January 03, 2011, 7:36 AM — If you're one of the lucky ones who had last week off (and you tend not to follow the tech scene while spending your holidays) then you might be wondering what went on while you were relaxing. With apologies to those of you who had a full week of work, here's a quick wrap-up of just a few of the stories that caught my eye.
Did you hear? Sears and Kmart launched an online movie service called Alphaline Entertainment. It's build on Roxio's technology. It's virtually identical to Best Buy's CinemaNow service. How similar? When I clicked on an option to see what portable devices were supported I got a pop-up that said: "Watch CinemaNow movies on the go with a wide variety of DivX certified mobile phones and portable devices." It looks like Roxio just cloned and re-skinned a copy of the CinemaNow site. Prices are $19.95 to purchase, and $3.99 to rent, new movies.
I'm not sure how Sears/Kmart hope to with theses prices. For example, Amazon Video-on-Demand has The Town available for $9.99 (and in HD though that might be a special offer). Apple & Vudu both have it for $14.99. CinemaNow has it for $15.95 and Alphaline has it for...$19.95. Way to launch a service, Sears!
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Did you hear? Amazon has enabled the loaning of Kindle e-books. Sounds like the details are pretty much the same as with Barnes & Noble's Nook. You can lend a book to a friend, once, for a 2-week period. While your book is on-loan you won't have access to it. The other caveat is that publishers have to allow the lending function. Flipping through my Kindle library it looks like lendable books are the exception rather than the rule, but maybe that will change as the program matures. I also have a rather high percentage of free books in my library. Thanks to a short post at Cnet (How to find free Kindle books) that isn't likely to change.
Did you hear? Another Playstation Phone rumor! This one says the device will launch sometime this spring. Yahoo News has more details, or you can go right to the Japanese source, Asahi.com.
Last of all, did you hear? Google's give-away laptop, the CR-48, has been hacked to run Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu, according to Electronista. I was lucky enough to be given a CR-48 just before Christmas. I'm planning on using it as my 'personal office computer' this week, after which I'll have a quick review. As neat as it'd be to put Ubuntu on it, it seems disingenuous to sign up for a free device being distributed in order to test an OS, and then wipe that OS off it and use the hardware for your own purposes. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
And that's it! At least, those were the stories that caught my eye last week. If I missed something that you were excited about, please leave a comment. And now, back we go to real life and the daily grind.
Peter Smith writes about personal technology for ITworld. Follow him on Twitter @pasmith.
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