E3 to focus on cheaper hardware, new games

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The video game industry will gather for its annual expo next week, with expectations that cheaper hardware and new games will fuel the strongest sales in years.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, is also a chance for investors to look under the hood of a $30 billion global industry that rivals the movie and music businesses as it expands beyond a traditional audience of teenage boys.

This year’s E3 is forgoing the huge crowds, gaudy displays and scantily clad “booth babes” of years past in favor of smaller, more dignified proceedings scattered among venues in the Southern California seaside city of Santa Monica.

The biggest expectation is that Sony will slash the price of its PlayStation 3, which is stuck in last place among new gaming machines due to its $600 price tag and thin lineup of games.

However, if Sony does cut the PS3’s price by $100, the impact could be blunted if Microsoft responds by trimming prices on its own Xbox 360, which comes in three models now costing from $300 to $480.

“The biggest potential would be maybe announcement of price cuts for both the PS3 and the 360,” said Mike Hickey, an analyst with Janco Partners.

Nintendo almost certainly won’t tinker with its prices. Its Wii console is enjoying runaway success, outselling rivals by several times due in part to a $250 price that hits a sweet spot of mass-market affordability.

Instead, Nintendo may announce new features for the Wii or unveil a redesign of its popular DS handheld gaming device.

“The only thing I think Nintendo may announce is a headset and microphone for the Wii. They are also inching their way into online gaming. They are not as focused on communications as they should have been,” said Peer Schneider, vice president of content publishing for IGN, a games-oriented Web site.

Price cuts for two of the three consoles may be just the thing to juice sales and build a larger base of hardware ahead of the year-end holiday shopping season that accounts for more than half of the industry’s annual sales.

But Evan Wilson, an analyst with Pacific Crest, said Sony may not cut prices until just before the holidays. Sony already loses several hundred dollars on each PS3, and management’s drive to get the giant electronics company back on track financially may force it to stay the course on price.

“Any meaningful price cut on the PS3 would drag down the profitability of the game unit,” Wilson said.

Many are looking forward to checking out a dizzying array of new games at E3 that analysts think will mark a turning point for the industry after a longer-than-expected transition to new consoles.

“The migration to next-gen consoles has taken longer than expected, which is prolonging the early stages of this product lifecycle,” analyst Eric Handler wrote. “But an increasing slate of games being readied for market offers the potential for strong growth.”

A small sample of the titles expected to grab the spotlight this year includes Grand Theft Auto IV and Bioshock from Take-Two Interactive Software, Killzone from Sony, Super Smash Bros. Brawl from Nintendo, Rockband from Electronic Arts and rival music game Guitar Hero III from Activision.

“Last year was all about hardware. This year is software, and software drives hardware,” Hickey said. “In a few years, they’ll be selling software to a gigantic installed base and at a higher price point. The economics are phenomenal.”

The new game titles could be a catalyst for publisher shares, many of which have traded flat to lower this year.

Wilson of Pacific Crest estimates industry total revenue could jump 20 percent in 2007.

The fast growth is drawing increasing attention. Lehman Brothers recently began covering four major U.S. video game publishers, saying that returns in the industry were better than in all other media and entertainment sectors.

Electronic Arts and Activision are two favorite picks by analysts due to their broad array of games and strong movie tie-ins.

Investors have frowned upon publishers that are overly reliant on one or two hit games, such as Midway Games, which has dropped 10 percent this year and Konami, which has shed 23 percent.

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Another iPhone feature — it crashes!

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When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January, I wrote,

The other problem is that computers are inherently buggy. Macs crash, and it’s frustrating when they do. It’s even more frustrating, however, when your music player crashes, and if your phone or your TV crashes, you’ll probably want to tear your hair out. The iPhone is so complex — it’s got an accelerometer in it to detect when you flip it sideways, it’s got a proximity sensor to tell when it’s near your face, it’s got to understand myriad finger gestures — that crashing, or at least slowing down, the way an overworked computer sometimes does, might be a real possibility.

A bunch of MacHeads jumped on me for that, claiming that Macs never crash and that Apple’s phone would be similarly solid. This was absurd; the Mac OS is very forgiving, and you’ve got to do a lot of crazy things to it to bring it down, but it certainly can crash. (For examples, see here and here.) And iPods — if you’ve never crashed your iPod, you’ve never used your iPod; who of us isn’t familiar with the Menu + Select button method of reseting an unresponsive Pod?

Well, the iPhone crashes too. My first brush with iPhone death occurred Friday night, shortly after activation. I called the phone from another number to see if its activation had taken — and when the iPhone began to ring, I hung up on the calling phone. But the iPhone didn’t stop ringing. For 10, 15, 20 seconds it continued, ignoring my tapping on the on-screen and physical buttons. Remembering the way to force a PC to turn off, I held down the iPhone’s Sleep button — and after about about 10 seconds, it gave me the shut-down screen.

On Saturday afternoon, I managed an even wilder crash while I was trying to get the phone to connect with a Wi-Fi router that has always been a bit picky. After connecting and disconnecting from the network a few times, I loaded up a Wikipedia page. Halfway through the loading, the phone froze. And now even holding down the Sleep button did nothing.

The third screen of Apple’s iPhone Troubleshooting Assistant came to my rescue. It turns out that you restart a frozen iPhone in much the same way you revive a chilled iPod — “press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time until you see the Apple logo.”

The MacHeads are going to tell me that all smart phones crash. Well, sure they do. My Windows phone goes down about once a month, and sometimes the only way to get it back up is to pop out the battery for a bit. Not a pretty thing. And Apple, of course, has never promised a crash-free phone — that it set up a page to help people combat “frozen iPhone and common issues” suggests as much. Indeed, the iPhone even reports its crashes to Apple — when you sync back up after a crash (even if just a single app, and not the whole phone, has gone down), iTunes asks if you’re OK with sending a log to Apple. (Daring Fireball has posted a crash log; scroll to the bottom here.)

Are two crashes in a weekend a bad sign? I should say that neither freeze bothered me too much; each occurred during non-critical tasks — I wasn’t talking on the phone or listening to music — so I found them more curious than frustrating. Plus the iPhone starts up again in about 20 seconds, much quicker than a Mac or PC. Still, I can’t fathom why a missed call caused my phone to fall apart. Is occasional crashing just the cost of being amazing? I hope not. But in case, just remember: Sleep + Home.

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IPhone activation headaches still trouble users

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AT&T, Apple won’t say how many users have had problems, but some have been waiting nearly 60 hours.

It took Iain Gillott 47 hours to activate his iPhone after waiting in the Texas heat Friday afternoon to buy one.

He has been an AT&T Inc./Cingular Wireless customer for 12 years, so he never dreamed there would be any trouble setting up service. But after a day of trying, he learned that his family rate plan wouldn’t accommodate an additional line, and once that problem was solved, he learned AT&T sent Apple Inc. a message to activate, but the Apple servers had timed out.

So, basically, both the maker and the carrier for the iPhone screwed up, from Gillott’s point of view. “When the next big device comes out, I’m not rushing out to buy one,” Gillott said in an interview. Both AT&T and Apple “had the opportunity to set a benchmark for customer service but haven’t solved any problems at all. They’ve done nothing apart from pissing off a lot of people.”

Gillott, a market analyst for wireless products and services at IGR Inc. in Austin, waited 47 hours for service, but that might not be the longest to wait, according to Apple’s support blog, where one person known as “SVDaily” waited more than 59 hours and still did not have service today.

Apple and AT&T officials have not responded to requests asking how many iPhone customers faced long waits for activation or what has caused the problems. One Apple official yesterday told the Associated Press that a small percentage of iPhone customers had an activation problem, while AT&T said overloaded servers were to blame and that adjustments were in the works.

An online poll at Engadget.com started on Sunday morning recorded by midday today more than 5,300 users who said they were “still dead in the water” and upset about activation delays, while another 1,600 said they were indeed activated after facing problems. Another 6,800 reported that their activations went smoothly, nearly half the survey group.

Rumor: PSP recall in the Netherlands, possible attempt to reduce homebrew?

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There are rumors ongoing that Sony has recalled all of it’s current PSPs from retailers in the Netherland in order to replace it with new, “unflashable” units. This might have been in response to the growing popularity of custom firmwares.

Of course, this piece of information is not comfirmed yet, and if these new units were to be “unflashable”, it probably could render the PSP un-updatable even with the official PSP firmware updates. Poor game sales was seen as a possible reason as to why Sony attempted this move.

Due to the nationwide recall, the PSP would be out of stock for a period of time in the Netherlands. It’s not known if Sony would do the same for other retailers in other countries.

Via MaxConsole

Windows Vista Aero glass sucks up batteries juice

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Aero Glass is touted as on of Windows Vista’s most wanted feature. Yet, there is a price to pay when you want this feature. It has been found that using Aero Glass on Windows Vista drains out the battery’s juice much more faster than compared to using Windows XP on the same notebook.

However, if Aero Glass is disabled on Windows Vista, the computer actually lasts longer compared to Windows XP using the same battery [unplugged to the mains].

Although Windows Vista has been touted as having better power management, having Aero Glass on doesn’t make this convincing. This probably lies within the defaults, and if the settings were tweaked, the power hog problem won’t become too much of an issue. Microsoft even encourages PC makers to tweak the power settings.

However, Windows Aero Glass doesn’t seem to put too much load on the computer, since even if Aero Glass was disabled, the computer still runs as fast as with Aero Glass active. Thus, the problem could be due to the inefficiency of power management when Windows Vista deals with Aero Glass.

This power hog issue was not something new. The problem was aready apparent during the Windows Vista betas, and while Windows Vista now performs much better compared to it’s historical betas, it still has a long way to go before it can be said as being “more power efficient than before”.

While PC makers would help create power-efficient hardware, Microsoft for it’s part, would release updates and tweaks to improve Windows Vista’s battery life and performances.

Patch Tuesday: Windows Vista 0-day exploit fixed

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Looks like Windows Vista has a few loopholes of it’s own.

Some of these fixes involves Microsoft Agent, the successor to “Clippy” (the sometimes annoying paperclip), the Client/Server Run-time Subsystem, and some other vulnerabilities.

Microsoft has tagged the update as “important” (one level lower than “critical”).

See-through battery in development

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Researchers at Waseda University have just come out with a battery that is flexible, and transparent. This battery requires 1 minute to charge, and can last for over 1000 cycles (there’s no information on the amount of energy that it produces when it is in use).

These batteries may be nice to look at, but, don’t expect to see them out yet - it’s still a prototype. Well… at least it won’t be soon well most of our gadgets are near invisible.

via Gizmag