July 07, 2005, 4:41 PM PDT
Here comes (Sprint's) EV-DO
Posted by: Molly Wood

Sprint is finally rolling out its high-speed EV-DO network, and some of us may actually see it next month. The company says EV-DO will be available in airports and business districts in 34 markets, with more expansions in the third and fourth quarters, and a nearly complete rollout in 2006. Of course, it's still between $40 and $80 per month and most phones don't support it, but don't let that dampen your enthusiasm.

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July 07, 2005, 4:40 PM PDT
Hearts and minds in the U.K.
Posted by: Molly Wood

Everyone at CNET was saddened and upset by the subway and bus attacks in London, and more so because of our concern for our colleagues at the recently launched CNET UK. We know this is a terrible time, and our hearts go out to them, their families, and all the residents of London.

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July 07, 2005, 4:37 PM PDT
Longer battery life and high-speed wireless?
Posted by: Molly Wood

Let the cottage industries begin. As high-speed wireless technologies such as WiMax and 3G start to hit the streets, the problem of battery consumption looms large. So new, semitheoretical wireless technologies, such as one called xMax, are soon to be the darlings of the next generation. Will xMax work? Will some other technology? More importantly, will any wireless tech ever not involve the word Max?

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July 07, 2005, 2:48 PM PDT
Women and gaming
Posted by: Jasmine France

I recently had a conversation with top executives from AirMedia, a developer and publisher of mobile entertainment software, and SkillJam, an online gaming site, and was at first surprised to learn that the majority of casual gamers are women--65 percent of them, in fact--and that the median age is 37. Of course, my shock quickly dissipated when I considered what exactly constitutes a casual game...we're not talking console games here, for which the audience is still 18- to 24-year-old males. Casual games refer to such classics as Bejeweled, Solitaire, and FreeCell. Essentially, they're the puzzle, card, and (less frequently) word games played on the PC, usually online. These are the distractions that can be played in 10 minutes or half an hour--indeed, data indicates a prime time for playing is during lunch--rather than the more intensive role-playing and shoot-'em-up games that appeal to the young male crowd. The significance of this data to me is, for the time being, minimal. I'm a few levels beyond casual in my gaming (my favorites: THUG and GTA Vice City for PS2, and Mercury and Hot Shots for PSP), and my premonition of groovy games geared for grrls won't be realized as a result of such data. Instead, you can expect that many more casual games will soon be available for your cell phones, so these gaming companies can keep you playing away from the desk. But, hey, I do take public transportation every day, so I'm all for mobile distraction.

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July 07, 2005, 2:08 PM PDT
The PSP piracy arms race
Posted by: Robert Dubbin

Over the Fourth of July holiday, PlayStation Portable hackers unveiled the first working pirated PSP games, no doubt casting a pall over Sony's otherwise successful company barbecue. As you may have read elsewhere, the PSP hax0rz were able to run ripped copies of Lumines, Archer Maclean's Mercury, Coded Arms, and a handful of other titles by exploiting a known loophole in unpatched PSPs with leaky v1.5 firmware. Sony's response? Future PSP games will require newer firmware to run, thus closing the backdoor that makes this and other hacks possible.

Of course, there's just one problem, which is that hackers don't need to run protected UMD games, they just need to read them. So long as they can keep dumping pirated games onto their hard drives and creating patches to remove the higher firmware requirements (something PC gaming pirates have been doing for years), they'll have no convincing reason to upgrade. The result is an ever-escalating piracy arms race, in which Sony releases firmware updates, only to have hackers release their own patches a few days later. It's a situation that the PSP coding scene will relish as a challenge but that Sony will rue as a perpetual drain on resources.

My suggestion to Sony is this: Ignore the pirates because you can't beat them on their own terms. Instead, dedicate those resources to putting out a firmware upgrade that's actually useful. The PSP has its problems, and an update that gives customers a Web browser, WPA support for Wi-Fi, or full-resolution Memory Stick videos would provide more than enough incentive to drop the hackable v1.5 firmware for good.

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July 07, 2005, 12:40 PM PDT
Sprint joins 3G game
Posted by: Kent German

Sprint announced plans today to unveil its own 3G EV-DO network by 2006. The high-speed network is expected to be available to about 150 million people in 60 metro areas across the country. Download speeds are promised to be up to 10 times faster than 1xRTT, with 400Kbps to 700Kbps on average and a peak rate of 2Mbps. The carrier says initial service will begin this month in airports and central business districts in 34 markets, with broader coverage in 14 of the cities following in the third quarter.

With the announcement, Sprint joins rival Verizon in providing an EV-DO network. And while it's good news all around, we'll have to wait and see how Sprint will complement the service beyond Wi-Fi cards for PC users. Zippy data speeds and downloads are great, but we're more curious to see how Sprint will compete with Verizon's V Cast service and if the carrier can roll out a good selection of quality 3G handsets, which are promised by the end of the year.

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July 07, 2005, 9:01 AM PDT
HDTV energy consumption
Posted by: David Katzmaier

I just got my electric bill, and being wary of peak oil, I got to thinking: how much of this is my TV? According to one test described in an informative article in the Christian Science Monitor (via Mark Schubin's Monday Memo from June 27), I have one of the more efficient kinds of TV: a direct-view CRT. Still, the EPA's methodology for rating TV power consumption is way out of date, so you can't really go by the Energy Star ratings of TVs as an indication of how much power it draws. Until the EPA modernizes its ratings, a few quick rules of thumb: big screens draw more power (duh), turning down contrast reduces consumption, and HDTVs--especially plasmas--are hungrier for watts than other TV technologies. Turning off the TV once in a while also helps.

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