum case, lack of arsenic in the display, minimal packaging, etc.

"That is the fourth thing I wanted to talk to you about today." He's recounting everything Apple's announced during the first two weeks of 2008. "And we've got 50 more weeks to go."

"We have a special treat today." A few songs from Randy Newman. Randy's won one Oscar and been nominated for 17. Five Grammys and thirteen nominations. Steve met him at Pixar. "He's simply extraordinary."

A curtain raises, and here he is. Singing "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country." Which is...in a stunning surprise...sardonic.

Randy is talking about watching CNBC. He's bashing corporate America but saying Apple is different. Sardonic? I can't quite tell. Now he's playing "You've Got a Friend in Me" from Toy Story.

Steve Jobs is back. There's clearly no "One more thing" today. We're done. More thoughts later...

Steve Jobs Keynote: Time Capsule, iPhone, Movie Rentals, Apple TV 2.0

I'm sitting here in a very full room at San Francisco's Moscone Center--crammed between Dylan Tweney of Wired and the Valleywag guys--waiting for Steve Jobs to appear onstage. If connectivity holds up, I'll tell you what he tells us as it happens...

It's now 9:04am, and people are still chatting and listening to the pop music being piped into the room...I'm talking to Paul Boutin of Valleywag and Slate, and hoping that my battery doesn't conk out before Steve Jobs stops talking...

And here are Mac and PC onscreen, celebrating the new year. PC is regretting difficulties with Vista, acknowledging the success of the iPhone, etc....

And here's Steve Jobs. 2007 "was an extraordinary year for Apple." He's thanking everybody. And he has four things he'd like to talk about today.

"The first one is Leopard." Over 5,000,000 copies have been delivered in the first three months. "Unbelievable." The most successful release of Mac OS X. 19 percent of Mac users are running it. "We're really, really thrilled by it." The press has been very kind, too. Quotes from Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, Ed Baig, and Ed Mendelson of PC Magazine (who?).

Developers love it, too. Microsoft is shipping Office 2008 for the Mac--"the last big app to go native on Intel...we're finally there." Thank you Adobe and Microsoft.

Steve just said Tiger has a bunch of great new features, but he meant Leopard--he's touting Time Machine. But pointing out that backing up via it from a notebook involves constant plugging and unplugging of an external hard drive.

Today, Apple is releasing a companion product--Time Capsule. It's an Airport Extreme router with a hard drive built in. "It has a sever-grade hard drive...it's very reliable."

Time Capsule will let you back up a notebook--or as many Macs as you want--wirelessly. "Enable Time Machine on all your Macs, and that's all you have to do."

Steve just said it comes with a 500MB drive, then corrected himself--500GB version is $299, and a 1TB edition is $499. "These are very aggressive prices...we want people backing up their content."

Shipping in February. Here's a Mac/PC ad about Time Machine.

"Thing number two is the iPhone...I have some great news for you." In 200 days, four million iPhones have been sold--20,000 a day. "We're really pleased with this."

What does this mean? We're seeing a market share chart for smart phones. In the first quarter if iPhone shipments, Gartner said, BlackBerries had the highest market share with 39 percent. iPhone was second, with 19.5 percent. Palm, Nokia, Motorola, and everyone else is far behind.

Steve is pointing out that the iPhone (almost) equals the combined market share of Palm, Motorola, and Nokia. Applause from crowd.

"What everyone is really excited about is the software development kit that we're going to release in late February for our developers." But Apple wanted to roll out stuff today.

iPhone can now find your current location in maps. It has Webclips (a la Leopard). You can customize the home screen, SMS multiple people at one, and get chapters, subtitles, and languages in videos. And it has lyrics for songs.

Steve is taking a water break, and now he's demoing...

Maps can now locate your rough location on a map--a feature that other phone versions of the app have had for a little while now. Steve is using this to find his way from Moscone back to Apple. He's routing out a trip that involves a trip to the Apple Store in Union Square. "That's pretty cool."

He's putting a pin on the map and moving it about, showing that he can bookmark locations. "That is the new maps..." He's crediting Google. "They have awesome maps technology, and we write the front end."

Now, he's SMSing multiple people at once--Phil Schiller and other Apple execs, like the iPod's Tony Fadell. "Hi." They all get the message at the same time. iPhone SMS is threaded, and he can continue to send messages to all of them at once.

Webclips: Steve is going to Google, and showing there's a plus button in Safari. He can add a page to the phone's home screen. It becomes an icon on the home screen. Now he's loading the New York Times ("this one takes awhile, but it's a great Web site") and showing that Webclips remember where you've zoomed and panned. So he can zoom to the Times's technology section and add just that to this home screen. "I can just touch that and go right to those Web sites."

Now he's showing home screen customization. Touch and hold an icon and they all jiggle, letting him shuffle icons around into the order he wants. And he can create up to nine home screens and shuffle between them. "So there you have it." Applause.

Now he's explaining how the location finder in Maps uses Wi-Fi triangulation from a company called Skyhook Wireless and Google's cell phone tower triangulation to show where you are. And he's showing the chapters, subtitles, and lyrics.

"All this is available today as a free software upgrade for every iPhone." Applause. "The iPhone is not standing still--we keep making it better and better and better"

"What about the iPod Touch?" It's getting mail. stocks, maps with locations, and notes--in other words, more iPhone features. New iPhones have this; for existing owners, it's a $20 upgrade.

Thing number three: iTunes. They've sold four billions songs (20 million on Christmas), and a ton of video. But the 7 million movies they've sold have been disappointing. "We think there's a better way."

They've never rented music because you want to own your favorites. But people watch a movie once or twice. Touchstone New Line, Lions Gate, Miramax will be part of it. And so will Fox, WB, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony--"We have every major studio." Whoops and hoots from audience. "And we're going to have all the great first-run films." Ratatouille, for instance. Or Away From Her, which Steve missed.

There are 1000 movies, available 30 days after DVD. They work on PCs, Macs, iPods, and iPhones, and start less than 30 minutes after purchase. You can transfer them between devices and have 30 days to start watching, and then a day before the rental ends.

$3.99 for new releases; $2.99 for older stuff.

Steve is showing how you can rent Ratatouille and move it to your iPod. "iTunes Movie Rentals...launches today...it's a free software upgrade." In the U.S. today; internationally, later this year.

But what about this? We're seeing a picture of a flat screen. "I'd like to watch movies there too." Steve is saying that Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Blockbuster, and Vudu have all tried to figure out how to put Internet movies on the TV. "We've all missed." He's acknowledging that Apple TV "was not what people wanted."

What people really wanted was "movies, movies, movies."

"So we're back...with Apple TV 2.0." Which syncs with a computer if you want, but doesn't require a computer. You can rent movies directly and watch them on your widescreen--in DVD or HD quality. Applause and whistles.

You can also grab 125,000 video and audio podcasts, and view photos from Flickr and .Mac. "As you know, photos are stunning on an HDTV because modern cameras are all HD." Over 50,000,000 YouTube videos are available, and you can buy TV shows and music. And play iTunes content and photos from a Mac or PC.

HD movies are $4.99, a buck more than standard def; 100 movies are available. Steve is now demoing the new interface. It's less flashy and animated than the old one. He's previewing Blades of Glory.

"If I want to buy this--excuse me, rent it--I just go over here and push one button." It's downloading. Now it's ready to play. And here it is, in DVD quality.

Now we're watching Live Free or Die Hard in HD. Here's Bruce Willis. Exploding cars and helicopters. etc., etc. "So you get the idea...it's very strong...it's very strong."

Steve is browsing different genres. Here are Westerns--The Sons of Katie Elder, The Magnificent Seven. He's searching for Shakespeare in Love.

Now he's checking out TV shows--"We've got over 600 TV shows in iTunes." Buy one on Apple TV, and it will sync back to your PC or Mac.

Now he's browsing music. He's searching for a Linkin Park music video and previewing it.

Now he's looking at podcasts. Here's something with HD footage of mountains. "This streaming off their servers--it's free."

Now he's looking at photos on .Mac. "You can go to your own sites or other people's sites."

Now he's talking about that anonymous "chief architect of iMovie" and showing one of his vacation movies with underwater stuff. Now he's looking at Flickr photos and browsing around.

He's trying to do a Flickr slideshow, and getting music but not pictures. "I'm afraid Flickr isn't serving up the photos today."

"That's what I wanted to show you today...isn't it incredible?" Recap of the news. So far.

The new software is a free upgrade for current owners. And they're knocking the price of Apple TV from $299 to $229. Upgrade and new Apple TV start shipping in two weeks.

Fox was first studio to sign up for rentls. Here's Jim Gianopulous, the president and CEO of Fox. He says he's excited by the news even though he already knew about it.

He's talking about all the models and complexity of movies. "It all boils down to two things...make great movies, and give them to people in as many ways as you can. That's all there is."

"It's basic enough that even a studio guy can get it."

Fox's tech guys and futurists looked at all this. "I think we have a slide with the results."

The slide is a iPod ad with Homer Simpson clutching a donut-shaped iPod.

He's explaining that Fox Blu-Ray titles will come with iPod-ready copies of the movies.

Jobs is back, and I'm going to start a new blog post...

Is Wireless USB the "Air" in the MacBook Air?

I wouldn't usually be up at 3am when I need to be up bright and early to attend a Steve Jobs keynote later this morning, but I just got home from a quick trip to New York. And after reading this post at Wired, I'm wondering if a major part of tomorrow's (er, today's) news will be that one or more new Mac portables will support Wireless USB or some other flavor of Ultra WideBand connectivity.

That would be in keeping with the apparent "There's Something in the Air" theme at the show. And it's certainly more plausible than WiMax, which is just too far from prime time to be showing up in mainstream Apple products. (It's early for Wireless USB, too, but not that early, and Apple would have more control over implementing it than with WiMax.) Built-in Wireless USB would put Apple ahead of the curve on a technology that stands a good chance of eventually being everywhere--=which would certinly be a move in the Apple tradition.

I've been predicting until now that the MacBook Air (which I'm assuming for a moment does indeed exist, and will go by that moniker) won't use flash instead of a hard drive, and might have a built-in optical drive. I think I'm still likely to be right on the former, and possibly on the latter, too. But the Wired post's scuttlebutt about this laptop being astonishingly thin has me weakening a bit. If it's the Mac equivalent of the original iPod Nano--a product so thin it almost establishes a new category--Apple might be willing to make more compromises to make it happen.

Or maybe not. Seven hours or so from now, we'll know for sure...

Last Call For Macworld Expo Keynote Speculation

At the moment, it's 9:37pm here at New York's JFK airport on Monday night, and I'm stuck--but still hoping to get home to San Francisco in time for tomorrow morning's Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld Expo. If I'm there, I'll blog the whole thing so you can learn what's new as soon as I do, and we'll have plenty of other coverage, too.

I know what I hope to see there: A small, thin, light MacBook that sports both a hard drive and an optical drive. There's no reason why Apple can't engineer such a beast--and no way (yet) to build a truly satisfying, affordable MacBook that has flash memory instead of a hard disk. And who wants to tote an external drive?

Daring Fireball's John Gruber, one of the smartest people in Macdom, has a list of his best guesses at what we'll learn that's the smartest one I've seen. By which I mean, I agree with practically all of it.

And here's a stupid little poll that covers some of the rumors about tomorrow's news--take it before Steve Jobs takes the stage and eliminates all the fun of wondering about this stuff...

The iPhone's Anonymous Heroes

Over at Wired, Fred Vogelstein has an excellent piece on the creation of the iPhone that's worth a read if you're interested in Apple, the phone industry, or how the former is shaking up the latter. But I'm struck by the fact that the one and only Apple employee mentioned in this story on the inception and execution of the whole idea of the iPhone is...well, you know who it is.

I've written before that Apple, a company that made its hardware engineers and software designers into rock stars, has become one which seems to want them to work in anonymity. Which would be a shame for any company, but is particularly regrettable for the one which surely employs more extraordinary talents than any other single outfit in Silicon Valley.

Original Mac software wizard Andy Hertzfeld lovingly documents the cast of characters who created the Mac at his superb Folklore.org site. The iPhone's creators have come up with a product that promises to be at least as important as that 128K Mac, but it's unclear whether we'll ever know who they were or how they did it.

Fred's piece is titled "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry." If you ask me, the real untold story is this: Who, other than Steve Jobs, invented this thing?

Quick Poll! Did Gizmodo Ruin CES?

When you devote the better part of a week of your life to attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you want there to be lots of news--and you want that news to be about cool new products. CES was at least as much of a zoo as ever, and while the product news was high in volume, this year's edition was a disappointment in terms of truly exciting stuff. When I asked folks what they thought the big news of the show was, the most common answers involved not an exciting product launch but all the scuttlebutt about the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD wars. Which was kind of depressing.

And now that the show is over, we have more non-product-related drama in the form of "Gizmodogate"--the news that contributors to the gadget blog used special remote controls to shut off some of the hundreds (thousands?) of TV sets that festooned booths at the show. Everyone in the blogosphere seems to be taking sides, from the New York Times' David Pogue (anti-Giz) to ZDNet's Larry Dignan (pro-Giz). And Gizmodo has apologized...at least sort of.

And me? Well, the prank was clearly self-defeating, given that CES says they're banning one Gizmodo blogger and may take further action against the blog and its parent company, Gawker Media. But yes, it was damn funny--and if you ask me, both CES and Las Vegas could use more fun and surprises. (They're both rife with "entertainment" that's monotonous and canned.)

I wouldn't have done it; I wouldn't have wanted it done to me. But if I'd been one of the companies whose chains Gizmodo's bloggers yanked, I'd hope I'd have the good graces to be briefly annoyed, then cut them some slack and move on. Much as the companies probably would have if Allen "Candid Camera" Funt were still with us and had pulled this stunt. Life's too short to waste brain cells on staying angry or exacting revenge--and it's better PR to show you have a sense of humor than to be publicly pissy about something which was, at worse, briefly annoying. No orphans died; no widows had reason to weep.

(Full disclosure: I'm friendly with Gizmodo editor-in-chief Brian Lam, and the site has said enough nice things about me that "harry mccracken" is a Gizmodo tag. So I can't analyze this situation as a dispassionate bystander.)

But enough about what I think. What do you make of Gizmodo's practical joke?

The UMPC: Still Evolving! Still Pointless!

As my colleague Narasu Rebbapragada has blogged, among the eight zillion products here at CES in Las Vegas are some new iterations of the Ultra-Mobile PC, devices the size of a paperback book that have touch screens and run Windows Vista. I didn't see 'em all, but I did check out Toshiba's technology preview of a UMPC it's working on (seen above). What Toshiba is showing is an early rough draft; the company won't say when the device might go on sale, and the demo shows one being powered by a fuel cell, something that's not going to happen any time in the short-term future.

The Toshiba UMPC packs a number of advanced input technologies, including motion sensors that let you scroll around by tilting the entire device around. The company is working on unique finishes that could make it better-looking than any UMPC before it. All in all, it's an impressive piece of next-generation technology.

And yet it looks like it'll be just as crippled as all its predecessors, because the whole UMPC concept is based on a fundamentally bad idea: putting a full-blown copy of Windows on a device with an undersized screen and no keyboard.

The Windows Vista user interface was designed to make sense on PCs with large displays and lots of pixels. On the Toshiba, text is barely legible, and the icons in the System Tray were so small I couldn't figure out what they were, period. Like other UMPC companies, Toshiba has incorporated workarounds to deal with this, like a mode that magnifies part of the screen so you can actually read URLs as you input them into Internet Explorer. But that's inherently kludgy-shouldn't the default type size on a portable computing device be large enough to read?

The situation is similar with input. The Toshiba has the aforementioned motion sensors, several buttons for performing mouse-like maneuvers, a mode that puts a virtual touchpad on the screen, and an onscreen keyboard that's broken into sections on each side of the screen. Most of which merely compensate for the fact that Windows Vista is designed to use a mouse and full QWERTY keyboard-items which UMPCs don't have room for. I've never seen a UMPC which rethought how you interact with a small computer from the ground up, rather than trying to work around Windows' deskbound origins.

As I got a demo of Toshiba's prototype, it dawned on me that one company has managed to make an ultra-mobile personal computer that leapfrogs past all the ungainliness of all the other ones on that market. No, I'm not talking about OQO or FlipStart--I'm thinking of Apple and the iPhone. The iPhone is pocket-sized, which makes it infinitely more portable than the not-quite-pocket-sized UMPCs out there. The multi-touch user interface is different from and better than the pseduomouse features on UMPCs. The iPhone's menus make everything legible. The onscreen keyboard is far from perfect, but I haven't seen a UMPC that does QWERTY better.

Of course, UMPC supporters might bring up one seeming point in that platform's favor compared to the iPhone: UMPCs run full Vista and can therefore run just about any Windows application, while the iPhone's simplified version of OS X isn't compatible with Mac apps, and Apple is only now getting around to letting third party developers write iPhone programs at all. But it seems to me that the manifold compromises and limitations of the UMPC largely negate the value of full Windows compatibility. UMPCs can run a lot of software, but it can't run it very well at all.

That's why I'm not optimistic about the future of the UMPC platform-but am intrigued by the upcoming Windows Mobile 7, which, if this post at InsideMicrosoft has its facts straight, will go a lot further towards rethinking Windows for small devices. And I suspect that both the iPhone and Windows Mobile will flourish long after the UMPC quietly vanishes from the market...

Wacom's Cheap, Sleek New Cintiq Tablet

One of my favorite products from the Consumer Electronics Show was actually released last month. But it's still pretty new and exceptionally cool: Wacom's Cintiq 12WX pen display, a PC peripheral that lets you draw directly on the screen with a pressure-sensitive pen.

Cintiqs have been around for a long time, and have been one of the best digital tools an artist could have--they replicate the natural feel of working with pen and paper in a way that no other input device can.

But they've been pricey--two grand and above--and big, bulky beasts that needed lots of room. (I have the 21ux model and love it, but it occupies an entire small desk all by itself.)

At $999, the 12UX is half the price of any previous Cintiq, making it a plausible purchase for a lot more serious amateur artists. But the price is less interesting than the tablet's design, which bears little resemblance to any previous Cintiq. It's the first Cintiq you'd describe as sleek--it's .67" thick, compared to 1.8" for the 21UX model. Actually, in terms of form factor, it looks more like Wacom's Intuos tablets, which don't have displays, than the other Cintiqs.

Earlier Cintiqs have versatile but bulky stands; this one has a very simple one that folds flush with the tablet when you're not using it, letting you hold the whole tablet in your lap to draw or stow it in a laptop bag.

The 12WX's LCD display looks good; the pen has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, just as with the pricier Cintiqs. The only downside to this device I can think of compared to its pricier predecessors is the screen size--at 12.1", with 1280-by-800 resolution, it's more akin to a small piece of paper than the giant surface that other Cintiqs give you. (The 21UX's 21.3" display provides almost twice as many pixels.) That means you're much more likely to need to scroll around when drawing or working in Photoshop, reducing the natural feel.

I asked Wacom if they plan to release a Cintiq with the 12WX's thin profile, but with a larger screen; they were noncommital. I'd love to see one with a screen that provided a bit more in the way of real estate and pixels, but the 12WX remains impressive. I'll bet a lot of people who thought they wanted an Intuos tablet without a screen will splurge on one of these instead, and be happy they did.

Here, by the way, is a quick video in which my colleague Ed Albro takes a look at the new Cintiq....

My War With Hotel Check-In Kiosks

As I've blogged before, I have the worst luck with the touch-screen check-in kiosks that are popping up in hotels. Whenever I see one, I try to use it--but I'm only able to leave with key in hand maybe 25 percent of the time. Otherwise, said kiosks are either out of order, or they give me an error message somewhere along the way.

Along with my PC World comrades, I'm in Las Vegas this week to attend the humongous Consumer Electronics Show. We're staying at the Sahara--which, despite being one of the last relics of Old Vegas on the Strip, is the first hotel here I've stayed in with kiosks. I ambled up to one and got most of the way through the check-in process before it choked and told me to see a real person.

Which is what I shoulda done in the first place--especially since there were no lines at the counter. I guess it's geekly instinct, but when given the opportunity to accomplish something by using a computer, I usually try to. Even though my experiences with hotel kiosks have been dismal and those with automated checkouts at grocery stores haven't been that much better.

Anyhow, every time I try to use a kiosk at a hotel and go away empty-handed, I wonder: Is it me? Or are these things simply not ready for prime time? If you've used 'em, I'd love to hear your experiences.

And as long as I'm talking CES, here's a quick plug: We'll be doing a ton of coverage the news here at the show over the next four days. Here's Denny Arar's report on Bill Gates' keynote last night, the official kickoff of the show; check out our CES Info Center and Today @ PC World blog for lots more stuff.