Before getting to more Sony good and bad news, the biggest buzz this week, at least from the coverage I’ve been reading thus far, seems to be about Apple’s iPhone announcement at Macworld in San Francisco. Some think it will be cool, even one person stopped by in the comments area and said he’d be buying one. I’m reading many others saying no way, too expensive, battery life concerns, what about smudging and so on. And then there is the whole Cisco lawsuit over the name iPhone. APPL stock (disclaimer: I own some) seems to have emerged unscathed. For whatever it’s worth, I think the news at last Macworld with the release of the Intel Macs was much more exciting.

Now back to Sony who seems to have chosen Thursday as the (official?) PlayStation Store update day. Now available is a new version of Grand Turismo HD v1.1 in the store for download. If you start downloading now, maybe by dinner you’ll be able to play. Sony, why haven’t you enabled background downloading yet? Microsoft got this covered months and months ago. 49% done … This is the good news, in case you’re keeping score.

Earlier this week, Sony said it met its shipping target of 1 million PS3s in the United States in 2006. But the combined U.S. and Japan total puts the company well below its global shipping goal of 2 million … Lackluster PlayStation sales would be further cause for concern for a highly hyped product launch already off to a rocky start with two delays.

I’ve seen lots and lots of PS3 around but not any Wiis, however my sister-in-law says the Yakima area (Eastern Washington) has Wiis everywhere. Sony better hope the Nintendo Wii shortages continue. Then again, the shortage has worked more in Microsoft’s favor. Almost every store we hit over the holiday season had a wiped out Xbox 360 section, while there were plenty of PS3 games.

This is bound to be controversial, but I’m putting the PS3 and Apple iPhone, sight unseen, in the same category. Both are overpriced and late to market (yes, I realize this will be the only cell phone running OSX, but if they had done this in 2002 or 2003 imagine what they’d have now). I know Steve Jobs thinks Apple is going to knock it out of the park with the iPhone because it’s so much better than what else is out there (his opinion) but I think he’ll be singing a more subdued song a year from now.

I’m not caught up with all my CES reading so far, and my enthusiasm could change, but I’m not that excited over what has come out of there so far. Perhaps it will take another week or two for the information to fully filter out, but it’s not a good innovative sign when the news at CES is about what happened at Macworld.

As for Sony? Will just keep ringing the bell, hoping they get it soon. Once a week updates for the PlayStation Store will not be enough to get the job done. I doubt anybody from Sony will care what I have to say, but if they are listening, get on a twice a week update schedule ASAP. Otherwise everything I said about them being the next Sega will come true.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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