Well, if the leaked photos, leaked videos, legal battles, and planned Steve Jobs keynote weren't enough to convince you that a new iPhone was coming, then nothing will. But we have yet another piece of evidence that suggests it's coming anyways.

Retail mammoth WalMart has been given the go-ahead to drop the price on the iPhone down to $97, a sure sign that the company is looking to clear out inventory in anticipation of an upcoming product release.

For those of you who will only settle for the latest and greatest from the iPhone world, this is a sucker deal. After all, who buys a phone just days before the company rolls out a new model to make it obsolete?

For others, however, this could be the time to move up from a regular phone and get an iPhone. A 16GB 3GS is still a pretty powerful handset and Apple will almost certainly maintain support for the model at least through the duration of your two-year contract.

While many Apple faithful will scoff at the notion of buying an iPhone at WalMart, users who don't need the latest and greatest and just want to get an upgrade over their older model and run-down battery could save themselves some decent money. If you're not into video chat or HD video or a snappy new case design, you could do much worse than to spring for the bargain price.

Posted by Shaun Nichols on May 26, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1)

For much of the weekend people around the world have been playing old school Pac-Man on Google's home page.

The celebration of the anniversary was a cute one, and so popular that Google has left the game up permanently on its own site, but according to one company the game may have cost nearly five million user hours last Friday.

Now Sleuth is always highly sceptical of such studies. After all, someone taking a few minutes out for a quick break of gobbling pills and chasing aliens doesn't necessarily mean they were less productive, just that productivity was more focused. Nevertheless the maths on the news is interesting for what it tells us about how we use the search giant.

According to the data from the software company Rescuetime the average user of Google spends only an average of 11 seconds per visit, which sounds low but when you think of it is quite a long time for a search, given that most users only really examine the first page of links.

The addition of the Pac-Man game bumped up that average time by 36 seconds on Friday. That's not a lot, but a huge increase over normal use.  

"Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)," the company says in a blog posting.

"$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 - 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power."

Posted by Iain Thomson on May 25, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Pac-Man game by embedding a free version of the classic game on its homepage for the next 48 hours.

The game is played by clicking 'insert coin' or just waiting for about ten seconds. It has been recreated in its original 8-bit format, using the same game logic, graphics, sounds and ghost personalities. The original bugs in the code have also been included.

"Pac-Man seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. They're both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood," wrote Marcin Wichary, senior UX designer and developer at Google on the company's blog.

"There's a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. You know, without actually needing any quarters."

The code also includes a subroutine that allows Ms Pac-Man to be activated for a second player when an extra coin is inserted. 

However, Star Wars fans will be disappointed that the company is honouring Pac-Man and ignoring another important anniversary. On 21 May 1980 'The Empire Strikes Back' opened in US cinemas and has gone on to be one of the most highly rated films of all time.

Posted by Iain Thomson on May 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

California may seem to the outside world like a haven of hippy liberalism but in fact it's a deeply split state, and the Republicans are taking note.

The coastal and city zones may be meccas for the more open-minded but most of California's land mass, and pretty much the same amount of people, are from the heartland interior and are very conservative. This makes the state a target for Republicans looking to make life difficult for President Obama and it has enlisted the technology industry's support.

Former eBay president Meg Whitman is running for the Governator's job with his party and Carly Fiorina is looking to win the Republican nomination to try and unseat Barbara Boxer. This weekend Whitman got the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Fiorina has already received the blessing of Teabagger favourite Sarah Palin.

Technology firms tend to be socially liberal, particularly as start-ups where every good hand counts, but fiscally conservative because no company likes paying taxes. While companies like Microsoft traditionally support Democratic politicians (excepting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's money for the Discovery Institute) Intel and Oracle have interests in both camps.

Whitman's record never showed much political interest but she's looking like the strongest Republican bet to take over the governorship of the state. She's helped by being able to fund a lot of her own effort without having to kowtow to lobbies and Cheney's support means the establishment's financial muscle could start throwing money at the campaign.

Carly Fiorina's campaign is less clear. She's running against Senator Barbara Boxer, although she hasn't clinched the nomination as yet. It'll be a tough race to win, particularly after the 'Demon Sheep' fiasco.

The biggest potential disruption factor is the Supreme Court ruling that corporations and individuals can give what they like to political campaigns. If the tech industry wants to throw its billions of dollars at this election the result could be very interesting.

Posted by Iain Thomson on May 17, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fears that new electronic body scanners cause an unacceptable invasion of privacy seem to have been confirmed by an unusual case in Miami.

A TSA employee has been charged with assault of a co-worker after he was put through the body scanner, which uses radar to view under clothes, during a training session and it displayed an image of his genitals. One particular employee then took to taunting Rolando Negrin about his apparent shortcomings in a specific area.

It all got too much for Negrin and he, in the police statement, "could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind." He confronted the employee in the parking lot, beat him with a police baton, forced him to his knees and then made him apologise.

The case may seem bizarre but it's what most of the rest of America has come to expect in Florida, the most crazed of US states. But it does question the bland reassurances of people installing the scanners here in the US and increasingly at international airports like Heathrow, that they aren't too intrusive and images aren't captured.

Sleuth's been through these scanners twice now, both times as part of volunteer tests that are sadly a memory. The screeners at Heathrow refused then to show subjects from the front, but just the back view was enough to show that basically you were seeing a naked body.

This isn't the first time these problems have happened in the short history of the deployment of the scanners. Given that they are of questionable utility and wouldn't even have stopped the failed underpants bomber (as he should forever be known as part of his punishment) we now need to rethink wide-scale deployment.

Posted by Iain Thomson on May 7, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1)

The FCC has made its next move to ensure net neutrality in the US, and as one might expect, everyone is chiming in on it.

For those of you back in the Olde Country, the FCC wants to bring in net neutrality by reclassifying ISPs and putting tighter restrictions to force them to treat all traffic equally. The telcos have countered by tossing up the "government regulation" boogeyman that has been so popular for whipping people into a fervor as of late. Here are just a few of the comments we've received from various sectors of late.

User rights group Public Knowledge likes the plan. Here's what co-founder Gigi B. Sohn had to say:

"We are generally very pleased with the FCC's statement this morning. We have said for months that the right path for the Commission to take would be to examine all the possibilities for the best way to protect consumers and guarantee the expansion of broadband. The method the FCC is expected to propose should be on the table, and we are glad it is."

Business advocacy group Competitive Enterprise Institute was not so high on the plan. From vice president of policy Wayne Crews:

"Genachowski and his fellow Commissioners should be moving toward greater freedom of competition in the communications marketplace - especially among next-generation technologies that the future of broadband will bring. Instead, the FCC seems desperate for any excuse to expand its authority just as the economic rationale for the agency's overarching regulatory role grows weaker and weaker."

It's not the entire business world that opposes the plan, however. There are more than a few heavy hitters who are in favour of the FCC's actions. A list of companies including Google, eBay, Amazon.com and EchoStar have signed a letter in support of the plan:

"We applaud the middle ground approach that you have proposed. We share your belief that this course will create a legally sound, lighttouch regulatory framework that benefits consumers, technology companies, and broadband internet access providers."

Posted by Shaun Nichols on May 7, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

When it comes to politicians and scandal in the UK it always used to be said that with the Conservatives it was sex while Labour fell prey to money. Here in the US the same holds largely true with Republicans and the Democratic parties, Bill Clinton notwithstanding.

It's been a bad week for the Republicans and their allies this week, after one of America's most prominent anti-gay Christian activists was photographed on holiday with a male prostitute (who was hired to carry his bags apparently.) So when a Florida blog broke a story showing video of a Republican state senator perusing porn during an abortion debate of all things all hell broke loose.

Senator Mike Bennett's office quickly issued a statement explaining that he had been checking email during the debate and had opened "one disturbing and offensive transmission" which he promptly deleted.

"Anyone who has ever used email understands that you don't control all incoming messages, and that subject lines often are used to mislead people into opening messages that defy decency. This past week, I found out just how it feels when you're on the other side of one," said the statement.

From what Sleuth's seen of the video it seems Senator Bennett has a point - judging from the footage he downloads a file, the image opens, he studies it for a few seconds and then closes it and gets back to work. But the case raises a couple of important issues.

Firstly it shows that there are still far too many people out there who haven't realised that the age of video is here. If you're on a crowded train, at a conference hall or in an office you need to be very careful what you look at on your computer. You'd be amazed how many stories break at trade shows because someone is using a laptop during a keynote and doesn't think about who is looking over their shoulder.

Secondly the case highlights bad email policy. To open a file you need to trust the person sending it, and expect to receive it. While there are graduations of trust this Senator obviously hadn't set them high enough.

Posted by Iain Thomson on May 5, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A lawsuit in the US is seeking harsh penalties against LG.

A firm called AU Optronics has filed suit in a US district court alleging patent infringement by the company regarding LCD screen construction. The suit is asking that the US bar LG from shipping LCD screens to the country until a licensing deal can be made.

Given the sizable legal resources LG possesses, it's not very likely that the company sees itself blacklisted in the US, but this can't be sitting well with the company regardless. LG was among the companies named and shamed in a recent price fixing scandal, and the latest news has sent the company's stock shares tumbling.

With the bad press piling up, LG may want to look into overhauling its corporate image. Regardless of the outcome in this patent case, the company is really starting to look bad in its market practices.

The news also comes amidst what should be an otherwise upbeat time for LG. The company has struck a deal with the makers of Iron Man 2 to offer a new line of smartphones based on those used in the move. The limited edition Android phones will sport a slide-out keyboard, touch-screen interface and special downloadable content which will include bonus movie materials.

Posted by Shaun Nichols on May 4, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oprah is one of those celebrities who has power that is a little unsettling.

A recommendation or interview can propel a book's sales into the stratosphere, if something becomes one of Oprah's favourite things it flies off the shelves and she can seemingly do no wrong, even though the Texan cattle producers tend to disagree.

Now Oprah has turned her ire on people who text or call while driving. Several states have laws governing mobile use while in the car and now the queen of daytime television has thrown her weight behind the campaign.

She devoted her program to "National No Phone Day," a campaign with rallies in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C today across the US demanding restrictions on in-car calls. She's also sponsoring an advert against calling in cars and is calling on viewers to take the no-phone pledge.

The cause is a good one. According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study 6,000 people were killed by distracted drivers in 2008, and half a million people injured. But the question remains as to whether it will work.

Here in California that job is done - only the police can use a mobile phone in their hand while driving, while everyone else now has to use a wireless headset. That's the law but people aren't obeying it as far as we can see, if the idiot who nearly sideswiped Sleuth on Market Street today was anything to go by.

Posted by Iain Thomson on May 1, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)