I’ll try and keep this short, but there will probably be some followup postings in the next week or so about the ramifications of today’s annoucements. Yes, the PS3 is delayed until November worldwide(I was pretty much on the money with that) due to Blu-ray DVD copyright protection issues. Yes, the PS3 is going to have a big online service that is more media-centric, but will probably have some cool gaming features. Yes, Sony still doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure to have games hosted on their servers. No, there was no iTunes integration for the PS3 announced. There was also more media-centric stuff annouced for the PSP, but I honestly don’t care about the PSP anymore. It’s not a good enough gaming device or a good enough media device for me to use it as either, much less both. I think the real winner in this is Microsoft, but I’ll get to that later…

Gaming Age is reporting that the recent rumors of a PS3 announcement on March 15th are true. Joystiq and others have already reported this. So, is it really going to happen? What are they going to announce?

Here is a short recap of the various PS3 rumors and their probability of being confirmed:

Playstation 3 Delay - Will the PS3 hit it’s supposed spring launch date? I really doubt it. At this point everybody is expecting a delay. Nobody really knows when the PS3 will be shipping and thus no stores are taking pre-orders yet. It’s most likely that the PS3 won’t hit the US until November. Perhaps it will show up in Japan as early as this summer, but don’t count on it.

New PS3 Controller - Everybody seemed to hate the original boomerang design even more than the Spiderman PS3 font. If they are going to unveil a new controller now would be the time, so it could very possibly happen. However, don’t expect it to look like the dualshock. They already got into hot water with that controller design once.

PS3 Online Service - I expect this to happen at some point, but don’t expect it to be annouced until E3. If they are building anything, then it’s probably going to be more media-centric than game centric. It’s going to disappoint a lot of people. It won’t be an Xbox Live killer by any means.

iTunes PS3? - As unlikely as this probably is, it also makes a whole lot of sense. If Sony would ditch their whole Sony Connect and latch on to the iTunes user base of millions of people, they might have the next generation’s “killer app”. However, the one thing Sony wants more than money right now is control, and without the ability to control the iTunes format, they won’t ever go for it.

So there you have it. Any other PS3 predictions?

It seems that we are hearing about high definition everything these days. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both launching this year and every major media company is really starting to push the high-def revolution. This year might be the year when enough devices take advantage of HD and enough HDTV’s are within the budget of most consumers. However, is it really all wine and roses for this forthcoming technology advance?

In a word, no. The dirty little secret of this push to high-definition is really a push to DRM and closing the so called “analog hole”. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are going to use a content protection scheme that degrades the quality of the so called “high definition” movies to something much closer to DVD quality if you aren’t using a HDCP enabled connection to your television. Now, if we all owned HDCP enabled HDTV’s this wouldn’t be a problem. However, most of the HDTV’s sold in the last 5 years DON’T have HDCP enabled HDMI(or DVI) connections. What’s worse is that many HDTV’s being bought by consumers today still don’t have HDCP and thus the shiny new Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s they are going to be buying in the next year aren’t going to even show up in high-definition.

So, what is the movie industry going to do about this? Well, they are going to try to not really tell anyone until it’s too late, which I think is a mistake. You don’t hear Sony talking about how Blu-ray isn’t going to be high-definition on most televisions, instead they keep refering to it as “true high-definition”. However, it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger squarely at Sony. Toshiba and others aren’t doing much better to educate consumers about what is really going to be required to experience this high-definition revolution.

Ironically, the only comapnies that seem to realize that most HDTV’s don’t support HDMI/HDCP are the cable/sattelite television companies and Microsoft. Despite the seemingly constant evil of Microsoft, they have actually came out as pro-consumer in the high-def debate. They at least recognized that most HDTV’s use component inputs for their high-definition input when they built the Xbox 360. I for one thought that was a very intelligent decision. My only hope now is that the HD-DVD addon drive for the Xbox 360 somehow bypasses the content protection and allows the watching of HD-DVD in 1080i or 720p. Otherwise, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to end up being one of the biggest wastes of consumer dollars ever and the winner is not going to be either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. The winner is going to be the cable and sattelite comapanies that offer video-on-demand or perhaps a video download service such as iTunes offering movies in HD.

TechCrunch got ahold a bunch of screenshots of Google’s upcoming calendar application. It looks like it’s still not ready for the masses, but it’s always good to see Google continuing to develop cool new products.

The Mole’s Take

A calendar is something that everybody can use and so it’s obvious that Google needs to create such a calendar. However, It’s something that Goggle needs to be very careful about introducing. Unless it’s as incredible as GMail was when it was first introduced, it will flop. Unfortounately right now Google can’t afford to just introduce any old software. We all expect it to be on par with Google Search, GMail, etc… I think a calendar could be a great addition to GMail, but I just hope they take the time to make it something better than “just another calendar”.

read more | digg story

Dude, you’re getting an Alienware. News article at The Inquirer outlining why it makes sense.

The Mole’s Take

I think this is a move that Dell needs to make. Dell has driven down prices to the point that they have razor-thin margins on their consumer PC’s. Most of Dell’s money is made in Corporate lease and server deals. That’s where the money is. The consumer PC business is not a place where Dell makes a lot of money. Their companion products aren’t exactly selling like iPods either. Buying Alienware would make a lot of sense because they have a high profit margin and are really good at selling gaming PC’s. If Dell does this they will most certainly need to retain most of Alienware’s operations as they currently are. If Dell tries to make Alienware into something that resembles Dell, then they would kill it and gamers would go elsewhere for their gaming rigs.

One thing is for sure, Dell is a cheap computer company and not a “cool” computer company. No matter how shiny you make a Dell, it still isn’t “cool”. The best evidence of that is the Dell DJ’s and other music devices. They are a joke and haven’t even put a dent in the iPod that it was intended to kill. Now that Apple is going Intel, Dell needs something to help their consumer image, otherwise cheap is not going to cut it.

read more | digg story