Into Tech

Despite many delays there seems to be an urgency at Sony to sort out its ambitious online world, PlayStation Home, with news that European PS3 owners will soon be invited to test it out.

Sony announced just over a week ago that the PlayStation Home project was about start a closed beta test period, with invites going out to Japanese PS3 owners, to start. Now, Sony has confirmed that ‘active’ European users of the PlayStation Network can expect an invite ’soon’

In a statement, the company said:

Just days after rival Vodafone launched a music download service, O2 has teamed up with Sony BMG to kick off their own download offering called ‘My Play’.

Claiming it to be an ‘artist-led’ endeavour, My Play is being touted as the first hook-up between a mobile operator and major music publisher.

This might make some of you happy and you may think it would result in a better deal but, you’d be wrong.

Like the Vodafone Music service, downloads of songs are priced at a stinging 99p each, which is a bit of a cheek seeing as you can download the same tunes cheaper elsewhere and just pop them on your phone.

Sony has taken the wraps off some new T-series Cybershot cameras, the super-skinny and colourful DSC-T700 and DSC-T77.

Both cameras sport 10.1-megapixel sensors, new Carl Zeiss optics with 4x optical zoom and the T77, at just 0.55in deep, is being touted the “thinnest touchscreen point-and-shoot camera.” It also sports a large 3in, 16 x 9 widescreen touch panel LCD screen.

Other features include updated intelligent scene recognition technology, Smile Shutter and face detection technologies with child and adult priority, as well as a sensitivity shooting up to ISO 3200, 11 scene modes, and in-camera image management.

Vodafone is the latest to get involved in the mobile music business with the announcement of its own download store, Vodafone Music.

It’ll allow those with 3G handsets to browse and download tracks directly to their phone, and is currently compatible with 11 models, including Sony Ericsson’s W910, W890, W880, W850, V640, V630, K850, K800, K770 and K610 handsets, and Nokia’s N73.

Japanese electronics group Sony is buying its partner Bertelsmann out of their Sony BMG music joint venture, in a deal worth $1.2bn (£614m) to the German media group.

The move could provide privately-held Bertelsmann, whose RTL unit owns British television channel Five, with the financial firepower to buy all or part of BSkyB’s controversial 17.9% stake in ITV.

The sale, which needs regulatory approval, is part of Bertelsmann boss Hartmut Ostrowski’s plan to dispose of under-performing or non-core businesses.

Last year, online piracy helped push music sales to their lowest level for a decade, down 8% globally to $19.4bn, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Sony BMG’s sales dropped 4%, to $4.1bn, last year as digital revenues failed to make up for declining sales of CDs. The company, has been aggressively cutting costs and has seen profits more than double to $178m.

Bertelsmann is not moving out of music altogether but re-focusing its BMG business on the more lucrative area of rights management. It will take over a number of European music catalogues from Sony BMG including more than 200 artists, who will be distributed by Sony.

Sony has been negotiating with Bertelsmann for several months about acquiring full control of Sony BMG, which they created in August 2004 by pooling their music labels.

Sony BMG already had $600m in cash on its balance sheet, which was split equally between the two owners. Bertelsmann will take all that cash, plus Sony is paying a further $600m for the business.

Sony BMG will now become Sony Music Entertainment Inc (SMEI). Its CD manufacturing and distribution will continue to

be split between Sony’s manufacturing arm, Sony DADC, and Bertelsmann’s services offshoot, Arvato Digital Services.

Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive of Sony Corp said: “This acquisition will allow us to achieve a deeper and more robust integration between the wide-ranging global assets of the music company and Sony’s products, operating companies and affiliates. It enables us to offer a total entertainment experience to consumers.”

Ah, movie tie-ins, don’t you love [or loathe] them? This time out, wannabe James Bonds can purchase a limited edition Sony Ericsson C902 Cyber-shot phone, clad in titanium silver, just like the one used by our favourite spy in his new flick, Quantum of Solace.

Great, a real spy phone. In-built code breaker, flip-out carbon steel blade for close-quarters work, microscope, laser beam weapon and bomb, all-in-one slinky phone. Woo-hoo! OK, not really.

Sony, as a company, has had something of a split personality on issues having to do with unauthorized file sharing. The content side of the business is obviously very much against it. But the consumer electronics side of the house recognizes how it can be quite beneficial towards raising the value of consumer electronics. Even so, it’s still a bit of a surprise to hear an exec basically tell fans to just download unauthorized content. Reader Yakko Warner points us to the news that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO David Reeves was telling frustrated PSP users in Australia and New Zealand that they’re going to have to keep waiting for games to show up there… or they can just download them off BitTorrent:

“You can wait for it and you can have it in good quality, you know you can get the stuff from Bittorrent if you want to and download PSP games, it’s up to you.”

One would imagine that the legal team at Sony isn’t exactly thrilled about the “it’s up to you” line at the end there.

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As if feminists didn’t have enough to be pissed about with videogames, where most women are portrayed as incredibly proportioned sex objects. Now they have to contend with the opposite. While many female characters come sheathed in the minimum amount clothing but with whopping swords of fire or twin guns blazing, this ‘damsel in distress’ comes armed with…cake.

Meet ‘Fat Princess’, a new downloadable game on PlayStation Network that has Web feminists up in bingo wings, arms. This is what it’s about:

Sony’s much-delayed, but very ambitious, PlayStation Home online world is set to get the once-over from drooling fans.

Sony is looking to recruit 10,000 lucky PS3 owners between now and August 11 to enter the PlayStation Home world as closed beta testers, ironing out the kinks, decorating their free luxury apartments and generally running around causing virtual mayhem.

Blu-ray iMac

We’re looking to buy an iMac, but there’s no indication of if or when Apple is going to offer Blu-ray drives.
Rachael Johnson

JS: It’s more than three years since Apple joined the Blu-ray Association’s board and more than two years since Sony announced Windows laptops with built-in Blu-ray drives, so Apple’s silence is a mystery. The iMac is based on the same Intel technology that is found in Sony and other laptops that play Blu-ray discs when running Windows XP or Vista, so it’s not clear why there has been a delay.

However, Apple needs to offer the H.264/AVC High Profile and VC-1 video and various audio codecs, support the Blu-ray Java interface software and implement the required DRM (Digital Rights Management) system - none of which it appears to do, so far. Monitors must also support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), but Apple’s website doesn’t actually say if any of its screens support it, and Apple’s Cinema Display screens do not. This makes it impossible to predict when Apple will finally offer Blu-ray, but I’d guess it would come with a new range. You could, of course, connect an external Blu-ray drive, such as the LaCie d2 (£546 at Amazon.co.uk), to an iMac if you wanted to use it for storage. If you want to play commercial Blu-ray movies, I suspect you’d be better off buying a standalone player or a Sony PlayStation 3.

From Tiny to Bit.ly

Until two weeks ago, it was all TinyURL. Now it’s all Bit.ly. I can’t find an article explaining the difference. Is there one?
Tim Gossling

JS: Both services let you paste in a very long web address then provide you with a short code that redirects to it. The main thing that Bit.ly adds is URL tracking: in other words, we get a number for how many people clicked each link. Unlike TinyURL, Bit.ly also keeps a copy of each page. For more details, see bit.ly/3Z5DAA

Closing Task Manager

There seems no way to close the Task Manager in Windows Vista other than rebooting. Once opened, there is no close button, and right-clicking does nothing.
Callum Brown

JS: Normally you can close applications by clicking the cross in the top right hand corner or by pressing Alt and F4. Not having a close button was a bit of a mystery, but a Microsoft Knowledge Base article reveals that Task Manager has a Tiny Footprint Mode. Briefly, double-clicking the top border of the window will bring back the usual controls. This applies in Windows XP as well.

Failed update

I was trying to update Windows Defender in XP but the application declared that error code 0×80241001 prevented this. Afterwards my browser, Firefox, kept crashing.
Alan Braddock

JS: The error code indicates that an update was not installed successfully. The Microsoft Knowledge Base describes two ways to fix the problem. If that doesn’t stop Firefox crashing, try uninstalling Firefox 2 and then reinstalling either Firefox 2 or 3.

LA in a TIFF

I submit environmental reports to a local authority. It says: “TIFF files are required for archival purposes as they are uncompressed which means they retain image detail and are stable (ie, do not degrade through successive opening and closing and saving)” unlike JPegs.
David Lynn

JS: JPeg files are “lossy” - they use a compression system that loses some detail - but opening and closing images does not cause any degradation. However, loading a .jpg image into a paint program and saving it can cause degradation, even if you don’t change it. There is no reason to do this, of course, but paint programs typically have a quality setting somewhere, so you will be re-saving them at “95% quality” or whatever. The rule is therefore not to mess about with original images, only with copies. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a very old but very flexible format and it provides the option for lossless LZW compression, for example.

Backchat

Meriel Whale wanted an MP3 player with a built-in FM radio. On the Ask Jack blog, Paddydog suggested using a mobile phone: “The Sony Ericsson W960i has all the benefits of a Walkman and great sound quality. It also has FM radio and a capacity of 8GB.” I also suggested only buying DRM-free tracks, and Peter Killick adds: “You need to make people aware of the big quality differences between what you get from different suppliers for more or less the same cost.” An MP3 from Play.com might have a bit rate of 320kbps and one from Tesco Digital only 128kbps, he says.

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk