Fully Equipped

In case you missed it, the U.S. government recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five of this country's largest publishers, alleging they conspired to limit competition for the pricing of e-books. Three of the five -- HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster -- opted to settle the case, while Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple didn't.

So where does that leave us?

Well, if you've spent any time reading through the terms of the settlement, you quickly realize not everything's all that black and white and is in fact quite muddled. For starters, a judge … Read more

Yesterday, we got some new numbers on the number of Vita hardware and software units sold, so I thought it would be a good time for a Vita launch recap, with a quick look at what's gone right and what's gone wrong.

First, the numbers Sony says it has sold more than 1.2 million Vita units worldwide since the portable launched in Japan on December 17. As CNET blogger Don Reisinger noted in his post, Sony didn't break down the sales figures by country, but acknowledged that this month's launch across the U.S. and … Read more

Recently, I wrote an article titled "What if the Vita had an Apple logo instead of Sony's?" Some readers didn't appreciate that I'd talked about the Vita in the context of Apple or as one reader put it, "Damn, CNET has to talk about Apple all the time???"

Worse yet, another reader chillingly removed us from his Google home page, stating that our articles don't have enough "variety and range" for him anymore.

Ironically, a couple days ago I ran into an Apple employee at an event who complained that … Read more

I was talking to a friend and tech enthusiast the other day--let's call him "Chuck"--and he sheepishly admitted that he'd taken the iPad plunge.

I was shocked. Not so much because Chuck had never bought an Apple product before (take note, Android fanboys), but because he'd bought an iPad 2 with the iPad 3 just around the corner (if the rumors are to be believed).

I told him he was crazy. In buying his first Apple product, he'd not only broken the cardinal rule of buying Apple products (don't buy within six … Read more

With the boom in e-readers, self-publishing has become big business, and Author Solutions, one of the largest self-publishers in the U.S., has entered the DIY e-book market in a big way with Booktango.

Whether Booktango should be called an "e-book generating app" or "self-publishing platform" is hard to say, but it basically provides a free and simple way to upload your manuscript, edit it for proper formatting, then automatically serve it up to various e-bookstores, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iBooks.

On the surface, Booktango, which bears the "beta" tag, looks fairly slick … Read more

There's been some chatter lately about Amazon opening its own stores out in the non-cyber world. Yes, we're talking physical, brick-and-mortar stores, the kind people can actually walk into.

This is all speculation, of course, but Jason Calacanis got the ball rolling with a post late last year entitled "Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction."

That was followed last week by a story in The New York Times Bits blog speculating (and citing that Calacanis story) that Amazon might just very well be exploring opening physical stores.

"For years, there has been speculation that Amazon will open its own outlets, presumably to sell Amazon-label products," David Streitfeld wrote. "The idea seems far-fetched, but before 2001 so was the idea of Apple operating its own stores." … Read more

Call me crazy. Call me misguided. But I preordered a Sony PlayStation Vita the other day.

That's right, I plunked down a $50 deposit at a GameStop near work, thereby earning the right to own Sony's new handheld game console the day it comes out here in the U.S. on February 22.

I didn't catch too much grief among my fellow editors for doing it, although we have an ongoing debate in the office about how successful the Vita will be. A lot of folks think the Vita, like the Nintendo 3DS, will have a rough … Read more

You may have heard by now that the New York Times wrote an article called "In China, human costs are built into the iPad" that takes a look at the dark side of producing Apple's products in China.

It's not the first time the Times and other publications have written about the "punishing" work conditions at Foxconn, the contract manufacturing behemoth that also makes products for loads of other companies, not just Apple.

Foxconn--headquarted in Taiwan, but (according to Reuters) the largest private employer in mainland China--has been frequently in the news for fires and explosions at its factories along with a spate of worker suicides. But coming on the heels of Apple's jaw-dropping earnings and news that it had $98 billion squirreled away in cash, the article seems to have really touched a nerve, the "Occupy Apple" kind.

I don't think anybody's faulting Apple for wanting to make a good profit on its products or trying to keep up with demand. But what seems to be the big friction point is how much profit Apple is making and how it continues to squeeze its suppliers and manufacturing partners to the Nth degree. … Read more

Buried among the gadgets, superthin screen OLED TVs, and all the other products we saw at CES this year was something not terribly sexy-looking, but something that will potentially affect millions of people living in rural America.

It's Exede, a new satellite broadband service from ViaSat that just launched this week. Yes, you heard right, satellite, those contraptions that orbit the earth, and until now a very sluggish way to receive Internet service (satellite has frequently been referred to as the Internet service of "last resort").

However, thanks to the launch of ViaSat-1, a next-generation satellite system … Read more