5 O’Clock Roundup: Sidekick apocalypse, twilight for email, no freaking way is Sun selling its hardware business

October 12, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

sidekickT-Mobile halts Sidekick sales, allows angry, angry customers to cancel contracts for free – The Infocalypse has arrived for some T-Mobile Sidekick owners. After two weeks of service outage, Microsoft’s Danger unit now says some customer data — we’re talking people’s photos here — may be lost forever. Or at least until data recovery can go back in time. I hope Microsoft, rather than trying to bury the details, hires a writer like Gary Wolf to explain the tale to non-techies of future generations.

te-aa822a_email_f_20091008202711Email, your reign is over — Twitter and Facebook and text messages have become our prime means of communicating, the Wall Street Journal says: “Email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.”

64Flash memory gets an overdue upgrade — SanDisk’s newest flash memory chips utilize technology called X4 to store four bits of data per cell, instead of one or two. “You really won’t be able to tell the difference,” SanDisk president Sanjay Mehrotra told the Journal. But SanDisk now has lower production costs, and its new 64-gigabyte cards have double the capacity of existing chips.

Videogame publishers are chasing women in hopes of a new market – Grown-ups get personal-training software Your Shape, little princesses get “Littlest Pet Shop.” Female gamers are now 40% of the market, according to market researchers at Wedbush Morgan.

Larry Ellison comes out swinging at Oracle OpenWorld — The world’s third-richest man — and he could totally beat up the other two — displayed some of IBM’s latest anti-Sun ads during his keynote talk at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Sunday night. The ads claim that Oracle/Sun is getting out of the hardware business, so it’s time to migrate to IBM servers. Here’s a video of the highlights of Larry’s presentation. It’s been edited into dullness. ZDNet’s writeup is more fun.

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • RC
    Paul,

    You should have read to the end of the WSJ story on email. It doesn't end the way you imagine. This is the nature of the new methods of communication, people don't have time to think, ponder, or even read to the end of the story. This is the last paragraph of the story:

    Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

    Does it sound like they think the new communication methods are valuable?