Freyburg

Once again Steve Jobs dominates this week’s headlines, this time for revelations in his autobiography of an honest-to-goodness Apple TV. Besides that, it’s been a weird week, with Google maybe mulling buying Yahoo possibly, Microsoft gaining tons of cash off of Android (!) patents and Netflix hemming and hawing and not really knowing what it’s doing.

On the plus side, Todd is playing Arkham Asylum, Chip is reading Ready Player One and Warren has backed off from the flu-laden precipice of death he was wobbling on last week, though a lingering cough still stalks him.

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iOS5, iPhone 4S, and Siri are out, and pretty damned impressive. Less impressive is RIM’s three-day outage, or the fact that Google is shutting down Code Searh, their University Research Program, Jaiku, and Buzz.

Bits and pieces besides that, but it’s a bit of a short one. Chip is a little injured and Warren is sick, and Todd is grateful for being neither.

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Sad, sad news today as Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer. To call the man an artist, a businessman or a technologist is to sell him short…he was, without a doubt, a titan. His products, from the Apple II to the Mac to the iPad, iPhone and everything else affected all three of your hosts across much of their lives, and changed both our tools and our culture in ways that have yet to see their full measure. Our conversation can’t hope to do justice to the man’s accomplishments, but we hope to add our thoughts to a swelling tide of grief. The world has lost a great man, and we are all the poorer for it.

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Platformer…NEWS EDITION! With Chip out on assignment, Warren and Todd tackle the big issues of the week, including Facebook’s radical and frankly weird changes, Apple’s upcoming iPhone event, the Kindle Fire tablet, and the utter lunacy of Meg Whitman taking the helm at HP.

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Windows 8 bursts onto the scene and only our intrepid squad of tech analysts (by which we mean Warren, Todd and Chip) have the savvy to suss out what really matters with Metro, sandboxing and pissed of developers. The Boston Globe got one hell of an HTML5 redesign, Rogers is told to stop throttling games, and we all discuss what we’d do if we were in charge of RIM and/or Nintendo. One of us would wear a lot of costumes, apparently.

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Bartz gets the boot, Amazon wants to make a Netflix for books, Star Trek Online goes free to play, and Warren gets a THUNDERBONER, all on this episode of Platformer.

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Patent madness this week, and a deep dive by Todd into the machinations and tribulations surrounding high tech and patent law. Here’s a pile of links for you on that subject…

- Samsung and Apple’s battle means worldwide grief for the Korean tablet maker

- more grief for Samsung in the EU

- Google’s Andy Rubin plays fast and loose with violating patents

throw Apple cops, Cory Doctorow on online identity, Amazon tablets, and Michael Arrington being a dink into the mix and you’ve got our first one hour show!

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Like every other podcast on the internet, we led off with discussion on Steve Jobs resignation from Apple, then branched off into whether Apple can stay “Apple,” as well as discussing the oft-rumoured Apple television set that may or may not happen. Speaking of TV, Google told the television industry to go to hell (except it didn’t). We also looked at the new Mozilla WebAPI, an awesome gaming laptop from Razer, and much, much more.

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Chip gets a TouchPad, HP gives up on PCs (and TouchPads), Robert Scoble doesn’t love Twitter anymore, Chrome extensions can be riddled with malware, and Apple might be making its own chipsets for Macbooks after all.

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Google buys Motorola Mobile, SETI gets Kickstartered, EA throws its weight around, and Cinemaware is going iOS. Whee!

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