Does anybody out there not gripe about their cell phone at least once a week? Thanks, I thought so.
In yesterday's column, I tried to dig a little deeper into why so many cell phones work as if they're built only to please a wireless service's whims. (Short answer -- "because they are.")
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I think we've got a basic market failure here -- the people who pay for and use the products don't get to cast an effective vote for or against them with their wallets. Let's put it this way: When I talked to the publicists for wireless carriers, they kept referring to the cell phone that you paid for as "our phone." Read my column here.
Cable-TV viewers have had a similar problem for years, in the form of the cable boxes you must attach to your TV to watch any premium channel (or, sometimes, any channel at all). But there's finally a solution at hand. Mike Musgrove wrote about the CableCard, which can rid your living room of cable boxes and their remote controls while shaving a few bucks a month off your cable bill. Read Musgrove's piece here.
In Web Watch, Leslie Walker tried out Yahoo's new Yahoo 360 service, yet another variation on the social-networking genre.
Our reviews this week cover a batch of baseball games (Nats fans take note, only one lets you play in Griffith Stadium as well as RFK; too bad that game is the weakest of the bunch) and a new version of an old sub-warfare game. Finally, in Help File I discuss why you shouldn't rush out to buy a DirecTV high-def TiVo recorder or try to block spam by senders' addresses.
Playing With the PSP
Sony's PlayStation Portable continues to draw a lot of interest and attention, at least among gamers and hackers. The most interesting hack for it that I've come across is this involved workaround for browsing the Web using some software buried inside the game Wipeout Pure.
There's more along those lines at the end of Ars Technica's review of the PSP.
Not all is cheery in PSP-land, however; some users have complained about the number of "dead pixels" -- those stuck permanently on -- in their handhelds' screens.
Another indicator of the PSP's potential for success, I got my first item of PSP-related spam (something along the lines of how to win one free) Tuesday evening.
