Cover art for the Blondie single "Call Me"

Some iPhone apps are useful. Others are entertaining. Over at Ars Technica, Jeff Smykll takes a shot at a series of paid apps whose value is highly questionable: the speed dial apps from JerryBeers.com. Smykll writes:

In what could be considered the least imaginative get-rich scheme in the history of the App Store, developer Jerry Beers of JerryBeers.com has created a slew of speed dial applications that allow users to dial a phone number by touching an icon on the iPhone's Home screen. The catch is that the developer is hard coding names into the apps; so while the number can change, the name cannot, allowing Beers to sell a plethora of applications with the only difference being the name on the icon, as well as a pink or blue icon based on the sex of the name.

Caveat emptor, right? Yes...were it not for the fact that these apps clog up the store, which potentially makes it harder for more dedicated developers to rise to the surface. While I'm sympathetic to Smykll's complaint, I'm not sure that it's really in anyone's interest for Apple to clamp down on such apps. However, it does drive home the point that the App Store is going to become less like a retail outlet and more like the Web. There will be a wide variety of content--some useful, some entertaining, and some whose value is highly questionable--for all of us to choose from. And in time, we'll come to see that diversity as a strength, not a weakness.

 Train tracks shrouded in fog. Photo courtesy of vsz.

According to Wikipedia, vaporware is "a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product." Every year, the tech industry gets us journalists all wound up about its new products, so we in turn wind you up, but a lot of them don't make it to market; hence the term vaporware. Wired has been handing out its Vaporware Awards for eleven years; you can see its 2008 list here.

My thoughts? While the recently released Home virtual chat room for Playstation 3 is certainly deserving of criticism, its inclusion on the list violates the spirit of the Vaporware Awards. After all, if a released product's beta status were enough to make it eligible, shouldn't Gmail (yup, still officially in beta) get a Lifetime Achievement Award? Other entries, like the Zap-X all-electric SUV (#7), GPS-maker Garmin's Nuvifone mobile phone (#5) and Blizzard's real-time strategy game StarCraft II (#4) are all worthy of the honor. As for the #1 choice--the twelve-years-in-development videogame Duke Nukem Forever (most games are completed in 12-36 months)--all I can say is, hail to the king.

An image from Atari's original patent application for its "video game control unit"

The folks over at Technologizer have put together a gallery of images taken from patent applications for electronic gaming systems ranging from the original Television Gaming Apparatus in 1969 to the Nintendo Game Boy in 1989. The text of the applications is rather geeky, but the images therein make for memory-prompting journey through our not-too-long-ago interactive past. Enjoy.

At a certain age, every boy outgrows his toys and his sandbox. The Central German amusement park Männerspielplatz says no, you just need bigger toys and an even bigger sandbox. For 219 Euros, or around $280, customers can spend and entire day driving front end loaders and backhoes, playing with jackhammers and firing all kinds of weapons. Here's how Andrew Curry described it in Wired (you can also see the magazine's photo slide show here):

The brainchild of Alexander Bammer, a former IT honcho, Männerspielplatz (literally "men's playground") began seven years ago as a one-off corporate promotion with a handful of rented earthmovers at a construction site near Kassel in central Germany. The event struck a chord with pasty execs who loved getting in touch with their inner ditchdigger. "Most men these days don't work on a construction site; they work at a desk," Bammer says. "They dream about experiences like this." So in 2004, he decided to open Männerspielplatz, just outside Kassel, as a 17-acre one-stop shop for man fantasy (slogan: "We fulfill men's dreams!"). Most of the customers, it turns out, are actually women buying tickets as gifts for husbands or boyfriends as an alternative to one more tie--or perhaps something else. After all, Bammer says: "I hear 'It's better than sex' a lot."

• FLAT: "Sales Growth of Flat-Panel TVs Is Expected to Slow" is the headline of Eric A. Taub's New York Times story on what's happening to the centerpiece of any worthwhile man cave. The story quotes DisplaySearch senior vice president as saying "There was an unnaturally high growth in sales due to the transition to digital TV and the replacement of picture tube TVs....You would expect a reversion to the mean, but this is beyond that."
• BOOHOO: The layoffs at super-portal Yahoo! have to results both tense and funny. Tense, according to a blog post Valleywag's Owen Thomas, are comments made to Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang during the company's Southern California holiday party (sample remark: "You laid off my husband in February, we just had a baby, I got laid off on Wednesday. Now you at least can put a face with some of the people you put out on the street.") What about funny? That would be this YouTube video here.
• FLASH: Traditional hard drive manufacturers can't rest on their laurels, because solid state drives (SSDs) are breathing down their necks. Ars Technica's Jon Stokes writes that Sun and Micron have found a way to increase the lifespan of Flash memory-based drives. But that's not all. "The other big SSD news today is Toshiba's announcement of a half-terabyte (512GB) SSD, the price of which hasn't been revealed. The new drive has a maximum sequential read speed of 240 [megabytes per second] and a max sequential write speed of 200 [megabytes per second], making it plenty fast, especially relative to its 2.5-inch magnetic competition." Which means quieter computers that consume less power. Nice.
• 3-D: Stereoscopic imaging for laptops and iPhone is what Wazabee is showing off at MacWorld 2009. Engadget's Darren Murph posted about the company's 3DeeShell, an "autostereoscopic overlay for the MacBook Air and other 13.3-inch notebooks," and 3DeeFlector, "a special protective skin with an integrated removable lens that can display 3D content on the Apple iPhone." Perhaps 3-D pictures of that not-going-to-be-keynoting Steve Jobs will help ease attendees' pain.

 Grand Theft Auto IV, developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games

Yesterday, the stock price of Take-Two Interactive fell after the company announced a fourth quarter loss of $15 million (up from a loss off $7.1 million a year ago) even though its revenue of $323 million (up from $293 million a year earlier) was greater than expected. What's interesting is that in early November, according to Bloomberg, Zelnick all but declared Take-Two recession-proof, stating "With entertainment products, if there’s something you must have, typically consumers are going to buy it....So far, we’re not seeing any negative influence of the overall economy on sales of our titles.” Yesterday, however, Zelnick was siging a different tune. "We too are influenced by a very difficult set of economic conditions and the world looks a lot worse than it did just a couple of months ago," he admitted.

The news wasn't all bad, however. For the entire fiscal year, Take-Two is projecting a profit. And the best news of all was that the core staff of the studio that's primarily responsible for those profits--Rockstar Games' Dan Houser, Sam Houser, Leslie Benzies and unnamed others--has signed new contracts with Take-Two through the year 2012. More interesting, however, than the fact that the new deal would be "primarily based on a profit sharing agreement," was the following paragraph:

In addition, Take-Two has agreed to fund the future development of certain new intellectual property to be owned by a newly formed company controlled by key Rockstar Games team members and published exclusively by Take-Two.

In other words, the Housers and their inner circle retain creative control of the franchises they've created, including Grand Theft Auto. They received a rich new deal. And they will also be able to create brand-new franchises for a separate company that they control--note that the release doesn't specify who owns the company, so Take-Two could have a stake in it--with those new games being funded and distributed by Take-Two. We were impressed when Bungie got to keep its name upon departing from Microsoft during the Flight of the Killer B's, but this strikes us as a far better and shrewder deal, with the Housers and company having the best of both worlds: they get to strike out on their own without ceding control of the house that they built.

For further analysis, we turned to Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter. Here's what he had to say:

• SAYONARA: We don't need no stinkin' Macworld, says Apple, which revealed yesterday that a) Steve Jobs would not be delivering the keynote at the January 2009 conference (senior vice president Phil Schiller will, um, fill in); and b) Apple would no longer be participating in Macworld following that event. And if Valleywag's Owen Thomas is correct, the way the news came to light was interesting. He says: "When [BusinessWeek's Arik] Hesseldahl published a story on Monday with the headline 'Steve Jobs Will Be at Macworld,' all hell broke loose. Kent called back, saying he meant that the show would go forward, not that Jobs was a sure thing. Hesseldahl changed 'will' to 'may' in his headline and updated the story--but Kent's PR firm kept calling to backpedal. The story spread, and the drumbeat of speculation grew ever louder. Then, late Tuesday, came Apple's announcement that Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at Macworld, a tradition he's maintained since he returned to the company a decade ago." Oh, and one more thing: The cover story was plausible enough: Trade shows were an outdated way to sell Macs and iPhones. But Apple investors didn't buy it, sending the stock down in after-hours trading."
  
• IPTV: Phone giant AT&T crosses a major threshold with its U-Verse online television service: 1 million subscribers across 79 major markets in 16 states. Writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson: "The numbers remain below those of competitors like Verizon, and much further below those of cable companies like Comcast. But getting to a million subscribers for AT&T is a remarkable achievement given its use of new technology (it's the only true IPTV operator among the big US players), the regulatory and legal climate (the company got state laws changed across the country), and the fact that's it's all happening through DSL on twisted-pair copper wiring over which AT&T continues to sell Internet and phone access."
• SERVED: If you've got legal woes, you may want to consider ditching your Facebook account, in Australia, anyway. As Canberra Times legal affairs reporter Noel Towell writes of a couple that had defaulted on its mortgage, "[A]fter 11 failed attempts to find the couple at their Wyselaskie Circuit home between November 8 and December 6, the lawyers tried a change of tack. Lawyers Mark McCormack and Jason Oliver convinced the court the Facebook profiles for the defendants were those of Ms Corbo and Mr Poyser. 'The Facebook profiles showed the defendants' dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,'' a spokesman for the firm said. This information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants." Gives a whole new meaning to the relationship status "It's Complicated."
  
• WEEZY: Can Lil' Wayne (and Merge Records and Kid Rock) save journalism in the Internet era? That's the argument being made by Alissa Quart in the Columbia Journalism Review. Quart says, "The first thing that writers might copy from musicians—even more than they do already—could be called the Free Culture Method. In music, one prong of that is mixtape giveaways. Despite recent miseries in the music business, Lil Wayne, the rap artist, sold more copies of his CD in one week than anyone this year, having built an audience by sending free mixtapes into the ether. Mixtapes, at least these days, are pressed CDs or downloads containing demos or raw mixes of tracks, as well as collaborations. Lil Wayne’s mixtape method is the musical equivalent of writers who give away original material on their blogs, writers like Alan Sepinwall, otherwise just another television reviewer at a mid-size metro—The Star-Ledger in Newark. Sepinwall writes an elaborate, trenchant, and heavily commented-upon blog (check out his 2,023-word analysis of the television show Mad Men’s 'Maidenform' episode) in addition to his print column, and the blog has extended his reach. Or consider Andrew Revkin’s sharp New York Times blog and vlog on global warming, through which Revkin made himself a brand."

 Steve Jobs discusses the iPhone. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

The recent rumor that a $99 iPhone would be making its way to Wal-Mart set the Internet abuzz last week. That is until the idea was debunked. For the record, Wal-Mart will sell iPhones next year, but the entry-level $199 price isn't expected to change. Nevertheless, it prompted me to seek out some informed speculation about the iPhone's possible future—emphasis on the speculation, given how closely Apple holds its future cards to its vest.

I reached out to Jonathan Steuer, a technology consultant based in New York City. Prior to striking out on his own, Steuer was a vice president and general manager at the consumer-research firm Iconoculture, whose clients ran the gamut from financial services (MasterCard International) to automotive (Ford) to technology (Sony Electronics). He's perhaps best known for founding Hotwired, Wired magazine's Web counterpart—considered the Internet's first banner-ad-supported online magazine at the time of its October 1994 launch—and has also served as a judge for the annual Best of CES competition at the spectacle that is the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. When I asked him about where the iPhone was headed, the first thing he stressed was that part of what has driven the iPhone's early success is that it is constantly evolving, through both hardware (expanded storage and the 3G radio) and software (the operating system upgrades and new programs made available through the Apple App Store). "It becomes so much more functional over time," says Steuer. "As a consumer, most of my tech products get worse over time. This one gets better, which makes it a great value."

• Can Palm find its mojo again? As someone who's still rocking a Palm T|X--along with a BlackBerry and a 3G iPhone--I'm pulling for them. Thankfully, this Business Week story centered around ex-Apple guru Jon Rubenstein gives me hope. Peter Burrows writes: "On Jan. 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm is due to unveil the long-awaited operating system, code-named Nova, as well as the first of a family of products that will run on it. While Palm has protected its plans with Apple-like secrecy, Rubinstein and others say the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple's iPhone, oriented to fun. 'People's work and personal lives are melding,' [Palm CEO Ed] Colligan says, adding that Palm is aiming for the 'fat middle of the market.'"
• Microsoft's Live Labs group has released its "deep zoom" mobile photo application called Seadragon first for the iPhone. Why? Says Alex Daley, the division's group product manager, to TechFlash's Todd Bishop: "The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit)....Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn’t just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support." The article says that we can expect to see other iPhone apps from Microsoft next year.
• Just as video killed the radio star, Steve Jobs snuffed out the album. That's the word from Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, sort of. When interviewer Greg Kot asked Corgan if "Zeitgeist" was his last album, Corgan replied: "We're done with that. There is no point. People don't even listen to it all. They put it on their iPod, they drag over the two singles and skip over the rest. The listening patterns have changed, so why are we killing ourselves to do albums, to create balance and do the arty track to set up the single? It's done." This Smashing Pumpkins fan hopes that Corgan will reconsider.
• Looking to bring in some extra coin during "The Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo"--and satisfy passengers who start jonesing without their broadband connections--Delta is rolling in-flight Wi-Fi service on a number of its flight. Here's how the Washington Post's Alejandro Lazo describes it: "The service will allow customers traveling with WiFi-enabled devices such as laptops, smartphones and personal digital assistants access to the Internet, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services. Voice calls still will not be allowed. The service will be offered for free on local shuttle flights through the end of the year. Next year, it will be $9.95 on flights of three hours or less and $12.95 on longer flights." Once I get my hands on a gaming laptop and a copy of Left 4 Dead, I'll be able to train for the coming zombie apocalypse just about anywhere.
  

Welcome to the debut of our newest consumer tech blog, "American Geek." My name is N'Gai Croal, and I'm a senior writer for technology here at Newsweek who also pens the monthly "American Geek" column in our print edition. When my editors asked me to describe my proposed blog, here's what I told them:

The American Geek blog sits at the intersection of technology, culture and lifestyle. It will be accessible and knowing at once, clear without being condescending or appearing to dumb things down. The tone will sometimes be wry, sometimes playful, excited by the potential of technology but appropriately skeptical of individual product, with a bias towards products, services and culture that are a genuine fit with our lifestyles. Expect it to be somewhat tilted to the guy end of the tech and culture spectrum--notable Blu-Ray releases; geek-leaning films like "Watchmen" and "Star Trek," etc.--but not offensively so.

Looking this description over, I still don't think it captures everything that I'd like "American Geek" to be. My premise is that we are all geeks now, as we TiVo our television shows; listen to our personalized Pandora radio stations; and Twitter the day away by sharing snippets of our lives with a few hundred of our closest friends. That's the terrain that I and my colleagues who'll be joining me on this blog would like to map, bit by bit, day by day. So check back regularly for our updates, and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.