New Gadgets and Gizmos

If you watch television or read magazines, you’ve probably seen Ashton Kutcher swanning around chi-chi Hollywood parties with the Nikon Coolpix S60, a slick new digital camera with an iPhone-like touchscreen. The camera looks hot on the party scene, but as reviewer Michael Lasky discovers, it’s a bit disappointing when you try to live with it for awhile:

With its high-gloss metal case and giant 3.5-inch, iPhone-like
touchscreen, the Nikon Coolpix S60 just begs to be touched. But your
lust will turn to disgust once you get to know this camera’s internal
quirks. In this case, beauty is only skin deep.

$350 • nikonusa.com
(5 out of 10)

Read the full review: Nikon Coolpix S60 Review

Ever since Apple introduced visual voicemail with the launch of the iPhone, envious customers of competing carriers have requested it as a feature for their own phones.

Thanks to the new version of their visual voice mail application, PhoneFusion looks like it’s the first company to take the Android plunge into voicemail efficiency. It might not be enough at this point to compete with the top phone (especially considering the G1’s substantial flaws), but it appears to be a good, useful app.

Several companies have also come out with their own versions of the app in the last 15 months. CallWave uses a voicemail widget and texting notifications (similar to GotVoice), and others, like SimulSays and most recently, Verizon, have added them for a small price. Most of them look the same visually, but they are often not as smooth as the iPhone’s set-up.

PhoneFusion’s app works just like the other visual voicemail apps and comes closest to the iPhone’s. You get to judiciously pick through your voicemail on your phone, with some archiving and labeling options. After you sign up from your G1 browser to open up a free account, you can set it to forward any other voicemails in your life (like your work voicemail) and they will all be grouped together in the Googlephone app.

While the first version of the PhoneFusion app was heavily scorned by Androidites as fugly and a slightly better version of a Windows Mobile app, the new Beta version looks much better, with room to grow.

That first version of the app was tested by the guys at Android Apps and they had a hard time receiving their first voice mail routed in to the phone. However, it has apparently worked for most other users. Personally, my concern is still with the design: It would benefit from a larger font and better graphics.

Still, like Charlie has previously suggested, the creation of a successful app for the Google Android mobile system gives us the opportunity to analyze the growth scale of the apps and the companies that make them.

One of the reasons why iPhone apps seem to do so well compared to other ones is that you know the ones that make it through the strict App Store process will work on the iPhone. Cross-phone apps usually don’t work as well because coding an app in the same system for completely different hardware (like touchscreens vs. keypads) makes it harder to replicate the user interface every time.

And since the G1 phone is the only Android OS phone at the moment, we can’t compare the difference in quality between a single app. Still, simple apps that accurately copy the user experience of a specific iPhone app like PhoneFusion’s visual voicemail suggest that Apple won’t have all the best apps in the next few years.

Mainly, a formidable open system like the future version of the Android OS will be able to replicate its apps across several mobile systems without losing ground in quality.

It’s just another reason why Apple might have to open up its closed system.

Apple doesn’t want you to believe what it says, even though the company claims it’s not lying.

That’s the gist of the Cupertino company’s legal response to a lawsuit regarding allegedly misleading advertising for the iPhone 3G.

The corporation’s nine-page legal document [.pdf] is an answer to a complaint filed by William Gillis, a 70-year-old San Diego resident who alleges that Apple falsely advertised the iPhone 3G by calling it "twice as
fast for half the price" compared with the original handset.

Some parts of Apple’s 32-point rebuttal say that the company was being truthful. But one paragraph says, in effect, that anyone who believes what the company says in its ads is a fool.

"Plaintiff’s claims, and those of the purported class, are barred by the fact that the alleged deceptive statements were such that no reasonable person in Plaintiff’s position could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple’s statements as claims of fact," Apple said in its answer.

Gillis was one of several dissatisfied iPhone 3G customers who recently filed lawsuits alleging Apple falsely advertised the handset’s performance. The lawsuits stem from widespread frustration over the popular smartphone; the complaints vary from frequently dropped calls to sluggish broadband speeds and the inability to stay on 3G before it switches to the slower EDGE network.

Apple has already motioned to dismiss some of the iPhone 3G lawsuits filed, but Gillis’s remains alive and kicking. Michael Ian Rott, Gillis’s attorney, said that out of the five iPhone 3G lawsuits filed, he thinks his client’s is the most likely to succeed.

"Ours has the most teeth and the most legs to it," Rott said. "If there was any way that Apple could get out of it, they would have filed a motion to dismiss here, too. Their M.O. has been, ‘File motion to dismiss and let’s get out of here,’ but they haven’t done that with ours."

In the past, Apple acknowledged the iPhone 3G’s network issues and promised the problems would be addressed with future software updates. Consumers are reporting that the most recent firmware version — iPhone 2.2 — appears to be mitigating the issue of frequent dropped calls. However, many still complain about reception problems.

"I keep waiting and hoping for a fix," wrote iPhone customer "BarJohnG," in Apple’s support forums. "So far the reception is still lousy. I can’t believe that Apple is not fixing this issue but merely trying to mask it and keep the customer confused by showing more bars than there is signal. When you look at the logs it is shocking the number of crashes and problems with the phone and OS."

Though Apple is continuing to hold its ground in U.S. courts, the corporation hasn’t been so lucky in the U.K. The U.K. Advertising Standards Authority banned two iPhone 3G advertisements, deeming them misleading for exaggerating the speeds and internet capabilities of the handset.

See also: 

• Lawsuit Alleges AT&T, Apple ‘Oversold’ iPhone, Strained 3G Network
• Wired.com’s iPhone 3G Survey Reveals Network Weaknesses
• Angry iPhone 3G Customer Sues Apple
• Apple: iPhone Update Improves 3G Network Performance
• Video: AT&T Blames iPhone 3G For Network Issues
• Opinion: Firmware Update to Fix iPhone 3G? I Doubt It
• Participate in Wired.com’s Global iPhone 3G Study
• What’s Wrong With the 3G in iPhone 3G?
• IPhone 3G Users Heated Over Network Issues

Photo: Jeffery Simpson/Flickr

Microsoft’s cashback program may have been a bust on Black Friday, but its Xbox 360 sales broke records — and outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game console by a margin of three to one.

Indeed, the Xbox 360 kicked off the holiday shopping season with sales on pace to beat previous years. Microsoft estimates a 25 percent increase from Xbox 360 Black Friday sales in 2007.

“We entered into the Black Friday sales period with cautious optimism, knowing that dollar for dollar, Xbox 360 offers more social entertainment value than any other console on the market,” said Don Mattrick, senior vice president of the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft.

The $200 Sweet Spot

Xbox 360 sales have surged worldwide since the September price drop, outselling the PlayStation 3 week over week across Europe. Console sales in Europe are up as much as 400 percent, with sales nearly double year over year and reaching seven million consoles sold this generation.

“Microsoft has a $199 Xbox 360 Arcade console, which is the cheapest of all three consoles. The entry-level Xbox is $50 cheaper than the [Nintendo] Wii and $200 cheaper than the [Sony] PS3,” said Michael Cai, a video-game analyst at Parks Associates. “So if the majority of the units Microsoft sold were from that price point, then obviously it’s not surprising. In this economy people want in-home entertainment — but they also want cheaper entertainment.”"

Traditionally, Cai said, video-game consoles reach mass adoption when the price drops below $200. Microsoft is the first to achieve that goal, in part, because the Xbox 360 was the first console released in the current generation.

“In this economy you do have a lot more bargain hunters and the price tag for the PS3 is likely to scare away some of the potential buyers in this environment than in a normal economic…

Megatechtronium is pulling the plug on its microblogging social-network site that allowed users to send music, photos and messages to friends using the Pownce Web site or desktop software.

Megatechtronium, a San Francisco-based company created by Digg founder Kevin Rose along with Leah Culver and Daniel Burka in June 2007, says Pownce will disappear on Dec. 15, less than a year after its service was made available to the public.

Culver, along with developer Mike Malone, will join the engineering team at Six Apart, a San Francisco-based provider of blogging software and the company behind Vox, Movable Type, TypePad and Blogs.com.

“We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service, but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009,” Culver wrote on the company’s blog. “We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.”

Moving On

“We are really pleased to have Leah [Culver] and Mike Malone joining Six Apart, as they are super-talented and we know will contribute great things,” said Jane Anderson, Six Apart’s spokesperson. “It’s too early to talk about what they’ll be doing, but they have already begun work here in San Francisco.”

Anderson said Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will join the company as advisers.

On Six Apart’s blog, Chief Executive Chris Alden said he has a lot of respect for what the Pownce team has accomplished, adding that the two companies share a common vision on making the Internet more social. “The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging, and we’re really proud to have them onboard,” Alden wrote.

Six Apart had a good year, hiring 90 people and growing the company to more than 200 employees. But the company took a hit from the economy and had to let go eight percent of its workforce in November. The company also took some…