Technologizer

It’s 2007 all over again, with Nintendo’s Wii in short supply at retail shops and online stores.

Shipments are coming in, but they’re selling out fast, Joystiq reports. Nintendo hasn’t gone into specifics on why it can’t meet demand for the Wii, but the company said “replenishing Wii inventories will be a challenge” in the short-term.

According to Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, 47 percent of GameStops had the Wii in stock last month, IndustryGamers reported, so you might have to call around to get one. Supplies are a bit scarcer at other retailers; Bhatia said 28 percent of channels had the Wii in stock last month.

Why are Wii shortages happening again? One GameStop employee told Joystiq that it’s a regular occurrence after the holidays, and that supplies should pick up in mid-February, but that doesn’t jive with Nintendo’s remarks about short-term supply challenges.

Back in the early days of the Wii, a popular conspiracy theory held that Nintendo was intentionally holding back supply to stir up buzz. I never really believed that, and it certainly doesn’t seem likely now. However, a variation on that theory, from GameStop chief operating officer Dan DeMatteo, seems plausible: In March 2007, he said Nintendo was holding back supply because the company already met its yearly sales goals.

A similar motive could be at work here. Despite a 23 percent drop in profits last quarter, Nintendo does seem on track to meet its sales forecasts for the year ending March 31, so the company may not be in a rush to boost production.

Again, only Nintendo knows for sure what’s going on here. As a consumer, it seems silly that a company would make it harder to buy its product, but that’s business for you.

I knew that high-quality Internet movie download company Vudu was focusing on adding its cool service to other companies’ gadgets (like LG Blu-Ray players and Mitsubishi TVs) these days. But I guess I didn’t realize that it had dropped its elegant box until I read this mostly-favorable new review of LG’s Vudu-enabled Blu-Ray player by the New York Times’ David Pogue.

I’m sorry to see the Vudu box’s thumbwheel-driven remote control–possibly the best remote ever shipped by anybody for any device–go away. Ultimately, though, Vudu makes more sense as a feature than as another gizmo to squeeze into an entertainment center. Here’s hoping the new strategy works for this plucky and inventive little company.

Anxious to see AT&T improve its wireless network? The long-term solution won’t involve beefing up the company’s current 3G network–it’ll be nailing LTE, the even-higher-speed 4G wireless technology that’ll eventually replace the current network. AT&T announced today that it’s working with equipment manufacturers Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson to begin tests of LTE later this year, with a full rollout in 2011.

LTE isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s promising and I look forward to its arrival. Even though absolutely none of the phones and wireless adapters we own now will be compatible with it…

I’m at Yahoo this morning for a press event the company is holding about its search activities. One overarching goal, clearly, is to make the case that Yahoo intends to remain an innovative force in search even assuming that its deal with Microsoft goes through and Bing’s index winds up as the basis of Yahoo’s search features.

Unlike yesterday’s Google Buzz launch, Yahoo’s event doesn’t involve any major announcement. We’ve seen a few brief recaps of minor recent additions to Yahoo’s search features, and gotten some quick previews of features in the works. The most interesting of the latter demos was of an iPhone app that lets you draw an outline with your fingertip on a map to indicate a geographic area, then get local results–for instance, to find restaurants on the waterfront.

Here’s a lousy photograph of the feature in action:

Yahoo says the goal is to let people search as easily as kids draw with an Etch-a-Sketch–it calls this feature “sketch-a-search.” As someone who spent a lot of time with an Etch-a-Sketch in my youth, the metaphor doesn’t quite make sense: The defining feature of the Etch-a-Sketch is that it’s hard to get a picture out of it that’s anything like the one you might have in your head. (It’s a lot of fun to try, though.)

I do like Sketch-a-Search, though–I’ve certainly spent a lot of time on the iPhone and other phones futzing with maps and having trouble zooming in to the geographical area I care about. I tend to end up either with the entire United States or a one-block radius, when what I really want is a region of half a mile or so.

Yahoo didn’t have anything to say about when or how they’ll make Sketch-a-Search available to consumers.

Here’s my latest guest post over at ExecTweets: “12 Smart, Memorable (and Sometimes Funny) Quotes About Technology.”

Norwegian browser company Opera, which has been talking about an iPhone version since 2008, is no longer just talking. It says that it will demonstrate an iPhone edition of its Opera Mini phone browser next week at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. And that’s all it’s said so far.

Opera seems to be following the increasingly common strategy of publicly announcing it’s working on something interesting for the iPhone in hopes of making of more difficult for Apple to reject the program once it’s submitted. But if Apple did approve an alternative browser such as Opera Mini, it would be startling–it presumably incorporates a JavaScript interpreter, and that interpreter presumably violates a clause in the iPhone developer agreement that prohibits apps from including interpreters of any sort.

I hope, however, that Opera does submit Opera Mini, and that Apple startles us all by accepting it. The single most disturbing thing about the restrictions that Apple puts on iPhone developers is their tendency to eliminate applications that compete with Apple’s own software–it’s bad for iPhone owners. And ultimately it might be bad for Apple, if it tends to leave the company more complacent than if Safari and other programs faced competition on the iPhone itself.

Does the world need Opera Mini for the iPhone? Maybe: Mini is a fine basic browser on other phones, and it compresses Web pages on the server side in order to deliver the fastest possible rendering on the phone. Which might make it particularly useful when the best speed you can get out of AT&T’s network is pokey EDGE. Whatever Mini is, it isn’t a boring, pointless knockoff of Safari…

US-China relations have turned contentious over the past several months, particularly in regard to the issue of “Internet freedom.” But neither nation has an unblemished record on Internet privacy, says Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.

Last month, Google declared that it has discovered cyberattacks on its systems targeting Chinese humans rights workers, and made a decision to terminate the censored version of Google in China as a response.

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What’s the most common first tweet that Twitter newbies make? That’s easy: “Trying out Twitter” and variants thereof. Nearly everybody who joins the service starts out in a mode that’s experimental, confused, and–for the rest of us–tedious. Which is okay, because on any given day, only a small percentage of tweets come from beginners.

Of course, there was a time when every Twitter user was a new Twitter user, but it was long before most of us had heard of the service. In fact, at the time it wasn’t even Twitter–it was Twttr.

Google Buzz, however, is different. Google could have launched it as a closed beta a la Google Wave or Google Voice, Instead,  the company decided to skip tryouts and go straight to Broadway, by opening the service up to every Gmail user over the next few few days. To a degree that’s really unusual in the history of the Web, Buzz will be chockablock with millions of confused newcomers all at once. Expect “trying out Buzz” and similar sentiments to be the primary form of Buzzing at first.

I still have access to Buzz only on my iPhone, not via Gmail. I’m only following a few people, and the majority of them haven’t buzzed at all yet. So almost all the buzzes I’ve read so far have been on the Web version’s “Nearby” tab, which simply uses your coordinates to show you updates from people in your general vicinity. A few of them are saying things that are at least vaguely interesting–or, at least, are alerting us to their eating activities. But yup, buzzing at the moment seems to mostly be about Buzz.

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Can’t we all just admit that we have no idea when or if U.S. carriers other than AT&T will get the iPhone? AT&T may not know. Heck, Steve Jobs may not know.

(Okay, trying to suss this out is irresistible: Seems to me that the window for a Verizon iPhone 3GS has essentially closed, and that the one for a CDMA iPhone on Verizon at all is quickly narrowing, too. With every day that passes with no news, the chances are higher that AT&T will preserve its exclusivity into 2011.)

As Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer has reported, a U.S. District Judge has eliminated the possibility that Microsoft might be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in class-action suits over its Windows Genuine Advantage copy protection and the method by which it was pushed onto XP machines back in 2006. I’m neither a lawyer nor a instinctive fan of class-action cases, so I’m okay with the news. (But I will say that there was a lengthy period during which WGA and Microsoft’s implementation thereof was an unreliable, vaguely insulting instrument that Microsoft willingly used against paying customers. The current version both works better and involves fewer instances in which people who pay for their software are forced to jump through hoops.)

I’m through with declaring any tech product or service to be a “killer” of any other tech product or service. But I will say this: If Twitter is found dead anytime in the next couple of years, someone’s going to need to hide Google Buzz, which debuted this morning, from the police.

Buzz seems to have most all the features that Twitter is missing, and Google is clearly going to take advantage of all the benefits of being Google to make it popular–most notably the inboxes of unspecified millions of Gmail users who’ll get Buzz as a service-within-the-service. My impression is that Google really, really wants this to be the dominant service in the still-evolving category of “that thing that Twitter does that doesn’t have a good name yet.”

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Google’s $350 “Equipment Recovery Fee” has pretty much received a universally poor reception among consumers. Complaints have flooded user forums, and apparently some have taken it as far as the Federal Communications Commission. Good news: the FCC’s intervention has seemed to have forced the company’s hand.

Effective immediately, the fee has been dropped to $150. This would not allow a user to escape T-Mobile’s $200 early termination fee — that would still be due to the carrier outside of it’s normal 14-day return period. To be fair to Google, it seems as if people’s complaints are more about the service than the device itself.

Being a former T-Mobile subscriber (and one for nearly seven years before switching to AT&T), I feel these people’s pain. Service when you have it is good — however 3G is extremely spotty, and in many rural locales you will have absolutely no service at all.

Now, in the defense of T-Mobile and Google, company officials are saying they are not making these changes due to pressure from the FCC. Needless to say — the FCC has been looking into these excess charges, which several commissioners have already said they thought were too excessive — and the commission itself has received thousands of complaints from consumers.

Quick reminder: I’ll be at Google headquarters for its product announcement this morning–possibly relating to new social features in Gmail–and will be covering it live at technologizer.com/google. Join me. won’t you?

Nvidia’s new switchable graphics technology.

Windows 7 battery problem? Nope.

Droid gets Android 2.1 update.

Redact that tweet, Journal editor.

iPhone gets memory card adapter.

What’s Shigeru Miyamoto working on?

Nexus one feature: phone support!

Nexus One double-life battery.

Publishers score e-book pricing victories.
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Two months ago, Barnes & Noble shipped its Nook, the most eagerly-anticipated e-book reader since Amazon’s Kindle. I thought it packed a number of nice touches and interesting features but that its software was decidedly rough around the edges, and advised that prospective buyers wait for promised updates before plunking down any money–which they’d have to do anyhow, since B&N was sold out and said it wouldn’t stock Nooks in its stores until it had fulfilled all the initial orders.

This week marks the Nook’s second chance at a first impression. Barnes & Noble started rolling out a software update, 1.2, over the weekend, and says that Nooks will finally arrive at retail in the middle of this week–just in time, it says cheerfully, for Valentine’s Day. I tried the revised software, and it’s a start–the Nook’s interface feels more spritely and less buggy, and some usability issues with the original version have been cleaned up. Icons now make it clearer which books can be lent out virtually for two weeks via B&N’s LendMe feature. (The company says “most” books offer the feature, but only about half of the ones I’ve bought do–notable exceptions include Superfreakonomics and The Four-Hour Work Week.) The Nook now offers some exclusive content and discounts (such as a 10 percent off sale on CDs) when it notices you’re on the Wi-Fi network of one of its stories.

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