Nintendo have announced today that as usual they will be releasing a redesign of their handheld players. The DS is the latest to have the pleasure (recently a second redesign of the GBA was released, named the GameBoy Micro), and apparently the unit will be significantly thinner and lighter, and have a brighter screen.

This redesign does make sense commercially for Nintendo, as by releasing a redesign they can sell a ‘new’ device which will increase their sales, without significant R&D costs as it is essentially the same product. You have to question the whole DS idea though. The user experience between the on the PSP is much better, with many people finding the touchscreen a gimmick and clumsy. The PSP offers significantly more features, including playback of video stored on both memory sticks and UMDs and a much larger, better looking screen. I know several owners of the Nintendo DS who are unhappy with it. I do not know a single PSP user not completely satisfied.

I used to be a big fan of Nintendo, and I bought the GameCube on its second day out in the UK, and before that the N64. However, they have been suffering a major decline in recent years, and it looks like this will continue with their apparent refusal to incorperate home media centre features into the Revolution, as Xbox 360 have and Sony will do with the PS3. I also found this video on Google Video of a programme on BBC3 about the questionable ethics which Nintendo has worked in the past and is continuing to operate. It’s not particularly good, but it raises some interesting points.

Google has agreed to censoring the search results obtained using its Google China search engine in return for being allowed to host their service on local servers. The Chinese Government is often criticised for setting up the ‘Great Firewall of China’, and has warned Google that it may be blocked before now, as Google serves up results relating to sensitive subjects for the Communist regime, including those relating to the events in Tiananmen Square.

MSN and Yahoo! are among the international search engines to have already pandered to China’s demands to help censor the internet, as well as Baido, the local market leader. Today, Google released a statement to CNN saying:

In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy,” a Google statement said.
While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.

As an emerging economic powerhouse, China is developing rapidly, thanks in no small measure to the Internet,” Google said. “We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China.

I can understand Google’s motivation for agreeing to censor their Chinese search results. According to Google Blogoscoped, Google already blocks Nazi websites in Germany, where they are illegal. If Google want to operate within a country that has censoring laws, no matter where they lie on the spectrum of curbing freedom of speech, they have to follow them. The question for me is whether or not they should operate from countries such as China with laws clearly designed to keep the existing government in power, and to inhibit dissent from the ‘party line’. It is a grey area, as on the one hand they are indirectly supporting the policies of the Chinese Government, yet on the other hand, they are providing a very useful service to the Chinese people.

I really have no idea what the right thing to do is, but there will be many people questioning whether Google has adhered to its motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ in this decision.

I was looking on the YouTube website, and came across this video of a demonstration of the MacBook Pro at Macworld. I thought it was quite interesting.

It has just been confirmed that Disney will buy Pixar for $7.4 billion. Steve Jobs (yes, that Steve Jobs) founded Pixar in the 1980s, and it has now become the leader in computer animation, with films such as the Toy Story franchise and Finding Nemo. These have been produced with funding and distribution from Disney, and since Disney stopped producing old-fashioned cartoon films a few years ago, many have seen this takeover as making good business sense, if not inevitable.

All this means that Jobs pockets a good few billion bucks, but it does have possibly more important repercussions for the film and digital media industries. Some Pixar content is already available on iTunes for purchase and transfer to the 5G iPod, but Jobs will almost certainly use his place on the Disney board to argue for Disney blockbusters to be added to the collection, which would give a significant boost to iTunes and also encourage other studios to follow suit.

Opera Mini, Opera’s free browser designed for Java-enabled phones was released today. It aims to replace the often less than perfect default browser that comes with mobiles, by using rendering techniques which optimise the viewing of ordinary webpages on a very small screen.

I downloaded it and installed it on my reasonable Sony Ericsson K700i. It worked fine, except when I tried to visit the new Google Mobile personalised homepage and Gmail. At that point, I was hardly delighted to get an ‘xml parsing error’ or something sounding equally irritating. This problem, despite the fact that Opera has just done a deal with Google to put a Google search box on the browser homepage. You would have thought the two could talk to each other to make sure that one’s service was compatible with the other’s browser. The end result of this problem is that I will now probably not be using Opera Mini.

So the whole thing is a bit pointless really. Still, if you don’t use those Google services, it’s probably worth a go.

Google seems to have a thing about leaving things in beta for years, no matter how popular they are or any other factor. Founded in 2002, Google News must be used daily by millions of people, and Google has finally decided that it can leave Beta. If you don’t know what it is, Google says:

Google News is a highly unusual news service in that our results are compiled solely by computer algorithms, without human intervention. As a result, news sources are selected without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, enabling you to see how different organisations are reporting the same story. This variety of perspectives and approaches is unique among online news sites, and we consider it essential in helping you stay informed about the issues that matter most to you.

So there you are. They added a new feature today; individual recommended stories, using algorithms similar to their personalised search feature. The Official Google Blog has more details on the new feature and Google News here.

Toshiba has created a hard disk so small that six could fit on a business card. They plan to implant it into phones, giving them greater scope as music players. (picture from vnunet.com)

At the moment, its not actually that exciting, as the capacity is only 4GB, which is no better than flash memory chips which have no moving parts, so are more robust. However, with perpendicular recording techniques coming in for hard disks, Toshiba reckon that they will be able to fit 10GB on the tiny device. That would make it a great option for phone music players.

While we’re on this subject, I thought I would share my views with you on the subject of phones with mp3 playback. The only way that this particular convergence is going to have great success is if the phone is implanted into the music player rather than the other way around. In the age of bluetooth headsets, it would not be necessary to clamp the entire mp3 player to your ear.

For example, think how desirable an ‘iPod Nano Mobile’ would be (certainly much more so than their feeble ROKR). Just a little suggestion to Apple, why not use the click-wheel to dial, as on the old fashioned phones with the dialling wheel? If they did that, I’d be their first customer.

The BBC had an interesting program on Google on last Friday, called ‘The World according to Google’. It is now available on the BBC website here. It doesn’t have much new material in it, but it has some interesting talking heads, including Marissa Meyer, a Google Executive, talking about the challenges that Google faces, including click fraud. A good introduction for those people not already abreast of what Google’s exponential expansion entails, both for itself and for the rest of the world.

It turns out that the reason the Million Dollar Homepage has been down for the past week is that it has been hit by a massive DoS attack. The BBC has details.

This is my original post on the subject:

The Million Dollar Homepage
has been much covered in the media recently. Founded by skint British student
Alex Tew as a way to fund his university education, it sold pixel space on the
site for the rate of $1/pixel with a minimum purchase of 100 pixels. It worked,
and Tew made his million dollars, selling pixels to companies such as The Times
and Orange.However, I have noticed that the Million Dollar Homepage has not been
online of late. This could make some advertisers very angry, considering they
have paid for their adverts to be on the site for at least three years. This
could be just a temporary outage (although it was down yesterday as well) or it
could be that Tew has made his quick buck and has now gone to do something
else.I admire him for the idea, but there could be an awful lot of trouble if he
doesn’t manage to get the site back up and running.

I hope for his sake he can sort it out.

Jacques Chirac, everyone’s favourite French president, has announced something interesting.

No, that’s not the news.

In a speech, he referred to an EU search engine in development, known as Quaero (latin for I seek). It will be able to ‘understand audio’ and have advanced translation technologies. Chirac sees it as a European answer to the ‘challenge’ posed by Google and Yahoo. It is funded by a combination of governments and companies, including Thomson, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. It will function on many different platforms, including computers, handhelds and even TVs.

I’m not sure its as interesting for us Britishers as it is for the rest of Europe. It’s obviously designed with a heavy focus on translation, presumably to open up the US web to non-English speaking Europe. We don’t have that problem, so I expect I will continue to Google along with the rest of Britain for at least the forseeable future (not that I have much choice - any alpha let alone beta looks a very long way off).