Who knows if this little bit of database wizardry would actually cause the traffic camera’s picture-parsing computer to drop a table? Even if it doesn’t it’s covered up his actual license plate. [See Also] More »

Hubble 3D is a pretty simple movie. It’s also one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen in my life. More »

Nobody cares about iTunes LP, reports Paul Bonanos. Six months into the format—one that Apple believed enough in to have a separate event—and nobody is buying. But what if it were free?

We’ve been discussing it in our top-secret internet chat place. Mark is certain that the LP format can be redeemed—or at least given a proper chance—on the iPad. And indeed, some had speculated that iTunes LP would be the format by which Apple would distribute books and magazines. (Turns out it was ePub wrapped in FairPlay DRM, at least for books.)

It’s hard to say confidently that the format has had a proper chance.There are only 29 LPs on the iTunes store right now, certainly not enough to make any sort of platform judgement. But they also cost more than simply buying an album.

So what if they were free?

The “LP” format is a sort of hybrid of the old album art and DVD-extras. (For everyone that reads this site, “albums” were giant vinyl CDs that were packaged in cardboard sleeves a bit smaller than a pizza box—lots of space for art.) But it didn’t cost anything extra to get that big art on an album, and most DVDs have at least a baseline special feature. That extra content is a value-add, an incentive to buy.

Apple has released the format for iTunes LP for months, although LPs still have to be approved just like Apps. But for a smart band or label, one strong LP version ready for the iPad launch—for free—could make a band’s release really stand out.

Or maybe the LP format, asked for not by fans and customers but by the labels and the RIAA, wasn’t really necessary in the first place.

Remember those cheap green plastic army men? The ones that were in Toy Story? And in your grubby toddler hands? Now available in a LEGO version for $11, they’re ready to melt your meta-meta-heart…with a lighter. Medic! [LEGO]

Media streamers aren’t exactly new, but there’s another entrant to the field that works so simply and easily it should be nearly mandatory for any iPhone user. It’s called Air Video—and it’s only three bucks.

Here’s the scenario: I’ve got a NAS with about a terabyte or so of video sitting on my network. Some torrented files, a lot of DVD rips I made myself, a fair amount of random Xvid and MKV files I’ve kept for years, and quite a few h.264 MPGs that I encoded of my own work.

Now, getting videos to an iPhone is relatively easy—if you want to convert them to h.264. Toss the file into Handbrake, fiddle with a few settings, and copy the converted file into iTunes to be synced to your iPhone.

Problem is, you’ve got to wait for the video to be converted. Then wait for it to copy to your phone. Then hope you have enough space to store it. Then delete it when you’re done.

The natural solution, of course, is streaming. And several nice applications have been written that make that possible, including Orb and (which will also stream live TV if your PC has a tuner), Tversity (which can also stream to Xbox, PS3, and even DirecTV boxes). But Orb is $10; TVersity Pro is $40.

Air Video is $3. And it’s so dead simple to set up that I didn’t quite believe it had actually worked.

I downloaded the Air Video server software to my first-generation unibody MacBook Pro, pointed it at a local folder full of video, and activated it. (It’s also available for Windows.) Then I opened up the Air Video iPhone app to find a simple directory listing. Within about three minutes from first discovering Air Video I was watching a 720p episode of a television program on my iPhone, streaming over my local Wi-Fi network.

Then I pointed the Air Video server at my NAS, suspecting that something would snag. My laptop wouldn’t have the CPU power to convert the video in time. My 801.11N network would get clogged. But nope—Air Video happily chugged away, sending a real-time stream of my videos right to my phone.

I even tried watching a 13GB 1080p rip from the NAS. (Of a Blu-ray I own, thank you very much.) It worked—mostly. Air Video lost the stream occasionally, pushing the stream back in chunks as it rebuffered. Considering my laptop chokes on that file even when it’s sitting on its own hard disk, I am not surprised.

Perhaps it shouldn’t impress me as much as it does, but it completely changed the way I think about my media library and my iPhone. I already sleep with my iPhone at my side. And when the iPad arrives, I suspect it’ll be on the nightstand, too. Now every movie or television show I have sitting around will be ready to watch in just about ten seconds.

Air Video manages to be both extremely simple to use, while extremely powerful for the settings tweaker.

If a video is encoded in h.264, a format which the iPhone can play natively, Air Video simply streams it. If not, you can “Play with Live Conversion”, which uses the ffmpeg library on your Mac or PC to convert the file in real-time. (Provided your machine is fast enough. Most newer computers should be able to handle that just fine.) You can also tell Air Video to do a permanent conversion of the file to a h.264, although the real-time streaming works so well I can’t imagine you’d find the need to do so very often.

There are tons of conversion settings that can be fiddled with, as well as different bit rates for streaming. But the default settings and guesstimates made by Air Video work so well, I haven’t yet felt the need to touch them.

You can even stream outside your network if you turn on the “experimental” Remote setting. Air Video will generate a ten-digit PIN that you punch into the iPhone app which allows it to communicate with the Air Video server even when you’re away from your home network. (I suspect it is doing some sort of simple DNS-like passing of your external IP to the company’s servers, although I have not investigated this.) The takeaway is that you can watch all your movies even away from home, even over 3G. Again, this isn’t a brand new idea, but to have it all work so effortlessly in a $3 app is. (There is also a free version that won’t display all your files at once that works perfectly, should you want to test it first.)

I’ve been toying with the idea of selling my HDTV for a while. I use it, but could live without it. I’ve barely been playing console games at all over the last few months, using the TV mostly as a giant monitor connected to a Mac Mini that serves as a home theater PC. I’d been considering replacing it with an iPad, as silly as that might seem, simply because I live alone and rarely watch movies and such with guests.

I don’t know if I’ll sell the TV and the Mac Mini or not, but Air Video has made me realize that if I wanted to, I could get the same functionality on an iPad. I’ll never be without my video library again. Not bad for three bucks. [iTunes]

We love Sony. We really do. And we want them to get back in the game, because competition makes everyone better. Here’s how they do it.

Open the Library

There was a time when I might have suggested that Sony jettison its media companies, setting music and movies adrift so that the electronics divisions would no longer have to be held hostage by internal squabbles over piracy.

I’ve come around. While Sony Pictures has had its ups and downs over the last decade, the addition of the movie and television libraries gives Sony a strength that none of the other Big Four have—if they can loosen up.

Microsoft has games and Office; Apple sells a lot of music, but owns no content beyond software; Google has YouTube and user-generated content, but creates little professional content of its own. In this space Sony stands alone, with a rich library of music, television, movies, and games.

Imagine if buying a Sony product gave you simple, inexpensive access to that vast archive. Not even for free, necessarily. (Although Sony should continue to be liberal with its media giveaways, like it did when launching the PSP, bundling Spider-Man on UMD.) But all of it at your fingertips with an ease-of-use that put its competitors to shame.

In theory this is the aim of the upcoming Sony Online Service. (The “S.O.S.” name is temporary, if apropos.) Sony has discussed plans to translate the moderately successful PlayStation Network into a cross-device infrastructure, allowing not just media downloads but media uploads, taking not only a shot at iTunes but at cloud services like Flickr and Picasa.

That’s fine and dandy in theory—but why would a user choose Sony, a company that has launched and then quickly abandoned several other media stores and sharing services in the past? When they closed the Connect store, they stranded customers who had bought into their proprietary ATRAC-based DRM. When ImageStation went bust, they migrated people to Shutterfly and cited “many capable online photo services” as a reason for the closure. Why start investing dollars and time and work and memories in a company that just five years ago allowed rootkits to be installed to protect the sanctity of its media?

There’s a trust issue at play, perhaps bigger than Sony realizes, as its halting and horrible missteps have made many potential customers leery of its commitment.

Lucky for Sony, there’s a new age dawning in media, one based heavily in the cloud, with subscriptions taking the place of media downloads—especially in video, where customers have yet to invest heavily in pay-per-download models simply due to prohibitive costs and the infinite format war.

Sony should send the Online Service into the world with a bang: open access to Sony’s media library free for a month. Or three. Take the write-down as a marketing expense, allow millions of users free access to the media that Sony controls, and use the media—not the hardware—as a loss leader to get people hooked on Sony again.

(And if they did it without DRM that’d be even better, but I’m not asking for miracles here.)

A comprehensive and liberal attitude towards online media would go a long way towards shoring up Sony’s more traditional media sales strategy, as well. Blu-ray, after a long and costly battle, has finally won—just as download and streaming content is taking hold in the video space. Buying a Blu-ray disc currently guarantees me access to the video on many non-Sony devices—why not give me access to that same movie on all of my Sony products? I bought Ghostbusters on Blu-ray—now let me watch it whenever I like on whatever Sony device I choose just by grabbing it from the cloud. That would certainly make me more eager to spend money on physical copies.

Become the Best Android Maker In the World

Sony’s software showing is weak. Its mobile devices, for a brief moment a bellwether in the “small and useful” space, are now bogged down in a swamp of too-little, too-late design. (More on that in a bit.) Its arcane PlayStation architecture is, according to many game developers, confusing. That was fine when PlayStation was the biggest game in town, but with the Xbox and Wii eclipsing PS3 sales and the DS and iPhone taking a huge chunk of the potential PSP market, Sony’s inability to provide powerful, easy-to-use software for developers has been a huge factor in its poor showing this console generation. (Things are are looking up, but on the beam the PlayStation 3 has been a disaster for Sony exactly when it didn’t need one.)

There is hope, and its name is Android. At first it might seem counterintuitive to suggest that Sony lean heavily on a product under the aegis of a company that by all rights should be a chief competitor. But for all its not-quite-actually-open-source issues, Android exists primarily so that Google can be insulated from Apple and Microsoft—the two companies that most threaten Sony, as well. In this case, the enemy of Sony’s enemy could be their friend—especially when Google isn’t interested in providing a full range of consumer products that use Android.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Sony used a competitor’s software: The entirety of the Vaio PC line runs Microsoft Windows, and its Sony Ericsson phones run Nokia’s Symbian OS or—oh look!—Android.

And in this case, Google’s weakness is Sony’s strength: great hardware. And adopting Android across all its devices would do nothing to impede Sony’s own platform goals. In fact, that a Sony-branded Android device could have access to the broad range of Android applications as well as Sony’s Online Service and media offerings would do much to set Sony apart from the glut of also-rans that make up much of the current non-phone Android marketplace.

At its heart, Android is “just” Linux. Sony’s no stranger to Linux—the PlayStation 2 and 3 both have dabbled with Linux support. But Android is Linux-as-platform, a trusted and understood consumer branding. (Or, you know, that’s the goal.) It is, as far as operating systems go, as good or better than anything Sony has ever cooked up themselves. Rather than spending years on disparate software platforms for each device, Sony’s software engineers could spend their time building easy-to-use and beautiful user experiences on top of a unified platform. (Remind me again why the Sony Dash doesn’t use Android?)

Ditch Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson’s products are late, underpowered, designed by madmen and utterly irrelevant. Worse, the company is helmed by a man too proud to make a flagship phone with Google. Fire him. Rescue the engineers. Let the rest of the company burn.

This business has changed. There are no phones anymore. There are simply things that also phone. That there is not a PSP Phone in my hands right now is a travesty, one surely due entirely to the fact that Sony is entangled in a bizarre partnership with a European company trying to make phones that appeal to a feature phone market that started to go away a decade ago.

Sony Ericsson is a stone around Sony’s neck and should be cut free as soon as possible. Telephony and mobile data are an intrinsic part of the electronic landscape. Even if a modern phone is really only a radio and a bit of software, it’s too important to be anywhere but in-house—and increasingly, in every product.

Another fantastic man-on-the-street piece from Woody Jang about what regular consumers think of Sony’s future.

PlayStation Everything

If you ask the average person on the street what their favorite Sony product is, more often than not you’ll hear “PlayStation”. There’s a couple of reasons for that—not the least of which is that it’s the last Sony product to completely stand apart from its competitors.

It’s a valuable and—when executed correctly—profitable brand. As for the hardware itself, the PlayStation 3 is powerful.

So why is it so half-assed? Why is it that I can spend hundreds of dollars on a PlayStation 3 and still not use it as a DVR? Or as a powerful, slick media center to access my media files? (You can do it, yes, but it’s no Boxee or Plex.) Why does Sony sell any other Blu-ray players at all?

The PlayStation of the last few years is battered, but not broken. Half-hearted and poorly conceived projects like PlayStation Home have shown how disconnected Sony is from its users, but the device, brand, and platform still have a lot to give.

I have four boxes connected to my television: All three major consoles, plus a Mac Mini. The reason I have the Mac Mini? It’s because none of the consoles do a proper job as a media center, giving me universal access to every type of media I consume, from streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, to movies and television I’ve ripped and downloaded (legally or otherwise), to DVDs and Blu-ray. (The Mini doesn’t do Blu-ray, but since I only own, like, six Blu-ray discs that hasn’t been a dealbreaker.)

Sony is trying. Netflix has come to the PS3, if somewhat awkwardly. But accessing files on the network still takes a UPnP server and other bits of annoying acronymic magic that makes my $350 console from a multi-billion dollar company feel gimpy and half-baked.

In the portable space, it’s ever worse: I don’t know a single person who bought a PSPgo. And why would they? It was clear from the outset that the PSPgo was a toe in the water of the digital-distribution stream, not the sort of cannonball into online game downloads that is already being explored to profitable depths by Apple.

But a PSP phone? A nicely designed portable device that has access to the library of amazing PSP titles, plus all the movies, music, and (hopefully Android) apps that Sony could provide? They’d sell a million on Day One, and have developers banging down their doors to let them create the beautiful 3D titles that the PSP is known for.

Thank goodness there are rumors that a PlayStation phone is happening—but Sony has made similar sashays before, only to jilt us later.

Keep It In the Lab

We’ve shown the absolutely monstrous number of products Sony has for sale (to US consumers) at any given time. To some extent it’s understandable, if not forgivable. It’s one of the strengths of megacorps to be able to shotgun lots of products onto the market to see what sticks, and diversification has been part of the Sony strategy for decades.

But it’s gotten out of hand—and worse, it’s turned Sony into a company that has stopped saying “Look what we’ve invented,” to instead murmur, “We can do that, too.”

I’ve written about how Apple’s restraint has given them a product lineup that’s easy to understand—and easy to invest in as a customer. Buy an Apple product and you can be sure that it’ll be supported for years to come. (And that it’ll be superseded by an improved version in a year, of course.)

But Sony is spitting out products that even they don’t believe in. The Mylo internet communicator? The Vaio P netbook? The PSPgo? The Sony Dash? The UX Series UMPC micro whatever-the-hell? A three-thousand dollar 2-megapixel Qualia camera? Those aren’t all dead products—yet. But Sony, by spewing out products that are clearly part of no greater strategy than “Let’s see what sticks” has eroded the value of their brand and the trust that customers should be able to put in it.

Bring Back the Robots

Except for the robots! While I’ll rail all day about how Sony has overwhelmed us with pointless or half-baked products, I have to admit: I miss the robots. I miss the strange little contraptions, the oh-so-Japanese experiments that clearly have no place in the greater company strategy, but exist only to show off the prowess of Sony’s engineers.

Is the Sony Rolly absolutely silly and overpriced? Of course it is. But if Sony were selling just a couple of dozen products that really nailed it, the Rolly would stop serving as an all-too-fitting icon of Sony’s directionless and instead take its place as a whirring, cooing, flashing reminder that Sony plays in the future.

Really, though: robot dogs! How are we supposed to believe in Sony if they don’t believe in Aibo!

Make the Best

Once upon time, you bought Sony because “Sony” actually meant “the best.” It’s that reputation of quality that Sony’s largely coasted on (and ridden roughshod over) for the last decade. Sony simply needs to make the best gadgets again.

Take its TVs for example, a core product where Sony is a brand that immediately comes to mind: The Bravia XBR8 is quite possibly the best LCD television ever created. Sony stopped making it last year. The products that followed it, the XBR9 and XBR10, are actually inferior products, despite costing just as much. We actually expected the XBR8 to spawn many better and less expensive TVs, not the opposite. That’s the death of the Sony brand. If Sony means nothing else, it should mean the best gadgetry you can buy. The XBR11 needs to be the greatest LCD TV ever made.

Make Us Believe

Sony is lost. Too entranced by their own mythos to make the hard decisions. Too ready to listen to the Madison Avenue hucksters who convince them that “make.believe” means anything at all.

But we believe in Sony. Even their worst products, however feebly designed, retain the air of quality. (We’re ignoring a few exploding batteries here and there as the travails of any massive company.)

We believe in a Sony that can practice restraint, that can encourage its engineers to dream and innovate, but also can understand that not every crazy accomplishment needs to be validated by becoming a product for sale.

More than anything, we believe that Sony can stop being so prideful, desperate to be acknowledged as the world’s leading electronics company. We believe that the company of Ibuku and Morita can stop telling us they’re the best, and do what they were formed to do:

Prove it.

The complete “We Miss Sony” series
• Video: Describe Sony In A Word
• How Sony Lost Its Way
• Sony’s Engineer Brothers
• Infographic: Sony’s Overwhelming Gadget Line-Up
• The Sony Timeline: Birth, Rise, and Decadence
• Let’s Make.Believe Sony’s Ads Make Sense
• The Return of Sony

Click to zoom and explore…and boggle.

• Small JPG [164KB]
• Medium JPG [952KB]
• Large JPG[10.4MB]

Thanks to Shane Snow for the design and Don Nguyen for the extensive data collection.

To understand Sony, understand its founders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. Even though both are now gone, their executive dynasty and its haphazard, emotional governance established the model for the Sony of today—even as it holds Sony back.

Rice Cookers and Electric Blankets

Sony’s early years are thick with stories of near disaster tempered by last-ditch recovery. After the Second World War, Japan was rebuilding its infrastructure. Electricity, no longer needed for military factories, was in surplus, and Ibuka and Morita wasted no time in putting together an electric rice cooker and an electric blanket for sale to the Japanese market.

They were horrible.

Despite a clever design, the rice cooker—a wooden bucket with electrodes at the bottom which would turn off when water steamed away, breaking the circuit—mostly under- or overcooked the rice. The electric blanket scorched blankets and futons, and there was fear it would eventually set a house on fire.

Ibuka was a tinkerer of the first order, so skilled at inventing that he won the Gold Prize at the 1933 Paris World’s Fair for his patented “dancing neon”. Morita was the scion of a prosperous family who chose a career of science instead of running the Morita sake business, breaking a chain of first-born leadership that stretched back fourteen generations.

They met working for the military, but wasted no time in forming Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, Ltd., which would eventually become Sony—as soon as the war was over.

Ibuka, in his founding prospectus, made it clear that above all else, Sony would exist as a welcoming workplace for the eternally misunderstood engineer: “The first and primary motive for setting up this company was to create a stable work environment where engineers who had a deep and profound appreciation for technology could realize their societal mission and work to their heart’s content.”

Engineers have always been stars at Sony—more so, perhaps, than their creations.

Ibuka Imagined, Morita Manifested

For decades—perhaps even up until this day, depending on who you ask—the key decisions of the company were typically driven by Ibuka, Morita, or one of the relatively small cabal of executives that led the company. This is typical in a Japanese company, where even the board of directors is often comprised mostly of cronies and yes-men, unlike in Western corporations where (in theory) a board of outsiders represent the needs of the public shareholders.

From its very start, Sony has been a wonderworks of invention, with engineers given ample leeway to work on their own projects. Their early inventions were often built on the ideas of other companies, improvements rather than wholly new ideas.

German companies had invented tape recorders in the 1930s, but both the machines and the magnetic tape used for recording was expensive. Sony developed a paper tape that was affordable but with a shabbier sound quality, literally brushing on the shellac by hand onto paper tape with a brush made from badger hair.

When Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, Sony sent an employee to the United States for three months to learn how to manufacturer them. When test runs yielded only five functional transistors out of every one hundred made, Ibuka ordered the company to move ahead with production. He held in his mind a vision of a pocket-sized transistor radio, and although it took a couple of years for everything to click, the TR-55 Transistor Radio was a very profitable product for young Sony.

Consider Ibuka’s biggest success: the development of the Trinitron picture tube, a couple hundred million of which Sony sold over the years. When the project began, Sony had licensed another tube technology, Chromatron, which had such poor production yields that it cost Sony nearly twice as much to produce than the price for which they were actually sold. Chromatron nearly bankrupted the company.

Ibuka himself led the engineering team that created the aperture grill that made Trinitron tubes colorful and clear. It took nearly two years for the first Trinitron tubes to roll off the assembly line. Years later, Ibuka considered it the high point of his career at Sony.

But if Ibuka had failed—and there were many failures before his team made the breakthrough—Sony probably wouldn’t be around today. It was a legendary success—a legend that now allows Sony to rush headlong into engineering-led disasters.

“I’ve always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio.”

Morita was less an impassioned engineer and more a dabbler, although make no mistake: Morita loved his gadgetry. It’s just that he also loved business, good food, the arts. Like his successor, Norio Ohga, Morita was concerned as much with the media that would play on Sony products as he was with the gadgets themselves.

It was this thinking that lead Sony into the content space, having first made considerable profits by selling recording media like audio or video tape alongside its tape recorders, as well as the extremely profitable acquisition of Columbia Records.

Eventually, having made a fortune selling both CD players and manufacturing a large percentage of compact discs, Sony made a play for a Hollywood Studio. Although Sony had looked at most of the major studios, it happened that Columbia Pictures had the right combination of a potentially profitable film archive, a vast television library, and promising upcoming film projects.

The problem? Sony had no idea how to negotiate the deal properly, led on by typical Los Angeles entertainment tricksters, and soon had decided the only practical choice was to abandon its hopes of acquiring Columbia.

Until Morita said one evening over tea, “It’s really too bad. I’ve always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio.”

And that was that.

Sony ended up paying an outrageous premium to acquire Columbia, only to write down billions of debt just a few years later. The same sally-forth qualities that had served Sony’s founders so well at the beginning of their careers were still in play thirty years later, only now they were in control of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees.

Echoes Not of Dreams, But of Dreaming

There are countless examples of Ibuka and Morita’s successors following in their footsteps, taking up the mantle of the brash engineer, forging ahead despite warnings of overambition or even unprofitable results, all in pursuit of a now-mythical Better Way. It’s hard to blame them. Sony’s founders brought fantastic success through their ideas and their tenacity, creating a corporate juggernaut big enough and diversified to withstand failures that would be catastrophic to smaller organizations.

Gadgets are not simply single-purpose electronic tools these days. They are platforms for software, for interaction, for media consumption.

I can’t help but wonder if Ibuka and Morita would look at the Sony of today and see any similarity to the company they founded, a place where engineers can work in peace to create the future, or if they would realize that sometimes the dreams of engineers are best when united towards a unifying vision—a vision that must adapt to the landscape of its time.

For this piece and others, I am indebted to the authoritative work of John Nathan and his book, “Sony: The Private Life”, as well as Sony’s own history page which, perhaps tellingly, only goes up to 1995.

More than anything, Sony’s lost its spirit, spending too much time telling us it’s the greatest electronics company in the world and not nearly enough showing us.

Proprietary Formats

Sony’s last huge format hit was a product called “Compact Disc”. You might have heard of it. Spinning plastic wheel with pits in the bottom? Read by lasers? Co-developed with Philips?

It took a couple of years for CDs to take hold, but once they did, Sony raked in the cash. Not only by selling players, but by manufacturing CDs for themselves and others. It’s a huge part of their business even today, as Sony DADC produces not just CDs, but DVDs, Blu-ray, and PlayStation discs in facilities around the world.

Sony became spoiled. For decades, a success in a new media format meant that Sony could expect to make money selling the media itself. Through the ’80s and ’90s, they became less inclined to share the market. Sony developed the 3.5-inch floppy disc drive for computers which found wide adoption as blank discs were available from a variety of manufacturers. MiniDisc followed, but with less success. In 1998 as the flash memory market started to warm up, Sony introduced Memory Stick, what eventually became an entire family of expensive flash memory formats that were not compatible with devices from any other manufacturers.

And don’t forget the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD war. Sony eventually won that one, but the battle continued for such a long time because neither consortium wanted to lose the market to produce media for consumers—consumers who were increasingly getting their content online.

See the problem? Time and again, Sony took an excellently engineered solution and held it tightly, the better to extract big profits. But every generation, every iteration, Sony’s need to control the format became more and more of a liability. Even loyal Sony customers could tell the proprietary formats were a screw job, eroding their happiness with their Sony product every time they had to shell out a premium to buy a Sony-authorized blank.

Unwillingness to Commit

Sony is rife with good ideas. Too afraid to commit to each one fully, Sony instead releases a ridiculous number of products in an attempt to see which might take hold, making many that seem like one-off oddities that even Sony doesn’t believe in.

Take “Bravia Link“, the streaming media box that Sony decided to sell as a $200 aftermarket option for its televisions while Sony’s competitors were integrating similar services right into the TV. Worse, Sony sells the PlayStation 3. Why not integrate the streaming service into that, adding value to the PS3 and buy-in of its customers?

Or what about the Party-shot Automatic Photographer, a dock that works with just two models of Sony’s point-and-shoot cameras to automatically compose and shoot portraits of party-goers. Great idea—so why isn’t it just built into every camera Sony makes?

Nintendo ate Sony’s lunch with the Wii—so Sony is building a Wiimote clone for the PS3.

Netbooks were hot—so Sony built a netbook twice as expensive as its competitors with little performance difference then let it fade away in the market after spending millions on its launch campaign.

Sony released the first e-ink reader years before the Kindle—in Japan only. And it was nearly impossible to load your own content onto it. And it took years to get a solid online library and store together. According to estimates from Forrester Research, Sony had only sold about 50,000 of its Readers before Amazon entered the game with the Kindle. It took a competitor with a superior product to convince customers it was time to look at e-ink readers at all. And the non-strategic advantage of being the only reader sold in brick-and-mortar stores for Sony to get the #2 market share it had at last tally.

Apple announced the iPad—so Sony says the tablet market is a “space [they] would like to be an active player in.” I am sighing preemptively for the beautiful black slate that Sony will release in 2011, then never upgrade again. In the meantime Sony is pushing its new Chumby-based Dash device, or as you may recognize it, a five-inch thick touchscreen tablet that you have to keep plugged into a wall.

For a brief moment, Sony’s Vaio notebooks were among the most beautiful and colorful around. But it didn’t take long for Sony’s larger notebook competitors like HP to catch up on design—while Sony continued to charge a premium for their now stock-standard “pretty” laptops. Gartner analyst Leslie Fiering put it damningly: “They’ve been status quo for so long that it’s hard to see signs of change. If they continue on the path they’re on, they’re going to continue to be an also-ran.”

That’s today’s Sony: an also-ran who wants to be respected like a market leader.

For homework, Sony could start with these three studies from Stanford School of Business: “Too Much Choice Can Hurt Brand Performance“; “Asking Consumers to Compare May Have Unintended Results“; and “For Buyers, More Choice Means Better Quality“.

That last one might seem bolster Sony’s shotgun marketing plan until you read this warning: “In one study, for example, consumers gave top ratings to a restaurant that offered a wide variety of dishes in one category—Thai food. But when that restaurant was portrayed as offering not only Thai food but also food in other categories, consumer ratings went down. ‘In some cases, having a lot of unrelated options is a signal to the consumer that the brand is not focused, and therefore can’t be very good.’”

Arrogance

There’s no better example of the arrogance of the modern Sony than the launch of the PlayStation 3. It was the last of the current generation of game consoles to market. It cost more than all its competitors. Kaz Hirai, then president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America and now the head of the entire ball of wax worldwide, said infamously, “The next generation doesn’t start until we say it does.”

People were rolling their eyes at Sony even as Hirai and his executive team made those lofty statements—but our eyes flipped all the way into the backs of our skulls after Sony spent the next three years struggling in a videogame market they once dominated.

Why Sony would present this cocky face to the world is impossible to understand, until you realize that it’s the sort of self-delusional bluster, pre-game trash talk, from a team that hasn’t won a championship in years.

It’s clear in their marketing and press relations, too. Sony is always quick to throw a big party, launch some laptop with a silly event like a fashion show, or hand press review units out to lifestyle magazines but not technical publications. Having had one accidental lifestyle product success with the Walkman, Sony mistakenly believes that its products are stylish—when in fact the Walkman became a style icon despite its often garish or pedestrian looks.

If you think this is too harsh an appraisal, think about the many Sony products that arbitrarily ended up in our 50 Worst Gadgets of the Decade roundup. Almost all of them are guilty of more than one of the above infractions, and some—such as the $1900 solid-brass MiniDisc player above, a key device in the short-lived Qualia luxury line—are the glorious embodiment of all three.

I believe Sony has the chutzpah to do more than make me-too products—they’re capable of making market-expanding products that become household names. But until they take a hard look at themselves in an honest light, Sony will continue to embarrass themselves by remaining the company that says they’re bringing us the future—then sells us products even they don’t believe in.

-With reporting by Brian Barrett and Don Nguyen

We asked people on the street what they thought of when they thought of Sony. [We Miss Sony]

There are very few companies in the world whose names provoke not just recognition, but affection. Sony, whose products defined gadgetry in my youth, has lost its way. I want them back. I miss loving Sony.

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking to Sony customers, Sony employees, even Sony’s detractors in an attempt to figure out what’s gone wrong. It’s become clear that even the major upheavals and reorganizations over the last few years haven’t fully taken hold. And while Sony isn’t doomed by a long shot, their inability to provide a cohesive platform and the products people really want to buy may greatly diminish their influence over the future of consumer electronics.

When you think who will lead us in the coming years, it always comes back to Google, to Apple, to Microsoft. Why not Sony? Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable to think of the world of technology and not consider Sony a key driver. Today many consider it to be what one interviewee calls “just another electronics company.” What happened?

It’d be a shame if Sony continued down this path. Sony still makes quality products—they just aren’t great. Their engineering chops are second to none, but result in well-built products that only engineers could truly love. They’ve mismanaged their strongest brand, PlayStation. They’ve left smartphones in the hands of a bumbling partnership with Ericsson when their competitors have put smartphones in the center of their strategy. And they’ve let a titanic asset, their library of music, film, and television unmatched by any of their competitors, become an anchor that has slowed innovation and customer satisfaction.

Over the next few days, we’re going to explore where Sony screwed up and what they can do to fix it.

Because ultimately, we want to believe in Sony. It’s time they make us believe.

• Video: Describe Sony In A Word
• How Sony Lost Its Way
• Next up: Engineer Brothers

Apple has banned sexy apps. But apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated remain. Why does Apple care what turns me on?

If you need another example of why the iTunes App Store‘s walled garden is flawed, Apple has been only too happy to oblige, capriciously and arbitrarily removing an unknown number of “sexy” apps without warning. All that’s missing to complete the metaphor is a flaming sword.

Some of those apps were certainly garbage, but it seems most were simply slideshows of women in various states of undress.

Jenna Wortham, writing for The Times, quotes Apple’s Phil Schiller: “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”

By Apple’s own count, there are over 130,000 apps in the App Store. With a selection that varied, I’m sure there’s something to offend everyone.

How about an app that discusses abortion and birth control law? Maybe an app that helps you hook up with gay guys? How about an app that teaches you how to evangelize the fundamentalist Christian religion?

Think about that last one for second and the furor that would erupt if Apple made a sweeping ban of religious apps from the App Store. I am not a Christian. I would be concerned if my child were discovering religion before I’d gotten a chance to talk to them about it. (Especially since that would mean I had given birth to a baby without a mother, completing—if adventitiously—my dream to be the Male Madonna.)

Yet I wouldn’t blame Apple for letting the app be sold, just like I wouldn’t complain that I found it morally offensive, its existence alone threatening and insulting. And to be clear, I’ve got absolutely no problem with the “Grindr” app pictured here being on the app store. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. It’s simply a great example to highlight how subjective Apple’s ban has been. That image is right there on its App Store page.

Look, we know censorship is wrong. We’ve been having this conversation as a society for a couple hundred years, and if you haven’t learned by now that freedom of speech negates freedom from offense, there’s nothing I can do to convince you except renew your subscription to Hustler.

The issue at hand is that Apple doesn’t have to abide by the laws we’ve put in place in our society because the App Store is part of its business. Often I feel like that’s a good thing—or at least fair dinkum. They built it; they get to run it.

With a closed ecosystem comes a lot of responsibility. Apple has taken on the heavy mantle of arbiter, ostensibly to manage quality. I can forgive them for that, even if I don’t like it. But the only reason to ban blue apps is taste. And if these apps were a matter of taste, why were they approved in the first place? What will the next set of apps be that Apple decides are inappropriate long after people have spent hundreds of hours creating and marketing them? Ban apps because they’re poorly designed—not because they’re simply sexual.

Apple is making a moral judgement, declaring that nudity and titillation is something that should made hidden and shameful. It’s disappointing that a company so publicly supportive of progressive sexual rights would react so orthodoxly.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Apple is trying to take the easy way out, talking about degradation of women and the innocence of children, but allowing content from established brands—brands that exhibit sexual material meant to arouse—simply because they’re well known and thus “safe”. Apple is aping the sexual posturing of conservative American society, defining what expressions of sexuality are acceptable to even acknowledge.

Sure, there’s still plenty of smut out there on the internet, readily accessible through the iPhone’s Safari web browser. That’s not the point.

Apple has made a declaration: that sex and sexuality are shameful, even for adults. But only sometimes. And only when people complain.

Unfortunately, they’ve accomplished the opposite. The only thing I’m ashamed of is Apple.

It’s the worst feeling: Waking up completely wrecked from the night before, only to realize with a dull sweat that you pressed ‘Send’. Fortunately for the rest of us, what you drunkenly texted is often hilarious.

And now there’s even a whole website dedicated to collecting your stupidest text messages: Texts From Last Night (dot com), which has upped the ante with a book and the now obligatory iPhone app. (You can, of course, just text them.)

Here are some of our favorites.

Just because this came from California I’m not going to judge

(707) he doesn’t care that i have a boyfriend so why should i?

Strategy: Indisputable; Tactics: Perhaps Less So

Are they still out there making out on the couch? How can we get them to leave? I’m gonna go stand naked in the kitchen with a knife.

Modern love is hard, but Google is not

(314) I woke up next to her this morning and couldn’t remember her name. Luckily, she had written it on my hand so that I could add her on facebook.

Mooning Over My Hammies

Don’t feel obligated to get back to me but I think I just fell in love with a middle-aged waitress at the Denny’s in Waco. She’s used but in good condition.

No, you’re good. Just set your desk on fire.

She said I could do whatever I wanted to her. I pumped for 20 seconds, apologized, rolled over and passed out. I sit directly across from her at work. Awkward?

But where’s the remote?

dude I woke up laying next to some guy. I don’t have my bra or his name. he has a nice TV though.

Unfortunately all I ever watched was “The A-Team”, so I just got in my van and drove away.

I just crawled out of a second story window using a sheet and his clothes for rope so he wouldn’t wake up. I am so glad I watched MacGyver as a kid.

Finally: Everyone here wins

(949) Babe, the 4 years we’ve been together have been amazing. Will you marry me?

(1-949) are you seriously doing this over text message

(949) hahaha no, but i am dumping you.

Don’t know how to give good sext? Fleshbot‘s Lux Alptraum told me she’ll give a private lesson to everyone who leaves their name and phone number in the comments of her new howto. [Fleshbot; cc image] (NSFW, naturally.)

What’s less romantic: Buying something practical or buying something generic? Roses are right out. But can a gadget be sweet?

First thing’s first: I’m a guy. So I’m going to speak to my fellow men here. If the demographic reports are the least bit true, men make up the majority of our readership here.

And if my personal experience is any measure, it’s men who need the most help buying Valentine’s Day gifts in the first place.

That said, let’s remember the fundamental operating principle of all intergender relationships: Women are more like men than they are dissimilar. As the sage relationship counselor Miranda Lambert once advised men on the prowl, “We’re just like you. Only prettier.”

And if you’re gay, I suspect most of this still applies. Gay folk might have it slightly easier since they’re buying for the same sex, but they still need to get the romance right. If you’re buying for someone transgendered, they already told me what they want for Valentine’s Day, and it’s that you stop calling them “Optimus Prime” in bed.

First Things First Some More

Okay, answer me this: Are you buying something for a long-term partner or someone you’re trying to woo? That’ll make a big difference in the sort of gadgets that might be appropriate.

I asked some friends for their input.

Long-Term Has More Leeway

“Kourosh gave me my MacBook Air and an iPhone for Valentine’s Day two years ago. Best gifts, best hubby ever!” said Kristen Philipkoski.

Now it didn’t hurt that those are pretty spendy gifts, which, let’s face it, amps up the romance in the right situation. Especially in long-term relationships, where it shows you’re still in it to win it and big gifts don’t come off as desperate.

But don’t miss the most important thing: Kourosh bought Kristen two things that made her daily life better on an ongoing basis. He didn’t just drop a couple of grand to impress—the large amount of money showed his confidence that Kristen would love her gifts. You can take this sort of risk when you’re in a long-term relationship because you should have a good idea what sort of things your partner would really use.

Be careful, though! I once bought a girlfriend a sewing machine for her birthday, a gift she’d claimed she’d wanted for years. But when she never got around to actually using it, I couldn’t help but be hurt. That was on me—but just be aware before you invest too heavily in gadgets that imply that you want your significant other to change their behavior or which have a built-in fail state. (Which precariously includes most gadgets.)

Another pal, Ghostpony, warned, “I once bought my girlfriend a ricemaker for Christmas. Let’s just say it didn’t go over well. In my defense, it was a Zojirushi.”

If you have to explain to your girlfriend why the gift is really special, you’re off target—buying for you, not her.

If You’re Still Getting to Know Her

No matter how much money you’re ready to spend, keep it modest. Under $200, probably. And less is probably better. Lots of little gifts with which you can keep surprising her are probably the best.

iPods are a perennial favorite, but don’t let Apple guilt you into spending too much. A good rule of thumb for buying women gifts while you’re dating is to never spend so much that you’re going to make them even begin to question that you’re trying to buy their affection. Better an iPod nano than an iPod Touch, unless you’re sure they really would rather have a Touch.

If she’s already got an iPod of any sort, skip it. Sorry, but it’s just too thoughtless. In fact, I think that’s important enough to bold: Never buy her an upgrade.

Besides, if the relationship never goes anywhere—likely—you won’t feel like such a rube for spending too much money on a token.

Point-and-shoot cameras tend to go over well. Plus you can use it right then with her, which is a huge bonus. Especially when she’s taking pictures of you doing other romantic things.

Kindles and Nooks show that you have noticed she can read, or at least enjoys the way the squiggly shapes make her brains feel.

Try to keep it physically small. My gut feeling is that smaller, well-designed gadgetry is more “feminine” than something that’s pink or red. (Correct me if I’m wrong, ladies.) Plus, it makes it easier to…

Present the Present Properly, Poindexter

Valentine’s Day presents are about sending a message. “Hey, human. I enjoy your unique composition and would perhaps like to copulate in the future.” (You can use that on your card. No charge.)

Take whatever you’re giving out of its package. Unwrap the packing gauze. Charge the batteries. Load it up with music or apps or flash memory if it needs it. And by god, put it into a cute box or—if you must—a gift bag. You can make a cordless screwdriver at least borderline romantic if you put it in a nice box. (And if you’re incredibly good looking.)

However! Save the box and receipt somewhere else just in case! Don’t make a big deal out of it, but if you can tell she’s really not into it you can gently let her know that you wouldn’t be hurt if she decided to exchange it. Most stores will do gift receipts throughout the year, too, not only during the holidays. Wait until the day after, though.

Here’s the Real Secret

While the principle applies to gift-giving in general, it’s ten times as important during Valentine’s Day: If your gift doesn’t show that you’ve been paying attention, you have failed.

You can ignore everything else I’ve said if you just get this one right. Has she talked about really wanting a DSLR? That trumps my “keep it small” suggestion, provided it won’t be so expensive that it sends you into creepy attempted sugar daddy territory.

Heck, find her a nice used one and good 50mm lens on the cheap. The more your gift evidences your forethought and effort, the better it is.

A corollary: If you’re not sure that she’d like a gadget as a Valentine’s present, you might not even need to buy her a Valentine’s Day gift. Are you sure she’s expecting one from you?

Post-Gadget, Combo with Tradition

So flowers, chocolates, trips to the spa or weekend getaways? All the “romantic” stuff that just screams “I have no idea what to get you so I got you this baseline item”? That stuff is totally great in conjunction with a thoughtful gift. Give her an iPod because she lost her last one—and flowers. Give her a camera—in a box of chocolates. Fill up her Kindle with awesome ebooks—then send her to get a massage. Alone. (Sorry, but couple’s massage isn’t as relaxing.)

(While we’re on the subject: every woman in the world loves flowers. I don’t care how many times you’ve heard her say, “Oh, what a waste flowers are!” Even if she really means it, she’ll still be completely charmed when you hand her a bouquet. Any women who disagree with me should send me their address so I can send them flowers.)

(Oh, I closed my parenthesis before I got to the most important thing about Valentine’s flowers: Never, ever red roses. White or pink roses if you must. But lilies, tulips, orchids? Invariably a better choice. Ask your florist to make you something special for her. They do that, you know. Red roses are for toreadors and pimply junior high dancers.)

An Idea for Next Year

There are tons of great gifts available on Etsy. But did you know you can get the Etsy crafters to make you a custom product? Etsy Alchemy is like an inverted eBay: You describe what you want; people put up proposals and bids; you pick the one that seems best.

What’s clever about this is that, as a human process, Alchemy can be used to outsource your gift-giving and romance ideas. I’ve put up requests before that only described the woman for whom the gift was for—but made no mention at all of any specific item. Dozens of folks sprang into action, suggesting items she might enjoy based off of my description. Outsourced romance is the future.

A Final Warning: Sex Gadgets

This one is easy: If you live together or are in a similar long-term situation, these are fine. If you’ve just started sleeping together, avoid the toys. I think buying sex toys for a partner can be really sweet, but the inherent sexual underpinnings of Valentine’s Day sends it over the skeevy top in a new relationship. It’s like bringing a toothbrush on a first date.

Image courtesy of Rachel A.K.

CGChannel uncovered this fantastic ’80s vintage documentary that details the three-month process behind HBO’s iconic pre-movie intro. Grit your teeth past the corny “Illusion!” song. It’s worth it to see how special FX were made “with computers” before CG. [CGChannel]

This isn’t a review. It’s not even breaking news. It’s just a reminder that someone somewhere is doing something awesome.

I’ve been fascinated by the “Adspecs” since I first heard of them a few years ago. The glasses have oil-filled lenses which, when adjusted with the attached syringes, allow anyone to dial in their own prescription just by looking at a chart. (I’ve tried to show how the lens work in the video above.)

This story originally started with a question: Hey, did that project ever actually get off the ground?

I’m happy to report that it has—to the tune of 30,000 pairs of Adspecs already in the field around the world, distributed through a variety of aid organizations.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking to the Centre for Vision in the Develop World’s Owen Reading about where the project is going. It doesn’t hurt he’s a Gizmodo reader. (Hi, Owen!) He explained why the Adspecs are such a good solution for developing economies.

“They require very little training to dispense, can be dispensed by an organisation’s volunteers in the field, they only need to be delivered once and can make a difference for years afterwards, and are inherently safer (and less valuable on the black market) than items such as prescription medications.”

The Adspecs aren’t perfect. The sample pair I was given were an older design with a cranky hinge. It popped right apart when I put them on my huge head. It’s nothing a little superglue can’t fix, but thankfully a stronger design is already being distributed in the field. Adspecs are undergoing constant iterative improvement.

One of those improvements is price: The current version of the Adspecs still cost nearly $20 a pop to produce—a bargain considering they come with a self-administered eye exam built right in, but not as close to the $1-a-pair goal set by the project’s founder and director, Josh Silver.

It’s the sort of mixture of charity and innovation that makes my heart leap, an opportunity to use the mass production and design capabilities of the developed world to provide a life-changing solution to those who need it—without making those who receive aid dependent on someone else for continued support.

This won’t be the last you’ll see of the Adspecs here on Gizmodo, especially if you’ve got a notion to donate to the project or their distribution partners.

Among all the widgets-of-the-day, the tablets and phones and mail-order furniture, it’s easy to forget how technology can make such a profound difference in people’s lives. So let’s not forget.

Background music by a band I suspect most of you will really enjoy, The Depreciation Guild, a Brooklyn-based band that combine an NES with really lovely shoegaze guitar. In fact, here’s their latest single embedded below.

It’s taken me a couple of days for me to understand the wet sickness I felt in response to all the post-iPad whining, until it finally came up in a sputtering lump: disgust.

The iPad isn’t a threat to anything except the success of inferior products. And if anything’s dystopian about the future it portends, it’s an American copyright system that’s been out of whack since 1996.

Mark Pilgrim, a man I don’t know but can easily presume is my technical better many times over if only because he is employed by Google, said this in a piece called “Tinkerer’s Sunset“:

Now, I am aware that you will be able to develop your own programs for the iPad, the same way you can develop for the iPhone today … And that’s fine – or at least workable – for the developers of today, because they already know that they’re developers. But the developers of tomorrow don’t know it yet. And without the freedom to tinker, some of them never will.

Then, John Naughton, writing for the Guardian:

For the implication of an iPad-crazed world – with its millions of delighted, infatuated users – is that a single US company renowned for control-freakery will have become the gatekeeper to the online world. The iPad – like the iPhone – is a closed, tightly controlled device: nothing gets on to it that has not been expressly approved by Apple. We will have arrived at an Orwellian end by Huxleian means. And be foolish enough to think that we’ve attained nirvana.

This noxious attitude has permeated our tech culture for the last couple of decades, from a half-decade of open-source devotees crying about Microsoft on Slashdot, on toward the last few years of Apple ascendency. It’s childish. It’s defeatist. And it shows a simultaneous fear to actually innovate and improve while spilling gallons of capitulative semen to a fatuous, dystopian cuckold wank-mare.

Stop trembling, start creating

Nerds! You’re not smarter or better than the people who just want to use your creations for their own purpose. You want it both ways: to be able to complain about the incompetency of your family when you’re asked to help them work on their computers, but to swing around the half-understood ideas of dead authors when a company actually decides to build a computer that doesn’t crumble to dust as a matter of course.

You learned to love technology by tinkering? That’s great! Please explain to me how a closed ecosystem like Apple’s will impede a curious child’s ability to explore in the least way. It’s not 1980. It doesn’t cost a month’s salary to buy a computer. And as long as it takes code to make programs, there will still be plenty of “real” computers around.

Worse, this inviolate right to tinker you claim, the oh-so-horrible future you’re trying to frighten everyone with literal think-of-the-children fearmongering, is the imagined possibility that future engineers won’t be able to create their own tools.

Well guess what? Only shade-tree tweakers give a flip about creating their own tools. Most people want to use the quality tools at hand to create something new.

Fix the law

Is the DMCA a travesty? Is it bullshit that someone should go to jail for cracking the firmware of a device they own? Of course. Only monsters would allow the curious to go to jail for exploring. Every song ever recorded, every movie ever filmed—they’re all together less important than a person’s freedom.

But you know what will fix those issues? It’s not bitching about how those stupid customers may or may not buy an iPad. It’s fixing the legal system. (Or for most of us, myself included, letting the EFF fight those battles for us.)

The number of engineers complaining about Apple’s decisions who aren’t using products of other capitalist corporations who thrive in the shadow of patent law and the DMCA approaches zero: Moan away in your Google browsers on Windows running on your copyrighted Intel processors. You’re really fighting the good fight.

Hilariously, the great open-source hope is Google’s Android, but its best apps are designed—and tightly controlled—by Google, which has used its clout to roll over countless web-based companies in a manner just as Orwellian or Huxleyan or whoever it is we’re invoking now as Apple or Microsoft. And even with the threat of the DMCA looming, the iPhone has been cracked over and over again. It’s been a tinkerer’s paradise.

If you want to walk the walk, you can follow Stallman’s lead and do all your computing on a tiny netbook, interfacing with the internet from a text console running emacs. Let me know how that works out for you. Be sure to take a picture of yourself using your Lemote Yeeloong next to the biodiesel engine you made on your handforged anvil.

Fix your product

“Now it seems [Apple is] doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world,” whimpers Pilgrim. Grow the fuck up. Apple has no more “declared war” on your children than Henry Ford declared war on colors besides black.

Apple is selling a product. They’ve chosen to keep it closed for demonstrably reasonable benefits. And—yes, okay!—several collateral benefits that come from controlling the marketplace that services their products.

But Apple is not the government. There’s no mandate to buy an Apple product except the call of excellence. And if you think the average persona on the street doesn’t recognize both the ups and downs of buying into an Apple ecosystem, you’re eyeing them with the typical nerd myopia, looking down your nose with the same autistic disdain you cultivated in high school. Turns out the internet you helped build as a sanctuary ended up a great place for normal folk, too.

Consider a path that will truly inspire the coming generations of tinkerers and engineers: Working your ass off to make a product that competes with Apple on every count that matters—design, ease-of-use, a simple marketplace, customer satisfaction; you know, everything—and does it with the open-source licenses and values you claim to believe in; or fight to change the broken copyright laws that demonize the tinkering in the first place.

Only way to interpret the launch of the iPad? Apple has declared the PC dead. Well-crafted but closed devices are their future of consumer computing. And if no one else can match the iPad experience, they may be right.

“In many ways this defines our vision, our sense of what’s next.” – Jonathan Ive

PCs will be around as expert devices for the long haul, but it’s clear that Apple, coasting on the deserved success of the iPhone, sees simple, closed internet devices as the future of computing. (Or at the very least, portable computing.) And for the average consumer, it could be.

It’s the “internet device” vision of a decade ago all over again, except now Apple can offer what is arguably the best user experience for internet and media consumption combined with a very reasonable (for a brand new gadget) price.

It may not be good for you, because you’re an internet dork who wants to do heavy video editing or run Photoshop. (Or, you know, multitask.) But for the average person off the street walking into a Best Buy, their laptop money may now be going to an iPad.

What happens when they find the iPad is all they needed in the first place? They never buy a laptop again.

In the meantime, here are a few things to think about for we full-time dorks.

Does it kill netbooks?

If there’s anything that you can take home from today’s announcement of the iPad it’s this: from here on out the battle between physical keyboards and touchscreen ones has moved beyond smartphones and into every other area of computing. Get ready to hear someone say “I touchtype just fine on a soft keyboard on my PC” very soon.

I’d be lying if I said the giant bezel doesn’t ward me off a bit, even if I understand why it’s necessary to be there. But it isn’t as sexy as it could be, all things considered.

But a 1.5-pound device with a (theoretical) 10-hour battery life? Done and done. Heck, I’ll haul two.

Yet I will buy the dock! Perhaps, even if I am frustrated to no end that they are not simply supporting the Bluetooth keyboard. But I suppose that is that—this really is what Apple imagines the future of laptops to be.

Belay that! A couple of you have pointed out that the Bluetooth keyboard is in fact supported! I am a’flutter.

But it’s a lot more likely I’ll carry around an iPad than a netbook.

What about the add-on keyboard, though? I sort of love it, but it is so very un-Apple to have a keyboard attachment. And all the dongles. And only a VGA output, not DisplayPort! It seems like the iPad came from an alternate dimension.

Productivity

If typing on the iPad’s soft keyboard is even slightly faster or more comfortable than typing on an iPhone, they could have a productivity winner here. But I sort of doubt it’s going to be comfortable enough to use for hours of typing at a time.

For emailing, attachment browsing, and the like, though, I think it’ll be a pretty powerful little device. Its form factor is perfect for pulling out of a little executive bag to check mail or show off a PDF to a coworker.

The new cloud-based iWork looks amusing, but who really wants to switch from Office to iWork? Email and other web-based tech is still the most portable solution. On the other hand, a functional iWork is what convinces your CTO that you can use the iPad to display Powerpoints.

Screen Aspect Ratio

There was never going to be a perfect size, especially since movies are widescreen, but a single page of a magazine or book is decidedly not. Yet the aspect ratio, which is something close to 4:3 (if not exactly), surrounds widescreen movies with a lot of black, especially when you include the bezel. I would expect future iPad models to lengthen ever so slightly, but not much.

3G Access

250MB for $15 a month; unlimited for $30. No contracts. Unlocked SIM slot. Completely reasonable.

Of course, it uses AT&T, so if you’re in NYC or San Francisco you’re screwed. But it also means you could switch in other carriers’ SIM cards if you like.

And the free Wi-Fi access in an AT&T hotspot—presumably only if you’ve paid for some AT&T access—won’t hurt.

That the iPad is unlocked, though, also means that T-Mobile could potentially roll in with a 3G option for even less money.

Pornography

It’s simple: You can hold something that weighs 1.5 pounds in one hand.

Relaxation

A few have mentioned how sitting down with an iPad may feel casual, less prone to send one into “work-mode”. I can buy that—but that will also serve to delineate use-cases between laptops and iPads, making the iPad seem more like a toy.

Reading

Don’t call it a Kindle killer. Books on iPad will probably be more expensive than Kindle’s titles, at least at first. And there’s nothing about the iPad’s screen that will make it better for reading than, say, a laptop. But having a dedicated iBooks store? That’s good for everybody, including iPhone and iPod touch users.

And for anything color—comics, children’s books, magazines—the iPad will destroy what e-paper can do.

Multitouch

Here is the thing to know: When it comes to multitouch, consider the iPad the harbinger of all the interface tricks that will be coming to iMac and MacBooks in the relatively near future.

VoIP

It has a microphone. There’s no reason to think it won’t be able to do VoIP.

All in all, I think they’ve got a category-straddling winner here, but it’s a bit of a gangly pseudopodal mutant at the same time. It doesn’t kill the laptop or the PC quite yet, but you can at least see how Apple intends to choke the life out of those markets.

Don’t like that? Better get to work on a better tablet.