Three remodeled Sony Stores are popping up soon, in California, New York, and Texas.
Consumers can check out the transformed Sony retail experience on December 3 at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif., the Houston Galleria in Texas, and the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, N.Y.
When Sony quietly dropped the name SonyStyle this year, it was merely the beginning of a major shift in retail strategy for the consumer-electronics giant. Things shifted even further when Sony shut down more than a dozen of its retail stores in the U.S. amid a painful fiscal year. There was hope within the company that a new Sony store design would reinvigorate the consumer experience, which has fallen to the wayside as rival Apple continues to build a juggernaut retail phenomenon.
This means more than just the passing of a now-obsolete machine. It's the death of another little bit of cool the world will never get back.
I've always felt a connection to the typewriter. As a writer, I banged out my first spectacularly melodramatic and amateurish stories back in high school on a mechanical Smith Corona that had been discarded from my father's office in favor of new electrics.
I would move up to a word processor within mere months, but I would always miss the satisfying tactile sensation of banging away at those keys amid that snare drum patter as the misaligned keys pushed through a fading ribbon to the clean sheet of rolled paper. It didn't hurt my affection for the ole qwerty beast that my hometown is Milwaukee--where, in 1866, Christopher Latham Sholes invented what would evolve into the 20th century typewriter.
When I learned that the typewriter had passed into antiquity, it struck me that its replacements--from the desktop computer and the laptop to the smartphone and the iPad--will never muster the ambiance and sense of literary history graced upon the typewriter.
You want proof? Take a second and try to picture Beat Generation poet Jack Kerouac blowing the thick purple smoke from his "J" over a bottle of bourbon and the brushed aluminum and white keys of an iMac. "On the Road" would've hit the road without its rebellious aura.
If Ian Fleming had sat down at his desk on his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica to bang out "The Spy Who Loved Me" on a Dell Netbook, James Bond would've ended up drinking Kool-Aid, stirred and not shaken.
Many cubicle hounds wish they could work in a more open office environment. You can't get much more open than the office environment at Nude House, an alleged Web software developer in Buckinghamshire, England. If stories currently circulating the Web are to be believed, the company is looking for female coders and salespeople of any gender who are willing to work in a completely naked office setting. That's right, not even shoes are allowed.
Now, we're almost willing to bet our skivvies this will turn out to be some sort of viral Internet spoof. If it doesn't, just think of the weight basic office decisions would take on. Aeron chair? No way; that mesh material will leave marks. Hot coffee in the break room? Maybe something room temperature would be safer. Best to keep that stapler at a distance, too.
With a name like Nude House, you might be expecting something titillating like an adult Web content or online strip poker. The company's main product--again, if Nude House doesn't exist just to test the gullibility of the Web-going public--is actually a somewhat old-fashioned technology called "Move Your Mouse" that enables text and additional images to pop up when a mouse is waved over an online picture.
Nude House founder Chris Taylor says he has been a naturist for about three years. As the name implies, naturists prefer to be naked outside. You can imagine that might be difficult in England's rainy climate, especially when lots of sensitive computer and electrical equipment is required to do the job.
According to Nude House, the office will feature warm temperatures, showers, and a collection hamper for soiled sitting material. I'll bet Microsoft never has to deal with soiled sitting material.
With April Fools' Day so recently upon us, I had to check in directly with Nude House over e-mail. "Yes," he insisted, "it is for real." The Nude House Web site looks like it was designed in 1996 by a middle-schooler with a basic HTML manual, so you can see where my skepticism comes from. The photo of a massive CRT monitor and naked salesgirls doesn't exactly project professionalism either.
This week, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, LG Electronics announced the launch of its new Netbook, following on the heels of the LG-X110 Netbook released last year.
Offering an integrated 3G HSPA connection and a 160GB hard drive, the LG-X120 appears to be a worthy contender in the Netbook market.
LG includes what the company refers to as a "Smart-On" interface, which basically allows the user to access the most frequently used programs just a few seconds after hitting the power button, without waiting for the operating system to completely load on the desktop.
The displays of the world are getting wider. For those of us who work, this is not progress. Sure, wide-screen computer screens look cool, but in the real world of working on laptops, a wide-screen display is an ergonomic step backwards.
Before I slam the move to wide-screen computers, I will gladly admit that for entertainment content, wide-screen works. Our eyes are side-by-side, after all, and having a story unfold in a way that more closely respects how we see gives a more engrossing, absorbing experience. Wide-screen plasma and LCD television sets make sense, as do CinemaScope movie theaters.
But when we have work to do, the fact that our eyes are set up to spot a herd of jackals approaching us over the plain becomes irrelevant. For most people, the world of work is in portrait mode, and wide-screen displays offer scant benefits.
Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line).
