Filed under: Portable Audio, Transportation

Alpine's cutting straight to the chase with its new iDA-X200 and iDA-X300 headunits. Forgoing a CD mechanism entirely, the two systems are designed primarily for use with an iPod, though they do pack a few extra goodies. The X200 works with Alpine's Sound Imprint system for some fancy DSP, while the X300 has USB input for pulling media off of non-iPod sources. No word on price or availability.

 

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According to holiday numbers released by Neilsen Soundscan, physical album sales were down 21.4 percent from last year. The drop is the latest indication of the spectacular decline of the music industry’s ability to move albums.

Many in the industry will shake angry fists of blame at Online piracy, but, as Ars points out, the fact that Josh Groban’s “Noel” was the highest selling album of the year speaks volumes. In summary: the music industry needs to focus more on making better music and work on becoming more progressive so that it can better fulfill consumers’ tastes.

‘Noel’ is music’s saving grace [Variety]

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Filed under: Cellphones

 

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The NY Times today has a piece reporting on the general state of high def DVDs. The report concludes that with about a million players in circulation (both formats combined), most consumers appear to be opting out of the battle altogether.

For me, it raises a lot of questions. It’s clear that one of the formats will take the throne from the DVD, but the question remains as to which one it will be. While Blu-ray is technologically superior, HD DVD’s price point makes it more consumer friendly.

I’m currently the owner of a Toshiba HD DVD player and find it to be passable, though I miss the snappiness of my old DVD player, the image quality is stellar. And it only cost $99, so it really couldn’t be beaten.

It makes me curious, however, as to what the adoption rate is amongst CG readers. Have you all opted for Blu-ray or HD DVD and why?

In the DVD War Over High Definition, Most Buyers Are Sitting It Out [NY Times]

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It’s been a great year for everyone at CrunchGear and we’re glad you’ve been here to enjoy it with us. Just a reminder that we’ll be in Vegas from the 5th through the 10th for CES and then we’ll be in San Francisco for MacWorld the following week. Look for big things from us in 2008. Have a happy and safe NYE.

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If there is one thing I noticed this past year, it is that companies seem to be tripping over themselves more than ever before to claim the mantle of openness. Openness is now a marketing mantra. Facebook kicked things off in May by opening up its social network to outside developers through a comprehensive set of APIs. Google responded by trying to “out open” Facebook with the launch of its own platform for social networking apps, OpenSocial (which was more open than Facebook’s APIs, but still not open enough for some people). Google also introduced its open-source mobile operating system, Android, which prompted even old-school, closed-network mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T to play the open card. And in the face of the success of open-source blogging software Wordpress, Six Apart finally made its rival Moveable Type open source as well. These are just a few examples.

Building a product or service on top of open standards is held as one of the highest virtues in technology. It is certainly one of the easiest ways for a company to score points with consumers, developers, or other companies. And for good reason. The Internet, after all, is built on open standards. Open-source technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and others have lowered the cost to start a Web company.

More importantly, open standards (whether or not they are technically open-source) are inherently more attractive to work with for startups and other companies. The best way to build a technology platform is to make it as open as possible so that the risk of proprietary lock-in is taken off the table for other contributors.  Also, compatibility can be baked right in. On the Web, everything needs to be compatible, which is one of the main drivers behind the widespread adoption of open standards. It is no coincidence that we are beginning to see a bigger push for openness in mobile networks as we start to use our phones more and more as Web devices.

But don’t be fooled. Companies are very selective about the areas where they choose to be open, and they very rarely open up their core source of profits voluntarily. For all the fascination with the iPhone, for instance, one of the big knocks against Apple is that it is taking its traditional closed, controlling approach when it comes to opening up the device to outside applications. (Although, the company has promised to open up the iPhone to developers soon). And when Amazon copied Apple’s iPod business model with its closed Kindle Reader (it is the only e-reader that can download digital books from Amazon), there were similar calls on Amazon to open up the device.

Just because industry pressures and increased interconnectedness are forcing companies to embrace open technologies, don’t confuse openness with profitability. Open standards tend to be good for spurring the adoption of new technologies, but not so good for generating profits directly. That is why companies choose to be open along axes where they don’t compete. Google, for instance, is a big proponent of open standards in social networking, mobile networks, Web applications, and practically everywhere —except the one place it makes money. Its advertising system is a black box. You also never hear any talk coming out of Google about opening up the search algorithms that drive all of those advertising revenues. In contrast, Google has no problem championing open standards in industries that it is hoping to disrupt (by commoditizing existing business models with open standards, and making money with advertising instead).

It is no surprise that, in general, startups tend to like openness more than larger, more established companies. Open standards lower barriers to entry and make it easier for multiple industry players to participate (and cooperate) in the same market. Bigger companies with more to lose tend to resist openness. Apple is being extra careful about how it opens up the iPhone precisely because it doesn’t want random third-party applications to ruin the consumer experience it has worked so hard to perfect by crashing the iPhone. The reason the iPhone is so successful is arguably because of Apple’s insistence that it control every aspect of how it works. Openness and control, though, don’t really go together.
I don’t mean to suggest that big companies cannot learn how to ride the momentum that openness creates. IBM is a great example here, championing Linux and other open-source technologies in markets where it does not compete or dominate (operating systems) in furtherance of businesses where it does compete that are built on top of those open technologies (enterprise software and IT consulting). Again, the point is that companies need to pick and choose.

Take Amazon and the Kindle. Amazon has more to gain from opening up the Kindle than Apple does from opening up the iPhone. Unlike Apple, which makes money from selling the device itself, Amazon makes money from the digital book store that comes with its device. (This is the exact opposite of Apple, which makes barely no money from its equivalent iTunes store). The appeal of the Kindle is the service behind it, not the $300 device itself (which is probably subsidized). Also unlike Apple, Amazon is not very good at industrial design. If it were to create an open-source reference design for the Kindle Reader, another company could make one that is less clunky. More electronic readers would be sold, and more digital books would be purchased from Amazon.

So the next time a company touts how open it is, ask yourself how that will help it make more money. Don’t confuse openness with altruism.

(Image via j/f/photos).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Filed under: Cellphones

We're not planning on seeing any sort of confirmation from Sprint on this, but word on the street has it that the carrier has actually halted shipments of the LG Rumor to its retail outlets. Apparently, the handset has a "known issue where certain sets of key presses during startup can trigger a complete erasure of the phone's firmware." Purportedly, the device cannot be restored once triggered save for at the factory, but LG is hard at work creating an updated firmware that "removes the code from being accessible." Once that's completed and approved, existing users can expect an over-the-air download to be made available, and users to-be can expect the mobiles to start showing back up with the update already loaded on.

[Via PhoneScoop]

 

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Rising gas prices, lower home values and a slightly unstable stock market had no bearing for online spending this past holiday season. According to the latest comScore report, there are some interesting trends to look at here: online spending during the holiday season has doubled since that of last year, indicating that shoppers are perfectly willing to continue shopping even after Christmas day has ended. For the shopping season (between November 1 and December 27) overall, there was a small dip due to warm weather in late November, but otherwise there was a significant increase of 19% from the holiday season of 2006, reaching nearly $28 billion for 2007.

What’s going on here? Could this be part of the rising comfort level with online spending? That wouldn’t seem to attribute for a 2x increase in traffic for the day-after-Christmas spending, which more than doubled from last year’s numbers, to reach $545 million in 2007. Are retailers getting better at taking advantage of their online potential? What better way to extend the holiday spending for the online sector. In all, these numbers from comScore are pretty much in line from what we’ve seen throughout the holiday season.

Knowing what we know now, hopefully retailers will be more prepared for the holiday shopping season of 2008. Yahoo, Sears and a handful of other online retailers couldn’t handle some of the traffic they saw during online shopping on Black Friday, after Thanksgiving. What I’m most curious to see is how new data-gathering and advertising methods have had on the 2007 online holiday shopping season, and if this would have anything to do with discounts, sales and post-holiday deals that retailers offered to shoppers in order to see such a large increase of online spending this year.

Considering the new advertising methods that are coming into play, more integration with social networking, hopes for more e-commerce integration with social networks, and good ol’ Facebook Beacon, there’s sure to be even more to talk about for next year.

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It’s the end of the year, and we’ve covered a lot of ground in the last 12 months, much of it with snarky reviews. Let’s look back, shall we, at a handful of these reviews, just for fun. We’ve seeen phones, cameras, iPods, cases, and combinations thereof. These items we liked (usually), and we think you’ll like them, too. The rest can be found here or here.

Ultimate Ears Super.fi 4vi: the review

While the iPhone has many problems, we’re only going to focus on one: Apple’s crazy decision to use a recessed headphone jack; a decision that, without a clunky adapter, rendered useless every decent set of headphones out there. And even with the adapter, your headphones have no mic or toggle button, which is one of the coolest things of the iPhone. It was a conundrum of epic proportions.

Six months out, however, we have some options.

DLO’s Dope iPhone Cases

While I’m not one for trapping my electronics in cases myself, I know that I’m in the minority. Your iPod will get dropped, dirty, and damp, some protective armor of some sort is in order. And if you’re an iPhone user, then protecting your fragile investment is important, and DLO has you covered, too.

Sprint’s HTC Touch

The Touch by HTC is hands down one of the best devices I’ve used in the past two years. That says a lot considering the number of devices that roll through the CrunchGear offices. But to each his own, I say. The Touch has been an integral part of my stay in the Bay Area and has saved me on more than one occasion.

Sidekick LX

When I got the LX last week, I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it. After all, I had already abandoned the SK3 and SK ID for the charming animations of the iPhone. So what if the iPhone didn’t have native AIM on the iPhone — there were a few apps that kind of worked. So what if the iPhone didn’t have a solid, real keyboard. I could handle that. So what if the iPhone wasn’t one of the best casual messaging phones on the market?

Sprint’s Palm Centro

For those of you who might not know, the Centro is Palm’s follow-up to the popular Treo line of smartphones. Features-wise, it’s pretty similar. The Centro takes the Treo’s aged form-factor up to a more modern level. The Centro isn’t the smallest smartphone out there, but it competes nicely.

Helio Ocean

The Helio Ocean marks a sea change in the evolution of MVNOs. Previously allotted for a limited demographic, the Ocean signals a significant market expansion for the cellco youngster Helio. Aimed directly at the Sidekick crowd, the Ocean could be poised to erode some of T-Mobile’s bountiful cache of hip youngsters with cash to liquidate for cool technologies.

Casio Exilim EX-Z75

For the past year, I’ve spent time with numerous Casio digital cameras. The Exilim series has proven to be an excellent blend of both value and performance. A fantastic camera at a low price if you will. But camera after camera, Casio didn’t really do much to change the design of each model. At one point, the difference between a 10.1-megapixel camera and a 6-megapixel camera was virtually undetectable (well, except for the megapixel thing). But with the release of the EX-Z75, Casio has tried something new. The unit I received has a new design, a bright blue paint job, and a new UI to play with. Has Casio finally taken a step forward?

iPod Touch

If you know someone who wants an iPhone, don’t get it for them. Instead get them the fantastic — yes, fantastic — iPod Touch. The iPhone, design and interface aside, is a crappy cellphone. No, it is. When I first got mine, I said, “If they can find a way to take out the phone part, I’d be in love.” They did that, and so dubbed it the iPod Touch.

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Filed under: Gaming

Controller abuse has always been a mainstay of the video gaming existence -- no need to blame your thumbs when there's this hunk of plastic to chuck at the floor -- but who knew Nintendo was working such violence into its own official support curriculum? Wired's Russ Neumeier gave Nintendo support a ring when one of his Wiimotes stopped sensing motion and none of the usual fixes seemed to work. After explaining his situation, the Nintendo rep asked Russ smack the controller into his hand, button side down, two or three times. After being assured that she wasn't kidding, Russ did as he was told and was awarded with a fully functional Wiimote. We could see why Nintendo wouldn't go shouting about this "fix" on its official support literature, but it has us wondering if "blow into the cartridge, whack side of NES, insert cartridge, repeat" was the Nintendo-approved method all along.

 

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