The PlayStation Vita, Sony's latest entry in the handheld gaming space, is available for general release in the US today. Retail outlets that had any unclaimed units available for sale were swarmed and sold out quickly in my area, so if you didn't pre-order, chances are that you're out of luck for now.

I don't have a PS Vita (yet) but there are already plenty of reviews that detail the high points and the low points of the Vita as a gaming device. But nearly every early review that I have read so far asks the question of why Sony made another portable game system. Is the Vita is a device that consumers will even want?

Read the rest of this post at the ThreeSpace Games Blog.

Sony released new firmware for the PlayStation 3 today. System Update version 4.10 (not yet mentioned on the update website as of this writing) claims browser improvements as its biggest feature, so I decided to give the browser a test run after I installed the new firmware (in order to be able to log on to the PlayStation Network).

Read more at the ThreeSpace GamesBlog.

Sony continues to lose money in it's entertainment division on sales of the PlayStation 3.And Nintendo continues to turn a profit on sales of the Wii.Then why are investors driving Nintendo's stock down and Sony's stock up?It's because they don't like thedirectionthat they're seeing Nintendo heading.Year-over-year profits at Nintendo are down almost 50% for the first half of 2009. Wii sales continue to slow, and even a recent $50 price cut hasn't seemed to spur additional sales of the console, worrisome news as we head into the holiday season when most sales are made.

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Remember when the typical cellular phone advertisement showed a woman with a small child near a broken down car on a dark highway? Cell phone in hand, she would call a tow truck and be on her way. The message--don't let this be you or your wife/mother stuck out here on the road without a cell phone for emergencies.

Back in that time, expansion was easy for the cellular providers. All they had to do was set up a few kiosks in the mall or a local retailer and wait for people to approach and sign up for new service. Contracts were typically one year long, and growth was simply made by adding new subscribers.

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Netflix's Instant Watchingfeature allows subscribers of the DVD rental-by-mail service to stream a select group of 17,000 movies to a PC or a compatible device. Up until now, the XBOX 360 was the only game console capable of streaming movies from Netflix, but that will soon change as the 360 is joined by its most direct competitor, the PlayStation 3.

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Windows 7 was released for general availability today, and there has been no shortage of digital ink extolling the virtues of the new operating system. The reviews have been mostly favorable and indicate that Windows 7 should be a marked improvement over it's immediate predecessor, Windows Vista. Not surprisingly, this has led to a countless number of comparisonsbetween Microsoft's latest release and Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which was released less than two months ago. Most of those comparisons, like this CNET Prizefight, give kudos to both operating systems, but give the nod to Snow Leopard. And I have to ask--are they running a different operating system than I am?

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Atlanta is one of a handful of cities with 4G wireless service already available. This first salvo in the race to 4G is an implementation of WiMAX, which claims speeds comparable to Wi-Fi over much larger areas. I have been using 4G service for about two months now, and on the whole I'm impressed with it, but there are certainly some gotchas in comparison to using 3G cellular data service.

The WiMAX network was developed by Sprint and Clearwire with funding from industry heavy-hitters like Intel, Comcast, and Google. As such, there are several different vendors for WiMAX service, but they're all using the same network. I'm using Clearwire's CLEAR service, but as far as I know, there shouldn't be any performance difference between it and Sprint's 3G/4G service or Comcast's High-Speed 2Go.

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I've been a Mac user for a little over three years now. In fact, I daresay that my fingers spend as much time on the keyboard of my MacBook as they do on any other computer. I'm not an expert, but I am comfortable with Mac OS X and can get all but the most specialized computing tasks done with it.

And I really like Mac OS X. I've been a UNIX user in some capacity for decades now, so the file structure and command-line Terminal are very comfortable to me. Mac OS is a rock solid operating system. I routinely run my MacBook for a month at a time, putting it to sleep between sessions, and usually only doing a reboot after installing a system update that requires it. Mac OS leans on it's tried-and-true BSD heritage to create a remarkably sound computing experience.

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After watching for years as upstarts likeNetflix and Redbox eroded their customer base, Blockbuster has finally launched a few salvos of it's own in the war for movie viewers. Notably,Blockbuster has partnered with DVR maker TiVoto provide an On Demand service which will allow users to rent and purchase movies through their TiVos. Rentals will start at $2.99; purchases will start at $7.99.

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The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) hasapproved a standard for mobile digital broadcasts. This comes after some bickering between factions promoting different standards finally agreed on a unified standard to promote. Adoption by the ATSC allows hardware manufacturers to start making devices that conform to the standard and broadcasters to start sending out the additional signals required by those devices, which will likely range from cellular phones and MP3 players to laptops.

Read the rest of this post at the ThreeSpace Blog.