Crave

Apple's delay in shipping the 27-inch iMac may have more to do with the sheer volume of sales than any problems with the graphics chips, according to numbers from market research firm NPD.

(Credit: Apple)

Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, told CNET on Monday that for October and November, Mac desktop sales were up 74 percent over the same period last year. While NPD did not break the numbers down by desktop model, it's clear the iMac is a top seller.

In fact, the 27-inch iMac appears to be selling so well, it could account for the shipping delay that Apple apologized for on Sunday.

"It's not surprising Apple would be having problems supplying them [iMacs]," said Baker. "I can't imagine in their wildest dreams they would have thought they would sell like this."

Reports over the weekend suggested Apple was delaying shipments of the 27-inch iMac due to reported problems with the graphics card. While those issues remain, it may not be the root cause of the delay.

The surge in Mac sales was not limited to the 27-inch model. Baker said that the 21.5-inch iMac and the Mac mini are also doing very well.

Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster estimated in a research note to clients on Monday that Apple could sell 2.9 million to 3 million Macs for the current quarter, according to a report on AppleInsider. Munster cautioned that approximately 50 percent of all Mac sales for the quarter happen in December, so that number could change.

Mac notebooks saw a 5 percent increase for October and November, while iPod sales were down 11 percent year-over-year for the same time period.

The Nook

(Credit: Barnes & Noble)

Demand is so strong for the Nook that Barnes & Noble has begun telling new customers not to expect delivery of the soon-to-be-released e-reader until the second week of December.

When the nation's largest bookseller unveiled the device in October, customers placing early preorders were told they could expect the Nook to ship by the end of November; customers placing preorders now are being told they can expect shipment by December 11. The new shipping date was first reported by Brighthand.com.

A Barnes & Noble representative confirmed the December 11 shipping date but disputed the characterization of the new shipping date as a delay.

"Like with any hot, new consumer device, the sooner you order it, the sooner you receive it," said Mary Ellen Keating, senior vice president of corporate communications and public affairs. "We had high expectations for the Nook and couldn't be happier" with preorder sales. However, she declined to say how many of the e-readers had been preordered.

"We are working hard to meet demand for the holidays," she said.

Earlier this month, start-up Spring Design filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, alleging the bookseller misappropriated its trade secrets in the design of the Nook. Spring Design had announced its Alex e-reader just days before Barnes & Noble formally unveiled the Nook. Both e-readers use the Android operating system and combine an e-ink screen with a color touch screen. It seeks both monetary damages and a halt to sales of the Nook.

The $259 Nook, a challenger to Amazon.com's Kindle, will join an expected boom in e-reader sales. In a report released last month, Forrester Research raised its 2009 forecast for e-reader sales in the United States to 3 million units from its previous prediction of 2 million sales. Forrester also expects Amazon's Kindle to command about 60 percent of the e-reader market in 2009, compared with 35 percent for Sony's Reader.

Adobe Systems has delayed by a few weeks the release of some upgrades to its Photoshop.com online service and to its high-end Photoshop CS4 software.

The upcoming Photoshop site upgrades include features to import address book entries from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail to improve photo sharing; an uploading tool to synchronize software on a person's PC with the version stored online; and new pricing options. They had been due Tuesday but now will go live "later this month," Adobe said in a statement Monday night.

Also slipping a few weeks is the Photoshop CS4 Configurator, a tool to let people create customized control panels for the image-editing software. It had been due in October, but now it and another new CS4 option, the Pixel Bender filter gallery, won't debut until later in November, John Nack, senior product manager for Photoshop, said in a blog post. Pixel Bender is a technology enabling high-performance special effects that Adobe hopes will be easier to use than earlier plug-in filter technology.

"We decided to give both tools a little extra bake time, so look for them to appear on Adobe Labs within the next two weeks," Nack said. "Also stay tuned for a Camera Raw update for CS4 that'll include a number of nice little surprises."

Update 3 p.m. PT: T-Mobile confirmed its Android phone is still on track, too.

Google denied a report Monday that phones using its Android software have been delayed to 2009.

The Street reported the delay, citing an unnamed source. But Google denied the report.

A view of Google's Android mobile-phone software, demonstrated at Google I/O.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

"We're still on track to announce Android-powered phones this year. Some of our partners are publicly stating that they plan to ship Android phones in the fourth quarter," Google said in a statement.

That's little surprise, given that Android leader Andy Rubin last week said phones using the soon-to-be-mostly-open-source software will be "available in the second half of this year" just last week at the Google I/O conference.

T-Mobile plans to ship an Android phone later in 2008, Chief Executive Hamid Akhavan said in February.

T-Mobile confirmed on Monday that its Android-based phone is still on track to arrive in the fourth quarter.

One source of possible Android confusion could be that although Google and various partners are collectively writing the Android software, Google isn't the only one supporting it.

Android software overseen by Google will appear in the first Android phones, but Android software overseen by partner Wind River Systems will appear in later models expected in the first quarter of 2009, said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Linux seller and Android partner Wind River.

"They (Google) did the first phone. They carefully handheld it all the way through," Bruggeman said. "We've got the rest."

Wind River supports Linux in embedded computing devices but will support the full Android software "stack," which extends to higher-level software as well.

"When Android is open-sourced, we will support the entire stack," Bruggeman said. "We've ramped up our infrastructure. We are resourced to be able to support Android and not just Linux--the messaging and telephony and e-mail and browsing."

Barely a month after Jeff Bezos' very public mea culpa over delays, Amazon's Kindle is apparently back on the virtual shelves.

The e-tailer's listing page for the e-book reader indicates that it's in stock and available for purchase, at the usual $399 plus free two-day shipping.

After the Kindle had sold out so quickly after its launch in November last year, there had been some speculation that the delays were caused by production problems or were planned deliberately to stoke more demand. But as Craver David Carnoy indicated, it was probably just a victim of holiday shopping madness.

This is just getting silly.

The makers of the popular Slingbox have been promising the SlingCatcher for almost a year and half now. And once again, the projected release date will come and go quietly.

Sling Catcher delayed again. This time, they're crossing their fingers for a release date sometime before the end of this year.

(Credit: Sling Media)

Gregg Wilkes, vice president of sales for Sling Media--which is now owned by EchoStar Communications--told a frustrated customer in an e-mail that the goal to release the device during the second quarter of this year will not be met.

Wilkes writes: "Will the catcher ship in Q2? No. We are upgrading the user experience and making enhancements to the feature set. These may or may not all ship at the same time. Will the Catcher ship in '08? All indications point to this happening in 2008."

The SlingCatcher is a set-top box, separate from the Slingbox, that brings video content from a Slingbox to another TV in a house, or from an external hard drive. The SlingCatcher also lets users project Web content to a TV screen, either wired or wirelessly, through an application called SlingProjector.

The device was originally introduced at CES 2007, and shown again at CES 2008, which was when Sling was floating the Q2 time frame.

If you happened to have visited Amazon's Web site today, you might have noticed that a large message from Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, was plastered across the home page of the site. Basically, it was a big fat apology for Amazon's inability to ship its Kindle electronic book reader in a timely fashion.

Ever since it quickly sold out at launch, a lot of folks have been speculating about just how many Kindles Amazon had sold and whether the long delays in shipping were a case of production problems or a PR ploy designed to make the Kindle appear hotter than it really is.

Well, the note seems to speak for itself. People want the Kindle, and Amazon hasn't been able to make them fast enough. All that said, I still think this was a case of the company rushing to get the product out before last year's holiday season--and failing to iron out all the production issues before it went to market.

Of course, Amazon is new to the consumer electronics-manufacturing game, so this isn't shocking. The fact is, this is what happens when you're a pro at selling crap but not at producing it. Comments?

(Credit: Microsoft)

If you ordered one of those Valentine's Day Zunes, there's good news and bad news.

The bad news is that Microsoft is running way behind on shipments and may miss the holy Feb. 14 deadline "due to some issues in our fulfillment center," according to an e-mail cited by Gizmodo. The good news is that the same e-mail says Microsoft is refunding the entire amount to those whose orders are in jeopardy--meaning that the media player will be free regardless of whether it gets there on time.

A sales rep confirmed the unfortunate situation--or fortunate, if your relationship has gone sour while waiting for delivery--telling Crave last night that the refund applies to those who bought the special red 80GB Zune by Feb. 4. So no, don't think you can order one now and get it for free. We already thought of trying that.

Sigma's DP1 prototype, shown at PMA in March 2007

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Sigma has delayed the debut of the DP1, a high-end compact camera with an unusually large image sensor, to redesign its image-processing technology.

The Japanese company had shown off the DP1 at the Photokina show in 2006 and later at the Photo Marketing Association show in March 2007, where it said it planned to ship the DP1 in the summer. The camera's sensor, made by start-up Foveon, is as large as the one used in Sigma's SD line of SLR cameras, offering the potential for much greater sensitivity and dynamic range than the much smaller chips typically used in compact cameras.

By the summer, the DP1 design had reached "pre-beta" development stage, said Kazuto Yamaki, Sigma's chief operating officer, in a note published Friday on the company's Web site. But after testing and comparing images with those produced by Sigma's SD line of SLR cameras, the company concluded it needed to back up and redesign some elements.

The sensor size on Sigma's DP1 compared to a common 1/2.5-inch size.

(Credit: Sigma)

"The images looked OK, but they clearly did not have the special image qualities that we see in our SD cameras: delicate, refined, and three-dimensional images rendered in fine detail," Yamaki said. "After a careful evaluation, we found that the image-processing pipeline we had developed for the DP1 was not ideal for achieving the best image quality as it was intended for the faster image processing speed, and we needed to make major revisions to it...After long and sometimes intense discussions, we finally decided to change the entire image processing pipeline."

The camera prototype had been designed with a 28-mm-equivalent f/4 lens and the Foveon sensor. Image processing was handled by Sigma's True chip, short for Three-layer Responsive Ultimate Engine, which Sigma boasted was four times faster than alternative products.

What of that technology will remain isn't clear. "We had to change some of the specifications that we had announced," Yamaki said.

The redesigned camera entered alpha tests during the beginning of November for "what we feel will be the final design," Yamaki said in the note, but said it's not yet possible to predict when the camera will go on sale. "I deeply apologize for the length of the time you have been holding out for the DP1 and appreciate your patience very much. I know it is difficult for some of you to wait a little more time, but we're working very hard to deliver a camera that we think will be worth the wait."

(Via The Online Photographer.)