DISQUS

@Rajan Try another search?! Blasphemy!

Honestly though, thanks for bringing up Live search. I've heard good things, though I'd still rather Google fixed their own search results.

Both MS and Sony have HD content for purchase and rental, so there's not a big difference there. The Netflix streaming quality is comparable to a low-quality DVD, and of course that will only be improved upon over time.

You're right to mention XMB update 2.4/2.41, but it's still not a perfect solution when it comes to a global friends list. It's a developer option to implement the friends system and custom soundtrack, whereas that's all standard on the 360 end.

(And yes, it's still an example of them playing catch up :P)

While Sony's service is free, it's still nowhere near the level of what the 360 offers. Personally, I'd rather pay $50 a year for Sony's service if it offered the same sort of multiplayer options.

And I do plan to get a PS3 soon, mainly because it seems that's the only way I'll get one with actual backwards compatibility ;)

William, it'll certainly be useful for users like yourself, my point is that it's not that wise of a release among general computer users. Most laptops today already run obscenely hot, and battery life hasn't been improved much recently, on dual core chips.

Unless significant changes occur to quad core chip architecture, they won't be a good addition to laptops. I'm sure it will happen eventually, just not sure if that will be this year.

Hey Christina, you're certainly right about poorly coded extensions, they can easily ruin your Firefox experience. The few times I had to completely rebuild my Firefox profile (not fun!) was due to some badly written extensions.

Ideally, Mozilla would be able to vet extensions before they head out into the wild--but that may be logistically impossible. For now, it's up to the community to keep bad extensions in check.

Firefox both needs good extension debugging for users, so they can know exactly what is screwing up their installation if something goes wrong, and for developers, to prevent these sorts of issues in the first place.

Good point Wing, although I would hope good broadband will become more widespread in the coming years. It's sort of like the move towards electricity, there's significant benefit to making sure everyone has access to broadband. That's a topic for another post though.

Unfortunately for now you and most others living on cow farms will have to make do. ;)

James: I'm not sure I agree with you on your police work there. The Powerbooks (and older Apple laptops) used 2.5" standard laptops running at 5400rpm. Go ahead, look it up. The Air is running a 1.8" drive which is running at 4200rpm due to the smaller disk size. It's pretty much the same as the iPod Classic's hard drive. Take a look at the link in that HD section above to see the sort of performance penalties 1.8" drives have in comparison to traditional hard drives.

Michael Long: Your calculations do not reflect the real world usage of the Air. It's a mighty thin device, but also much longer than the Eee. That alone means it will be more inconvenient to place in bags than the Eee. And yes, the Eee will fit in a manilla envelope too ;)

Gear: You're right, the Air has a backlit keyboard just like the Macbook Pro. I have a Macbook Pro though and have never really found it all that useful. Also, the top end Eee models have webcams as well.

Thanks for the comments guys, an update on battery life is forthcoming :)

I agree that Blu-ray does have benefits for the PS3, mainly the massive amount of disk space, but my argument was that Sony was not thinking about games when including the format--they were thinking only about movies. We're over a year past the PS3 launch right now, but it's still failed to find any "system seller" titles. There are a few games like Uncharted that are excellent, but they don't carry the hype that convince tons of consumers to purchase a PS3.

The "system seller" PS3 games, MGS 4 and Final Fantasy XIII, will start showing up in 2008. It's just a shame the system didn't have much to show for it in 2006/2007.

Wow, some excellent comments here! Let me respond to a few:

Keylimesoda: You're right about SACD playback over the PS3 analog ports, but I didn't mention those because that only supports stereo output. Thanks for the correction! HDMI is still the only way to get the full benefits of SACD from the PS3 though.

Vex: I didn't mean to offend anybody, but you have to admit, far fewer in the general public know about these formats than they did about HD DVD and Bluray when that war started out. It's the fault of the manufacturers who never really publicized DVD A or SACD.

PS3Owner and Greg: You're right about those stats, I think I just looked up the wrong article when trying to source that information. I was just a kid in the 80s, so I didn't have any first-hand knowledge ;)

DVD-A Owner: I'm in total agreement with you. With the music companies focusing on loudness in CD quality, and a public ignorant to how that ruins their music, there's little chance we'll see either of these formats truly take off...

Hans: I agree that this looks horribly bad for HD DVD, and their leaving the market is an obvious outcome of all of this. But still, I am interested to see what Toshiba does to recover. I'm not like some bloggers who will just give up on the platform altogether now.

The special features issue with Bluray also means that studios simply aren't sure what hardware is in most of the players out there. They're either going to produce discs that some people can't take full advantage of, or people will be forced to upgrade their firmware constantly. This issue comes to mind. Not to say HD-DVD players don't require firmware updates sometimes, but the consistency of hardware provides a good baseline for the content producers.

Also, I agree with you on the content end. It's certainly more important than the special features. But honestly, the Blurays inability to keep up with the HDi standard is just inexcusable. You can reason it away all you want, but in the end a big part of "next generation dvd" is "next generation special features". The HDi stuff is far more advanced than just the multi-angle DVD feature.

But you're right, Bluray has more space to work with and this year they'll finally be able to catch up on the special features front. Too bad the platform has screwed over all of its early adopters in the process. No one will remember anyway, and just like the Betamax/VHS fiasco, having the better specs on paper doesn't always translate to success in the market.

Bluray will probably win, but right now I'm still going to follow what the HD DVD camp does. All hope is not lost... Yet.

Dale: The good thing about the HD DVD players is that they make really good upscaling players for about the same price as a standalone upscaling DVD player. You really don't get much benefit from the ones under $100. I would say stick with Netflix for now to enjoy HD DVD until we hear more about Toshiba's new plans.

Brian, contrary to popular opinion, porn may not matter at all in this format war. It matter during Beta/VHS because that was really the only way to access it, but now people have access to it online and on dvd. I'm also not sure if HD quality is really going to help given the production values of most porn ;)

Ben, the advantage that HD DVD has is that their special features specifications were pretty much set upon the launch of the first generation players. This includes support for interactive menus and all of the HDi special features listed here. In short, these interactive special features are guaranteed across all HD DVD players, and they can also be upgraded to support features which weren't around when they launched.

The Blu-ray special features have not been as mature, and only the Profile 1.1 and greater players (released after Oct. 31 2007) have begun to support the interactivity so common on HD DVD. You can read a good explanation on the new Blu-ray profiles here . The other issue is that many of the earlier Blu-ray players are not upgradeable to support these new features, which means those consumers are stuck with players that can't fully take advantage of special features on new discs. To me, this has always been a glaring weak point for the Blu-ray camp.

Even when the light is red it's hot!

Smash isn't really a party game, it's just a 4 player fighting game. By party game I mean those things like Warioware that basically consists of minigames or things like that which you can really only enjoy as a group.

Honestly, I just keep my Wii unplugged until I actually need it. For some reason that thing gets hot even in its low power standby mode.

It's funny that you mention Gamefly, somehow I think the Wii is giving Gamefly lots of business as most of its games are decent rentals but unwise purchases...

Jaxon, thanks for the info! It makes complete sense in that respect.

Wing, I'm not sure if any music store could encapsulate your "eclectic" tastes ;) Now if CDBaby were to get in this business then maybe you'd be all set...

Honestly after thinking about it a bit more I think another significant factor in this no roll-over setup is that roll-over would make some of their more high-end subscriptions options less desirable. They obviously couldn't do an unlimited roll-over deal, but I see no reason why they can't retain credits for a 2-3 month period.

I should have been clearer, as it's quite obvious right now that you will need a fairly new laptop with HDCP compliant video outputs to output HD-DVD or Blu-ray content to your TV. We still don't know what Toshiba has planned with these new laptops though, and it would be fairly stupid of them to include HD-DVD playback and no easy way for people to get that content to their TV...

If they really wanted to impress us though, they could get the digital audio outputted through the HDMI as well and fix both setup issues at once.

Indeed, Apple seems to be an example of design at the extreme. What's interesting is that compared to a company like Lenovo/IBM, which is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum because they emphasize engineering, Apple is doing significantly better in the consumer market.

Still, both companies seem stuck in smaller niche markets. What they really need to do is combine the two as you suggest. Only then will they break out of the holes they've basically dug for themselves.

Thing is normal laptops integrate with smartphones just as well, they only lack the instant on feature. I'd rather save $300, get the Eee and deal with resuming from standby. Plus it can actually do laptop stuff, the Foleo is stuck with web browsing, email, spreadsheets, and word processing. Fun!

What does that even mean? We want legitimate reviews to show up when we search for them. Sites like yours, (*cough* www.DEALTAKER.com)</i>, just make that entire process difficult. Linkfarms are annoying in their own right, but at least I usually only have to see them when I mistype a URL. I see sites like yours every day amongst my general searching and they never cease to be annoying.

I'm a fan of deals as well, I'm totally in love with <a href="htttp://www.bensbargains.net" rel="nofollow">Ben's Bargains and Techdeals, but they also don't get in my way when I need to get legitimate searching done.

Angela is a plant, but I'll bite for now: I'm not saying I don't find these sites useful, but do they really need to get in the way search of results as they do? If only Google had some sort of filter to turn these things off, then I would have no reason to complain. Hell, you should understand my pain being affiliated with some comparison sites and all ;)

I actually didn't know that about the Socom series, but I'd like to see someone compare its online time to Halo 2. With more than four billion games played in Halo 2 (http://www.bungie.net/News/Story.aspx?link=four...), I had always figured that was the most played online console game.

As for the Jak and Rachet series, I know they are certainly quality titles. However, I'm still not convinced that they'll be groundbreaking next-gen games in the way that the non-franchise titles on the 360 will be. I'm sure they'll be great titles for people who already own PS3's, but are they sort of thing that will make people buy PS3's? Looking at the 360 line-up, there seem to be quite a few more original "must own" games.

Reading my post over there does seem to be a 360 bias--probably because I didn't plan to spend so much time on the other system's releases. It just pains me personally to see people struggling to purchase a PS3 right now when there aren't many great games to enjoy for quite a while. Really, how many times can you play Resistance? The post was originally spurred on by my increasing frustration that people aren't recognizing the 360 as the better value right now.