The quote, from Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore, is a sort of sad double entendre: The question is set up as a broad query about the state of the consumer electronics industry, but Stringer's answer sounds more like an off-record confession about his own company than a cool assessment of its industry. From Sony's point of view, the CE industry hasn't started to turn around; from Sony's point of view, Sony hasn't started to turn around: whichever was meant, these aren't the most reassuring words to hear from head honcho of one of the largest electronics companies in the world.

Anyway, cheer up Howard! People will buy your consoles, to play games, to sim-kill civilian hostages, for Christmas! It's how things are. [Reuters via Digital Daily—Apologies for the PS3 Spidey font. It had to be done.]

Between a general leeriness towards AT&T and spectacularly huge numbers involved, the whole thing sounds a little conspiratorial. Thing is, the price-fixing definitely happened:

South Korea's LG Display Co., Sharp Corp. and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd. agreed last November to pay $585 million in criminal fines in a U.S. Justice Department probe of illegally price fixing on LCDs used in flat-screen televisions, cellphones and other devices.

This lawsuit is less about AT&T proving that some of the biggest LCD manufacturers in the world have been gouging them (and in turn, their customers) than it is about getting some kind of compensation for said gouging, which has been driving up prices of phones for quite a while now.

I mean, probably not by more than a few cents apiece, but still! Outrage! As a bonus, this is a rare chance to earnestly root for the Death Star. [WSJ]

Levinson was, until recently, the Chairman and CEO of genetic research firm Genentec. But lately, he's been spending a little more time on other projects—namely, sitting as a Corporate Director for both Apple and Google. The FTC made it pretty clear back in May that they were uncomfortable with such cozy ties between companies that are increasingly working on the same stuff, at the same time—phones software, web services, and now even OSes—so Levinson's resignation firmly qualifies as "kinda tardy."

What interesting this time around is that the companies were essentially fighting for talent: As CEO, Schmidt was obviously going with the home team. Levinson, though? He was a free agent. Score one for Apple, I guess. And score 10 for the FTC.

UPDATE: 9to5Mac has a possible theory as to why Levinson went with Apple over Google, though they note that he isn't exactly hurting for cash. Anyway, here it is: Levinson's simply making more money from his seat with Apple. Like, a lot more: All other things equal—which they're not—it's a pretty compelling case. [AllThingsD]

Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha practically said as much, in a strangely frank interview on CNBC:

There's a lot of talk about "the long road ahead" and plenty of admissions of guilt, as far as Moto's poor product choices over the last few years, but when our old pal Jim Goldman straight up asks him when the mobile division is going to move out of its parents' basement (at about 6:10), Jha shows his cards.

He seems to see two paths: A world where people love Motorola smartphones again, where demand for smartphones in general is up, and where credit markets are stabilized; or, a world where someone like Dell just buys them up, and everyone lives happily ever after. As you can see in the video, only one of these possibilities makes him smile. If that's the plan, though, they might need to step up their PR game a little bit, by which I mean a lot.

What I'm trying to say is, the Cliq is basically a midlife crisis boob job, for Motorola.[CNBC--Thanks, Jimmy1!]

Sony's suffered through management shakeups and a lack of vision lately, and while this specific news is a little industry-insider, it will definitely have an effect on the juggernaut's product lineup. Sony may well leave certain sections of the industry behind, most probably their Sony Ericsson imprint, but Sony's pretty much getting kicked around on all fronts. They're a legendary company and they're not going anywhere, but we really hope they change their ways and start busting out some exciting, groundbreaking new products like back in the glory days. [New York Times]

Even Microsoft, who was originally losing $126 per 360, has making money on every Xbox sold for a while now. Poor Sony. Just think of everything you could buy with $40, like a day with Rachel Ray. [Adriansang via Joystiq Image: Flickr/Shagy6six6]

One name came up again and again. It was the Flip Video, the little camera that changed the industry. While tech giants like Sony, Canon and Nikon were duking it out in the typical, spec-warring dSLR space, a relatively small company named Pure Digital Technologies developed a real piece of crap camcorder called the Pure Digital Point and Shoot. The video quality was absolutely atrocious for 2006. The name was obviously equally as bad.

But as technology improves, we're reaching the era of "good enough."

The Pure Digital Point and Shoot (later renamed the Flip Video/Mino) was pocketable, cheap ($180) and served an important function: It was the perfect YouTube camera. And that, in itself, was enough.

Because of Pure Digital's singular vision and perfect timing, not only did the camcorder quickly steal 13% of the camcorder market causing bigger companies start duplicating the Flip (with only moderate success), but Pure Digital was itself bought out by mega corp Cisco.

However, the Flip Video is not alone in under-performing game changers. You may remember way back to 2007 when a company we all kind of knew named Asus had something planned called the Eee PC.

Its screen was but 7-inches, and its storage was dwarfed by most iPods. But once again, the Eee was small, cheap ($245-$400) and served an important function: It was the near-perfect knock around computer. And that, in itself, was enough to drive the entire computer industry mad overnight.

I'm by no way implying that the technological arms race is over, that companies no longer care about building the fastest machines with the biggest storage and most ridiculous sticker prices. But a number of technologies are finding a new equilibrium of price and performance in the industry by knowing just where consumers are willing to settle.

These are devices that fulfill a functional niche, sure, but do so with the minimum amount of effort possible—keeping a unit price and bulkiness to a minimum. The breakthrough "good enough" product features the price and specs of a third tier product, the build quality of a second tier product and the design aesthetic of a first tier product. The hardware is fully capable, but it's just sort of...cheap...for lack of a better term.

And yes, like Wired, we have to marvel at how magnificent gadgets of yesterday—the ability to record something in HD (HD!)—became just a "good enough" gadget.

Of course, now we must wonder, what is the next Flip or Eee? What's the next technology that can have its bar set ever so lower but actually excite the public with a new, utilitarian form factor in the process?

If you know the answer to that question, you stand to make a good deal of money.

The next OQO, the Model 2+, had us drooling when it was announced... four months ago. It's still yet to see a release, which means the years-old 02 is the most current model OQO has on the market.

OQO's best-connected messageboard has reported that OQO is facing serious financial difficulty and that we're unlikely to ever see the 2+ go into production. In addition, Dennis Moore, former CEO of OQO, resigned back in September 2008, so we've been hearing these warning bells for awhile.

Worse, European retail giant Expansys has cancelled pre-orders of the 2+, giving some vague excuse about "uncertainties" over the handheld PC as a response to customers.

It's looking more and more like OQO is having some serious issues, which is a bad thing for us: Even if we couldn't afford their toys, they always trod their own path, which sometimes feels like a rarity these days. [JK on the Run]

Sir Howard—who Wilson presciently anointed as one of the next Gadget Gods last month—has lived near the top of the company for almost five years now, but has had limited success in his efforts to simplify the anatomy of the company. His replacement of Ryoji Chubachi as President comes soon after Sony's comically abysmal fourth quarter earnings announcement, and has been interpreted as a sign that Sony is really, seriously trying to change.

The NYT reports that Sony is planning to "reorganize its electronics and games divisions to better integrate the company's sprawling business" and has appointed the former CEO of their games unit to head up the effort. Obviously this would mean some serious internal reshuffling for Sony, but as far as consumers are concerned, it could also lead to some drastic changes in Sony's convoluted product lines. [NYT]

[The Pirate Bay]

We've seen lots of Win-Mo 7 dates floated; most recently, the "early 2009" projection was more realistically hedged to the "second half" of 2009 by Microsoft in September. Jha's announcement could potentially mean that we won't be seeing any Motorola Windows Mobile 7 phones until 2010, but the Electronista folks have Jha saying on the earnings call that the expected worldwide rollout of WM7 won't happen until 2010.

This is also interesting because it appears to disprove yesterday's rumor in the Wall Street Journal that Motorola was planning on completely abandoning Windows Mobile in favor of the "more competitive" (and completely free to license) Android. Jha says Moto is still focused on Google' open source OS, but we have yet to see any official word of Motorola-branded Android gear getting close to release—they're not expected until the end of this year. Oh Moto. [Electronista, WSJ]

No specific retailers' plans are alluded to in the article, but it does spell out the writing on the wall: the only way the big retail chains are going to get people considering the $2,000 surround sound systems and brand new HDTVs is to go heavy on the promotional perks:

And retailers, worried about grabbing the few dollars consumers are willing to part with, will be offering the kind of discounts usually only seen in the days leading up to Christmas. “I think electronics are going to go through an early promotional period,” Mr. Cohen said. “We’ll be lucky to get through October without aggressive promotions.”

Buckle up! [NYTimes]

The big N anticipates it will shift 28.0 million DS units from now till March 2009, which is a reduction in the numbers sold in the previous year, where 30.3 millions units made their way to sweaty palms everywhere. Personally, I think Nintendo have their figures wrong; it'll be 28,000,001 units, as I left my DS on a flight I took yesterday. Life sucks. [Associated Press]

Following Sciacca's advice, I ran a Google search for "'Survivor' 'dvr' 'didn't record'", and found several message board posts detailing similar problems. The issue is present in other DVR types as well, including DirecTV and standalone TiVo. However, some other users say that they haven't experienced any problems with their time-shifted Survivor eps at all. To make sure this problem was confined to Survivor, I checked other popular shows like Lost and American Idol, and came up empty-handed.

We've put in a call to CBS to explain this paranormal activity, and the folks there are looking into the problem. Sciacca suggests that this may be a case of altering show metadata to instruct DVRs to stop recording—in the past, networks have been known to alter their programming to stop DVR users from getting content (and skipping ads)—but we will reserve judgment until we hear more. In the meantime, if you've been experiencing similar problems, please share. [Sound & Vision]