Recently, Sony released the latest update for the PS3’s firmware. It’s been a while so I was excited to see what new features we’d have that would improve its useability. In particular I was hoping for an improved web browsing experiance because currently the system is quite cumbersome to use.

What did I get new from this update? In short, nothing that I can find. It’s all about Sony this one. They made me download a couple of hundred MB of update simply so they could remove the option to install Linux from my PS3. Since that was a point of advertising when I bought it, I feel that they have breached their contract of sale with me by not providing what they advertised.

Other than removing that option, there was nothing I could see about 3d related updates or UI improvements anywhere else. If you are going to remove something from users that you previously sold to them Sony, you should at least make an effort to give something back. Improved useability in browsing using the bluetooth remote would be nice. Or being able to navigate the menu’s using a bluetooth keyboards arrow keys would be likewise helpful. How about some tie in between the new Xperia X10 and the PS3? There are so many things that you could have done to soften this blow that I am left wondering if you people will ever learn that the reason for your lost sales in TV’s and other lines is because you just don’t seem to listen to or think about the user experiance and impressions of your own customers. The PS3 is definately superior in value to the Xbox 360, the included Blueray drive, included wireless, superior CPU power, wireless 6 axis motion controller and bigger hard disks make it fantastic value for the price they now are. The reason you are not in front is simply bad PR and marketing of which this is just another example.

Releasing an update that is basically a downgrade in functionality is bad PR Sony. I don’t think you can’t afford more bad PR at this point.

Update: I just notice that the playstation site says this about the update:

This system software update includes all features contained in previous versions.

This is obviously not correct as they have removed the default system and other OS options. It’s a small thing but I’m feeling rather petty about it right now.

My average day has me logged in and working from about 6 different computers. Some are Linux, some are Windows and one is a Mac. Up until now, on all of these machines, I had separate different browser favourites\bookmarks, passwords, histories, preferences histories etcetera, and if I needed a bookmark or whatever on when computer when I was on another, I’d have to remote control or walk there to get it. Until now that is. Mozilla Weave has changed all that and now I have the same settings/history/bookmarks on all of my machine on all 3 operating systems. Best of all, it’s a free service!

What is Mozilla Weave I hear you ask? Well, think of it as an online service that stores your browser details in an encrypted state on one of Mozilla’s servers and you can access that data using the weave browser extension installed into as many different Firefox browsers as you like. In my case, my 6 different Firefox installs over Linux/Mac/Windows all have the weave extension installed and configured to use the same weave account, and as a result all of them now have the same browser details.

Case in point is this post, I’ve never posted to htmlfixit.com from this computer before, but because this computer and my home computer both have weave installed, this computer “remembered” the post address and the user-name and password to log in.

This is the way things are destined to move, all your data available all the time from anywhere. I’m a fan.

I’ve been following the Android Linux phone phenomenon with interest since it began, even going so far as to download the SDK and start learning to write Android apps. All I had left to do was choose the Android phone I wanted for myself. First I wanted the HTC Magic, but then I saw the Hero video on-line and fell in love. Since Australia is the A$$ end of the world as far as tech companies are concerned, it took so long for the Hero to arrive here that before they did, I fell in love with the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, it had twice the screen resolution twice the CPU power, a fantastic camera with flash and a flashy interface. I wanted one badly. When it was announced, it was the most technically advanced android phone on the market.

Fast forward months and months and I don’t have one yet. Why? because nobody else does either. When Sony-Ericsson announced the phone, it’s features were unrivalled. Now however, it still isn’t out, but it’s features are no longer outstanding. Motorola’s Droid, the Google Nexus one and others have most or all of the features of the Xperia X10, the main difference being that you can actually buy a Droid or Nexus one right now if you want to. (not in Australia yet, but you get the idea.)

An added sting is that the Motorola Droid (2.0.1) and Google Nexus one (2.1) are shipping with much newer versions of Android than the Xperia X10 (1.6) so in some ways it’s behind the 8 ball before it even joins the race. Why have all the other phone companies that wanted to, been able to design, manufacture and release outstanding Android phones, except Ericsson? There is already talk about Snapdragon 1.5ghz CPU Android phones, so unless the X10 gets out the door really soon, it will totally underwhelm the market when it finally does arrive.

Don’t get me wrong, the specs on the Xperia X10 still make my mouth water, particularly the screen and the camera, but if I’m going to spend big bucks on a phone, I’ll want it to be at the forefront of technology for at least a few months and the way it looks to me now, by the time it does get here, it will already be outdated. This phone had the potential to change the game for Sony-Ericsson, and now it is likely to under perform. Not because it’s a bad phone, just because the hype is gone and it isnt’ really special anymore.

Sad really, I had my heart set on one of these things and now I’m looking into buying a Google Nexus one.
Sony-Ericsson have had a hard time of it lately and if this is any indication, it’s not difficult to see why in my opinion. Building hype is great, but if you don’t actually sell the phone at the hypes peak, it declines. That is what happened here, the Xperia X10 took so long to come to market that it was overtaken by Motorola and Google who are now beneifiting from much of the hype generated by the X10 video’s and reviews all over the net.

I think these phones and the iphone are the future of the web for us, or at least a big part of it. There are a lot more mobile phones in the world than there are computers so the market is huge for the mobile Internet. My prediction is that 5 years from now, 60+ percent of the smart-phone market will be running on Linux/Unix based phones. Most of these will be used for browsing the net as well as social networking. It’s worth making sure your sites look OK on them.

Microsoft, who have been known to patent tiny and sometimes seemingly obvious things (timed mouse clicks for example) while riding on the shoulders of giants who often gave their truly revolutionary discoveries unencumbered by patents, has been bitten by the spurious software patent issue themselves. Microsoft Word it’s been ruled, is in breach of somebody else’s software patent (related to XML tagging). Better yet, an injunction forcing them to stop the sale of such infringing products has been granted also (Word and Vista). This has led to speculation that there may be something to the theory of Karma after all and that what goes around really might come around.

Sadly Microsoft has way too much money for this to make much of an impact on them. They’ll most likely pay the fine (290m), perhaps create a workaround and carry on business as usual. But still, the more money they have to hand out in the US, the EU and anywhere else that dislikes their practices, the more likely that at some point in the future, the board will realize that their version of business as usual isn’t really all that profitable anymore. Read more at Reuters.

According to Informationweek, IE8 has been out for only a very brief period, and yet many early adopters have already changed back to IE7. They also say that IE is now down around the 67% mark in overall popularity thanks to Firefox and Safari.

Makes for interesting reading and highlights again why you should never code your site in browser specific language.

There has been a great deal of fuss regarding the Windows 7 beta release and how it may be everything Vista should have been. To see what all the fuss is about, I grabbed a copy and set about installing it in a virtualbox VM and having a play. Here are my observations.

It’s very polished for a beta. It looks more like Apple OSX than any previous version of Windows. It seems quite stable. It boots and shuts down reasonably quickly (about XP speed to my eyes) and uses an order of magnitude less system resources than Vista. However, all of the above points bring to mind one question: Vista was created after many many years of development, whereas Windows 7 was evolved from Vista in about a year I think. So why was/is it so hard to get Vista to perform like this? It almost looks like they released Vista as a buggy bloated waste of hard drive space on purpose just to make the next (much sooner) release look so much better.

When you think about it, Windows 7 has almost the speed and system resource usage of the 8 year old XP OS, it can still suffer from Viruses and Spyware, It doesn’t seem any more or less stable than XP (which was pretty good in my experiance), so I’m left wondering why people are singing the praises of an OS that manages to mostly match its much much older sibling? Don’t get me wrong, Windows 7 is a MASSIVE step up from Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s only a minor step up from XP. It looks better than XP or Vista, it seems easier to use and more intuitive than Vista as well. (I’m so used to and familiar with XP that my opinion is not valid as to its ease of use)

Conclusion: Well done Microsoft for fixing the problems with Vista, but why didn’t you do this the first time around? Also, XP has been a pretty good OS for Microsoft and for end users. Until something really revolutionary comes along, everything is going to just seem like an incremental upgrade of XP.

Windows 7 is a good looking, stable and solid OS, but I’ve not seen anything so far that would compel a tight fisted company bean counter to justify replacing XP as it doesn’t really do much extra for a corporate desktop. As with MS Office, Microsoft’s older OS products are going to become their biggest competitors, especially with the current financial crisis making everyone nervous.

It seems that not all of the users of Firefox 3 were previous users of Firefox 2 upgrading to the newer version. Prior to the release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla browser had roughly 48% of our browser marketshare, making it the clear leader. Post Firefox 3 release, our Mozilla Firefox usage is up to nearly 65%. It remains to be seen how this trend shows up on other sites but it’s looking good for Firefox to make up some significant ground overall. We’ll know more not long after the end of July.