Uni-Media Press

In this tech-saturated world, few things are more annoying than car navigation systems that yell at you for making a wrong turn.

“Re-CALC-ulating,” the system says in that condescending robot voice, as if it is offended by having to rethink the route.

“Turn left at … [sigh] … recalculating …”

Such interactions lead people to think GPS devices are nagging them, said Mark Gretton, chief technology officer of TomTom, a GPS maker.

“The main interaction you have with the device is a series of commands, so that starts the tone of the relationship right from the start,” he said. “It’s ‘Do this, do that, turn right.’ ” And it doesn’t help if the computer sounds snippy, he said.

Despite advances in “text to speech” technology, current computer voices can still be socially tone deaf. Car systems are bossy. E-readers read to us aloud, but they don’t know what they’re reading, so Shakespeare can sound just like a monotone reading of a spreadsheet.

None of them can get intonations, pauses or emotional context quite right.

Farhad Manjoo, a tech columnist at Slate, compared the Amazon Kindle’s reading voice, for example, to “Gilbert Gottfried laid up with a tuberculin cough” and “a dyslexic robot who spent his formative years in Eastern Europe.”

So what gives? With more than a decade of voice research under our belts, why can’t computers speak our language — or at least sound a bit more human?

Well, they’re trying, tech researchers say, but these machines face a striking number of technological hurdles in their efforts to sound un-robotic.

Complex speech patterns

The most obvious reason the computers have trouble is that human speech is almost infinitely complex. There are about 40 phonemes — or basic sounds — in the English language, but there are seemingly limitless combinations.

To try to get computers on the right track, voice technologists record human actors reading all kinds of wacky sentences, which are designed to elicit as many phoneme combinations as possible.

Computers store all these sentences in a database, chop them into sounds, and then remix them to make any possible combination of words.

The result is intelligible, but it’s not quite human.

A super-high-quality computer voice might require 40 hours of voice recordings in order to sound nearly human, said Andy Aaron, a computer speech researcher at IBM.

That’s just for one voice, one accent.

Computing power

Aaron said computers that have lots of voice data to pull from can sound, at times, nearly human.

But the issue is that not every computer has an entire server farm waiting to process every sentence it would like to say.

Mobile phones and GPS devices, in particular, just don’t have enough computing power or storage space to thumb through mountains of voice files in order to sound as realistic as possible with current technology.

The result: Corners are cut in the name of workability, and some of the nuances of the spoken language are lost, said Gretton of TomTom.

This will improve as computers continue to get faster and able to store more data, he said.

Parts of computer voices are also generated entirely from equations and models, not actor-read sounds.

Those bits act as filler, and cut down on database sizes, too.

Speak thy heart

Another major problem for talking computers is that it’s somewhat difficult for them to replicate the sound of human emotion and inflection.

This, however, is a major topic of speech research, and the technology appears to have made some strides. People who record the sentences that are the grist for computer speech sometimes are asked to read in different emotional states. Computers can pull from these sounds if they want to flip the pitch of a computer voice up at the end of a sentence, for example, in order to ask a question. Or they pull from higher frequencies to sound happy or excited.

IBM Research has posted a demo of this on its website in order to show the differences between emotive and robotic computer voices.

Take this example sentence:

“These cookies are delicious.”

Listen to that sentence as read by a computer with no emotion.

Here it is again, spoken by a computer using a system called Naxpres, which tries to take emotional cues into account. Notice that the voice perks up at the end, as if the computer is saying the cookies are “de-LISH-ious.”

It makes some difference.

Emotional context

But copying the sounds of human emotion is only half the battle. To really make computers sound more human, the machines have to understand what they’re reading — at least to some degree — so that they know when to inflect.

This part of computer science is much more challenging, said Aaron.

Consider another sample sentence:

“I say tomato, and you say tomato.”

Most people would have heard that line before, and would automatically pronounce “tomato” as “to-mah-toe” the second time, said Aaron, of IBM.

But not a computer.

“How would the computer know that those two words are supposed to be pronounced differently?” Aaron said. “It’s only real-world knowledge that can tell the computer that those two words are supposed to be pronounced differently.”

The same applies to emotions and inflections. It’s difficult for a computer to know how to read a passage of text, and what emotions should apply.

“If you read a passage to somebody, you’re obviously going to read it a way that does justice to the content,” said Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance, a company that develops speech technologies.

“If you’re reading a technical report, you’re probably not going to read it in a way that’s much different from a computer, but if you’re reading a poem, it’s a different kettle of fish,” he said. “You’re really trying to communicate a lot of emotional meaning through the pauses you introduce and through the pacing and such. That really requires a pretty deep understanding” of language.

‘You want to punch them’

As it turns out, the best computer voices may be those that sound exactly like the person who’s listening. If a computer voice matches your mood, your speech patterns, your accent and your tonal range, you’re less likely to be annoyed by it, researchers said.

How well a computer voice matches the listener’s mood is not just a matter of preference — it’s a matter of safety, said Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who studies computer voices.

In a 2005 study, Nass found that these emotional mismatches may actually be dangerous in driving situations. Sad drivers who get instructions from happy computer voices — and happy drivers who listen to sad voices — are more likely to have accidents, he said. The emotionally confused drivers are also less likely to be able to pay attention to the road.

So, if you’re having a groggy sort of morning, instructions from a GPS device that sounds like a caffeinated cheerleader might just push you over the edge.

“If you think about it, when you’re happy, you want to be around happy people. But if you’re sad, do you really want to hang around chirpy, happy people saying, ‘Let’s turn that frown upside down?’” he said. “No. You want to punch them.”

Sejnoha, from Nuance, said his company has developed a prototype computer voice system that listens to a person speak and then tries to mimic it.

Gretton, from TomTom, said his company hasn’t looked into matching drivers’ emotions to the voices of their navigation systems yet.

But one interim solution, he said, gives drivers many options when it comes to the voices of their computerized companions.

TomTom offers a range of downloadable voices — from the fictional Darth Vader and Homer Simpson to celebrities like the rapper Snoop Dogg.

Users can also read a set of test sentences and have their own voices transferred into the GPS — so that they’re, in effect, bossing themselves around.

Perhaps it’s a little less tempting to yell at the computer if the computer sounds exactly like you do — or as close as technology allows.

It is usually the simplest expressions that take off like wildfire. Everyone’s been talking this week about “double rainbows,” based on a goofy home video recorded more than six months ago.

In early January, Paul Vasquez, also known as “Hungry Bear,” spent an hour videotaping, and marveling at, a beautiful double rainbow at Yosemite National Park.

Some 3½ minutes of his “rainbowing” were caught on tape, and it’s Vasquez’s reaction to the rainbows — not the rainbows themselves — that’s drawing viewers.

“Hungry Bear” oohs over the double rainbow, asks existential questions like “what does it mean?” and eventually sounds like he’s going into hysterics — perhaps laughing, perhaps crying, or maybe doing both. Some observers think he sounds orgasmic, or stoned.

Why are we just talking about it now? Two words: Jimmy Kimmel. The ABC late-night host tweeted a link to the double rainbow video to his 90,000 followers over the July Fourth weekend. Within a week CBS News and other outlets were interviewing Hungry Bear. The original double rainbow YouTube clip has now racked up more than 4.8 million views.

The sheer speed of this meme is pretty impressive, especially since there is already a double rainbow song available on iTunes. The “DOUBLE RAINBOW SONG!!” is a two-minute, auto-tuned song with the repeated refrain, “It’s a double rainbow. What does it mean?” Its website says all proceeds from the song go to Hungry Bear and Yosemite.

By this time next week, there will definitely be another “double rainbow” parody going viral on the web.

See CNN.com iReporters’ pictures and stories of double rainbows

Apparently, Hungry Bear already had some interesting adventures before he encountered the double rainbow. Urlesque.com has a great history of Hungry Bear’s colorful life, which includes time spent as a cage fighter. It seems like the big guy is both a lover and a fighter.

So what, exactly, can we learn from this “double rainbow” phenomenon?

In pure numbers, it shows that as Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking tools become more ubiquitous, memes like this will grow faster — and, perhaps, die faster, too.

It takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 or an iPad versus a printed book, Jakob Nielsen of product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey.

The study found that reading speeds declined by 6.2 percent on the iPad and 10.7 percent on theKindle compared to print. However, Nielsen conceded that the differences in reading speed between the two devices were not “statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability” — in other words, the study did not prove that the iPad allowed for faster reading than the Kindle.

A total of 24 participants (10 is about average for a usability survey) were given short stories by Ernest Hemingway to read in print and oniPads, Kindles and desktop PCs. Hemingway was chosen because his work utilizes simple language and is “pleasant and engaging to read.”

The narratives took an average of 17 minutes and 20 seconds from start to finish — enough time to get readers fully “immersed” in the stories, Nielsen explained.

After reading, participants filled out a brief comprehension questionnaire to make sure no one had skimmed through a story. Users rated their satisfaction with each device; the iPad, Kindle and printed book scored 5.8, 5.7 and 5.6, on a scale of 7, respectively, while the PC received an average score of 3.6 — due, in part, because reading on a PC reminded readers of work.

Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast.

As Nielsen notes, the satisfaction ratings on the survey are promising for the future of e-readers and tablet devices. However, I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed.

What do you think of the results? Do you prefer to read on an e-reader, tablet or in print — and why?

It’s summertime. Like many people, you may not have enough time for an extended vacation in which to devour a juicy full-length novel.

But, if you can steal a few moments for a mini-vacation, you can find some excellent summer reading material right on your cell phone. And you don’t even need a fancy smartphone with a pricey data plan capable of running an e-reader app (Kindle, Nook, Stanza, etc.) to do it.

These days, more fiction is being published not just electronically, but specifically with small screens and wireless connections in mind. These short works are different from e-books, because they’re meant to be read directly through your phone’s browser or even via text messaging.

This phenomenon started nearly a decade ago in Japan, but it’s now spread to U.S. mobile audiences.

Here are a few options to check out:

CellStories.net: If your cell phone has a web browser, chances are these short works of fiction (about 5 to 10 minutes of reading time each) will display reasonably well on your phone.

This free publishing project by Dan Sinker features works in several genres by several authors — with a fair amount of work that’s offbeat or slightly bizarre. CellStories are specifically not available for computer-based reading; you can access the stories only from a phone.

Sinker explains: “Why would you want to read something amazing while sitting at a desk? Instead, grab a beer and sprawl out on the couch, or take your lunch break under a shady tree, and then read. Much better, right?”

TextNovel.com: This is a rich resource to find, discuss or publish your own serialized English-language cell phone novels via SMS text messaging or e-mail. Novels are free, but text-messaging charges apply. TextNovel.com, founded by literary agent Stan Soper, also runs contests for text novel fiction writers.

Figment.com: This teen-oriented cell phone publishing project has not yet begun, but it sounds interesting.

Co-founder Jacob Lewis recently explained, “Figment will offer a place for teens to engage with peers, with authors, and with content. They can read a serialized novel by a friend down the block or a short story by their favorite author anytime, anywhere on their computer or their mobile phone. They can write a haiku or a 90,000 word novel while riding the bus to school. They can pick and chose, share and exclaim, write and review.”

On Figment.com, you can sign up for projects announcements and a private beta.

Hours after its iPhone 4 went on sale to excited crowds Thursday, Apple found itself responding to complaints that holding the phone by its metal edge causes mobile reception to suffer.

The company’s response, in a nutshell? You’re holding it wrong.

“Just avoid holding it in that way,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote in an e-mail that was making the rounds on the Web on Friday morning.

An official statement from Apple expanded in less pointed language than Jobs, who is known to occasionally answer e-mails from customers himself.

“Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas,” Apple said in a written statement.

One of the new phone’s vaunted features is its sleek design — nearly 25 percent thinner than its most recent predecessor. That’s achieved, in part, by snaking the antenna through a metal band around the edges of the phone.

The Apple statement, like early user reviews, said that putting a cover on the phone also reduces interference.

“If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases,” the company says.

The iPhone 4 — with its dual cameras, high-resolution display and glass-backed design — has received mostly positive reviews since its release. But by late Thursday, tech blogs and other websites were filling up with complaints about the reception issue.

On CNN’s iReport, several contributors noted the problem.

Keith Taylor of Sarasota, Florida, submitted a video review that initially said gripping the metal band made reception slightly worse than that of the iPhone 3GS.

Hours later, he wrote a follow-up saying that “the reception problem is very real” and that it improved when he bought a protective cover for the phone.

Share your thoughts on the new iPhone 4 with iReport.

The reception issue is chief among complaints that surfaced in the day since the iPhone 4 went on sale in Apple stores and other outlets.

There have been some reports of the phone’s glass casing cracking easily and of its “retina display” screen, billed as one of the sharpest in the industry, scratching even after only a few days of wear and tear.

iReporters share iPhone mania

Other owners of the new iPhone have reported that the display has an annoying yellow tint, although most have not noticed that.

Forget about the little old lady digging through her cluttered purse in the supermarket checkout line.

Thanks to smartphones, e-mail and sometimes-scary economic news, denizens of the digital world are now the ones clipping coupons — even when there’s not an actual piece of paper involved.

With services such as the iPhone app Scoutmob and e-mail offerings such as Groupon and Living Social Deals, experts say it’s now hip to be cheap.

“The advent of digital savings tools coupled with a challenging economy has taken couponing mainstream,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com. “All sorts of people, including what we call the ‘sophisticated couponer,’ are proudly aboard the couponing bandwagon.”

A recent survey by Harris Interactive showed that coupon use, particularly online coupon use, has spiked among a nontraditional population — those who are urban, well-to-do and tech-savvy.

In the survey, six out of 10 adults with household incomes over $100,000 said they had used a coupon in the past six months.

Four out of 10 of them said they got that coupon online — a rate nearly twice that of people who made $35,000 or less.

Keila Kirkpatrick said she started hearing friends talk about Groupon, a location-based service that deals out a daily bargain in subscribers’ hometowns, along with a punchy, fun e-mail description of that deal.

“I signed up to see what all the buzz was about, and turned out that they had some really good deals,” said Kirkpatrick, 23, who had recently moved to Washington to work for Americorps.

Since then, she’s used Groupons for a Korean restaurant that she’d never tried and Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

For the online coupon companies, encouraging that sort of urban exploring is part of the sales pitch.

“Our point, simply put, is to help you be a better local,” says Scoutmob’s website. “The only way to really get to know your city is by getting out, being curious and exploring the scene for all its worth.”

Scoutmob capitalizes on the rise of mobile social networking apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which let people “check in” to locations, alerting their digital friends to their whereabouts. Its original aim was to, in effect, create flash mobs at participating businesses which would offer a coupon for a short time, usually 24 hours.

But recently, many have extended their deals, allowing users to better plan social outings based around current offers.

The Scoutmob app runs only on the iPhone. The phone’s screen, in effect, acts as a user’s coupon.

Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the Atlanta-based company has spent almost nothing on marketing, with word of mouth spreading the app’s popularity in the 12 U.S. cities where it’s available. (Scoutmob’s website shows a 13th that will be familiar to fans of “The Simpsons,” the fictional Springfield).

Between 1,500 and 2,500 people claim a Scoutmob coupon everyday, Tavani said. Then, those “mobsters,” in the lingo of the application’s regulars, plan “mob hits,” visits to a spot by sometimes as many as 25 people at once.

Scoutmob doesn’t release its total number of subscribers.

At Groupon, the growth has been swift and strong, from about 400 subscribers when they started in November 2008 to roughly 5 million in the United States and another 1 million in Europe, according to founder and CEO Andrew Mason.

Groupon, which makes its money on revenue-sharing with the businesses it features, is active in 50 cities in the United States and 60 in Europe.

“It just resonated well with consumers,” Mason said.

He points to a recent deal for a boat tour in Chicago, Illinois. Groupon and the tour company expected to sell a few thousand tickets, total. Instead, they sold 20,000 in the first few hours.

“If you think about any other advertising medium, it wouldn’t have done that for this company,” Mason said. “That’s the power of the social commerce we’ve created.”

He, too, links the success of digital coupons to the emergence of online social-networking — calling Groupon an extension of the “friending” functionality that sites such as Facebook and Twitter have popularized.

“The holy grail is how can we make e-commerce social,” Mason said. “Usually, [a coupon] is a pretty solitary, one-to-one experience. But we’re helping consumers discover things.

“Somebody sees a screaming deal on paintball and, instead of buying one Groupon, they’re telling 10, 20, 30 of their friends and sharing it on Twitter and e-mail and Facebook.”

Heather Sokol does just that, as well as spreading word of coupons she likes on her “frugal blog network,” Inexpensively.

“When I find a deal worth sharing, I tell Inexpensively readers, friends, family and Twitter or Facebook,” said the Indianapolis, Indiana-based blogger.

One potential concern, as these coupon applications grow in popularity, is that they could end up being too much of a good thing for some participating businesses.

The price cuts offered are sometimes steep, and a small business swarmed with eager subscribers could be trading some significant profit losses in the short term for potential customer gains in the long term.

“Our platform is not right for every business, especially smaller businesses that can’t handle the traffic,” said Scoutmob’s Tavani. “[But] businesses that are scaled to serve many customers are ideal customers and loving the new customers we’re driving them.”

As iPhone 4 buyers prepared to unbox their new smartphones on Thursday morning, some screamed with joy. Others trumpeted vuvuzelas.

But shortly after testing out the world’s new “it” phone, some of those consumers turned to the internet to report problems with the new Apple product.

On Web forums and on blogs, some consumers posted videos and rants about the iPhone 4′s new antenna, which is built into a metal rim around the phone and, some claim, causes the phone to get unnecessarily bad reception.

The blog Gizmodo has posted a roundup of the complaints. Several people say that when they hold the iPhone 4 by its metal sides — essentially, when they’re touching the antenna — the reception gets worse or drops.

It’s possible that this is a software glitch and not a real problem with the phone’s hardware antenna, Gizmodo notes.

That’s a point also made by Walter S. Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, who reviewed the iPhone 4 this month.

“In some places where the signal was relatively weak, the iPhone 4 showed no bars, or fewer bars than its predecessor,” Mossberg writes. “Apple says that this is a bug it plans to fix, and that it has to do with the way the [wireless reception] bars are presented, not the actual ability to make a call. And, in fact, in nearly all of these cases, the iPhone 4 was able to place calls despite the lack of bars.”

On CNN’s iReport, where citizens submit their own news, Keith Taylor of Sarasota, Florida, posted a glowing video review of the iPhone 4, but he did note issues with reception when he put his hand around the metal antenna.
Video: iPhone fever takes hold
Video: iPhone 4 praise
Video: iPhone 4 frenzy
RELATED TOPICS

* Apple iPhone 4
* Cellular Phones
* Blogs and Blogging
* Gizmodo.com

“It grips well in your hand. The reception has improved, although it’s slightly weaker than the [iPhone 3GS] when your hand’s wrapped around the phone,” he says in the video, which he shot with the new phone. “It also affects the Wi-Fi, but only by one bar, so hopefully not a noticeable difference.”

CNN contacted Apple for comment but did not receive an immediate response. When the company’s CEO, Steve Jobs, unveiled the new phone at an event in San Francisco, California, he said that making the antenna part of the body of the phone was “really cool engineering.”

Some bloggers who got their hands on the iPhone 4 early — it went on sale in stores Thursday morning but was available by internet pre-order before that — put the phone through a number of stress tests.

The blog Engadget found that the iPhone is capable of being scratched, even after only a few days of wear and tear. Other owners of the new iPhone have reported that its much-touted “retina display,” which is supposed to be among the sharpest in the industry, has an annoying yellow tint on some units.

In an apparent attempt to see how durable the phone is, one man posted a YouTube video of himself dropping the phone on concrete. Similarly, a popular YouTube show called “Will it blend?” promises to post a video on Friday showing whether the iPhone 4 will turn to mush if it’s dropped into a kitchen blender.

On Thursday morning, other problems came with the phone’s availability.

The phone was scheduled to be on sale at Apple Stores as well as at Radio Shack, Wal-Mart and Best Buy, but CNNMoney reported that most non-Apple stores had run out of the phones and were turning customers away.

Much has been said about the iPad’s ability to reinvigorate the publishing industry. But the first generation of magazine apps on the iPad fall short: They’re an attempt to turn the clock back, rather than move the medium forward. Having splurged on a half-dozen iPad magazines this month, they’re now gathering dust on my home screen, never to be read again.

Wired: Early success

Perhaps the most dazzling magazine app on the iPad is Wired magazine. Developed in partnership with Adobe, the app sold 73,000 copies in the first nine days after launch. At a cost of $4.99 for a single issue (versus $10 for an entire year of the print edition), that would appear to be a massive success for publisher Condé Nast. What’s more, the iPad edition outsold the print edition this month. The app is a faithful recreation of the printed magazine, with pages of text and images to leaf through. And that’s a problem.

Despite the initial novelty of “swiping” to turn a page — not to mention interactive photo galleries, beautifully designed charts, audio snippets and videos — the app possesses the disadvantages of print without acknowledging the opportunities of the digital medium. Ads, for instance — lots of them. Unlike the easily ignored banner ads on Wired’s website, in the iPad app you find yourself assaulted by full-page brand advertising for the likes of Heineken, Samsung and Continental Airlines.

Wired wants you to read the app like a magazine, too: one page at a time. Little is done to improve navigation beyond the ability to view a list of all the articles in the issue. And more than 11 years after Google made every webpage accessible from the search bar, the Wired app inexplicably lacks a search function.

I don’t mean to single out Wired: Popular Science, Time, GQ and others all seek to repackage magazine content in an iPad shell. These too are novel upon your first viewing, but it soon transpires that most are simply a series of static pages intended to be read sequentially.

A lack of links

How can we do digital better? How about links?

Blogs create an evolving dialogue by linking to one another, building upon the work of others and enabling the reader fully to investigate the sourcing of a story — even if that means pushing eyeballs to competitive publications. For instance, I can link to venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s critique of iPad magazines, which makes similar criticisms. The publishers of iPad apps seem largely disinterested in linking to webpages. Perhaps this is a relic of their print editions. There’s a bigger problem with the lack of links: If I decide I particularly like an article within an iPad app, there’s no way to link to it. Even if I could, you would need to buy the app to see what I’m talking about.

What’s missing?

Putting magazines back into this bundled format completely ignores the atomization of media that occurred with the rise of the Web: Every piece of content is located and referenced using a link. It’s like being forced to download the entire album when you only wanted one song.

How about sharing? Most iPad magazines don’t seem to support it. So if I like this Wired feature about Mars, I can’t share my enthusiasm with you. Even if I could post a tweet or Facebook message, you’d be unable to view the article without downloading the app.

iPad magazines, it seems, have bypassed the content curation trend that’s swept the Web in recent years: Without sharing, my friends can’t help me find the good stuff. Which brings us to personalization. While news websites increasingly attempt to rank content based on your preferences and the recommendations of your friends (including, for instance, the Facebook-powered “Likes” feature on CNN.com), iPad magazines don’t appear to care much for your personal proclivities — the Wired app is the same for everyone, served up in an order determined solely by the publication’s editors. Even the ability to mark an article as a favorite seems absent in the majority of cases.

Comments? These too are absent, making iPad magazines a fairly passive reading experience. The Popular Science app even includes the “Letters” section from the magazine — on an Internet-connected device in 2010, the only opportunity for readers to talk back is limited to three letters, selected by the editors. PopSci.com, by contrast, encourages commentary from readers: Visitors to the website engage in heated debates, add new information and correct factual errors.

It feels to me as if iPad magazines are at risk of being the next CD-ROMs, the “interactive” element providing only a passing nod to the rise of truly engaging media formats. (It’s an analogy already made by the TechDirt blog, among others.) Or perhaps they’re more like early days of Flash websites, wherein website owners leapt upon the opportunity to adorn their pages with slick-looking animations, videos and transitions. Only later did they realize that all-Flash websites are both cumbersome and break the core functionality of the Web — namely, the ability to link to individual pieces of content.

Signs of hope

The next generation of iPad magazine apps may see vast improvements. Condé Nast this week previewed the Gourmet Live app, which will offer personalization, a “favorites” feature and the ability to share articles with friends. How Gourmet Live and other new apps overcome the “linking problem” remains to be seen, but one solution is obvious: Forget the apps, use the Web instead.

With the launch of the iPhone 4 a week away, potential consumers are wondering if AT&T’s wireless network is up to the task of handling what is expected to be another record-breaking launch for the latest version of the popular iPhone.

The company says it’s ready. But AT&T keeps giving its critics — and its own customers — reasons to doubt that it’s on top of its game. On Tuesday, the AT&T and Apple Web sites were overwhelmed by customers trying to pre-order the new iPhone 4. Customers saw error messages when accessing the Web sites and experienced long delays while trying to create or update their AT&T accounts.

Pre-ordering snafus aside, AT&T says that it’s been upgrading its network to keep up with demand from current iPhone subscribers and to support a flood of new customers. It has also armed itself with new data plans that cap usage at 2 gigabytes per month to help curb heavy data usage.

In many ways, AT&T has been a victim of its own success. The iPhone, which is built for accessing the Net, has been hugely popular, attracting scores of new customers with each device upgrade. It’s helped the company add millions of new customers every year since it was first introduced in 2007.

But the iPhone has also created a tsunami of mobile data on the AT&T network, which has resulted in poor service for many iPhone customers throughout the country, especially in densely populated cities, such as New York City and San Francisco.

While no one doubts that AT&T is making good on its promises to upgrade its network and keep up with demand, the fact remains that it’s fighting an uphill battle as growth in data usage outpaces its network expansion.

In other words, building out its network is more like adding sandbags in a storm rather than constructing a dam. It’s more about keeping up than changing the dynamics.

“The success of the iPhone has been a double edged sword for AT&T,” said Charles Golvin, a research analyst with Forrester Research. “Because iPhone users consume more data than any other smartphone customers, AT&T has been constantly learning how to manage heavy data usage on a cellular network. ”

There’s no question that the iPhone is still the hottest smartphone on the market. Tuesday’s pre-order meltdown is a good indication that demand is high for the fourth-generation iPhone. And looking at figures from previous iPhone launches, it’s expected that sales of the new phone will be strong.

During the first three days it was on sale last year, Apple sold more than 1 million iPhone 3GS smartphones. The original iPhone sold about 270,000 units during its first weekend in June 2007, while the iPhone 3G sold around 1 million when it launched in July 2008.

Of those sales, it looks like AT&T got a significant chunk. AT&T activated more than 2.4 million iPhones during the second quarter of 2009, which ended shortly after the device launched. Roughly, a third of the second quarter activations were for new AT&T subscribers.

The iPhone has become a cash cow for AT&T, and it’s helped the company attract millions of new subscribers. But it’s also come at a cost. Since the iPhone launched on AT&T’s network, it’s seen wireless packet data increase more than 18 times. Overall usage on AT&T’s network grew 200 percent in 2009 alone. And the company is now servicing more than twice the number of smartphones as its competitors.

The flood of new customers and the increase in data traffic have put strains on AT&T’s network, especially in urban areas. During the week in some sections of Manhattan nearly 70 percent of the phones active on AT&T’s network are data-intensive devices, John Stankey, chief operating officer for AT&T, said during the company’s fourth-quarter conference call.

In an effort to deal with the surge in usage, AT&T increased its capital spending budget to between $18 billion and $19 billion in 2010. It promised to use a portion of the money to upgrade its wireless and backhaul networks to handle the onslaught of new wireless traffic. This is roughly $2 billion more than the company had invested in the previous year.

The upgrades include the addition of 2,000 new cell sites. AT&T has also been adding three times more fiber links to existing cell sites than it had in 2009. This will increase capacity for the backhaul network that connects the cell towers to AT&T’s main network. The backhaul portion of the network is a critical component to AT&T’s network.

Last year, the company nearly completed its efforts to put more 3G traffic onto 850MHz spectrum, which will improve coverage and the quality of the network. It also completed the upgrade to HSPA 7.2, which as the name suggests has a theoretical download speed of 7.2 Mbps.

Later in 2010, AT&T is planning to upgrade the 3G HSPA network again. This time it will be upgrading to HSPA+, a standard that offers theoretical download speeds of 21 Mbps with actual download speeds averaging about a third of that figure. Eventually, AT&T will upgrade to a 4G technology called Long Term Evolution, or LTE. It will begin testing the technology later in 2010 with initial commercial deployments starting in 2011.

Unfortunately, for current iPhone users and those upgrading to the iPhone 4, the upgrades to HSPA+ and 4G LTE will not affect iPhone performance since these phones do not have these technologies embedded. That said, the HSPA 7.2 upgrade, 850MHz conversion, and addition of fiber links in the backhaul network will help alleviate some network congestion.

Analysts agree that AT&T is moving in the right direction with its upgrades. The only question is whether it is moving quickly enough.

“They are continuing to invest in backhaul and trying to migrate their infrastructure to HSPA+, which should give them faster network speeds and more network capacity,” said Ross Rubin, an analyst with NPD Group. “But as Apple adds new capabilities to the iPhone, which attract new applications, it opens the door for greater data use.”

The new iPhone 4 offers better screen resolution, a higher megapixel camera that records in high definition, a gyroscope, and faster microprocessors. These enhancements by themselves will not chew up more bandwidth than the existing iPhone 3GS, but the applications that will likely get developed using these new features could.

To help keep data usage in check, AT&T has adopted a new pricing plan. Earlier this month, it eliminated the unlimited data plan for new subscribers. Instead, new iPhone users will subscribe to one of two data plans. For $15 a month, users get 200MB of data. And for $25 a month, they will get 2GB of data. AT&T claims roughly 97 percent of subscribers use less than 2GB of data every month.

But most experts agree that data caps of any kind will likely alter customer usage patterns. And it will likely help keep data intensive apps like streaming video and audio on Wi-Fi networks instead of AT&T’s 3G network.

In fact, the new FaceTime video conferencing app that will use the iPhone 4 front-facing camera will only be used on a Wi-Fi network. And AT&T expects most Netflix viewing on the new iPhone 4, as well as the iPad, will be done on Wi-Fi.

“The benefit of the usage caps is that it will likely drive a lot of the heavy data usage for new applications to Wi-Fi,” Golvin said.

Some analysts believe that improvements in the design of the new iPhone 4 will also improve performance and might even help prevent dropped calls. First the company has added a faster, home-grown processor called the A4 chip–the same one found inside the iPad–that should allow users to access apps and the browser quicker.

Apple has also made some hardware changes to improve reception. Steve Jobs explained at WWDC last week that three different seams in the metal band running around the edge of the iPhone 4 are part of a new antenna system. According to Apple, that should help with some of the reception problems customers have experienced.

Even with network upgrades and newly designed hardware, iPhone users could still face a congested network. Meanwhile, AT&T’s rivals are not sitting idle. Sprint Nextel, the first national carrier to offer a 4G wireless service with broadband speeds for wireless devices, has just launched the new Google Android based HTC Evo.

Verizon Wireless is building its 4G network and expects to launch the network commercially in 2010 with more markets coming online in 2011. And then there is T-Mobile USA, the smallest of the major wireless providers. It is currently upgrading its 3G network to HSPA+. It already has several markets turned up and will announce on Wednesday that it is adding an additional 25 markets.

These challengers claim they are ahead of AT&T in terms of network speeds and capacity. But the reality is that few devices are even on the market that can take advantage of these network upgrades. For example, Sprint is the only company with 4G wireless handset, the HTC Evo. A Verizon 4G phone isn’t expected on the market until at least the middle of 2011. And T-Mobile USA is currently only offering data sticks for its HSPA+ service.

What’s more these operators service far fewer 3G smartphone customers than AT&T. For a comparison, look at T-Mobile versus AT&T. Today, T-Mobile has 5.2 million customers using 3G-capable converged devices on its network, which is an increase of 33 percent from 3.9 million customers in the fourth quarter of 2009.

By contrast, AT&T has 15 million iPhone customers alone. This doesn’t even include the millions of other smartphone and converged-devices AT&T has using its network.

“AT&T has been at the forefront of learning how wireless carriers deal with heavy data usage,” Golvin said. “They are really the pioneers. And if any other carrier had the kinds of traffic loads that AT&T has had to deal with as a result of the iPhone, then they would have the same problems. And for anyone to claim any different is crap.”

Still, many wireless consumers say the fear of poor AT&T network performance is keeping them from switching carriers for the latest iPhone. Joe Lopez falls into that camp. He had hoped that Apple would announce a new version of the phone for Verizon. When no such announcement came, he decided to settle for an iPhone competitor.

“I am currently a Verizon customer on a month-to-month (contract) waiting to see if they get the iPhone contract,” he said. “AT&T doesn’t make it attractive to switch. So after waiting long enough, I will now get the Droid Incredible.”

The Sony PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox made moves on Nintendo’s Wii at the Electronic Entertainment Expo — the three days each year when all eyes are on the video-gaming world.

With new systems that let players control games with their own movements, the industry’s “big three” now find themselves locked in a battle for dominance in what was once a single-player arena.

Video games, of course, are a world ruled by high scores — preferably ones that come after destroying your opponent with a dramatic finishing move.

So, did anyone strike a killing blow at E3?

Most analysts are saying it’s too early to tell.

“I’m excited by the hardware; the hardware all looks great,” said Shaun McInnis, associate editor at Gamespot.com. “It’s going to be interesting.”

McInnis and others are saying that it will be the software that ultimately will tell the tale.

Microsoft’s Kinect, a motion-sensing system that requires no game controller at all, and Sony’s Move, with a Wii-like wand that charts body movement, both showed off capabilities that largely lived up to their billing.

But the games that the companies are offering on the new systems are, perhaps understandably, limited at this point.

On Kinect, Microsoft showed off some compelling-looking titles, but ones that will mostly remind gamers of the first-generation party games that were offered for the Wii.

Sony offers a couple of its established titles, the new “LittleBigPlanet 2″ and “SOCOM 4″ games, for Move. But aside from “Sorcery,” a nice-looking adventure game, the titles fall into the familiar dancing, fighting and kids games categories.

Meanwhile, Nintendo — which made its biggest single splash by rolling out its Nintendo 3DS handheld device — countered with a flurry of titles for the Wii that harken back to the company’s storied place in gaming history.

New “The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword,” “Donkey Kong Country Returns” and “Mario Sports Mix” games were announced. So were “GoldenEye,” an update of the classic James Bond-inspired shooter, and “NBA Jam,” another old favorite getting a new twist.

“Sony and Microsoft don’t really have that” on motion-controlled games, McInnis said. “There’s no big, familiar games.”

Dan Hsu, co-founder of gaming-news site Bitmob, agreed that no clear winner emerged from the week, but said that Microsoft’s Kinect, known previously by its code name, Project Natal, might have suffered a bit from pre-show hype.

“I wouldn’t say any of them lost, because I don’t think anybody walked away from any of the press conferences thinking that company didn’t do a good job,” Hsu said. “But I’d say the one making the smallest splash might have been Microsoft.

“Most of the titles they showed, we’ve heard of before. There weren’t a lot of surprises there.”

Hsu said Nintendo made the biggest impact with a single device at E3 with its 3DS.

“Once you actually got to see it, you realize that this was some new technology that we’ve not seen before,” he said. “It’s visually stunning.”

While not personally fired up about the games offered on the new motion systems, Hsu said he is excited about their long-term potential. Kinect, for example, showcases voice recognition on “Kinectimals,” a kid-friendly game that drew “oohs” and “ahs” from folks inclined toward such things.

But it might take a couple of years to see if either of the new players can cut seriously into Nintendo’s hold on motion gaming.

Here’s our take on other “winners” and “losers” from E3:

Winner: The cloud-gaming platform Steam was a big winner with the announcement of “Portal 2″ for the console. “Portal 2″ will be the sequel to the surprise 2007 PC hit, “Portal,” that was included in “The Orange Box” game bundle.

Steam also announced that it will be bringing its cloud gaming network to the PlayStation 3, offering automatic updates and online saving of games in progress — a big win for players.

Winner: Numbers fared well at E3 — as in the kind that appear in game titles. Many of the gaming world’s major franchises will be coming out with fresh content to keep their fans happy.

“SOCOM 4,” “Gran Turismo 5,” “LittleBigPlanet 2,” “Gears of War 3″ and “Dead Space 2″ are just some of the follow-up titles that will be hitting consoles and PCs later this year.

Loser: Gamers’ pocketbooks are going to take a hit with new hardware upgrades. The 3-D advancements are going to cost a pretty penny for a new television/monitor and specialized glasses.

Sony is bundling its Move controller with the navigation controller, PlayStation Eye and a Move-ready game for just under $100. Microsoft hasn’t released a price for its Kinect motion-controller, but online rumors suggest the Xbox add-on may cost about $150 to $400.

Nintendo also has been silent on its new 3-D handheld console, 3DS. But the current price of the Nintendo DSi XL is slightly under $200, so the 3DS likely will top that number.

Loser: Santa is in for a rough season unless he starts working out now.

Last year, many blockbuster titles waited until after the holidays to come out due to the overwhelming demand for “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” a first-person shooter game that sold 4.7 million copies worldwide in the first 24 hours of release. This year, many “must-have” titles will be stuffing Santa’s bag and breaking his back.

“Civilization V” (September), “Medal of Honor” (October), “Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit” (November) and many others are expected to be on wish lists for the holidays — along with the new gaming systems from the big three.