The original plan was for Dell to bring its direct-to-consumer, low-cost selling kung-fu to consumer electronics retailing. Uh, time for Plan B now that traditional CE stores like Best Buy and Circuit City have categorically schooled Dell in the art of selling digital cameras, music players, and TVs. [Wall St. Journal (reg)]
A group of product testers and designers have declared this Thursday “World Usability Day,” a grand celebration of intuitive gadgets that don’t require reading a 500-page manual to use them (and subsequent shame-on-you finger wagging at user un-friendly devices). Rumors of mass Windows 98 PC sacrifices on Thursday have thus far been unconfirmed. [USA Today]
XM Satellite still has twice the number of subscribers as Sirius, but after seeing their stock drop 20% in the last month, they’d rather not answer any “how come you don’t have Howard Stern?” questions right now. [Washington Post]
Screw the Razr and the iPod: a Seattle Times columnist says the coolest gadget of the 21st century is the Toyota Prius [Seattle Times]
Nokia, Palm, Motorola, Samsung, HP, Siemens…the lineup of brawlers looking to knock off Research in Motion’s BlackBerry gets longer by the day. Any one of these guys would love to see the headline: “R.I.P. R.I.M.” [Wall St. Journal (reg.)]
Meanwhile, two weeks still isn’t enough for an AP writer to give a definitive thumbs up or down to the new BlackBerry 8700. [Detroit Free Press]
