Blu-ray making greenbacks, sales up 72% to start '09

Congratulations Blu-ray, you might be ready to step into the zone of mass market acceptance, as NPD's retail tracking service found Q1 sales of standalone players up 72 percent over last year, moving over 400,000 units with a 14% increase in dollar sales. Last year sure the format survived mad fights but high prices were a setback; fast forward to March when an online survey of 6,994 people found awareness has reached 90 percent in the last six months, with customers fascinated by its updates. Although BD-Live is looking more and more like an unneeded gimmick, the real facts are people care about cost and average player prices dropped from $393 last year to $261 in 2009. The "Blu-ray report" suggests the magic number is $214 for folks like Shawn Marion, so more room might be needed to breeze, and could come as soon as this fall around the time Vizio's player finally appears. It might be tragic for Vudu, CBHD and others trying to get a foothold, but Blu-ray's magic wand is word of mouth - so while much talked about, but much lower selling tech like Kindle is happy as hell to get a record deal, right now Blu-ray's unique skills can't be compared.

Amazon Announces Kindle DX! (hands–on)

We just got a quick first in-person look at Amazon's new Kindle DX. It looks bigger! Some quick thoughts on the device:

* It's not really drastically different from the Kindle 2. Not in any way. The ability to auto-rotate is nice, and the big screen is definitely easier on the eyes when it comes to reading newspapers, but largely this is the same beast.
* The screen looks great. It may just be the demo units here, but the blacks seem to be darker than they are on the Kindle 2. We'll have to hold this judgment for when we've got a review unit in our hands.
* Screen refresh is largely unchanged. You'll still see those black flashes when you turn the page.
* The keyboard seems better to us than the Kindle 2's. The keys are more raised, and there's more real estate for typing. It's still not an awesome experience, but it's improved.
* The size difference really is notable. The DX is a large device. It's not the kind of thing you'll be throwing into a purse, though it's not so large that you wouldn't consider it over the Kindle 2. In fact, if we had to choose right now, the Kindle DX wins hands-down.
* $489 is a lot of money for a device like this. Amazon is really going to have to show some considerable cuts on pricing for their deals with the NYT / schools to make this attractive to end-users.

iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 now available

Apple just dropped iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5, just over one week after its last revision and about half the time they've put between the previous updates. You know the drill by now, we don't know yet what the update entails, but we'll let you know when we do. Oh, and just like last time, it appears iTunes 8.2 is required.

Video of the Week!

Controlling a Radio Control Helicopter with an iPhone

What can you possibly do with an iPhone? Play games, surf the internet, listen to music, take photos and of course make phone calls. But it is just amazing to see what Joshua Ziering has used iPhone for. He took an iPhone, a radio-controlled helicopter, a Wi-Fi router and mixed it up with the iPhone’s accelerometer and touch interface to built a R/C helicopter controller. He made a custom software for “flight interface” on the iPhone. Watch the video below to see the iPhone controlled R/C helicopter in action.

Looks like Microsoft decided to pull the trigger just a hair early on this one, Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 is now available to the public at large

Looks like Microsoft decided to pull the trigger just a hair early on this one. Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 is now available to the public at large. If you haven't gotten your hands on it, now's your chance to try it out well into 2010. What are you still reading this for? Hit up the read link to download.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]