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Gates Damns Apple iPod And Blackberry With Faint Praise
Microsoft ubermensch Bill Gates foresees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice among portable music players, while dismissing the popularity of Apple’s iPod player as unsustainable.
“As good as Apple may be, I don’t believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run,” he commented in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface – like the iPod today – and then lost its position,” Gates added.
Isn’t it just so obvious that Gates hates the success that Apple has found? It drives him crazy. He thought it was going to go away, and has now realised it isn’t.
It’s now clear that Gates and Microsoft are on the attack, gunning for iPod. How do we know that? Well, previously Microsoft used to refer to it in the generic – “Portable music players.”. Now it’s iPod, and Apple are being praised, even if it is damned by faint praise after that. Something tells us that Steve Jobs will be deriving huge pleasure from this.
Apple currently has around two-thirds of the global market for MP3 music players, which can store thousands of songs on compact disk drives or teensy-weensy flash memory chips.
iPods have shifted off the shelves faster than a ferret on a frying pan, with Apple selling more than 5 million iPods in the last quarter.
Apple’s white wonder now faces increasing competition from a mightily miffed Sony who are keen to claw back the dominance it once enjoyed with its iconic Walkman brand, and from mobile phone companies busily integrating MP3 players into handsets
“If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure,” Gates told the newspaper.
Sadly for old Billy boy, Microsoft’s smart phones have been overshadowed in the US by Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, boasting over 3 million units sold so far with a bright future predicted.
The recent release of Windows Mobile 5.0 reflects Microsoft’s determination to become a big noise in the burgeoning market for digital movies, pictures and music and grow beyond its core Windows operating system business.
Gates said that their new Windows Mobile 5.0 – which pops up e-mails on a user’s phone as soon as they arrive – would be a cheaper alternative. “The BlackBerry is great, but we’re bringing a new approach,” he said.
“With BlackBerry, you need to link to a separate server, and that costs extra. With us, the e-mail function will already be part of the server software.”
“Therefore,” he added, before going for the karate-kick killer boast, “I’d venture the prediction that Microsoft will make wireless e-mail ubiquitous.”
Microsoft
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
13 May, 2005
XBox 360 Launched on US MTV. UK Tonight
Xbox 360, Microsoft’s successor to their popular Xbox gaming console, will be “unleashed” tonight at a celebrity-packed launch broadcast on MTV, which shows at 8pm in the UK. It was launched on US MTV last night.
With a press release positively hyperventilating with hyperbole, Microsoft breathlessly extols the virtues of their new games machine, dramatically waffling on about “a dawn of a new era in entertainment.”
Unlike the manly, chunky lines of the first-generation Xbox, the 360 has been given the ladyboy treatment, with smooth, concave lines covering the rippling muscle lurking below.
And there certainly is a beast in the box, with the unit powered by a custom-made IBM PowerPC-based three-core chip running at 3.2GHz, supported by 512MB of GDDR3 RAM – enough beefy brawn to keep up with even the nippiest modern PCs.
Graphics performance should be speedier than a rocket-assisted rabbit too, with an ATI GPU running at 500MHz, backed up by 10MB of embedded DRAM.
The Xbox will ship with a 12X dual-layer DVD-ROM drive – supporting progressive-scan DVD movies and a host of DVD and CD formats – three USB 2.0 ports, two memory unit slots and support for four wireless game controllers.
Users will also be able to stream media from portable devices or Windows XP PCs, as well as rip music to the Xbox’s detachable (and upgradeable) 20GB hard drive.
Networking needs are catered for with a built-in Ethernet port and support for 802.11a, b, and g Wi-Fi protocols.
“With the first generation of Xbox, our ambition was to change the way people think about video games,” said Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer at Microsoft. “Starting today with Xbox 360, our ambition is to transform the way people play games and have fun.”
Microsoft – never one to understate their case – are claiming that they will “unleash the greatest game lineup in the history of video games” when the Xbox launches in North America, Europe and Japan over Christmas.
They’ve certainly persuaded a gaggle of major league gaming companies to come onboard, with initial releases including NBA 2K6, Call of Duty 2, QUAKE 4, Madden NFL 06, Need for Speed Most Wanted and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 06.
“Xbox 360 marks the beginning of a renaissance in video games,” whooped Don Mattrick, president of Worldwide Studios for Electronic Arts. “The unbelievable Xbox 360 games in development at Electronic Arts will accelerate the industry’s mission to make video games the pre-eminent form of all entertainment.”
All the games are designed for high-definition, wide-screen televisions, although they’ll work on regular TVs.
Players will be able to access Microsoft’s free Xbox Live online service, which allows them to connect with friends through Xbox Live voice chat, send and receive text and voice messages and stuff their detachable Xbox 360 hard drive full of downloadable demos, trailers, new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, skins and community-created content
Gamers who shell out for the premium service, Xbox Live Gold, can join multiplayer online games and enjoy enhanced options for online game matchmaking and a greater ability to provide feedback on opponents.
Naturally, gamers love to customise their experience, so there’s a camera option to let vain players add their mugshots into games or even see their friends onscreen as they frag them to an inch of their worthless lives.
As is the current vogue, the appearance of the actual Xbox can be customised too, with a range of interchangeable Xbox Faces on offer.
Although the system is aimed at mad-for-it gamers, the Xbox is also a full entertainment system offering DVD movie, CD music and photo playback support.
So long as they’re equipped with a USB 2.0 port, MP3 players, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PC port can all plug into an Xbox 360 system to stream music and photos.
Xbox 360 players can also access recorded TV and digital movies, music, video and photos stored on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005-based PCs through any Xbox 360 system in the house.
We’ve yet to get our greasy paws on a machine, but Microsoft have certainly raised the stakes with their new Xbox, although arch rivals Sony have yet to, err, unleash their PlayStation 3, a potentially more powerful box offering support for new high-capacity Blu-ray discs.
With both units enjoying enthusiastic support from game makers and gamers, some of the real bloody battles could soon be taking place off-screen.
Promo video for Xbox 360 (Windows Media)
If you thought Xbox 360 was just about gaming, skip to 3 minutes into the video to see how they’re transforming it into a media centre.
XBox
13 May, 2005
Windows Mobile 5.0 Unveiled By Microsoft
Microsoft has unveiled Windows Mobile 5.0, a new version of its Windows operating system for mobile devices.
The new OS includes features to make it easy for device makers to equip phones and handheld computers with typewriter keyboards and iPod-sized hard drives.
The announcement by Chairman Bill Gates at the company’s annual conference for mobile software developers in Las Vegas, marked the end of the distinct Pocket PC and Smartphone brands of the operating system.
Microsoft initially offered a single mobile platform based on Windows CE (short for ‘consumer electronics’) with the platform fragmenting into Pocket PC PDAs, “smart” cell phones, and then Pocket PCs equipped with phones.
By dumping the 5-year-old Pocket PC brand and the ‘Smartphone’ label, Microsoft is elbowing its Windows Mobile platform onto the same table as rival mobile device platforms such as Symbian and BlackBerry.
Although the underlying software code remains 90 percent the same as its predecessors, the new Windows Mobile removes some technological distinctions that gave the phone and PDA platforms different capabilities.
This means that integrated support for Wi-Fi will be available for smart phones rather than just Pocket PCs, and that Pocket PCs will now include “persistent” memory storage.
This preserves basic user information, contacts and personal settings when a device’s battery runs out of juice and was previously only available for smart phones.
The new Windows Mobile platform rather belatedly adds support for internal hard drives, with Microsoft hoping that device makers will design phones and organisers with enough storage capacity to take on the likes of Apple’s iPod
Other feature enhancements in Windows Mobile 5.0 include tools for “push-to-talk” and video conferencing, support for 3G and USB 2.0, and improvements in soft-key operation and landscape display orientation.
Swivel action business folks will appreciate updates to the mobile versions of Microsoft Word and Excel, with the software providing more consistent formatting of documents created on a computer and allowing charts to be created from a spreadsheet.
Windows Mobile currently generates the loose change in Microsoft’s voluminous pockets, with the combined software revenue from mobile and embedded devices totalling US$80 million (~€62.5m ~£43m) in the first three months of 2005.
Although this was up 31 percent from a year earlier, it only amounted to a piffling tenth of Microsoft’s overall revenue for the quarter – but things are likely to change with Microsoft’s forthcoming marketing blitz (rumoured to reach US$100 million [~€78m ~£53.5m]).
Microsoft execs haven’t given out exact figures, but Susan DelBene, a corporate vice-president of marketing for the mobile and embedded devices division at Microsoft said, “You’ll see a bigger marketing effort from us than you’ve ever seen in the past for Windows Mobile.”
At stake is a lorra lorra loly, as smart phones are one of the fastest-growing segments of the tech industry, with sales expected to increase 67 per cent this year (32.2 million units). Compare that to the single digit growth of the PC market and you can understand Microsoft’s enthusiasm to get their sticky fingers in the smartphone jam jar.
Windows Mobile 5.0
12 May, 2005
Nokia Sensor, A ‘Social Bluetooth Application’
Going up to people and actually introducing yourself has become, like, so uncool with the introduction of the Nokia Sensor Bluetooth widget.
No longer will you have to fumble for those awkward opening lines – instead you can let your phone do the introducing for you, as prospective partners wandering into range are automatically forwarded your profile.
Described as a “social Bluetooth smartphone application”, the free-to-download Nokia Sensor program runs on Series 2.0+ phones.
Here’s how it works: after downloading the software, you must set up a personal homepage (dubbed a folio) which can be shared with other Sensor users.
This folio includes your profile (pictures, snappy bon mot etc.), a file sharing page (where you can put mugshots, amusing photos, video and audio) and a Guestbook.
As lustful lotharios enter a nightclub, their phones can be set to automatically start scanning for other Sensor users over Bluetooth.
Once connected, the user can look through other people’s folios, and if they like the look of what they find, they can message them and possibly consider doing something really radical – like putting down the bloody phone and talking, like normal people.
The Sensor app comes with the usual yoof-tastic features, like Buddy Alerts, which tells you if someone you know is nearby (isn’t that what eyes are for?) and ‘Group Codes’ which bleep when someone with similar interests is lurking in the area.
We can see mischievous users running wild with the Guestbook feature – which lets people leave messages and comments on other people’s phones – and can only imagine the fragile teenage egos that will be crushed by an empty ‘popularity measure’ (which tells users how many times their Folio has been viewed).
The Nokia program is very similar to the existing Mobiluck application and reflects how the increasing sophistication of smartphone technology is creating new ways for mobile interaction.
With the Series 60 phones growing in the mass market it looks like this kind of social networking is going to have a significant impact amongst its target demographic (i.e. young).
Be kinda handy for people plying nefarious trades, when you think about it.
Nokia Sensor
MobiLuck
11 May, 2005
BBC Opens Up RSS News Feeds
The BBC has opened up its RSS news feeds to commercial Websites for the first time, with a new set of terms and conditions letting other sites integrate the BBC feeds for free, and free from offline contractual negotiation.
Previously, RSS feeds for BBC new stories have only been available to individuals via RSS Readers, but this move will put the UK broadcasting giant in direct competition with heavyweight news agencies in the RSS market, such as Reuters and the New York Times.
Opening up the service to other sites means that Webmasters can utilise BBC content on their own sites, with available feeds being marked by an orange RSS button on BBC pages.
A comprehensive range of feeds will let users subscribe to specific sections and not just the homepages, so that connoisseurs of real football could just subscribe to the white knuckle excitement of the BBC’s Cardiff City FC homepage.
Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News Website said: “Liberating the availability of our content for re-use is an important step for the BBC. We’ve been a bit cautious about it up to now but there’s a real demand for us to provide this service. If we are to build public value it’s important that we respond to this demand.”
BBC News and Sport headlines will initially be offered as RSS feeds, with other parts of the BBC expected to be rolling out feeds over the coming months, possibly including the latest film reviews or updates from the Top of the Pops Website.
The BBC’s site – a firm favourite in the office – remains one of the world’s busiest Websites, with figures for April 2005 showing 18 million click-throughs generated by the feeds to the bbc.co.uk/news and bbc.co.uk/sport Websites for the month.
BBC RSS
11 May, 2005
Yahoo Music Unlimited Launched: Price Shock
Yahoo has slapped a king-sized gauntlet on the floor as it announced plans to roll out an aggressively-priced online music service.
The new service, unsurprisingly dubbed Yahoo Music Unlimited, will give downloaders unlimited access to over a million music tracks for US$6.99 (~£3.70 ~€5.42) a month, or, alternatively, for US$60 (~£31.86 ~€36.58) a year.
The service, which also lets users transfer the songs to compatible portable music players, massively undercuts its rival’s services.
RealNetworks, for example, charge a comparatively hefty US$179 (~£95 ~€139) a year for a near-identical service while Napster charging US$14.95 (~£7.95 ~€11.60) a month for a portable music subscription service and US$9.95 (~£5.25 ~€7.72) a month without the portability option.
“We look at subscriptions as a way to get people to pay as little something for digital music as opposed to ripping their own CDs or stealing music.” Yahoo Music General Manager David Goldberg said.
Yahoo hopes that the low, low, low price is designed to get users hip to the subscription music model, which allows consumers to play downloaded music and “streamed” tracks whenever they want — as long as they keep shelling out for the privilege.
Just like Napster’s similar service – which offers a similarly vast online music library – the second a customer’s cash flow stops, their opulent oasis of a record collection will rapidly turns into a tune-free desert.
Yahoo’s price pruning bonanza looks set to spur further expansion of the online music business, which despite huge growth still only accounts for about 2% or less of total music sales, according to analyst estimates.
Yahoo’s hugely popular Website – visited by 100 million US users every month – should give their music service a big head start, with the company being able to let rip with the kind of massive marketing muscle that few online music rivals can match.
“It’s a hugely aggressive move, a shot in the arm to the subscription notion,” says David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research, predicting subscription revenue will be larger than downloads within a few years, from roughly equal shares today.
iTunes, the current online music market leader, provides a different service, preferring to charge users on a song or album download basis, with Apple previously being critical of the subscription model.
Some suspect that they may be pressured into adopting a similar offering once Yahoo’s PR machine rolls into action.
Although it’s generally accepted that subscription services are more lucrative than charging per download, some analysts are wondering whether Yahoo will actually be able to make any dosh at the US$60 (~£31 ~€46) annual subscription level.
Yahoo’s David Goldberg has expressed confidence that the service will be profitable, although conceded that the company could eventually raise its fees. He’s been a bit sketchy with the small-print details too, but says Yahoo will pay music labels royalties linked to its revenue and subscriber numbers for the service.
Yahoo’s subscription service will work with selected portable MP3 players that use Microsoft’s digital-music format – there’s currently around compatible 10 devices available, including Dell’s DJ player and Creative Technology’s Zen Micro.
Owners of compatible devices will have to install new software on them to be able to use the service, with newer models offering built-in compatibility.
Apple may be slightly perturbed to learn that the Yahoo’s service will not work with their iPod, despite it being the biggest selling digital music player on the planet and probably elsewhere.
Yahoo’s testosterone-charged move reflects their determination to grab a Brobdingnagian chunk of the online music pie, with the company splashing out US$160 million (~£85m ~€124m) last year to acquire MusicMatch, a company already offering a song/album download deal with a non-portable subscription service.
MusicMatch’s subscription charges have now come down to match the new service with Yahoo expected to merge the two services shortly.
The new service will include free software a la Apple’s iTunes jukebox, with the bonus of letting subscribers rummage around in their friends computers for songs, and then listen to their tracks if the music is part of Yahoo’s catalogue.
To further entice subscribers, Yahoo is looking to incorporate the social aspects of listening to and discovering music through tie-ins with other Yahoo services -like gamers on Yahoo’s site being able to listen to the same music as friends they are playing with.
Yahoo Music users not ‘down’ with this subscription thang will still be able to buy tracks under the traditional download model, with fees of 79 cents (~£0.42 ~€0.62) per song for Music Unlimited subscribers and 99 cents (~£0.53 ~€0.77) for nonsubscribers.
Yahoo
MusicMatch
11 May, 2005
High Altitude Platform (HAP): Broadband For All?
Broadband is taking off everywhere, speeds are increasing and everybody’s happy. Well almost. Broadband isn’t available to all, especially those in more rural areas.
Unfortunately cable companies don’t have the financial resources to lay fibre everywhere (especially in today’s economic climate) and even BT, who are radically changing the old telephone network so that every exchange in the UK is wired up for Internet, still won’t be able to reach rural customers. It isn’t because they don’t want to, but (in BT’s case) the DSL (digital subscriber line) technology just doesn’t work at long distances.
This will leave large percentages of the population without broadband and currently their only option will be expensive satellite systems.
There’s a chance that some kind of fixed wireless access (FWA) solution will become available, but currently the technology is expensive and again requires a massive investment in radio masts and connecting them all together. Unfortunately FWA is likely to be used for backhaul in more urban areas where the population density justifies the upfront investment.
HAPpy HAPpy, Joy Joy
Luckily it looks like there is an answer, and it’s call HAP (High Altitude Platform). There have already been trials of HAP using tethered balloons, and these have been reasonably successful, but there are problems. They are relatively low altitude, so may interfere with other air traffic. However being tethered means they can use the tether cable to connect to the infrastructure on the ground (i.e. say the Internet), but it limits them to being tethered in suitably connected areas.
Utilising a real HAP solution means sending what could be called airships up 20Km or so, these would freely roam the sky. Being so high they wouldn’t interfere with commercial air traffic – of course would still need to get approval from the international aviation authorities, especially for launching them and what happens when something goes wrong or they falls back to earth.
Other approaches to HAP involve lightweight aircraft, such as the European-funded Capanina project.
Both balloon and fixed-wing platforms would use radio systems (similar to satellite) to transmit to end-users, who would use a steer able dish that tracks the HAP. Current thoughts are that the HAPs will use both radio and optical transmissions between HAPs (since optical interference is very low at 20Km altitude).
The HAP end-user connection may use existing WiFi-type solutions to actually connect people, so a small village may have a central HAP system which then people connect to using traditional systems.
Where HAP can offer significant benefits, is to moving objects such as trains. They would use a sophisticated electronically steer able aerial to track the HAPs and would allow continuous reception of signals – even between HAPs.
Since the bandwidth between a ground receiver and the HAP would be about 120Mb/s, rural (and moving) users might actually get a better service than traditional broadband users.
Unfortunately it’s going to take a while for this to be a commercial reality, but at least people are thinking about it, trials are commencing now and it’s got European funding.
Capanina
10 May, 2005
Palm LifeDrive “Mobile Manager” Appears On Amazon
After months of rumours on the Web, details of palmOne’s new LifeDrive PDA have finally shown up on Amazon.
Engadget.com reported that the listing confirms that the US$499 (~£262 ~€385) device will come with a 4GB Hitachi Microdrive, SD card slot, 320×480 hi-resolution colour display (with portrait and landscape viewing) and offer Bluetooth and 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless connectivity.
The LifeDrive handhelds will be powered by a 416MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor and run on the Palm GarnetOS, which includes support for wireless connections such as Bluetooth.
The device will be a little larger than palmOne’s latest high-end model, the Tungsten T5, sizing up at 4.7 inches tall, 2.8 inches wide, and a pocket-threatening 0.8 inches thick. It will weigh 6.8 ounces.
According to sources, the music-playing device will use Pocket Tunes and sync with Real’s Rhapsody music service, suggesting that it could be seen as a turbo-charged challenger to Apple Computer’s US$199 (~£104 ~€153) 4GB iPod Mini.
NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes is able to play MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV files and the unit will also support full screen video and photo playback.
Business users will be catered for with the bundled DocumentsToGo software supporting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Acrobat files.
The unit also comes with ‘Camera Companion’ software for transferring photos to and from the device, with ‘Drive Mode’ allowing users to plug their handheld into the USB port on a PC and have the microdrive appear as a removable drive.
The LifeDrive comes with USB 2.0, so transferring files onto the microdrive should be a fairly nifty business.
Despite black leather clad doomsayers predicting the death of the PDA, palmOne clearly thinks that a hard drive-based multimedia device able to take advantage of the immense software resources of the palm platform could be a winner.
There’s certainly industry interest elsewhere, with Dell rumoured to be considering a hard drive based handheld.
Although there’s been no official announcement from palmOne, the LifeDrive is expected to launch in the US on 18th May, 2005.
palmOne
Palm LifeDrive on Amazon
Engadget coverage
9 May, 2005
Google Web Accelerator Gets Flak, Website Goes Down
It was a bad weekend for Google as the entire site was rendered unavailable on Saturday night and their new Web Accelerator application drew criticism on privacy and security concerns.
The free Web Accelerator app was designed for broadband users to speed up access to Web pages by serving up cached or compressed copies of sites from Google’s servers.
Within hours of release, critics were pointing to a flaw that meant that users could be served cached copies of private discussion groups or password-protected pages.
The issue was first discovered when users of Backpack, a wiki-like service for individuals and small businesses, complained that their Web pages were suddenly disappearing.
Jason Fried of 37signals, the company behind Backpack, discovered that Google’s Web Accelerator was behind the problem, explaining in his company’s blog, “Google is essentially clicking every link on the page – including links like ‘delete this’ or ‘cancel that.’ And to make matters worse, Google ignores the JavaScript confirmations.”
A clearly miffed Fried continued, “So, if you have a ‘Are you sure you want to delete this?’ JavaScript confirmation behind that ‘delete’ link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.”
Deeply unchuffed, Fried complained that “Google’s Web accelerator can wreak havoc on Web-apps and other things with admin-links built into the UI.”
Other users of Google’s tool also found themselves loading pages previously cached by other users on Internet forums – letting them view that user’s account information and private messages (Web Accelerator doesn’t cache secure Web sites written in “HTTPS”, so online transaction sites were unaffected).
Web publisher have raised concerns that, if Google is caching the publishers content and readers are using the Google cached version to access the information, the number of people that the server logs are reporting as accessing their content may not truly reflect the number of people reading their site. If this is the case, there would be a direct hit on the publishers advertising revenue.
Conversely, there are others claiming that there were other problems associated with the application’s ability to prefetch Web sites that are never viewed by a user – this could inflate page view numbers and exaggerate views of advertising banners.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Web products, acknowledged the problems while downplaying the threat, saying that it had only affected a small number of sites.
“It looks worse than it is. We’ve cached the page with that username on it. But you are not actually signed in; you couldn’t operate as that person,” she added, before cranking up the PR spin machine, “We’re committed to provide users the utmost of integrity in security and privacy, and we’re working with urgency to solve this problem,” she added.
The program is currently no longer available from Google, with a notice on the Web Accelerator homepage saying, “We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.”
Sadly, things went from bad to worse on Saturday night when the world’s leading Internet search engine shut down from 6:45 to 7 p.m. eastern time, with some users experiencing longer outages.
It wasn’t just the search engine that had gone down – Gmail, Google News, Froogle and the entire caboodle of Google’s services had all vanished off the face off the earth.
Curiously, when some surfers typed in ‘google’ they found themselves being redirected to a SoGoSearch page, sparking rumours that the site had been hacked.
Google spokesman David Krane pooh-poohed such talk, declaring, “It was not a hacking or a security issue,” while insisting that that the problem was related to a DNS (Domain Name System) problem.
Google Web Accelerator
Google speed bump draws scorn
9 May, 2005
How-To: Sony PSP Internet Access
Looking for a review and background on the Sony PSP? Steve runs through the highlights.
Games developers have included Internet access in their products. The best example of this is Wipeout Pure, which includes a browser, allowing the user to download new game levels and features. Since the game has a browser built-in, it can be reasonable to assume that Sony have actually put all the code to access the Internet in the PSP itself (and made it available to developers).
Some clever users then looked at what the browser was doing (by monitoring the data packets that the PSP was sending across the Internet via their network) and it all looked pretty normal, i.e. it was just a standard browser. In order to access real sites they had to locally pretend to be the Sony servers that the PSP was accessing. This was accomplished by “spoofing” DNS (DNS is the system that maps names to numbers on the Internet, people like using names, but the Internet actually works by numbers i.e. it’s hard to remember something like 127.0.0.1 but easy to remember “localhost” as a name). The spoofing meant that the PSP would no longer go to the games servers to look for content, but rather a local server which could be configured with any content that was so desired, including a text box that allows you to enter another site name.
Rather than everyone set-up spoof servers, some nice people have done it for you, and these then point to a PSP portal which someone has set-up PSP friendly content. You can access the spoof DNS servers by amending your Internet set-up configuration (on the PSP) and leave everything to automatic except for the DNS settings, into which you enter the spoof server settings.
To complement the PSP portal, a PSP irc client has been written. This is actually a script run on a Webserver, but the output fits on the PSP real estate (screen).
There’s probably going to be a lot of copies of Wipeout Pure sold, purely for its browser capabilities.
Once updated versions of the firmware come out, or there are 3rd party applications, the system will have all the features to be a powerful media hub. It supports WiFi, has a decent screen and video capability now, adding other Internet capabilities will just add the finishing touches to a superb product.
9 May, 2005