Trade in Your DVDs, Plus a Couple Bucks, and Get the Blu-ray Versions

Warner set up a DVD to Blu-ray exchange program called, appropriately enough, DVD2Blu, as sort of a more-tempting version of its HD-DVD to Blu-ray version. The problem is, it's not actually that great of a deal; you're limited to Warner movies, obviously, but it also costs $8-10 per DVD, plus $5 shipping, for the exchange. You might actually be better off just hitting Best Buy or Walmart or whatever and looking for sales, since DVD2Blu could cost you 18 bucks plus the agony of waiting for your new HD copy of The Wedding Singer: Totally Awesome Edition to arrive. [Engadget]

Steve Ballmer Acknowledges Apple's Gains, Remains Cocky

Microsoft held a shareholder's meeting this morning, led by the always-dynamic Steve Ballmer, and an interesting question came up: Why does Microsoft have such a lousy reputation among certain demographics, like, say, upper-middle-class college kids? Ballmer admitted that Apple's been seeing some gains that, while small, are a clear sign that Microsoft has room for improvement, either in marketing or product positioning. It's a pretty clear-headed statement from Ballmer—after all, he notes, Microsoft still has an insane marketshare, even in the high-end consumer demo, so despite Apple's visibility, Microsoft doesn't exactly have cause for concern. That level-headedness is why this story's in Remainders: Where's the explosive, frothing-at-the-mouth, prone to Bidenesque gaffes Ballmer we all know and, um, know? [TechFlash]

Sanyo to Build Houses Powered by Solar Energy and Li-Ion Batteries

Sanyo, considered Japan's "greenest" electronics manufacturer (sort of like being the best-dressed homeless person), is about to start building solar-powered, lithium-ion-based homes in its native country. The houses are all equipped with LED lighting, solar-powered water heater, all that stuff. They'll be a little pricey, at around $355,000—an equivalent non-green house would cost $62,000 less, although the Sanyo houses come with a $30,000 government subsidy. It's in Remainders because it's Japan only, and because I don't understand enough Japanese to learn any more about it. [Crunchgear]

Sony Announces Vague "iTunes-Like" Store on PlayStation Network for Books, Movies, Music

Sony announced the tentatively named Sony Online Service today—it's described as an "iTunes-like" service on the PlayStation Network, offering movies, music, and books, all media for which Sony also sells accompanying hardware. It'll also allow users to upload their own video, and will probably have support for independent app development later on down the road. We don't really know much else, like, say, a launch date or pricing (or even a final name), so it winds up here, alone in the dark corner of Gizmodo we call Remainders. [AppleInsider via Engadget]

GM's offering in-car internet for $500 and +$29 a month. Great! This is a stupid thing to get—think about devices like the MiFi, and ask yourself who would buy this. Plus, do you really want to buy a GM? If you go American, go Ford. They have cool tech! [Engadget]
Apple stores are ditching those clunky handheld point of sale computers—which are Windows-run—for iPod touches that can do the same thing. There's no way to write this story up without making an easy Microsoft joke, which isn't fair because those point of sale units have been a big part of why Apple stores have been such easy places to drop loads of cash. [AppleInsider]
Virgin erases Helio and the Ocean 2. But not before we erased the love and care we had back in 2007 for the company. Remember how progressive they were? Were? [Mobile Crunch]
JVC's $200 Blu-ray player does not stream media and does not cost less than the LG bd370 which does. It doesn't even cost less than the PS3, which also, you know, plays games. Do not buy. [JVC]

The biggest new feature would have to be the addition of Blu-Ray support, supposedly to go along with the Blu-Ray integration in upcoming iMacs. We're decided skeptics on a Blu-Ray/Apple union, because it doesn't really make a lot of sense for Apple's business model. Apple's making boatloads of cash from digital media, and supporting a physical format that they don't make a penny from just doesn't feel like a smart move. Plus, we've been hearing this damn rumor for years.

More plausible is the ability to rearrange and move iPhone apps with iTunes 9, which is the kind of feature Apple should have had for years. Aside from that, there's some typical rumbling about the integration of Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm—we wouldn't rule them out, but we're also not particularly excited about it. How about a "Play Next" or on-the-go playlist feature, like WinAmp, Mediamonkey and others have had for years? iTunes 9 is expected to debut around September, with the intro of new iPods. [Boy Genius Report]

Fast and the Furious on July 28 will be the first Blu-ray movie to go all iPhoney, where you'll be able to use it to spin cars around in a virtual garage with an app you grab in the App Store. Yes, this is their brilliant plan for engrossing you even more deeply in the movie. Movies coming out later this year will let you download actual stuff onto your iPhone—because you've always wanted a portable version of the making of The Mummy—and tell all your friends you're watching Mallrats on Facebook and Twitter.

You'll need a BD-Live player to get in on all this awesome internet shit, since it works over the internet because it harnesses the power of the WEB, oh yeah. [Home Media Magazine via AppleInsider]

Maybe, maybe not. Although the old version didn't have DVD either (the new version does), there was no Blu-ray functionality at all in iTunes before. And, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to have iTunes be the Blu-ray playback, so we're not sure what's going on. [9to5Mac]

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Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath.

You might recall our discussion about video bitrates earlier, or how much data is packed into a file. As a general rule, more bits per second translates into more betterer quality audio and video. The variable in that—the other part of the equation—is how the content is compressed and de-compressed. Better compression techniques—the zen of knowing what bits of data to pull out to make big data chunks smaller—make for better quality video while taking up less space on your hard drive. Basically, the part you need to know is that codecs are the software that make that magic happen.

Standard Standards
• H.261 is not a term you have to worry about, but it's the technology that most video standards and codecs were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it's the first major digital video compression standard, and like other "H" standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass.

• MPEG-1 Part 2 is another oldie, developed by the Movie Picture Experts Group and approved in 1991. (BTW, the whole "part" thing is because video is just one "part" of each MPEG standard.) Based quite a bit on H.261, MPEG-1 was designed to take VHS quality video and squeeze it down to a bit rate of about 1.5Mbps, optimized for CD transfers. No surprise, it's the standard used for all VCDs (which can play in most DVD players), but not a standard you would see hanging around today.

• With MPEG-2 Part 2, approved in 1994, we're finally talking decent vid. Also known as H.262, since it was developed jointly by the ITU-T and ISO, MPEG-2 is an extension of MPEG-1 that delivers better resolution and higher bit rates (3-15Mbps for standard def and 15-30Mbps for HD, though the spec allows for up to 100Mbps). It's the video codec used by DVD and digital television, though now it's slowly being replaced by the more efficient MPEG-4, except on DVDs, where it'll ride out that disc format's lifetime.

• H.263 is designed for sending video over crappy connections. So it's used to encode most Flash video and to send video over mobile networks.

• MPEG-4 is where we really stand right now. It has a much broader scope than past MPEG standards, aiming to tackle both the low end (crappy cellphones on a crappy network) and the high end (Blu-ray). It's still developing, so it's not-so-coincidentally where this whole story gets messier. There are two relevant parts of the MPEG-4 standard for our myopic video purposes: There's Part 2. And there's Part 10—which is also known as H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC). To be clear though, even though they're both part of the MPEG-4 standard, they're totally different formats. Nevertheless, both are more efficient at compression than past MPEG codecs, delivering better quality using less space.

• Okay, so if you've ever frequented a Torrent site, you've actually watched tons of videos that use MPEG-4 Part 2, though it's not like they would've had a flashing sign telling you so. MPEG-4 Part 2 actually has different "profiles"—the two that matter being Simple Profile, for low bitrate, low-res stuff, and Advanced Simple Profile. The latter profile is what's used by movies you would download in formats like DivX or XviD or 3ivx—which are all codecs that are essentially just differing implementations of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard.

• MPEG-4 Part 10, the other part, was actually co-devopled by MPEG and the ITU-T, so it's also known—in fact, more commonly known—as H.264. It's more efficient than MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, delivering the same quality video in as little as half the space, making it suitable for the low and high-end. Because of this, it's quickly becoming the standardest standard. It's part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray spec, replacing MPEG-2 in digital TV (like with satellite services and AT&T's U-Verse IPTV) and supported by pretty much every portable video player on the planet from the iPod to the PSP. Apple has a decent, if Kool-Aid flavored, FAQ about H.264.

• VC-1 is essentially a Microsoft developed alternative video codec to H.264 released as a standard by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, though it descends from the same H.26X/MPEG family. (It essentially started life as WMV9, but then Microsoft shopped it to the SMPTE to make it an industry standard, and now it is.) It too, is part of the mandatory Blu-ray and HD DVD spec, and is the official video codec of the Xbox 360. It's pitch is the same as H.264's—trying to deliver better quality using less space, like HD video in 6-8Mbps.

Free-Floating Codecs
Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of all of those, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (proprietary) and XviD (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. Like the Xbox 360, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common. Same deal with H.264: Some well known codecs that use it are Apple's Quicktime H.264, x264 and Nero Digital. You've also got Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, which are Microsoft's proprietary twists on industry standards.

Containers aka Wrappers
Alright, well you've probably noticed that none of your video files have the extension .h264 or .vc1 or the like. That's because videos are packaged in containers or wrappers that stuff things like the audio, navigational info, etc. along with the video in a single pretty file. Naturally, there are about as many of them as there are codecs. To be clear, you would take a video encoded with, say, H.264, and wrap it up as a .mp4 or .avi file.

The majors ones are:
• AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is Windows' standard multimedia container
• MPEG-4 Part 14 (known to you as .mp4) is the standardized container for MPEG-4
• FLV (Flash Video) is the format used to deliver MPEG video through Flash Player
• MOV is Apple's QuickTime container format
• OGG, OGM and OGV are open-standard containers
• MKV (Mastroska) is another open-specification container that you've seen if you've ever downloaded anime
• VOB means DVD Video Object. Guess what? It's DVD's standard container, and what you get when you rip a DVD.
• ASF is a Microsoft format designed for WMV and WMA—files can end in .wmv or .asf

So, in order to play a video file, your setup has to be able to handle both the actual video codec and the container. It's why you can try to play an AVI file and Windows Media Player laughs at you, even though it totally played one a minute ago— the container was no problem, but it didn't have the right codec. Or conversely, even though an iPod could play back an H.264 encoded video, if it was wrapped up in MKV, it won't be able to read it.

Okay, my brain hurts. Hopefully this will make yours hurt less when it comes to dealing with pesky videos. If you'd like to do even more homework, Wikipedia, as always, has a more in-depth discussion. And Doom9 is always an amazing resource for all things digital video.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about codecs, kitties or pad thai (but not RealMedia) to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

[Image: ME@Flickr]

Besides, how long will it be before Blu-ray is dumped for digital downloads? Personally, I don't care about Blu-ray on a Mac, but I'm sure plenty of people out there feel differently. And that is what Psystar does—they fill a need that cannot be satisfied by current Apple offerings. [Ars Technica]

Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from the consumer point of view. It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off before we burden our customers with the cost of licensing.

Takeaway? Huge battery drain, likely replaced by digital downloads in the not-too-distant future, so we'll hold off on the big price jump, thanks. Me? I still love 'em on my PS3, but I'm going to have to start using "bag of hurt" way more often.

Since Blu-ray was announced, there's been a lot of talk about its impending obsolescence in the face of digital downloads. Just last week, Samsung took a low blow at the format, predicting its lifespan to be only five years. Sony fired back, claiming that the "Blu-ray format will not only coexist with the networked era, but will actually enhance it for many years to come."

I'm here to say, I don't give a crap that Blu-ray is living with an incurable disease, wasting away on intravenous feeding tubes stuffed with the cash of early adopters. It's, sadly, still the best option for me to watch hi def movies. Why?

Digital downloads take too damn long to acquire
You've been there. It's a Wednesday night, your butt is planted on the couch and you feet are on the coffee table. You splurge on some delivery and plan an impromptu movie night with your sweetie. "Let's download something." You pick out a film. And then you wait. Your dinner comes. And you eat in silence, watching a status bar trickle to a buffer point capable of playing the film without interruption. Want to download an HD clip? You'd better order it at lunchtime. The convenience of download, in terms of speed, is an illusion.

There's limited content in HD
If you are using a service that supports HD (which excludes popular download spots like Unbox right off the bat), chances are that the content you want to watch isn't in HD anyway. I know it's just a documentary, but I want to flex the muscles of my HDTV a bit. Don't make me pick through old, rotting produce. Chances are if I have the tech to download your movie, I have the tech to watch it in HD.

The content in HD costs extra
I'm still at a loss here. Why should I pay more to download a movie in HD? You can point to film remasterings, or argue that Blu-ray is priced at a premium too. But the simple fact is that Blu-ray will eventually be as price-friendly as DVD (pending its adoption) while downloading services will ALWAYS have the bandwidth excuse to charge you extra. And that HD download isn't coming with anything special other than the resolution that you can get free on freaking antenna broadcasts.

That HD content might be compressed (not really HD)
So you say you've found a service that gives you instant HD streaming? You didn't. They may call it 720P, but it's got more compression artifacts than Blu-ray any day.

DRM restrictions are absurd
I rented a movie the other day on my PS3. Lars and the Real Girl. But I made the mistake of previewing the content, just for 10 seconds or so, as it downloaded. Then I walked away. But when I returned the next night to watch the movie, oopsies, my 24 viewing window was up. The DRM was smart enough to know when I first loaded the movie, but didn't care as to whether or not I'd had a chance to actually watch it. Netflix and Blockbuster understand that plans change, and that's why they offer consumers a way to watch movies at their own pace.

I don't trust digital formats to be less obsolete in the future than Blu-ray
MPEG4, the codec that both Blu-ray and download services use, isn't going anywhere soon. But there's enough DRM on most downloads that not only links you to a specific platform (PS3/AppleTV), but a specific download service (iTunes, Unbox, etc) as well. Do I really believe that my Unbox purchases will be there 5, 10, or even 20 years from now? No. And if they are, will it be easy to access old hardware to bring up the service? Probably not. But VHS, DVD and Blu-ray will all plug into my TV for a long time to come. Unlike services that don't allow unlimited redownloads, I won't have to worry about swapping hard drives only to find SATA connections are dead for a better (read: incompatible) format with my PC.

And Piracy Doesn't Make it Any Better
Look, I'm not an 8-year-old living off some minuscule allowance. I don't have to make sure I have cash left for the movies after splurging one day at the comic book store. I want things to be simple, even if that means I have to pay for it. Bittorrent isn't all that easy. Unless you're downloading the latest, most popular content, good luck finding enough seeders to get a decent download speed...if you're lucky enough to find what you're looking for at all.

I know what I'm saying isn't cool. I know that Blu-ray sits on a temporal fissure in the way media is delivered to us, probably teetering before it falls into an abyss beside its friend VHS.

But at least I know where my Blu-ray is going—on my shelf, ready to watch whenever I choose at a quality I can appreciate with extras still not found in downloads. (Plus, if I insist on watching the movie on my computer, many Blu-rays are accommodating that anyway.) If that makes me old fashioned, then so be it. They don't make media like they used to.

Today, as new boxes and services are announced, there has yet to appear one that can give you every movie, let alone a single format you can use on your various everyday devices. Thankfully, what we're hearing now is that while this infinite format war may not go on forever, the state of video will suck for the next five years until every service has the same baseline catalog. If you believe the studios. In the meantime, you'll be looking for the set-top box with the best catalog, and the one that can deliver you your films in the best way possible.

If you thought the HD DVD/Blu-ray split was bad, at least there was an easy order to it, an alignment by studios. Warner, Universal and Paramount were on HD DVD, everyone else (plus Warner) put their movies on Blu-ray. Sure, no Big Lebowski on Blu-ray, but at least you knew why. There is nothing even approaching logic when it comes to the movie options from VOD set-top box to the next, at least not from the user perspective. Warner Bros. put out Ocean's Thirteen. You can watch it on Vudu and Amazon Unbox, but not iTunes. Warner also put out I Am Legend, which is on all three, and Xbox Live Marketplace. Paramount's Shooter is on all three, but only for purchase, not rental (and totally MIA from Xbox). And you could rent Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille a few months ago, but now it's only for purchase. "WTF?" is a natural response. (On a side note, it's a bitch to really search or go through any of the catalogs, so it's even harder to tell if it's an accidental or intentional roadblock.)

To explain our current clusterfuck, you need a quick trip back to 1999. Remember the state of digital music back then? It was messy and ugly. The music industry had no idea what to do with this whole internet thing, and they were involved in assorted, competing ventures. Then along came iTunes, which basically organized the music universe and, to the chagrin of the RIAA, set up a sane pricing structure, too. It's not a complete catalog of all music ever (Beatles, hello?), but it's the closest thing there is, and it's pretty damn good. It brought order to the chaos, and now claims 85 percent of the legal download market. So it has the music industry by the balls, enough to speed their efforts to fortify a worthy number 2—Amazon, which was the first store to boast a catalog exclusively made up of DRM-free music from all four majors as a result, a perk deliberately withheld from iTunes to curb its power.

We're basically at that same, nebulous 1999 point with video, though Hollywood has learned from the music industry's mistakes—and iTunes is not the guaranteed champion in the case of online movie sales. The industry is eagerly putting stuff out there, and on as many services as it can—we're at the point now that most of the major studios release movies on online services on the same day they release them on disc.

A problem gumming up our dream of the one box is that each service requires a different format—one studio told us that a big issue is digitizing and formatting a film to meet each service's specs. It just takes time, though they're going as fast as they can. And new releases are gonna take priority, obviously. We are at least a little skeptical of this claim—we don't think it takes that long to digitize a flick

From what we were told, there's surprisingly little worry of a single company dominating digital distribution. A studio we talked to said that it's all so new, the fear of a monopoly (by Apple or otherwise) is at worst simply a thought skulking around in the back of their mind, not an actual concern. So no service is getting any favors to promote one over the other, or keep another in check. (At least not yet, though Blu-ray-happy Sony may well have the most incentive to keep the online space anemic.) Again, here, we're a little suspicious—obviously they wouldn't come right out and tell us they're afraid of iTunes, but when you look at the measly catalog and consider the studios' close study of how the music industry complete botched online music, the idea of Apple becoming the single biggest distributor of most digital media and holding serious sway over the entire entertainment industry has to weigh on their minds.

I mean, if you were in their shoes, and could prevent making iTunes into the all-powerful Walmart of the digital video generation, wouldn't you?

The one bit of protectionism going on that was copped to is the push to purchase, rather than rent. It makes sense that a studio gets more money when you buy a movie than rent it, since it's the same set of bits headed to your hard drive, and both are guaranteed you'll watch the movie at least once, but one costs three to four times as much as the other. So you are going to see a lot of them not open a flick up to online rentals until a month after it's available for purchase, and even see rental options disappear, as recently happened across the board with Pixar movies.

Ultimately, and somewhat shockingly, Hollywood does have the same vision we do—a single god box that'll deliver the entire catalogs of all the studios. Only, unlike in the iTunes hegemony, every home could have a different god box, be it Xbox, TiVo, Vudu or Roku.

Forgive the buried service journalism. Enough of this theoretical talk. So, what does it take to get a decent download collection? Until the god box, you will need several, two at least. Right now, Vudu is good for latest and greatest plus some older favorites; Netflix Roku has better TV options and some interesting deep cuts (plus a $99 box price and unlimited streaming for 10,000 so-so titles for any plan over $9 with discs by mail as a backup); Xbox 360 has a surprisingly large amount of HD movies, and a nice catalog geared towards the gaming demographic; Apple TV has its own legion of fans for its ability to move movies to iPods and computers, though it still has a lot to prove in the catalog section. That's not even counting the TiVo with Amazon Unbox or the cable box you likely already have, each with their own assorted VOD options. Even if you owned all of 'em, you still might not find what you want, even if it's something that should be slapping you in the face. Take Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, for instance. We could not legally find it on any service, even though the sequel hit theaters just a few weeks ago—and got a surprisingly good buzz from usually snooty critics. Did Warner miss the perfect opportunity? They wouldn't say.

The other major issue is the state of broadband and the guys controlling the pipes. For the online video revolution to fully take off in HD, we need bigger pipes. For most people, that's years away. This is deeply threatening to the cable companies, and they're pretty clear that they're not happy about content moving online—you can see the fear in the recent moves to limit all kinds of data consumption (most of which is already video), not just the supposed protocol of pirates. What if limits or overage charges were put in place for people who were simply doing their best to buy copyrighted video? Why would someone give up DVD and Blu-ray rentals from Netflix in order to pay twice—for both the bandwidth and the content—and have to wait somewhat impatiently for the download, too?

So friends, while all of this gets ironed out, the infinite format war rages on: Lots of boxes, lots of online services, none of them complete, none of them that'll fully satisfy your wife's desire to rid the shelves of DVDs. Hollywood just can't move fast enough for this revolution, as arguably eager as it is, and the ISPs may not clear the way when the show does get on the road. From what we can tell, the stuff will all get sorted out in time. How much time? Give it five more years. If you believe the studios. [Insert groan of impatience here.]

Update:
Denny Breitenfeld, the CTO of NetBlender, told us that it's not a standalone application but a technology for professional Blu-Ray authoring tool combined with an SDK for iPhone developers:

It's a technology that is built into our professional Blu-Ray authoring tool that will allow studios, independent movie companies to enable BD Touch features.

These features send data in two directions from the Disc to the Iphone and vice versa. Video, Audio, text, and player commands can be sent.

So right now it seems everyone likes the "remote control" idea. However the player can control the IPhone as well. One idea is to automatically pull up IMBD of the movie you are watching right on your Iphone or send the movie information a movie database on your phone. The ideas are only limited to what people want and will use.

We are releasing an SDK for the 100k Iphone developers out there so they can take advantage of BD Touch features to build applications that easily work with all kinds of titles.

According to NetBlender:

• The iPhone application will be able to interact directly with movies, showing extra information in the iPhone.
• It will also be able to keep a database of your movie collection.
• BD Touch will also be able to get digital copies of the movies inside the Blu-ray disc, presumably already encoded for iPod touch and iPhone playback.

The only problem we see with BD Touch is the quote they gave to MacWorld UK:

The sophisticated user interface of the iPhone enables greater user interaction as well as the power to leverage the iPhone's existing network. Search, e-commerce and advertising possibilities related to movie content abound when one imagines real-time communication between the iPhone and the content currently being displayed on a Blu-ray player.

Possibility of buying/snatching a song while I'm listening to it in the movie soundtrack? Great. Advertising popping on my iPhone while I watch a movie? I was going to say "no thanks," but I just stopped at the "why?"

We will see how it exactly works when it gets announced this Thursday. [Netblender via MacWorld]

Reasonably, summer wouldn't be a bad time to expect them to come through, especially with the even more efficient Montevina chipset to offset Blu-ray's battery-killing nature. But, Apple's official support for Blu-ray has been completely non-existent despite its exceedingly long rumor half-life.

On the other hand, Blu-ray's victory logically means we'll see them populating more computers in (sorta) short order, now that the risk of shipping machines with $300 drink holders is gone. [AppleInsider]

[There's] a smaller chance Apple may use a combo Blu-ray/HD DVD drive to ensure full compatibility and not get involved in the format wars.

• In January, Intel will introduce what they claim is the smallest SSD in the industry. Officially named the Z-P140 PATA SSD, the drive holds 2GB or 4GB and is 12x18x8mm (about the size of a penny if you couldn't tell from the pic), and 0.6 grams. The Z-P140 can act as a controller for compatible NAND memory, which means these drives are expandable to 16GB. Intel says that this new style of SSD should be showing up soon in several UMPCs and other mobile internet devices from companies such as Asus, BenQ, Clarion, Lenovo and more.

• Intel will also bring WiMax and other wireless connectivity options to these devices. A WiMax/Wi-Fi combo chip, code-named Echo Peak, will also come to market in 2008. Of the 25 devices in the mobile computing category planned for next year, Intel says that 20% will have WiMax, 60% will have 3G and 40% will have GPS. 100% will of course support both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

• For desktop users, processor capacity and hi-def performance will see major enhancements in 2008. "Skulltrail", a new dual-processor based platform, will enable high-end and professional computer users to run dual quad-core Core 2 Extreme processors for a massive 8-core performance, for gamers and other hardcore users. In addition, a new feature called HD Boost is an instruction set that will provide faster video encoding/decoding, 3D rendering and photo editing.

• Consumer electronics such as set-top boxes and digital televisions will also get a boost from "Canmore", a "system-on-a-chip" that combines 1GHz processing core with A/V processing and graphics and I/O components onto a single chip. Intel sees increased internet connectivity in these types of devices, and cited examples such as playing video games over your cable box as possible implementations.

• Santa Rosa Refresh, an updated version of the Centrino processor, is a 45nm Penryn chip with better graphics capabilities. The Refresh will be offered in notebooks and desktops and is geared to improving the quality of HD DVD and Blu-ray, among other graphic intensive applications.

• Finally, Intel says that the Gateway One and Dell XPS All-In-One will get the Penryn boost next year, and I was also told that they are "talking to Apple."[Intel]

Microdisplay TVs are down 70%, but the fabulously floaty 70-inch SXRD is on target for its revised (that is, delayed) early December shipdate. No price change, but my guess is that the $6,000 tag will be slashed at some point. Says Vandenbree: "As long as people shop on cost per inch, microdisplay has a home."

Will flat-panel pricing erosion be major for this holiday season? Smaller screen sizes won't see much in the way of price drops, but in the larger screen sizes, 46" and 52" in particular, there will be drops.

Is Sony concerned with BD Profile 1.1 Blu-ray players from Samsung and Panasonic? "The important thing is the features. Performance doesn't improve with 1.1," says Glasgow, adding "The important thing is what studios are doing to add capability. 1.1 is just the beginning." He confirmed that not every Blu-ray feature can be upgraded via firmware, as we knew.

The HD DVD-Blu-ray Format War: "The war is continuing to rage. We're still in the middle. There's a lot more that can be done. Let me say this: there are 170 companies [in the Blu-ray camp] against two companies [in the HD DVD camp]. I find some abnormality in that. Let's leave it at that." He looks forward to more "performance" on Blu-ray, with increased studio involvement.

The new Sony Reader will get PDF support in January.

The Reader is finding an audience among the military, among companies who want to load up manuals for employees, and among housewives. Educational publishers are still slow to see its value: "They are probably a little old fashioned—probably not the right thing to say—but they are a little slow to adapt," says Glasgow, adding that he thinks they will get on track. Sony welcomes the Amazon reader and any other competition as "publicity for the category."

On Apple's success in the laptop business: "We have different sizes, weights [than Apple], and we're using different materials," says Glasgow, welcoming Apple's sales boost and saying it doesn't affect the Vaio division's competition. "This could be the best year in the history of Vaio. We're not in this to have 40% market share, we're here to continue to innovate and use that expertise to help us in consumer electronics." He mentioned that Leopard has problems of its own, though the crowd laughed (implying Vista problems of greater severity.)

On recent better-than-expected sales in the flash-memory music and video player (aka iPod nano) market: "We can't keep them on the shelf," says Vandenbree, saying the new players did better in walk-in brick-and-mortar sales, where people can see the products. "We'll take a bite out of Apple," says Glasgow. "We learned more about what to do right. I'm more frustrated than you that it took so long."

[Sony Electronics Official Blog]

+ Apple
Apple's Leopard. Pretty good we hear. And yes, we've heard a lot about it. Apple might have almost no computer market share compared to Dell and HP, but the small loyalty seems to have been justified this week...

- HD DVD, Blu-ray and Us
HD DVD brags that they've had the biggest hi-def disc launch of all time with Transformers, right before Blu-ray reports that they are actually outselling HD DVD movies by nearly 2-to-1 in the US. But with as low as both sides' overall sales figures are, any company currently "winning" this format war is at about the same place as the ant who just "won" a stale pile of dog crap for the colony.

= Pear Cable
Let's say you are a company who charges $7,250 for some speaker wire. Then let's say you won't supply said $7,250 speaker wire for a test—run by you—comparing your own wires with another brand. Then let's say you are Pear Cable and all of this actually happened.

Usually when a company is called out on their own BS, it hurts their stock big time. But since we always knew that Pear Cable was completely full of it, the company really had no lower to go.

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