While vacationing in France, you find a DVD of Ishtar. Score! (It’s never been released on DVD in the US). But when you get home, you discover that you’ve purchased a Region 2 disc, which, in your Region 1 player, is as useful as a coaster. This raises two questions: Why do you want to watch Ishtar? And why do we still have region codes?

The answers: taste and money, respectively. Though there’s no accounting for the former, those codes may soon be gone.

Regional restrictions began in 1997, as DVD technology was rolling out. They have nothing to do with the NTSC and PAL...

Apple has confirmed maybe the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley: it’s been working on a cloud service, and will announce it at the June 6 Worldwide Developers Conference.

So now we know annual developer’s conference will unveil “iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” but we don’t know yet what it is, or what exactly will reside at the domain name it may have bought for $4.5 million in April.

La bataille de brevets entre Samsung et Apple a pris un nouveau tournant. Suite au droit concédé à Apple par la justice américaine, la semaine dernière, de pouvoir accéder aux produits annoncés par Samsung, pour vérifier s’ils ne violent pas ses brevets, la firme coréenne a répliqué, révèle le sitethisismynext.com. Elle a indiqué vouloir jouir du même droit et désire par conséquent voir les prochains produits d’Apple, à savoir l’iPhone 5 ou 4S et l’iPad 3 avant leur commercialisation, bien qu’Apple n’ait comme à son habitude fait aucune annonce à ce propos.

On dirait qu’Ouriel Ohayon et ses associés et investisseurs ont eu le nez creux quand ils ont créé Appsfiredébut 2010. L’application pour iPhone et Android qui permet de découvrir et partager des applications pour iPhone et Android surfe sur le développement exponentiel des App Stores pour iPhone et Android, et apparemment ça marche.

Mothers, lock up your gamers. The PlayStation phone has arrived.

And while it’s a bit on the chubby side, we think that, for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, big is beautiful.

You could almost call the Xperia Play the shorter, fatter cousin to the svelte Xperia Arc, which Sony Ericsson once described as the “world’s thinnest smartphone.” At .62 inches, the Play looks positively bulky compared to its Xperia-line relatives — a veritable Jan Brady to the Arc’s Marcia.

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.