iFrame's based on industry-standard codecs H.264 and AAC, but it's got a standard res of 960x540 and it's designed by Apple "to speed up importing and editing by keeping the content in its native recorded format while editing."

Currently, the only two camcorders using iFrame are the Sanyo VPC-HD2000A and VPC-FH1A. The question is what other cameras are gonna be using it and how much of a real standard iFrame's going to be. We all know how much Apple loves setting standards. [Apple via Cnet]

If Apple really wants to recreate that "feel" of buying a record, I have to feel like I'm buying something that isn't just higher quality, but also permanent. If I buy a lossy AAC file from the iTunes store today, not only do I know that it's inferior to the same $15 CD, but also that I'll have to chuck it once AAC is put out to pasture.

Together with all of the liner notes, lyric books and photos, lossless files could perfectly replace CDs (assuming they're properly backed up). In the future, if needed, I could transcode these lossless downloads into any lossy compression format that comes along. Apple Lossless in the iTunes Store would offer all the convenience of digital downloads along with the permanency of CD quality audio. If it ever happened, I would never need to buy a CD again.

Unfortunately, that last part is exactly why lossless audio isn't included as part of the iTunes LP package. The labels know that once they give customers lossless audio in online music stores, they'll have reached the point of no return. As popular as iTunes may be, CD sales still make up the majority of music purchases. The record companies are understandably scared to let go of their last strong foothold in the industry and give Apple even more leverage.

As a result, I don't think it's Apple's fault that lossless audio isn't available in the iTunes store. The iTunes Producer software labels use to create files for download on iTunes has supposedly had an option to encode in Apple Lossless since 2006. Apple would probably love to offer lossless files at a premium, just like they originally did with iTunes Plus. But then record companies would probably want that content triple-wrapped in DRM. Until the record companies stop making money off of the CD, we won't see a big move to lossless.

CD quality lossless audio would just be the beginning. Really, the ultimate archival format would be 24-bit, 96KHz tracks, maybe even 192KHz someday. That might sound crazy, but it's out there. HDTracks has Alison Krauss and Robert Plant's album Raising Sand available in DRM-free, 24-bit, 96KHz FLAC files. The price? $16, one dollar less than some iTunes LPs that include 256Kbps AAC files. Obviously, for 99.99% of the population, mastering-quality FLAC files are overkill for everyday listening. From an archival perspective, though, it's not unreasonable. And as scary as it may seem to manage such a huge library of lossless files, it's totally doable.

As it stands, iTunes LPs are a bunch of compressed AAC files with music videos and lyrics attached (Haven't they been adding videos, bonus tracks and more to cheaper albums on iTunes forever?). For some, that's fine. But for me, if I'm going to pay $17 for a digital album, I need to get everything the $15 CD version offers and then some.

I was hoping today would be the day I could start buying music on iTunes. But until Apple or Amazon or any of the other major online music stores offer lossless audio downloads, I'm stuck clinging desperately to the sinking ship that is physical media.

And once lossless audio becomes the norm, I can't wait for everyone to start complaining the inadequacy of CD-quality downloaded audio.

They Call It "Open" For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by... Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By "standard," we're talking about a format, interface or programming framework that a bunch of companies or people or organizations agree is the way something's going to get done, whether it's how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won't play on another, web sites that work in one browser don't work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don't make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn't the only open standard that Apple's had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you're the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto "standards" enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 percent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you're making everybody else do things the way you want them done. If you're doubting how important standards are, look no further than the old Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it'll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a "universal OS," or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It's so standards-compliant it tied with Opera's Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What's most striking about WebKit isn't the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn't just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the "real internet" is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple's been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole "free and open" thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it's too crappy to become the web's default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe's Flash. Apple says Ogg's quality and hardware acceleration support don't match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardized H.264 codec, which is tied up by license issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG's H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it's in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft's WMV didn't become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It's actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn't become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC's superiority to MP3: Microsoft's WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can't leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn't work out. It's a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple's shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that's also notably supported by Dell—which'll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don't see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That's just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple's had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn't always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple's position doesn't allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet broadly. They've actually made things better, at least so far. But, one glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they're the most gracious tech company second thoughts about that.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom's legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The iPod Plug

While it in some ways seems like an example of a proprietary technology done right (it's solid, supports lots of connection types and has become basically ubiquitous), Old 30-Pin has quite a bit to feel bad about. Consider this: It single-handedly obliterated the non-iPod accessory market. Almost every MP3 player dock, FM transmitter or interfacing device supports this port exclusively—or with some feeble aux plug (cable not included) in the rear. And why shouldn't they? There are more 30-pin-jack iPods out there than there are all other MP3 players combined.

But it means Apple is stuck. An abrupt switch would be a disaster for third parties and customers alike (consider the outcry when the iPhone 3G wasn't compatible with some older 30-pin accessories) and it's not clear what they could switch to. Micro-USB probably doesn't have enough pins for all the various functions the port should serve, and switching to a solution that would, say, force users to connect both a power plug and and audio cable to a dock would seem like a step backwards. But hey, just because it's currently practical and ubiquitous doesn't mean it isn't evil. It's because of you, iPod jack, that my Sansa has about as many docking prospects as the average Giz writer.

Sprint and Verizon's Secret Shame: CDMA

To the end user, CDMA and GSM don't seem very different—Sprint, a CDMA carrier, offers the same services as AT&T, a GSM carrier—except when it comes to how they handle phones.

GSM phones are identified by the SIM card that they carry, which can be moved between phones at the user's will. Not so with America's other wireless standard. Effectively, a CDMA phone is like a GSM phone with the SIM card welded to its socket. Your CDMA phone is permanently locked to your carrier, and your mobile connection is permanently bound to your handset—unless your carrier is kind enough to authorize a transfer to another phone.

The presumably intentional effect is that there's no market for 3rd party hardware in CDMA, which is fine for carriers, shitty for customers. Worst of all, there's no good reason for this. CDMA SIM cards exist. They're called R-UIM cards, but US carriers are in no rush to implement them.

The Battle of the Redundant Audio Formats

There was a time when it wasn't clear which stupid format would reign supreme, Microsoft's WMA or Apple's AAC. [Note: Yes, Apple didn't invent AAC. However, they are the only reason any of us have heard of it.] While each technically brought improved sound quality, they were both bastards born of the same greedy combination: the desire for DRM and the unwillingness to pay MP3 encoder/decoder royalties. Your AACs wouldn't play on your Zen; your WMAs wouldn't work on your iPod; your ATRAC3s wouldn't work on anything. These formats only grew popular because people accidentally used them to rip their music, and later, because they were an unavoidable part of the digital music purchasing process.

With wider format support in new players, the slow death of the all-you-can-download rental WMA stores and Apple's new "our bad!" attitude towards audio DRM, it seems like we're taking a healthy step back to good ole' em-pee-threes. And while iPods will never play WMA, iTunes does convert 'em. And it's nice to see more Microsoft products supporting AAC, which Apple still won't shake off.

A Unique Phone Charger for Every Phone

Even—or rather, especially—when phone plugs were only for electricity, every goddamn manufacturer had their own exclusive, silly connector for dumping current into batteries. Today, little has changed, and as virtually anyone who owns a cellphone knows, this sucks. A lost charger means your phone is out of commission, and because of carrier subsidies, a new charger sometimes costs more than the phone itself did.

And that's how we arrive at the reason for this stupid situation: Unique chargers=$$$ for cellphones makers. This would explain why the first substantive call for standardization came so recently, and why Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Apple and pretty much everyone else still, in 2008, enforce phone-charger monogamy. And if you think phones are a pain, try finding a replacement charger for your Bluetooth headset. Good luck.

A Raw File By Any Other Name...

R-A-W. If you care about digital photography, these three letters form the most beautiful sound in the English language. Raw images, supported by almost every new DSLR and an increasing number of point-and-shoots, are made up of the 'raw' image data, pulled directly from your camera's sensor, letting you change all kinds of parameters—white balance, exposure and noise reduction, to name a few—instead of letting the camera pick them automatically during the shooting. And you can make infinite changes and tweaks long after the photo has been taken.

It would seem that by now importing raw files should be as easy as transferring JPEGs. Well, it's not. The problem is that almost every camera maker has insisted on using their own slightly different version, meaning that you either have to use your camera's supplied raw conversion software (almost always a steaming pile) or invest in a wide-support program like Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom—and make sure it has the right compatibility. Come on guys, Adobe gave you a perfectly fine, royalty-free raw format back in 2004. Use it.

So Many Memory Cards

For years, everyone had their own memory card format: Sony products used Memory Sticks, Olympus used xD, Fujifilm used SmartMedia and so on... they all thought they had the heir to the 35mm/CD/Zip Drive throne. It was adorable! Now, it's not. While we were all busy stockpiling one soon-to-be-obsolete memory cards and multi-compatible (bit never totally compatible) readers, most of the electronics industry was aligning itself with a winner.

Two, actually—or maybe three. SD cards (backed by Panasonic) are cheap, compact and capacious and only getting better, with MicroSD as its tiny phone version. Meanwhile, beefier, more durable Compact Flash cards suit the serious photogs. The rest of you: You all do the exact same thing! Please die.

For Our Earphones Only: Non-Standard Headset Jacks

When a little metal trim kept the original iPhone from accepting regular old 3.5mm headphones, a lot of people almost blew a gasket, and rightfully so. It seemed hopeless: Even a phone that was more iPod than handset couldn't resist the allure of proprietary earphones.

Phones have always been terrible for this. The same varied, awkward orifices that charged your old phone probably served as its headset connector too, leaving you stuck with the flimsy, tinny OEM earbuds or an easy-to-lose adapter to deal with. For a while though, it seemed like companies were starting to catch the drift, as standard 3.5mm headphone/mic jacks became more and commonplace in music phones. But a Nokia or two is little comfort; HTC's newest Android phone, a multimedia powerhouse, only has a USB port. Apple's new Shuffle—a friggin' iPod-only works with the supplied earphones or special replacements. Grief ensues.

Sony's Entire Oeuvre

The story of Sony is like an exaggerated summary of the history of proprietary goofs. Sony entering a new market=Sony introducing a new, frustratingly exclusive format, plug, codec or device standard. With audio, it was MiniDiscs and ATRAC; on the PSP, you got UMD; for cameras and other portable devices, the Memory Stick. In video, there was Betamax, Laserdisc, HDV, and now Blu-ray. Yeah, this last one is sorta successful, but only because Sony decided to fight like there was no tomorrow to beat its rival format. [Blam: I'm not apologizing for the past, but Sony's promised to better about open formats going forward.] It worked this time, but God only knows what Sony labs have in store for us, and our shrinking wallets, next.

Did we leave out any nasty ones, like Nintendo's many accessories, or an Apple USB port that doesn't take all USB products? If you have a good one, throw it into a comment below.

AppleInsider cites a Dec. 3 story from the French publication Electron Libre that says iTunes will remove DRM from Sony BMG, Universal and Warner tracks on December 9th, like it already does with EMI and indie content. The story doesn't say what percentage of tracks from the major labels, or what the cost bump for the new tracks might be, if any, though it seems to say the thing might cover every single album and track on iTunes. In fact, check out this rather ungraceful machine translation of the French story for yourself:

...The signals are clear today. iTunes should offer catalogs of three majors Universal Music, SonyBMG Music and Waner [sic] rid of technological protection measures next Tuesday, Dec. 9. The transition to DRM Free should be at a global level...

With that opener, it almost reads like a fortune. I for one hope this fortune comes true. [Electron Libre via AppleInsider]

Apple also boasts 50 million iTunes customers and over 4 billion tracks sold. It's a nice celebratory email, based on solid facts, but it hides some serious insecurities: things might not remain this rosy for long.

More and more people will soon discover Amazon's download store, with higher-res, lower-priced non-DRM MP3s, plus automatic loading into iTunes. Many iPod owners will also be drawn to Wal-Mart's own increasingly busy download department, though in our Battlemodo we decided Amazon was the better bet.

You can't get just anything DRM-free yet, and iTunes still has some sweet exclusives, but with stronger support from all four major labels, Amazon is bound to overtake iTunes by and by, and Wal-Mart may easily expand its lead.

Apple's release:

iTunes Now Number Two Music Retailer in the US

iTunes Customers Top 50 Million

CUPERTINO, California—February 26, 2008—Apple® today announced that iTunes® (www.itunes.com) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, with an incredible 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone, and offers the world's largest music catalog of over six million songs from all of the major and thousands of independent labels.

"We'd like to thank the over 50 million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes. "We continue to add great new features like iTunes Movie Rentals to give our customers even more reason to love iTunes."

Last month, Apple launched iTunes Movie Rentals featuring movies from all of the major movie studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate and New Line Cinema. Users can rent movies and watch them on their PCs or Macs, all current generation iPods**, iPhone™ and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV®. iTunes Movie Rentals will offer over 1,000 titles by the end of this month, including over 100 titles in stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound which users can rent directly from their widescreen TV using Apple TV.

iTunes 7.6 is available as a free download at www.itunes.com. iTunes Movie Rentals are available in the US only and are $2.99 (US) for library titles and $3.99 (US) for new releases, and high definition versions are priced just one dollar more with library titles at $3.99 (US) and new releases at $4.99 (US). Movie rentals from the iTunes Store for Mac® or Windows require iTunes 7.6. iTunes Movie Rentals require a valid credit card with a billing address in the country of purchase.

*Based on data from market research firm the NPD Group's MusicWatch survey that captures consumer reported past week unit purchases and counts one CD representing 12 tracks, excluding wireless transactions. The iTunes Music Store became the second-largest music retailer in the US after Wal-Mart, based on the amount of music sold during 2007.

**Movie rentals work on iPod classic, iPod nano with video and iPod touch.

No, it's not a new L'Oreal eyeliner but the new Sony Walkman Series E. It's like, they come in trendy-schmancy colors and they are oh-so-shiny and the three-line LCD screen magically appears and it has newly arranged buttons and stuff. And if you charge them for three minutes, they will give you three hours, with one hour of charge giving you 30 hours of looping music hell, although only if you use the ATRAC 132kbps format.

And while someone in Cupertino may be going "whatever," the interesting part is that these 1, 2 and 4GB sexy USB lipsticks also support AAC, so they are compatible with that other player with 100 million units sold and its online shop. They are WMA-compatible too, but who cares about WMA now?

The Series E are coming next month to Japan for $165 (NW-E016), $115 (NW-E015) and $92 (NW-E013), where they may sell in even better numbers than the PlayStation 3. Or maybe not. Hopefully they will be around here in time for your girlfriend's birthday.

OK people, keep your wigs on. There's an update after the jump.

So, you call it potatoe and I call it potato. Some of you readers think that this post is unfair to Sony but I don't agree with you, so I am going to reply here in a new segment I've decided to call:

Some of You Readers Think That This Post Is Unfair to Sony but I Don't Agree With You

First of all, MP3 support is a given unless you think Sony is suicidal (and trust me, despite the PS3, they are not).

Then, why I posted about this even if I don't think it's a wetting-my-pants amazing player? Obviously because some of you actually like it. Good. That's why we are here for, to cater for a large audience composed of Sony fanboys, Apple fanboys, Nintendo fanboys, Microsoft fanboys and Chicken Latex Outfits fanboys. Well, maybe not the last one. But we do write for everyone else who likes gadgets, each with their very own opinions and likings.

Like you, we also have our own. My extended one about this particular player is the following:

I think the packaging is ok and sexy, but the fact is that it looks like a L'oreal eyeliner or a M·A·C lipstick. Some people may love it to the point of inviting Sir Howard Stringer to dinner.

I don't.

Furthermore, a screen (the trick of the appearing LCD is an old one, btw) of that size is absolutely stupid. I still agree with Apple (and Microsoft if you trust the leaks) that to navigate your music collection you need a big screen. This one won't be useful to navigate, won't be useful to see photos and won't help me knowing what song is playing because I already know the song.

You may think otherwise. I don't.

Finally, I think that including battery lifetime figures using ATRAC is just silly, because nobody gives a damn about ATRAC, not even the most rabid Sony fans. OK, maybe those do give a damn. But they use MiniDiscs too. But I digress: even without forgetting about that, this player has a nice battery life, just like other players from other manufacturers. The Sansa comes inmediatly to mind.

In other words: the battery life is a blah feature. The price is just ok. And Sony is not The Hardware Quality standard anymore, period. Not by a large margin (exploding batteries anyone? manufacturing problems with Blu-ray drives? LCD panels actually manufactured in a joint-venture that uses Samsung expertise and technology? Come on).

So my verdict is: while sexy looking for some, this MP3/AAC/WMA/ATRAC player is not amazing by any means. Worth mentioning? Yes. Worth praising? Not.

Now, if you don't agree, please justify your opinion with facts and logic, but stop the frikkin' trolling about how much we hate Sony and how much we love Apple or whoever.

The fact is that we hate and love them all the same and, like you, look at things from our experience and from our personal perspective. That's why we often disagree between us, the editors, and with you, the readers. – Jesus Diaz

Press releases (japanese) [Sony via New Launches]

Even nicer is the Push technology they've thrown on here: Push-to-share sends your dumb friends your even dumber photos and Push-to-talk keeps one lucky person always within the reach of your sharp talons.

This slightly upgraded SLVR should be in stores sometime before the end of the year. For what wireless carrier, um, we don't know, but considering it's GSM, you can probably rule out Verizon Wireless. Hopefully the cellphone performs better than its silly name would lead you to believe. – Nicholas Deleon

new MOTOSLVR L7e handset [Slashphone.com]

The Xmod works by upconverting the digital music using Creative's X-Fi CMSS-3D technology. Here's the kicker: the Xmod "restores" part of the audio information that was originally stripped in order to make the lossy music file. So we're led to believe that the Xmod generates missing information on its own. Laptop seems to think it does, everything from Lauren Hill to Queen. Quite an eclectic bunch they've got over there.

The Xmod is still scheduled to be released later this month for $80.The urge to call "shenanigans" on this product is so immense right now. – Nicholas Deleon

Creative Introduces the Xmod [Laptop Magazine]

On the multimedia front, the Z610i also tries to perform like a champ; never having used it, I can't say for sure one way or another. There's support for MP3, AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+ digital audio files and pictures taken using the aforementioned camera can be uploaded to a Photo Blog application ("this is when the cops showed up..."). Sony Ericsson graciously includes a 64MB Memory Stick Mico (M2), but users can plug in cards up to 1GB in size. She even reads RSS feeds.

The Sony Ericsson Z610i will be available in black, blue and pink when it ships later this quarter. – Nicholas Deleon

Sony Ericsson Launches Mirror-Like Z610i [MobileBurn]