May 17, 2006, 4:52 PM PDT
Hands-on: the Apple MacBook
Posted by: Justin Jaffe

Yesterday afternoon, our executive editor ran down to the Apple store on Market Street in San Francisco and nabbed one of the first MacBooks to be sold. (He also witnessed an alleged thief get gang-tackled by Apple's beefy security detail.) You can see the MacBook unpacking process in all of its pornographic detail in CNET News.com's slide show and on Engadget and Gizmodo.

I've been playing with the MacBook since then and have come to a preliminary verdict: Apple may have finally nailed it. The company has corrected a handful of the iBook's shortcomings, hit a totally reasonable price point (at least for the $1,099 baseline white model), and finally delivered a laptop with a 13.3-inch display, which I believe offers a better compromise between size and portability than any other screen size on the market. Although plenty of laptops out there start for many hundreds of dollars less than the MacBook, I believe that with the MacBook, the value gap between Apple laptops and the PC competition has narrowed significantly.

Read more first impressions of the Apple MacBook. And watch the video.

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• See product information for Apple MacBook (13-inch, 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo)
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May 17, 2006, 3:40 PM PDT
RIAA sues XM over Pioneer Inno
Posted by: Molly Wood

The RIAA is now aiming its lawsuit firepower at XM Satellite Radio, alleging that the Pioneer Inno is causing "massive wholesale infringement" of music label copyrights. The Inno device lets you record the music you get over your XM satellite subscription and play it back. You can't copy the music, and you can't transfer it off the device, and it vanishes the moment your subscription vanishes. In addition, XM already pays a licensing fee to the RIAA for the right to broadcast its library of music. But the RIAA says the XM's features constitute "inducement" to piracy, and, in the nut of the lawsuit, maintain that "XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings." Which is funny, because I don't recall hearing about any law that says I have to buy anything, ever.

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May 17, 2006, 2:54 PM PDT
Gamers growing up
Posted by: Dan Ackerman

As E3 fever winds down, you can instead direct you attention to the latest fact sheet released by the ESA, otherwise known as the Entertainment Software Association. That's the trade group for the game industry that runs E3 and generally tries to put a good face on everything the industry does.

Every year the ESA releases a detailed demographic and trend report titled "Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry." In the recently released 2006 version, the ESA claims that the average age of gamers is now 33 (it seems to creep up by a year or so every 12 months), which means there's at least one valuable demographic group we're not aging out of just yet.

Other interesting numbers claim that 38 percent of gamers are female (a number that's been pretty steady for a few years) and that the biggest titles of the past year were Madden 06 for consoles and World of Warcraft for PCs. The ESA says the data comes from a survey of 1,700 "nationally representative households" that own at least one console or game-playing PC.

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May 17, 2006, 2:30 PM PDT
A CDMA Slvr?
Posted by: Kent German

Engadget says Motorola will introduce a CDMA Slvr sometime this summer. Verizon is the likely carrier, but other details are unknown at this time. Such a move would make sense, considering Verizon customers were waiting with bated breath to get their hands on the CDMA Razr V3c.

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May 17, 2006, 2:22 PM PDT
T-Mobile tells the truth
Posted by: Kent German

I told you two weeks ago that T-Mobile won more accolades from J.D. Power and Associates for its customer service. Well, now the secret to the carrier's success may be out, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is attributing T-Mobile's customer-service rankings to good old-fashioned honesty. The carrier's personal coverage check allows potential and current customers to gauge coverage in their area. Depending on location, the maps can be very detailed, even up to the city block. The Post-Intelligencer says the coverage check is part of T-Mobile's "no secrets" philosophy, which directs salespeople to be honest about the carrier's coverage.

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May 17, 2006, 2:00 PM PDT
RIAA reminds me of 1950s-era urban planners
Posted by: Tom Merritt

Jane Jacobs was speaking of city planning when she wrote the following, but if you substitute the recording industry for city planners, you seem to have a good description of the current situation with DRM (digital rights management) and the RIAA. I definitely think the comparison to bloodletting is appropriate.

"As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. The tools of technique have steadily been perfected. Naturally, in time, foreceful and able men, admired administrators, having swallowed the initial fallacies and having been provisioned with tools and with public confidence, go on logically to the greatest destructive excesses, which prudence or mercy might previously have forbade. Bloodletting could could heal only by accident or insofar as it broke the rules, until the time when it was abandoned in favor of the hard, complex business of assembling, using and testing, bit by bit, true descriptions of reality drawn not from how it ought to be, but from how it is. The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world."

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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• Read also: MP3, Home audio, Home video, Digital video, Portable audio
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May 17, 2006, 1:13 PM PDT
Even easier cell phone video and photo uploading with ShoZu
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

After I wrote about the new YouTube mobile video upload feature, I heard from ShoZu, a company that focuses exclusively on mobile upload utilities. This company isn't about helping you post video to its own site, like YouTube; rather it makes it easy to post video and photos from your cell phone to whatever site you want to use.

For example, the ShoZu mobile app can post directly to your Flickr account, or to Webshots (a CNET company), Textamerica, or Buzznet. Support for other services and blog hosts is forthcoming. ShoZu will also support direct uploading to media sites, such as CNN and the BBC, for users who want to contribute news items.

The sweet thing about the ShoZu architecture is that once you've uploaded a picture once, you can easily earmark it for delivery to a different service. You don't have to upload it again, because it's already stored on the ShoZu servers.

ShoZu is a cell phone application, and to use it, you'll need one of the 48 ShoZu-compatible handsets. Unfortunately I couldn't get quick access to one (we're all Palm Treo junkies here at CNET, and the Palm OS is not supported), so I can't offer a demo. The company is working hard to get the application built into phones, so future users may not need to bother with the download at all.

This could become an indispensable application for people who want to get utility from their camera phones. Instead of being locked into your carrier's photo application or hassling with different upload applications and e-mail addresses, you'll have one app that will send your videos and photos where they belong: party photos to your Flickr account, whiteboard photos to your ScanR account [blog post], videos from a rock concert to Buzznet, and so on.

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May 17, 2006, 12:07 PM PDT
Pioneer ships first Blu-ray computer drive
Posted by: Felisa Yang

Pioneer Electronics announced today that it is shipping a Blu-ray computer drive, the industry's first. The BDR-101A uses blue laser technology to burn up to 25GB of data onto a single-layer Blu-ray disc. It ships with Roxio Blu-ray Disc software and blank TDK Blu-ray discs.

As expected, the BDR-101A write speeds are slow when writing to BD-R and BD-RE (rewritable): 2X. What's surprising is its slow DVD write speeds: 8X to single-layer -R and +R; 4X to -RW and +RW; 2.4X to double-layer +R; and 2X to double-layer -R. As soon as we can get our hands on a unit, we will test it and let you know how it performs.

Thinking about getting one? Hope you have $1,000 to spare, because this drive ain't cheap. Also expensive are the Blu-ray discs. A quick search on the Internet shows TDK BD-R discs for about $18 apiece and BD-RE discs for about $20 apiece. Yikes!

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May 17, 2006, 9:21 AM PDT
Is Toshiba's HD-DVD demo false advertising?
Posted by: David Carnoy

Yesterday was a tough day here at CNET New York for the home-theater team. With a sense of regret, we carefully packed up our Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player review sample, and I headed to Best Buy to return the product a day before the store's 30-day no-questions-asked return policy expired (yes, we do occasionally end up buying certain key products ourselves when we can't get them quickly enough from manufacturers). Earlier in the week, Senior Editor David Katzmaier's bid to expense the $500 deck and keep it as a reference piece for HD content was summarily shot down after we decided our money would be better spent on a next-generation model. While the HD-A1 has its share of kinks--and we haven't been afraid to point them out, even at the expense of being accused by readers of favoring Blu-ray (not true, we just call 'em as we see 'em)--we were sad to see our slightly clunky HD-DVD player go just as more discs were coming out. Training Day looks great, by the way.

"What's wrong with it?" the no-questions-asked customer service rep asked as I plunked the weighty box on the counter.

"It's slow and has HDMI issues," I said.

She nodded, and with a few magic swipes of her bar-code reader, my MasterCard was credited for the correct amount and--thank you, Best Buy--I was free to go. But instead of leaving right away, I headed to the back of the store to check out the HD-DVD display. When I'd bought the player 29 days earlier, a day before the player was to be released officially, no demo was running. But now there was one, and it was looping.

In case you haven't seen it, the demo's divided into two parts. One part has clips that feature various impressive-looking trailers--the King Kong trailer, in particular, looks awesome. But scattered among them is a woman narrator with an English accent talking over a split-screen picture comparing an HD-DVD image to a standard-definition image. The problem is the standard-def image looks truly horrible, blurry, and much worse than just about any DVD that not only I but the Best Buy rep standing next me said he had ever watched. Underneath the standard-definition label is a disclaimer that reads, "simulation."

What Toshiba might say in its defense is that the demo shows a comparison between an HD source and a standard-definition TV signal displayed on an HDTV--which often does look pretty bad but can also look much better than the demo footage. However, the correct comparison is clearly HD-DVD to DVD, movie to movie.

Consumers who have little experience with high-definition content may be swayed by the demo, but I think it's unfortunate that Toshiba has to stoop to this level. The fact is the HD-DVD clips look really good and should be able to stand on their own merit. What do you think?

More CNET resources:

Toshiba HD-A1 review

Blog: Toshiba's HD-A1 has HDMI issues

Column: Ten ways HD-DVD falls short

DVD 2.0: HD-DVD and Blu-ray

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May 17, 2006, 8:47 AM PDT
Nikon Capture NX revealed--but not by us
Posted by: Lori Grunin

We recently had a briefing with Nikon on the upcoming revamp to its raw work-flow software; we signed an agreement saying we wouldn't post any screenshots of the beta until after June 1. I guess the guys at digitalreview.ca didn't, 'cause they've posted a pretty thorough first look at the beta.

We're waiting to find out if Nikon is going to try to hold us to the agreement, but in the meantime, as long as it's up, I suggest you take a look. The software is pretty cool.

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