Rumors are circulating that Sony is planning to develop a combo gaming and cell phone device. Japanese Business daily Nikkei reported that Sony is putting together skunkworks team to develop this gadget that will marry the PlayStation Portable gaming consoles with the Sony-Ericsson mobile phone handsets.

O RLY? Can Sony take on the iPhone? Neither their Walkman or Sony Ericsson phones do that well at all in the US market. Personally, I’d like to see more Ericsson phones in the US market, I’ve had an Ericsson phone and I was really happy with it. But the general attitude towards Ericssons are “meh” at best. What could help this phone is if it gets the same all access to the PlayStation gaming network like their other handheld gaming systems. They also have to go up against the big wall of iTunes.

However, this isn’t the first time that Sony’s had designs on this kind of hybrid device. From Businessweek:

“Rumors that Sony was working on a PlayStation cell phone first cropped up two years ago when Sony’s engineers filed a patent describing such a gizmo. The Internet rumor mill went into overdrive again in April, after Kazuo Hirai, who had led Sony’s video game division, was named as the head of a broader portfolio of networked products and services. The PlayStation Network is Sony’s biggest success story in online services. Under Hirai, the PlayStation group has rolled out online downloads of music, movies, TV shows, games and created a content platform for developers to create applications and games, sell videos, and post trailers and sneak previews. It’s clearly the model that Sony wants other divisions to emulate.”

With some phones such as the LG Versa trying to capture the gamers with it’s gamepad module, we see that companies are hoping to catch gamers’ attention.

[via businessweek]

Me and my friends talk tech about the iPhone 3GS. Ok, we talk a little smack too.

Well, you don’t really lose. You just have to wait a couple more weeks before you can get your new iPhone 3GS. If you put in your order now, your new baby will be delivered to you and you won’t have to go to the Apple Store to pick it up.

If you have put in your pre-order order, you are ate least guaranteed a slot at the Apple Store in the 7am power hour to get your new baby. The rest of the masses will have to gear up and be ready to throw down to fight for the remaining stock when the Apple Store opens at 8am or go to your local ATT store.

So, gear up. Either for your camp out at the Apple Store, or for your battle to get your hands on the remaining stock. Good Luck all!

[from Endgadget]

It’s the World Wide Developer’s Conference! What What! And everyone is waiting for that one piece of magical news….new iPhones? Short answer yes. But there was other stuff too. Here’s what I gathered when I was watching Ryan Block and Peter Rojas of gdgt.com’s live blogging from the event:

New Macbook Pros are shipping. Unibody design with built in battery.
New batteries have over 1k recharge cycles, and the batteries should last five years.
How’s the Speed?
It’s the fastest notebook we’ve ever made, up to 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo – up to 8GB of memory.”
Starts at $1699 – Woah, crazy fast AND more affordable? Word!
And.. there’s more:
the 13-inch now has SD, FW800, and “it deserves the name: MacBook Pro. And it starts at just $1199.”

MacBook Air gets an upgrade too – now it’s got a 1.8GHz for $1499 – $300 less than before. 128GB model for $1800… that’s $700 less than before.”

Then there is the specs as to how “green” it is.

Then there is the Operating System Talk:
OS Leopard update is 90% backend tweaks for Speed. Speed. Speed.
Not just speed but it’s more compact too: upon install, you recover over 6GB of disk space – over half the footprint of the existing OS.
– is this a move towards netbooks OS status? hmmm. Liz Likes.

Safari talk:
This is interesting, they’ve done some kind of magic where if the plugin crashes, it does not crash the whole browser. Excellent. Does that mean there will be more extensions and add-ons for Safari? I like what I hear.
More Speed talk:
Even more JS speed in Safari: 50% faster in 64-bit.
Also: Full history search in Safari; Cover Flow view of the browsing history, and Quicktime is faster, and has color correct, and new streaming technology.

Super Techy Deets:
“Lots of enhancements, but there’s also powerful new technologies.” Talking about the modern Mac: “You have gigabytes of RAM, a few years ago it was expressed in megabytes! It’s GHz – used to be expressed in MHz. And a GPU with enormous raw processing power. But to take advantage of all this, you need to write software. We have a number of technologies, but I want to mention three.”
“First: 64-bit. If your app runs in 32-bit mode, it has a 4GB memory limit. In 64-bit you have 16 billion gigabytes. Unlimited. Things run up to 2x faster: for those reasons, we’ve been on a trajectory for 64-bit. SL is the final stage, all major system apps run in 64-bit mode.”
“We want to use this power for all kinds of things. So we developed OpenCL – the C stands for computing.” Hardware abstraction, auto optimization, numerical accuracy.

Exchange: “We’ve decided build Exchange into the main three communication apps: Mail, iCal, and Address Book.” Demo time again! Mail now auto-discovers corp mail servers.
More MS Digs: Bertrand: “It’s so ironic that we have Exchange support for no extra charge, while Windows PCs have it as an extra product.” Ha.

Pricing: 29$. Srsly? Srlsly. And the family pack is $49. Pricing like Woah. Available in September.

Ok, here’s the iPhone talk. They started off with the 3.0 OS update
Scott Forstall makes the presentation:

MMS, CutnPaste, Text message search, and Spotlight.
ok Spotlight is dope. Oo000oo Tethering over Bluetooth! That makes me excitey.

Safari on iphone:
Streaming live audio and video. SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. More talk of speed speed speed.
js runs 3x faster. Auto-fill. HTM5 support (with offline db support) and audio/video tags.

Then there is lots of app talk:
Airstrip technologies is bringing patient monitoring software to the iPhone. I remember the partnership with Johnson & Johnson developing a blood glucose monitor at the prior OS 3.0 announcement in March. I figured this was a big step, of making the iPhone a legitimate medical device. I seem to be correct: Airstrip Critical Care supports virtual vitals and patient monitoring. Doctors can look at real time patient data on the iPhone even if they are away from the bedside.
I feel that this is a good step for the iPhone. However, I wonder about security of the connections. Medical records are no joke.

ScrollMotion is introduced. Their online bookstore. Books, newspapers, journals, even textbooks. Eyestrain abounds.

GPS:
TomTom. Get turn by turn directions and there is also a dope accessory kit.

TomTom car-kit accessory: windshield mount (in portrait or laptop), dock + power, louspeaker, GPS enhancer, handsfree calling, and audio output.

Music apps:
Line-6 and Planet Waves. Control sounds for your amp and guitar through the iPhone. Pretty impressive, 80 amp models included. Tuning feature, change your guitar sound on the fly. Super cool for the recording studio, however, this may be unwieldy for onstage performance. I’ll have to get my musician friends to try this out and get their feedback.

They also announced an app that is integrated with the Mobile Me service that will locate your iPhone if you leave it somewhere. And if you have lost it, it will remotely wipe all your data. If you find it again, just sync it and it’s all restored. Ploy to get Mobile Me subscriptions, perhaps? This could probably be it’s own standalone app.

When is the download date for this upgrade? Free for iPhone users, $9.99 for iPod Touchers.
June 17th.

NEW iPhone 3GS announced.
S for Super fast Speedy performance. Good thing because they’ve upped their camera to 3mp autofocus cam, and the big news – Video, with edit features, and upload to youtube, and .mac.
Voice Command over all apps, and…
Compass (what? Random. But it may be a nod to compete with Google Android’s Compass feature)
Nike+ integration for you worky outtie runny types

AND they are keeping the regular 3Gs on the market for $99 (new contract, etc etc). Well that’s pretty cool.
When can you get one? Preorder now and pick it up on June 19th. Rumor has it that you will be able to come into the store an hour early V.I.P style and pick up your new baby.

Downsides – ATT will not be supporting MMS and they are not sure about the tethering. It was definitely disclaimed at the keynote that “SOME CARRIERS” will support these features. Hmph.

But go get you some Safari 4 now, it’s available for download, and peep the Apple site for the new iPhone 3GS

iPhone 3GS pricing

Analyst Shaw Wu calls it: 2 new iPhones to come out later on this year. Wu, Kaufman Bros.’ analyst, reports that, according to his sources:

“Apple will launch two new models of the iPhone, one of which will have longer battery life, a faster processor and be capable of running more complex applications. Wu is unsure if the new phones will be available in June or July.
Additionally, Wu thinks that AT&T Mobility, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States, may cave in terms of data pricing for the hot gadget, offering tiered data plans to replace its single, $30 per month unlimited data plan.”

Wu-ut!
Well, there have definitely been indicators that Apple is prepping for …something. With the major update of its OS 3.0 slated to be released in June, and that you can now buy iPhones at Apple stores as well as at ATT stores sans contract, these are definitely indicators that they are clearing out inventory.

from fiercewireless.com

iphone, ipod, ipod touch, Shaw Wu, Kaufman Bros, gadget, gadget411

The official Skype app will be in the Apple App Store Tomorrow, March 31st, and Blackberry users can expect to see one around May of this year.

The iPhone’s Skype feature set includes free Skype to Skype calls, SkypeOut support, a pretty interface that is keeping with the iPhone interface, and instant messaging. You can also take a picture from within the app, and accept conference calls. The app will also work on 2G iPod Touches that have the external mic.

Caveats are: only being able to use on a wi-fi connection, as there is a ban on any VoIP on a 3G network, no text messaging, file transfer, or access to your Skype voicemails.

I’ve been using the Fring app for a while now, and it’s a great multi-protocol client that supports talk, chat, and Skype already….jus sayin.

image from Mashable

mobile, skype, iphone, mac, blackberry

It may have been St. Patty’s day but in the tech world, it was iPhone OS 3.0 day. Coming on the last day of South By Southwest’s Interactive week, Apple announced what would be included in their next iPhone update. The hype machine was in full effect in the days preceding this announcement. We knew that there would be some good stuff coming – we talked about MMS and tethering in the latest Money Shot, my homie Chris Pirillo wanted a search function, and Kevin Rose of Diggnation predicted cut n paste.

When it was all said and done, Apple touted over 100 features to be included in the update.

Here’s the Deets:

• Cut Copy and Paste. W00t! Apple may have taken it’s time, but they definitely did it well – it works across all apps, and, in cute Apple fashion: you shake it to undo. Hee.
• MMS! W00t W00t! Finally, you can send peeps pics via SMS. I guess I owe a lot of peeps pictures now. No more teasing them about phone cam pics I’d send them if they could get them. Also you can send contacts, audio and locations.
• SMS services: now you can forward and delete your text messages.
• Push Technology – get alerted by text, a little badge or by voice.
• Spotlight: search. Just like on their computers, across all apps and even mail that’s still on the server.
• Typing in landscape – across apps. Very Nice.
• Bluetooth connectivity is beefed up. More functionality to connect to more hardware. Johnson and Johnson demoed LifeScan – a diabetes monitor and meal planner app. This is very interesting, and opens up the possibilities of the iPhone being utlized more in the medical field.
• iphones will also be able to communicate to each other via peer-to-peer Bluetooth technology.
• Maps and GPS – more support for turn-by-turn GPS when devs supply their own maps.
• CalDAV- subscribe and share your calendar. Let everyone know what you are up to.
• Stocks app – beefed up and can subscribe to news feeds.
• Stereo Bluetooth support.
• YouTube: login to your account. Subscribe to channels. Like…The Gadget411’s Money Shot.
• VPN on demand. Dope. Virtual Private Network.
• Voice Memo.
• Auto-fill for web forms. Awesome.
• Audio/Video tagging.
• Live video streaming from the web. ESPN did a dope demo streaming some March Madness games.
• Shake to shuffle your songs.
• Wi-Fi auto login.
• Proxy support.
• Parental Controls.
• LDAP support.

Whew. That’s a lot of stuff. In sum, it’s a lot of stuff that frankly, most phones already do. Only Apple can create such fervor of gratitude for stuff that their products should have had in the first place. My favorite tweet from the coverage: @engadget “Applause for a feature that every other device in the world has. Odd.” haha. I found that quite the amusing.

Some fun things were also demoed – LiveFire – a First Person shooter, and Smule, creators of the Ocarina app brings on Dr. Ge Wang up from Stanford — he directed the Stanford laptop orchestra, to demo the new Trombone Leaf app. Will the iPhone be the next new musical instrument? Will it make being in the high school band cool? Marching Bluetooth Band.

Now you want it. Yes you do. When can you get it? Summer. Yes, now you have to wait. It’s free for the iPhone, and $10 for the ipod Touch. But if you are a dev, SDK is out and available now. Go Play. Let us know what you think!!

For some live blogging action from the announcement, hit up gdgt.com