Steve Jobs action figure sports youthful '70s mop top

     'Steve Jobs forever' reads this promo pic for Japan-based Legend Toys' latest action figure.

It's been just over two years since Steve Jobs died, and it's probably not surprising that there's more than one action figure of the Apple icon.
Japan's Legend Toys has released its latest ultra-realistic 12-inch figure of Jobs, but this one is the young brash executive from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Available with mop top and double-breasted suit, the mini-Jobs comes with an amazingly detailed 1:6-scale version of the Apple I as an accessory.
The Young Steve Jobs is based on the entrepreneur's life from 1976 to 1984, and he's pretty groovy-looking in a refined lava lamp kind of way. Coincidentally, that time frame is when AM airwaves were filled with divinely smooth music known as yacht rock. But I digress.

The attention to detail is still there with the latest Jobs. Its Apple I is actually made of laser-cut, engraved wood and comes with a keyboard, motherboard, and cabling.
"We think all the Steve fans will want to collect these historic symbols to remember him and to witness the history of the legend," says Legend. "We think you can feel that we are not just making a commodity -- all our artists including sculptors, painters, tailors and all our staff are working wholeheartedly to recreate our spiritual mentor."
Apple doesn't seem to mind these tributes from Legend. Although a Hong Kong toy company stopped making its Jobs figures in response to pressure from Apple, Legend said it hasn't heard anything from the computer giant so far.
The Young Steve Jobs action figure will go on sale in late November, priced at $149.99.

Super-authentic 'Star Trek' fan series warps into Kickstarter

"Star Trek Into Darkness" was a monster in the "Star Trek" franchise. It made over $460 million worldwide, more than double its $190 million budget.
That's great and all, but to be honest I had a better time watching a humble fan-made episode in a Web series called "Star Trek Continues" that was shot for some $40,000.
For fans of the original "Star Trek," this tribute has mind-blowing authenticity. Now it has beamed into Kickstarter with a campaign to raise $100,000 to make three more episodes.
Produced by Farragut Films and DracoGen Strategic Investments, the nonprofit series stars Vic Mignogna as Captain Kirk, Todd Haberkorn as Mr. Spock, and features the late James Doohan's son Chris in his father's role as Scotty as well as Grant Imahara of "Mythbusters" as Lieutenant Sulu.

                                          (Credit: Star Trek Continues)

There have been many fan-produced remakes of "Star Trek," but few can rise to the level of faithfulness to the original that "Star Trek Continues" has shown. The idea is to continue the adventures of the Enterprise crew during its five-year mission.
Its first episode, "Pilgrim of Eternity," featured Michael Forest reprising his role as the Greek god Apollo from "Who Mourns for Adonais?," originally broadcast in 1967 as part of Star Trek's second season. Another blast from the past is Marina Sirtis, known as Deanna Troi on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," who provides the Enterprise computer's voice.
The episode was shot at a 10,000 square-foot warehouse that hosts impressively accurate reproductions of the Enterprise bridge, transporter room, sickbay, and other classic sets.
"It was an enormous undertaking to get off the ground," Mignogna tells CNET. "And now we've got all pieces on the ground, so subsequent episodes won't be as expensive.
"There are a lot of elements that went into the authenticity. One of the big differences between 'Star Trek Continues' and all of the other fan shows is that we have people in charge of the different areas who are actually production professionals. They're not just fans. They have training and professional experience in their respective areas."
Mignogna, who directed and wrote "Pilgrim of Eternity," has been doing film work since college, and is known as a voice actor on titles such as "Fullmetal Alchemist," "Dragonball Z," and "Pokemon."

Activision stock buyout allowed, sans shareholder vote

Activision Blizzard, publisher of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, has won a key ruling in its bid to buy out Vivendi's share in the game company.

The Delaware Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Activision Blizzard could commence the $5.83 billion stock-buyback plan it announced earlier this year without first getting approval from shareholders. According to Bloomberg, which was first to report on the ruling, Chief Justice Myron Steele determined that a shareholder vote was not necessary, since the deal "is not a merger, business combination, or similar transaction."
Vivendi's divestment in the company will total $8.2 billion, with Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, along with several partners, paying over $2.3 billion in a separate transaction to obtain an approximately 25 percent ownership of the game publisher. If all goes as planned, Vivendi would own 12 percent of Activision after the deal, down from 61 percent now.

Nvidia CEO: We intend to keep investing in Shield

  
     
Nvidia's Shield gaming device is no one-off project for the company.
When asked about whether Nvidia would work on a follow-up to the Android-gaming device, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang would only say that he intends to continue investing in Shield.

"We developed (Shield) as a platform to nurture and grow the Android gaming market," Huang told CNET on Thursday. "To bring great games to Android will take multiple years. It's a long-term endeavor for us."
As Nvidia sees it, more sophisticated-looking games on Android will drive the need for more powerful processors, which is where the company's Tegra 4 chip comes in.
Huang declined to comment on how well Shield has sold, only noting that the company has "modest expectations after a modest investment."
The company's Tegra business, where a bulk of growth is supposed to come from, dropped more than 54 percent to $243.9 million in the third quarter as the company pushed back shipments of its Tegra 4 chip. But Huang said he believes the business is on an upswing, pointing to the 111 percent gain over the second quarter. He projected another period of sequential growth in the fourth quarter.
Nvidia earlier on Thursday reported a third-quarter profit of $118.7 million, or 20 cents a share, down 37 percent from a year ago. Its revenue also fell 12.5 percent to just over $1 billion. Its results, however, managed to top Wall Street expectations.
While Huang touted the broad base of potential customers for Tegra, he conceded that Nvidia would have a smaller presence in high-profile phones found in the US. He said most of the opportunity comes from overseas phones, and noted that the Tegra 4 is powering the flagship phone in China.

Mozilla: No Firefox phones in US

      Mozilla leader and "Chief Lizard Wrangler" Mitchell Baker at Mobile World Congress in 2012

SAN FRANCISCO -- If you're a Firefox OS fan and you live in the United States, you're going to have to wait a bit longer to get your Firefox phone.
Earlier this year, Mozilla's then-CEO Gary Kovacs said at Mobile World Congress that Firefox OS phones would be coming to Sprint in 2014. At the OpenMobile Summit here Wednesday morning, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker appeared to backtrack on that comment.
"Currently, there are no plans to launch in the US," Baker told CNET's editor-in-chief, Paul Sloan, during a fireside-style conversation in front of an audience of around 100 people. She then clarified that Mozilla will have developer phones for the US market, which it has already sold more than 1,300 of on eBay.
After the on-stage conversation, Baker told CNET that there are no changes in Mozilla's plans from what Kovacs announced.
Mozilla's vice president of mobile, Andreas Gal, told CNET in a statement that while Mozilla is "actively exploring" operator and manufacturer partnerships for the US market, the ZTE Open on eBay remains its only US offering so far.

In talking about Firefox OS, Baker stressed the importance of the company's strategy to market to developing countries. Something that the Apple and Google duopoly has missed, she said, is the importance of price.
"For most of the world, price is really important. But for us, a $500 phone, how many of us have one," she asked rhetorically. "How many cents you can shave off the bottom of the phone is the driving factor," she said.
Baker also emphasized that her belief, and the belief of Mozilla, is not that is there room in the mobile world for more than just Apple and Google, but that the very concept of mobile is "an anomaly."
Mobile, she said, "means a particular operating system, an app model, it means essentially Apple and Google. But if you think of [smartphones] as computers," she said, and not as phones, "you get a sense of their potential."
This, she said, is merging with the coming world of massive data, where most objects, such as the chair you're sitting on or the room you're in, are Internet-enabled.
"Some experiences will look better on a big form factor. So, we want an experience that's seamlessly interoperable with the data," she said.

Facebook releases updated Messenger app for iOS, Android

Contacts on Facebook's updated Messenger app.

(Credit: Facebook)


Facebook on Wednesday released an updated iOS Messenger app and announced that its Android version would become more broadly available after two weeks in limited testing.
The updated standalone app, which was released for Android in late October, sports a new look and functionality. Among those updates is the ability to see which friends are currently using the mobile app, with the help of an icon that appears in a users' contact list.
The update also adds the capability of communicating with Messenger app users who aren't Facebook friends, using only their registered telephone number. It also introduces a fresh navigation look for accessing recent conversations, settings, and other people using the app.
"As more and more people use Facebook to connect with their friends on mobile, we are focused on building the best mobile products," Facebook said of the update. "Facebook messaging started as a desktop chat experience, but when it comes to messaging on mobile, people want something faster and lighterweight."
The renovation is part of Facebook's effort to make Messenger the go-to smartphone app for instantly getting a hold of friends and address book contacts. Along with enhancements in speed, function, and design, the updated app is based on a "mobile-to-mobile" philosophy that intends to make sure people using the app are immediately available to each other on their smartphones

Android, e-ink YotaPhone mashup arrives December

Yota Devices, the company behind the Android and e-ink YotaPhone, will start selling its unusual smartphone creation "in time for Christmas 2013," the company said in an e-mail.
We've seen dual-screen handsets before, but this one is unique in pairing a high-resolution LCD screen in front with an e-ink display on the rear.

Why the e-ink? The idea is that when power runs low, switching to an electronic paper image for reading or referencing items can help keep a phone usable longer before needing a charge.
The Moscow-based Yota Devices first showed off the YotaPhone in January at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and has been updating it since then. At the time, the device featured high-end specs like 4G LTE, Android 4.1, a 4.3-inch 1280p HD display, a 12-megapixel camera, and a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus (MSM8960) chip.
Although we don't have details yet, I'd expect that at least some of these specs have been updated; we might see a quad-core chip instead of the dual-core CPU, for instance. We'll also need to be patient about pricing and availability details. Yota Devices will sell the phone globally. I'm guessing it'll turn up in Russia first, with other European and international markets to follow.
In the meantime, you can read all about the YotaPhone in our hands-on with an early model from CES.

                  The YotaPhone pairs Android with a power-saving e-ink screen on the back.

NASA re-creates ancient Mars on YouTube

                                 Mars: Nice place for an ancient beach vacation

Four billion years ago, Mars would have been a pretty nice place for a spring-break trip. At least that's the way it appears in a new animation published to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's YouTube channel on Wednesday.

The animated artist's rendition of ancient Mars begins with a flyover of a lake that bears a slight resemblance to, say, Utah's Lake Powell. Then we see time progress and a transition from a warm, wetter climate to a dry, colder one (like, say, 10 miles north of Lake Powell in January).
Deliberately missing from the video are any colonists from the finale of "Battlestar Galactica" or other signs of life -- there's evidence that water was once present on Mars, but so far definitive Martian fossils have not been forthcoming.
Check out the full video below. NASA is also hosting a hangout on Google+ Wednesday afternoon for the pre-launch of its MAVEN spacecraft that will study the atmosphere of Mars.

Black Friday 2013: The thrill is gone -- but the deals are back?

           Walmart's official Black Friday 2013 is already out. And there are some deals to be had.


Because I'm The Cheapskate, this is the time of year when people nudge me and say, "Bet you're getting pretty excited about Black Friday, huh?"
Well, of course! The day after Thanksgiving! The day when stores, both brick-and-mortar and click-and-order, serve up the very best deals of the year, slashing prices so low you'll be willing to freeze your butt off in an overnight line like you were waiting for Kanye tickets.
Yep, pretty excited. Except, nope, not excited. Black Friday is no longer the mysterious, exciting, deal-chasing fun-fest it once was. It's been homogenized, commoditized, overanalyzed.
In fact, this year, there really is no mystery left: Nearly every major retailer -- Best Buy, OfficeMax, Staples, Target, Walmart, and more -- has publicly released its Black Friday ad. Never mind that the actual day is still over two weeks away -- the stores have stopped playing the "leaked ad" game, meaning you no longer need an aggregator like BFAds.net or BlackFriday.info to sneak a peek at what's coming. Now you just go to, say, Walmart's Web site and click "Plan your Black Friday in-store shopping trip!" (Ironically, that store's Black Friday now begins on Thursday at 6 p.m. Last year it was 8 p.m. Next year: Wednesday midafternoon.)
As I've said in the past, it's hard for me to enthuse about Black Friday when I see (and share) amazing deals all year long. Just yesterday I featured a Braven 570 portable Bluetooth speaker for $30. It was refurbished, yes, but still an incredible buy; new ones go for $100. And a couple days before that, the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 was on sale for $299, down from $649 earlier this year. Beat that, Black Friday!

Black Friday strikes back?

I was all set to keep on decrying the ruination of Black Friday, but the reality is I'm seeing some fairly tempting deals from various sources. In particular, TV and tablet shoppers might just find themselves lured out of the house on November 29. Here's a look at some of the standouts:

 

 The AOCe2752she27inch desktop$179.99

• Best Buy will offer the LG 55LN5100 55-inch LED 120Hz HDTV for $499.99 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablet (previous-generation) for $99.99.
• Walmart will sell the Vizio E601i-A3 60-inch HDTV with apps and Wi-Fi for $688, down from the current price of $998. (And here's what I don't get about the super-early ad reveals: Who in their right mind is going to buy this TV now if they can get it for $310 less in a couple weeks?) Also at Walmart: the first-gen iPad Mini (16GB) for $299 -- same as the current list price, but with a $100 Walmart gift card.
• Similarly, Target will have the iPad Air (16GB) for $479 -- $20 off list -- with a $100 Target gift card. Also at Target: the 7-inch Nook HD (8GB) for $79, which is insane.
• OfficeMax plans to offer the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 14-n014nr laptop for $319.99, down from $449.99. It's a budget laptop, yes, but the lowest price I've seen for a model with a 14-inch touch screen.
• I've also heard from an AOC rep that starting Black Friday, various retailers will sell the AOC e2752she 27-inch desktop monitor for $179.99, which is $120 off the MSRP. Specs include a 2ms response time, two HDMI ports, and a headphone jack.
• An H. H. Gregg rep notified me that the first-gen iPad Mini (16GB) will be $249.99, and that with the purchase of any 4G LTE smartphone, including iPhones, Black Friday shoppers will receive a $100 gift card. And a little extra incentive to actually set foot in a store: "One Black Friday shopper in every H. H. Gregg store nationwide will win his or her entire Black Friday purchase free."

Snapchat gambles with a promising hand

   
     Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, pictured left, at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Two-year-old Snapchat is playing a high-stakes game of Blackjack, betting that its business won't bust with the turn of an unwelcome card. The company reportedly refused a $3 billion cash buyout offer from Facebook, a decision that may forever define the future of Snapchat and Evan Spiegel, its 23-year-old CEO.
Venice, Calif.-based Snapchat traffics in disappearing messaging -- 350 million of them per day, to be exact. An unknown number of people, youngsters in particular, turn to the smartphone application to do what young people like to do: goof off. Here they send photos and videos, innocent or otherwise, that they believe will never come back to haunt them.
The startup makes no money, which means that it's worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And apparently investors are so anxious to get a piece of the company that they're willing to value it at $4 billion. But that's just play money -- it's not real like the $3 billion in cash Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently was ready to trade for the teen-beloved app.
"If you look at it solely from a monetary perspective, yes, they're absolutely foolish," Altimeter Group principal analyst Brian Solis told CNET of Snapchat's rumored decision to reject the Facebook bid. "I don't know who's going to give them more than that -- or that they're going to generate more than that in terms of revenue."

Why, then, would Spiegel turn down $3 billion, which is three times the money Zuckerberg threw at up-and-coming Instagram last year? The simplest answer is because he can. Spiegel and Co. have been dealt an incomplete but promising hand.
Snapchat, said Gartner analyst Brian Blau, is in a position where there isn't much risk to wait for a bigger, better offer to come along. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal's scoop didn't close the door on an acquisition, indicating instead that Spiegel would wait until 2014 to make a decision about taking more financing or selling the company.
"What you're talking about here is the next half-generation of people coming under the Facebook umbrella," Blau told CNET of the social network's potential reasoning for bidding big on Snapchat. "But to be honest, I think [Snapchat] would have the same kind of value for other companies."
The logic goes that Spiegel can, in a market where the unprofitable Twitter is worth $25 billion, buy time if he wants to. His app's teenage audience is also the most-coveted in all of social media, as Blau insinuated.
Snapchat is a new and still unrivaled representation of the social network. A cross between monstrously popular mobile-messaging applications such as WhatsApp or WeChat and more traditional social networks, Snapchat is a hybrid app where people have complete control over what they share and who they share it with. And because Snapchat blends messaging, mobile, and social, the proxy comparisons to bigger or profitable apps are fairly open-ended.
"Instant-messaging services, such as Snapchat, are growing faster than anyone could have imagined," Forrester analyst Julie Ask said.
Ask lumps Snapchat in with other chat apps, a group of apps she said doesn't yet experience the same level of enthusiasm in the US as they do elsewhere in the world. But they very well could -- and soon. "The game is going to be: How big can your audience be? We've seen examples of companies going from zero to 400 or 500 million users inside of two years."
Clearly, Spiegel values Snapchat's unknown potential far more than Zuckerberg does, just like Zuckerberg anticipated back in 2006 that Facebook would be worth more than the $1 billion that Yahoo offered him. Interestingly enough, the Facebook of today looks a lot like the Yahoo of 2006, which was then a company that also tried to buy its way into the lives of the next generation of Internet users.
But Snapchat is far from a sure thing.
"If we've learned one thing, it's that no service is infallible and users are finicky," Solis said. "Snapchat is the next Snapchat until whatever is next comes up and starts to displace Snapchat -- just like Snapchat emerged out of nowhere and rivaled Instagram because it was just a new and different way to share pictures. At some point that's going to happen again."
If Snapchat isn't careful, it's now-you-see-it, now-you-don't philosophy may come back to haunt the company.

With Moto G phone, Google's mobile revolution now plausible

 
                    Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside introduces the Moto G
 
Google's inexpensive, new Android phones mean the company has a real chance at transforming the wireless industry -- something it attempted to do nearly four years ago with the Nexus One.
In October, the company released the Nexus 5, a top-end phone built by LG Electronics that has a remarkably low price of $349 for a 16GB model -- unlocked and with no contract. On Wednesday, Google announced the Moto G, which costs $179 for an 8GB model, also unlocked and off contract.

An unlocked, off-contract phone can be moved from one carrier to another simply by buying a new SIM card, effectively avoiding the typical two-year contracts that network operators love. For the carriers, the contracts cut down on customer churn. But to consumers, they mean big barriers for anyone who's dissatisfied with network coverage or other factors. For example, if one carrier introduces a competitive new plan, contract termination fees likely will make a person think twice about switching. In a world where people buy unlocked devices, smartphones become more like PCs. You pay up front then do what you want. Customers can switch phones more easily, for example. Like the latest and greatest? It's easy to sell your used phone whenever you want.
Google first tried to shake things up in 2010 with the Nexus One, which the company sold directly to customers for $529. But the Nexus One vision flopped when carriers like Verizon and Vodafone didn't play ball, among other troubles.
A few years and one $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility later, Google has a chance. The prices it charges for its new phones are getting close to the subsidized prices that most customers encounter when buying phones -- initial prices that might look good but that don't factor in 24 months of payments made as part of a network service subscription.
We got a taste of this with the Nexus 4, whose price plummeted, but only after it had lost some of its initial luster. And the pure-Android versions of the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 -- at $600 and $650, respectively, are too expensive to move the needle.
But Google evidently wanted to see lower handset prices -- and of course, it can effectively subsidize phones through its online services. Google makes money through ads on services such as search, maps, and YouTube, and it offers subscriptions for music and Google Apps; a big part of Android's raison d'etre is increasing usage for such services. So it has a good way to justify lower prices.
As Motorola pointed out during a press conference on Wednesday, you could buy four Moto G phones for the same price as Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4. The two phones have plenty of differences, to be sure -- the Moto G isn't aimed at premium buyers -- but that's still a powerful price comparison to make.
Motorola's Moto G is a budget model, though Google touted its performance at its press conference. It has a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 display; a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor; a 5MP primary camera and 1.2MP front-facing camera; and a 2,070mAh battery. It runs Android 4.3, but Google promised an upgrade to the new 4.4 KitKat version in January. Also, a $199 16GB model will be available soon.
Another difference: Moto G doesn't support 4G LTE networks as higher-end phones do.
Even without LTE connectivity, those specs mean Google is selling modern, useful phones -- a strong contrast to today's budget options, in the view of Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside. "Next year, 500 million people are going to buy a smartphone for around $200. Up until now their choice had been to buy cheap phones with last year's technology or a phone that was several years old," he said at the press conference.

 

 

There still are plenty of hurdles in the way of Google's vision, though. One of them is wireless spectrum: Different carriers bid for different wireless frequencies, and a particular phone may not work on another network. The Nexus 5, for example, works on the LTE networks of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, but not Verizon.
Another factor is that carriers still are powerful in phone sales and support. It's convenient to buy a mobile phone and wireless service at the same time, and carriers have countless retail stores around the world. Google's direct-sales model is still the exception, not the rule.
Last, Motorola has been a drag on Google earnings, and Moto and Nexus products complicate the company's relationships with handset makers. That means the business case for Google can't be a slam dunk.
But Google isn't demanding an overnight revolution, and its new prices show it's willing to take a very un-Apple approach when it comes to handset profit margins. With the Moto and Nexus brands now offering competitive pricing, Google is showing it may have what it takes to reshape the mobile market.