All Things Digital

The week ending Oct. 3, 2008, was a momentous one and not solely because of ongoing McCain-Obama high jinks like Tina Fey’s encore as Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live” or the one and only Web site where you can decide the race in a Kung-Fu Election.

• First and foremost, this week’s big slide on Wall Street hit tech stocks with a vengeance, too, disproving Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s assertion a little more than a week ago: “My guess is that the drama is New York and not here.” Ouch. But don’t say BoomTown didn’t warn you.
• Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s new general counsel, has “strong ties to the Republican Party.” Including a stint in former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office, where, as chief of staff, he handled the government’s response to the the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s indentity. “Ted’s arrival demonstrates we’re a little more grown up.” No word on whether or not you need to change your status immediately.
• Unsurprisingly, the ad partnership between Yahoo and Google is on hold so the Justice Department can spend more time reading the small print. The much debated deal is now also much delayed.
  Google will spend the interim rolling out Clean Energy 2030, a $4.4 trillion dollar plan to transition the country from coal and oil dependence to clean energy. And to lower the gas and electric bills on all those Google data centers.
• People have some strong ideas about the term “cloud computing”–if not about the concept itself. In September, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said, “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anybody is talking about … It’s complete gibberish.” Well, Steve Ballmer doesn’t think so–though what he coyly announced this week at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference will go by another name. Or maybe not. Says Ballmer: “Let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud.’” Let’s.
• Walt Mossberg lays out the different ways to make a Mac emulate a PC, including one option that’s just gotten better. He also answers readers’ questions, which this week include issues about following features from one version of Microsoft Office to another, dealing with malware, and embarrassing CD misidentifications.
• And in a showdown at the iTunes Corral, Apple walked off into the sunset with its profit margin intact. It was threatening to shut down the iTunes Store if the Copyright Royalty Board were to raise royalty rates 66 percent–as had been proposed by the National Music Publishers’ Association.

As part of AllThingsD’s ongoing effort to make your world more laden with information about All Things Digital, we’ve decided to introduce a new “Weekend Update” feature.

This is our first installment:

• Microsoft abandoned its nonsequitur Seinfeld advertising strategy this week for a nonpartisan one–in which the spots themselves are watermarked “made on a Mac.” Meanwhile, Google did some advertising of its own, launching a new site solely to allay fears about its advertising partnership with Yahoo (and quoting BoomTown out of context for good effect). That won’t help advance its case, though, with the American Antitrust Institute, which believes the deal “could end up as a black hole that swallows up Yahoo.”
• Speaking of Google, Walt Mossberg offered the first comprehensive look at the Google G1, the Android phone, declaring it a contender, with many appealing features (cut-and-paste! real keyboard!), but not quite up to the iPhone’s polish.
• Seems Silicon Valley is adopting a cautious approach to tenuous economic times. As Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski wrote earlier this week, the Valley’s unemployment rate rose for the fourth consecutive month to reach a four-year high in August. Sound familiar?
• In that vein, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang released a memo outlining upper management’s intention to make the company “disciplined” and “fit.” Its fitness evaluator? Management consultants Bain & Co. No word yet on layoffs, but that doesn’t mean they’re not on the way. For your convenience, BoomTown has decoded Yang’s memo.
• During the inaugural meeting of Yahoo’s new board, first on the agenda was a discussion of AOL and its availability. While according to BoomTown, this only confirms that talks have been going on for a while now, Digital Daily opines out that a merger would be like combining two louts to make a cretin.
• Finally, Digg.com raised a $28.7 million dollar round of funding–a surprising announcement for a company recently rumored to be the object of a bidding war. Digital Daily asks: “Is Digg worth it?”

The first handset to be powered by Google’s Android OS debuted this morning at a T-Mobile launch event in New York. Manufactured by HTC, the G1 is largely as anticipated. Peter Chou, CEO of HTC describes it as “iconic,” but that’s being a bit generous, I think (“The G1 won’t win any beauty contests with its Apple rival,” writes Walt Mossberg. “It’s stubby and chunky, nearly 30 percent thicker and almost 20 percent heavier than the iPhone.”)

In design, the device seems to borrow quite a bit from T-Mobile’s Sidekick, and its touchscreen GUI owes a thing or two to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Which makes perfect sense, since that’s the device it’s clearly intended to compete with. The G1 will run on both 3G and Wi-Fi and be tethered to the T-Mobile (DT) network. It will come preloaded with a version of Amazon’s MP3 store and Android Market, an application store similar to Apple’s App Store. And it will support and sync with the broad spectrum of Google (GOOG) apps–Google Talk, Google Calendar, etc. Its browser is something the dev team refers to as Chrome-Lite, a mobile version of Google’s new Webkit-based Chrome browser.

Oddly, the G1 has no built-in video player. Odder still, it has just 1GB of memory. T-Mobile has helpfully outfitted it with a 1GB/month bandwidth cap, though.

The G1 supports PDFs and Microsoft Office documents as well. Email will be handled through Gmail; there is no Exchange support, though presumably, engineers developing for Android Market will fill that void in short order.

Oh, the device offers copy-and-paste functionality. Hear that Apple?

It will arrive at market Oct. 22. Price: a highly-subsidized $179.

After seven months in beta, the latest iteration of the application that reignited the browser wars is finally here. Firefox 3 debuts today and to mark the occasion, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the popular open-source Web browser, is rallying users to help it set a Guinness World Record for highest number of software downloads in a single day.

There isn’t yet a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a single day, so Mozilla will truly have rewritten the record books if it manages to set one. The group’s hoping for 5 million downloads–not an unreasonable figure, given that Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times the first day of its release. Indeed, Mozilla’s already well on its way to reaching that goal: 1,721,775 users had already pledged to download the browser upon its release today at 10 a.m. PDT.

What can they expect from Firefox 3? More sophisticated bookmarking, endless customization possibilities, an “awesome bar,” more robust malware protection and a browsing experience that Mozilla claims is seven times speedier than Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer. Said Walt Mossberg, “Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now” and that it “tops the current versions of both IE and [Apple's (AAPL)] Safari in features, speed and security.”

Clearly, Firefox 3.0 is a force to be reckoned with now more than ever before. As of May, the browser’s worldwide market share was 18.4%, while Internet Explorer’s stood at 73.8% according to Web metrics company Net Applications. Where will it stand after setting that world record?

This year’s D conference had its share of great lines–tired ones, too (we’re all clear on the subject of Facebook and information sharing, right?). Here’s a selection of the former…

Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”

–Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates

AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Web. We don’t get no respect.”

–Jeff Bewkes, president and CEO, Time Warner (TWX)

I will probably never be a CEO again.”

–Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang states the obvious

It’s a company that creates technology.”

–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answers the question, “What is a technology company?”

Read more »

A tough act to follow, last year’s D: All Things Digital 5. How do you best, or even match, a 75-minute joint interview with Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs–a history-making history lesson taught by two principal protagonists of tech’s narrative? Summon Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse from the dead to reminisce about the “War of Currents”?

No. Better to let history make itself, as it always has, and focus on making news. And it’s likely there will be quite a bit of it coming out of D: All Things Digital 6. With this year’s lineup, how could there not? Microsoft’s Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer onstage together just a month before Gates steps back from his day-to-day duties as company chairman. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes talking strategy as the media giant prepares to spin off Time Warner Cable and tries to figure out just what the hell to do with AOL. Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ) and FCC Chaiman Kevin Martin appearing separately, but together offering an insider view of the telecom industry as it grapples with issues of Net neutrality, open access and early termination fees. And then there’s Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, who’ve been struggling to right a foundering Internet pioneer as it battles Google (GOOG), Microsoft, investor-agitator Carl Icahn and itself.

And that’s just a sampling. Clearly, there’s much to talk about. Much news to be made.

Sure, we may not have managed to arrange another tete-a-tete as historic as last year’s Gates/Jobs interview.

But we did manage to get Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang on the same stage–albeit at different times. Still, no easy feat, that.

And who knows, perhaps we’ll get them onstage together as well.

So join us at d6.allthingsd.com tomorrow for as-it-happens, all-access coverage of the conference. Liveblogs of the sessions and demos. Videos of the speakers. Photos of attendees. You’ll find it all here.

(Photo illustration by Beth Callaghan)

On Sunday, the AllThingsD team, including Walt Mossberg, Katherine Boehret, Kara Swisher and I will trek to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, taking place all next week.

Such tech legends as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Intel’s Paul Otellini will deliver keynotes during the conference, but the real stories will come from the bustling floors of the convention, where we’ll be live-blogging, shooting videos and providing insights about key trends in the year ahead.

Stay tuned.

Today may well have been your last chance to buy shares of Apple for under $120. The first reviews of the iPhone (by journalists actually allowed to test the device) were published on the Web at 3 p.m. PDT today and seem to be generally positive, with the typical caveats about Apple’s choice of cellphone carriers. Interestingly, some of the issues that were initially cause for concern seem to have fallen by the wayside. Indeed, two of the three reviewers below actually seem fond of the device’s virtual keyboard and all of them found its new screen to be durable.

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions. … The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

–Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal

The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese. The glass gets smudgy—a sleeve wipes it clean–but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it. … But the bigger achievement is the software. It’s fast, beautiful, menu free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost, because the solitary physical button below the screen always opens the Home page, arrayed with icons for the iPhone’s 16 functions. … Apple says one battery charge is enough for 8 hours of calls, 7 hours of video or 24 hours of audio. My results weren’t quite as impressive: I got 5 hours of video and 23 hours of audio, probably because I didn’t turn off the phone, Wi-Fi and other features, as Apple did in its tests. In practice, you’ll probably wind up recharging about every other day. So yes, the iPhone is amazing. But no, it’s not perfect.”

–David Pogue, New York Times

If you’re looking for quibbles, flaws and omissions, you’ll certainly find them in this first version of the iPhone. (I’ll get to these below.) But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge. … In a sense, the iPhone has already made its mark. Even those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple’s achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products. But for all its virtues, the iPhone is still a risky venture because it’s yet to be proven that, despite the wow factor, millions of people are ready to pay several hundred dollars more than the going rate for phones—and in some cases, paying even more to bail out of their current mobile contracts.”

–Steven Levy, Newsweek

After months of hype, Apple has delivered a prodigy–a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset. Still, iPhone isn’t perfect, or even the most ideal smart phone for every user. It’s pricey. It lacks certain features found on some rival devices. AT&T’s coverage was spotty in some areas I tested it in. Your employer may prevent you from receiving corporate email on the device. … On the data side, [iPhone] works through AT&T’s Edge network, which is pokey compared with third-generation, or 3G, data networks used with other phones. At times, I fell off the Edge and lost coverage. Even at its best, Edge never felt close to the broadband-type speeds I experience on my home network. Assuming Apple gets around to supporting 3G in the future, you’d ultimately have to buy a new 3G-capable iPhone for improved network performance, not that Apple is ready to announce one.”

–Edward Baig, USA Today

No, Apple is most certainly not ready to announce a 3G-capable iPhone, as this call-and-response Q&A between Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs demonstrates:

Walt: When will there be an iPhone that runs on the fastest, so-called “3G” networks?
Steve: Walt, you know we don’t talk about future products. Again, Wi-Fi is far faster than 3G networks.
Walt: Will you follow the pattern you set with the iPod and bring out less costly models? If so, when?
Steve: We don’t talk about future products.
Walt: This first model is missing some features some other smart phones have, like video recording, instant messaging and real-time GPS navigation. Do you plan to upgrade iPhones purchased now so they have these features? If so, when?
Steve: We don’t talk about future products.

Over at Valleywag, Nick Denton’s whipped up a helpful chart scoring the critical consensus on the device.