Has PSN's downtime ruined the PS3?

At some point last week, PSN finally came back online after 22 days of PS3 gamers being left in the cold, offline wilderness.

It's back, but it's still a bit broken. Playstation Store is closed. The servers seem a bit jumpy, and my PlayStation Android app doesn't really, er, work.

Sony have promised that when PSN is fully functioning, owners can choose two of five free games to make up for that rather unfortunate matter of everyone's credit card details now sitting on the hard drive of some dark room dwelling borderline sociopath somewhere in Ohio.

On top of that, Sony PS President Kaz Hirai and his fellow executives apologised publically with a bow; a deeply significant gesture in Japan's culture of humility and integrity.

Too little, too late? Well, it might be. But we can't even get our free games yet, because the Store is still down.

The whole sorry episode has seen Sony shambling through problems like these. It's no wonder that PS3 trade-ins have increased an astonishing 200% since PSN went down, according to EDGE magazine, based on official retail figures.

PS3 had been having a good year until last month. Between exclusives like Gran Turismo 5, LittleBigPlanet 2 and the Uncharted 3 announcement, the PS3 was hot property. It even threatened to topple the Xbox 360's dominance, often overtaking it in sales.

They say a car is only as fast as its driver, though. Give Vettel a Red Bull F1 car, you get victory. Give me a Red Bull F1 car, and I'll give you an explosive, bloody mess, not a world championship.

Well, Sony ain't Vettel. They've driven the PS3 machine from a stable, advantageous position into the dirt track, and it may take a lot more than a couple of hand-outs of old games (LittleBigPlanet 1? Really?) to restore gamers' faith.

At the end of the day, we're all grown ups here. We don't hold certain companies or consoles in some beloved, quasi-weird position of love. We just want to game. It's understandable that many have probably defected to Microsoft's Xbox, where the online is always on and the credit card details always un-leaked.

To win over the gaming crowd again, Sony need to do something special - and I'm not sure they have it in them, any more than gamers have it in them to trust the company again.

E3, the annual games convention usually bursting with announcements, is only a couple of weeks away - and for PS3, it could be do or die.

Google Chromebook: The glorious future, not the glorious present

One day, we'll use the internet for absolutely everything. Every TV channel, every phone call, every time we watch a film or write a document, it will be online.

For some, that future could be in four months. That's when the first Chromebooks release; notebooks running Google's new Chrome operating system. It promises to revolutionise computing because every single application, everything it does and everything you do on it is done through the internet.

The advantage is that Chrome has no programs other than its built-in internet explorer. Nothing is running in the background, and it can't install anything, either. That means no viruses, and no bulky, slow anti-virus software, no hard drive, nothing. It can do pretty much whatever a normal notebook can - but it does it all via the web. It's proper 'cloud' computing.

As long as you're on Wi-fi, you can create a Google text document (no Microsoft Word here) then save it online, while playing your music collection on an internet-based music player using files from your online storage.

Here's Google's video, summing up exactly what the new OS offers:

Google's slogan is 'Ready when you are'. Thing is, when on earth will that be?

While most of America and Asia enjoys speeds of between 10MB/s and 100MB/s, much of the UK still runs at very poor broadband speeds - think 1-4MB. Imagine trying to stream a film, work on several word documents and browse the internet while Twitter is open in the background. Normally, a bad internet connection would struggle with that. But when the computer's every thought has to be piped down the internet and back every second, the wireless router will just explode at anything under 5MB/s. Unluckily for us, that's what most of the UK has.

Even if you have a good internet connetion, there's the problem of being out of Wi-fi range - and it's not just a problem for us Brits. Most computers are badly hindered by not having an internet connection, but at least you can work on documents and access your own music, video and photo collections. With a Chromebook, if you're offline, you've got nothing but an expensive paperweight.

Wi-fi hotspot coverage is improving all the time, of course. But it's still nowhere near what it needs to be to make a Chromebook anything approaching convenient.

Chromebook is undoubtedly a brilliant idea. It takes just eight seconds to start up, because it has no programs to load. If you lose it, or break it, well, all your files are online. Just buy another and you won't even notice the transition.

And buying another won't be so painful, either. Prices haven't been announced yet, but because a Chromebook is essentially an internet explorer with a Wi-fi card and a screen, they are going to be much, much cheaper than normal notebooks.

That means Chromebook could eat into Windows' marketshare quickly. If it's half the price, twice as fast and does everything a normal laptop can do, why wouldn't it take off?

Yup, it’s internet speed. It's a shame - and shameful - that the UK has such poor internet speeds. It lags far, far behind the rest of the world. But even in America, fast internet is nowhere near universal, and even if it was, Wi-fi hotspots aren't. And Chromebook's 100% dependence on them outside of the house makes it awkward, at best, to take on the road in 2011.

Chromebook is the future. Years down the line, it will be probably be how computing works, not just on notebooks but on phones, games consoles and TVs. But not yet. Not until internet companies and governments – especially in the UK- catch up with Google's ambition.

Skype's buyout: The end of free web calls?

Yesterday, Microsoft stunned the technology world by announcing it had bought up internet video chat company Skype for an eye-watering $8.5billion.

That's a lot of dollars. Enough to buy about a squillion M&Ms, according to some rough maths.

Skype, though, is a free service which makes very little money. Its only source of income is from a few small adverts placed in its side panel.

So why has the American tech giant spent so much cash on a company which produces free software? And more importantly, does this mean the end for Skype as we know it?

Currently, Skype is available on all platforms - including Apple's iPhone and Google's Android products. While Microsoft would be crazy to suddenly block all competitors, we can surely expect that the best new features will come to Microsoft's much-vaunted, much-overlooked Windows Phone first. Perhaps some features might even stay exclusive to Windows PCs and mobiles.

Non-Windows users' losses are Xbox players' gains, of course. Skype represents a great opportunity to add another string to Xbox's bow - video calls over Kinect, with voice control, is a perfect example of the different features of the games console coming together to offer something exciting.

And then of course there's Live Messenger, the age-old instant chat service once known as MSN. While it has been offering free video calls for years, it would be a big suprise if Microsoft didn't work in the Skype experience (which has always bested Bill Gates' program) into its software. We might even see Skype calls from inside Hotmail, in much the same way that the company has started working in a light, free version of Office into its email service for all users, regardless of whether they own the full suite. This image shows off quite well what Microsoft has in mind for the service in terms of merging it into its own offerings:

All of this is very nice and happy, but the acquisition could mean trouble ahead for non Windows Skype users. Should Microsoft try too hard to monetise Skype, they could find the people flocking to another service, whilst excluding Apple and Android users from any future features could see Skype's marketshare dwindle at a time Microsoft need it to start making real money.

On that subject; Microsoft might try to split the market, offering a free version with very low quality video, stripped down to the basics, and a pay-per-use version with all the bells and whistles.

Equally, they could ram the service with adverts. Imagine having to watch an ad for Burger King every time you rang your girlfriend, or sit through a very loud, very long Call of Duty trailer just to ask your mum how to cook an omelette. There could even be ads during calls: "We interrupt this heartfelt apology to the love of your life to bring you this important message: Have you had an accident at work?".

As the immortal line in the Social Network goes, at the moment, it's cool. Start throwing ads around and it's no longer a party.

Microsoft has to tread very carefully not to ruin a great service by desperately trying to squeeze money from it, nor anger users on non-Windows devices by treating them as second class.

The reality is, Microsoft's acquisition of Skype smacks of desperation. Unable to capture the market themselves, or perhaps wracked with paranoia that cooler, hipper Google or Apple were going to snap Skype up and rule the world, they jerked their knee and opened their wallet just to spite their competitors.

For Microsoft, it looks almost a lose-lose situation. Keep Skype the same and they'll never get back their investment. Change it too much and they risk alienating the users and, er, never getting back their investment.

Play it right, though, and Skype could be the cornerstone of Microsoft's latest assault on the market, taking a bite out of Apple and helping Windows Phone and Xbox to scale new heights.

Just dont ruin Skype please Bill. Unlike Windows Phone, it's quite good at the moment.

Can the iPad really kill the newspaper?

It's 7am: you lean over your toast, pour some orange juice and flick through the morning paper, chewing over the news while chewing your breakfast.

Only, it's not a 'paper' at all, it's a big square lump of plastic, glass and silicon - an iPad, running the top news apps, flashing up the latest headlines.

For thousands, this scene is already a reality - but will a future where every newspaper is delivered digitally, instantly, and in a proper newspaper format, ever become the present?

What the iPad is packing in 2011 is already enough to put the traditional newspaper under threat if you're a Times reader. For £2 a week, you get the latest version of the paper streamed straight to your iPad every morning, with all the same headlines, pictures, text and layout as the traditional print version - except upgraded to be interactive. It literally marries the best bits of both formats into one impressive - and inexpensive - package.

Other news organisations have been slower off the mark, though. None of the others can boast a digital offering as complete or as comprehensive as Murdoch's outlet. But other papers are slowly coming on board, and it's only a matter of time before we see the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and The Sun get their papers digitised.

Even if we do get to the stage where every notable news outlet is offering their own complete-paper app, will it really spell the end for traditional ink and paper news?

Well, there are several hurdles to vault first. For one thing, iPads are expensive. Really, really expensive. Even if the tech-savvy, cash-rich of the 20-40 group gobble up pads and news apps like there's no tomorrow, that still leaves the rather sizeable group of everyone else who still like to read their news from a piece of paper.

Here in Sheffield, there are fiftysomething blokes in peaked caps whom I'm almost certain are never going to trade up their Daily Bilge for the iPad version while chatting about snuff in their local greasy spoon. Joking aside, there are literally millions of people who for one reason or another just won't take to reading newspapers in a digital form, even if it looks largely identical.

One option often mooted among the media is that papers should give free iPads out on a subscription model, like how mobile operators subsidise phones in exchange for your loyalty. To anyone with an interest in news but without the ability to stretch to £600, this is likely to be much more popular.

But even then, asking people to put another monthly subscription on their overheads, let alone carry a hefty slice of news device everywhere they go, is a big step.

But these are teething problems. The fact is, the iPad, Kindle and Android tablets are increasingly becoming home to a like-for-like version of traditional newspapers, complete with turnable pages and all the same content of a newspaper. One day, you'll wake up and each newspaper and magazine you subscribe to will have been wirelessly streamed to you in your sleep.

Whether that really means that one day, one truly sad day, the printing presses really will grind to a halt remains to be seen.

But you can be sure that if that day comes, you'll probably read the news on your iPad.