The Guardian reports that US cinema chains are run by fucking idiots. OK, so The Guardian’s language isn’t quite that fruity (the article is ‘US cinemas threaten not to show films in video-on-demand dispute’), but I think my intro sums things up nicely.

Cinema is under increasing pressure from television, largely because people now have TVs the size of a wall, and they can watch stuff in private, without having idiots around them yammering on phones and stuffing overpriced popcorn into their faces, and, occasionally, their mouths. But with Hollywood studios planning to make new releases available for online rental two months after they debut on the big screen, US cinema chains are threatening to not show films by the likes of Universal, Sony, Warner Bros and Fox.

THAT WILL WORK!

No, wait. It won’t.

Two things here:

1. Cinema chains rarely leave anything other than blockbusters on for more than a few weeks. Therefore, if the window really is going to be reduced to two months, it isn’t really going to make any odds anyway.
2. Cinema chains rattle on about how cinema remains relevant because it’s all about the experience. If that’s really the case, cinemas shouldn’t feel threatened by video-on-demand—they should instead be doing their level best to improve the cinema-going experience. Clue: this doesn’t involve sticky floors, suddenly turning the best seats into super-expensive VIP chairs that no-one ever sits in, charging more for popcorn and a drink than a meal out at a local pub, and sound systems that distort the audio so much that you think the latest Oscar winner is about a bunch of bees disguised as humans.

Good grief. While everyone’s still reeling from the shock of Lenovo’s 23-inch tablet and the non-shock of dual-14-inch-screen tablet Kno quietly passing, Kyocera’s seen its chance to fight hard to top the Bonkers League Table of Touchscreen Stupidity.

As anyone paying attention to the smartphone battle between iOS and Android will know, it’s often a fight between usability and bullet-points. Apple hardware and software is designed to be easy to use, but is somewhat locked-down, and so Android and its hardware partners regularly respond with a list of exciting specs and bullet-points, typically offering ‘more’ in a number of areas that geeks and engineers care about, to best Apple’s shiny toys.

We’re thinking that with the Kyocera Echo, there was a discussion that went along these lines:

“We need something to beat the iPhone. What can we do to be one-up on those guys?”

“Other Android phones have done more speed, more RAM, more installed and impossible-to-remove third-party apps, so we can’t do any of that. What’s left?”

“What about… screens?”

“Genius! The iPhone’s only got one screen, so we’ll clean up if we release a device with two!”

And so (probably) was born the Echo, a device Katherine Boehret on All Things Digital says:

may turn out to be a niche product

No kidding. The device is a fat little bugger, due to the dual-screen nature, and it’s also awkward to get it into dual-screen mode. Worse, though, is this little nugget of information:

only seven of the phone’s apps work in the mode that runs an app on each screen

So even Nintendo DS-style arguments don’t really work here. Instead, you have a device where you can get:

• a slightly bigger screen with a huge black bar across the middle of the content
• a standard-sized screen, hiding the other within the device’s bulk
• ‘Simul-Task Mode’ on seven (count ’em) apps

Sounds great.

Now, where’s my damn 12-screen Android phone? That’s sure to be a winner!

Whatever you think about Hugh Grant, your opinion might change after reading The bugger, bugged (New Statesman). Grant, by chance, met ex-News of the World hack Paul McMullan when Grant’s car broke down; he was given a lift and was invited to the hack’s pub sometime. Grant was keen to hear more about the phone-hacking scandal, since he’d been a victim. Being a canny sort, he also figured he could secretly record the conversation when he later visited the pub.

The revelations are astonishing, implicating Andy Coulson (“Coulson knew all about it and regularly ordered it”), Rebekah Wade and the Daily Mail. McMullan is quoted as saying:

For about four or five years [The Daily Mail have] absolutely been cleaner than clean. And before that they weren’t. They were as dirty as anyone… They had the most money.

McMullen revealed he was also a fan of the Daily Mail’s cash mountain when it came to non-stories about celebs:

When I went freelance in 2004 the biggest payers—you’d have thought it would be the [News of the World], but actually it was the Daily Mail. If I take a good picture, the first person I go to is—such as in your case—the Mail on Sunday. Did you see that story? The picture of you, breaking down… I ought to thank you for that. I got £3,000. Whooo!

Presumably, McMullen went to them a second time after Grant dropped by his pub, since The Daily Mail on April 4 reported Grant’s invited visit with the shocking, hard-hitting exposé Hugh Grant racks up bar tab worth £5.45 at local pub in Dover… but leaves without paying. Naturally, it neglects to mention the invitation and the chat Grant and McMullen had (and it referring to the pub as Grant’s “favourite pub in Dover” seems spurious at best). Still, perhaps McMullen will be happy he got his retaliation in first (not least those jibes about Grant’s riches, which he used to justify the invasion of celebrity privacy regarding phone-hacking) even if the Mail’s article comes across like a fey slap to the cheek compared to Grant’s knockout punch.

“Er.”

That’s pretty much what went through my head on reading TechRadar’s report about Lenovo’s proposed 23-inch tablet. Now, I largely agree with Steve Jobs that 10ish inches is about the right size for a tablet. It’s big enough to enable more complex interfaces than you get on smartphone apps—something that seven-inch tablets don’t fare well with. Instead, they come across like SMARTPHONES FOR GIANTS.

Someone at Lenovo presumably, then, was thinking about gaps in the tablet ecosystem and yelped “what if Godzilla wanted a tablet?”, because that’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

We think that there is potential for a 23-inch tablet

—said William Cai, Lenovo’s senior specialist in marketing, apparently with a straight face. Fair enough—maybe loads of people have been looking at iMacs and thinking, man, if only that thing didn’t have a stand. Or a keyboard. And I could lug it around the house, like some crazy person, yelling LOOK AT THE SIZE OF MY ONE, to envious and surprised bystanders.

Cai continued:

We’d have to take care of battery life and we are working to get the weight down.

No kidding. Maybe also consider supplying each one with a year’s gym entry, or possibly a small crane.

Amazon’s released a third Kindle into its line-up. As reported in TUAW, the $189 3G and $139 Wi-Fi models are joined by a ‘with special offers’ edition. It costs $114 and the discount is supported by adverts that appear on the screensaver and home screen, but not inside books.

The decision is interesting. Amazon’s one of the few companies able to rival Apple in terms of experience. If you’ve unboxed and used a Kindle, it’s rather like doing the same with an iPad. Despite the relatively low price of the gadget, it feels like a luxury item, and so adverts might place it in a rather different category, cheapening the experience.

Also, arguments are currently raging online that the adverts should have resulted in a much greater discount. Ian Betteridge counters this argument on Technovia:

I think that $25 is a fair reflection of the value of the ads. Remember, these ads are home-screen only, and not in the books. Pundits constantly over-estimate the amount of revenue that ads can bring in, and the expectation that Amazon could price a Kindle at $99 based on these kinds of ads is wrong.

Ian’s right: people often massively over-estimate the value of advertising. It’s pretty clear that Amazon will have reduced the price of the ad-supported Kindle by the same amount of money the adverts are bringing in—while Amazon’s happy to operate on razor-thin margins much of the time, it’s not a company keen to make a huge loss, especially on a top-selling item.

But this leads me to wonder whether Amazon should have bothered at all. I don’t see many people avoiding buying a Kindle but saying they’d be tempted if it was 25 bucks cheaper. In order to get this version of the Kindle flying off the shelves, it really needs to be at an impulse price—$99 would be the sweet-spot in the USA.

The thing is, Amazon knows what it’s doing in retail, and I suspect this new Kindle price-point is nothing more than a test-run, to see if the model works. If it sells, Amazon can up the price of the adverts, and, if it wishes, drop the device’s price accordingly. This could be the long-run to an end-game of a free ad-funded Kindle, supported and subsidised by advertisers, enabling Amazon to continue making huge piles of cash by selling many more eBooks than it otherwise would have.