Verizon has said this week that it will not sell Windows Phone 7 smartphones until 2011, putting an early dent in Microsoft's plan to sell to a broad market.

Brenda Raney, a spokeswoman for the carrier, said they will support the operating system, but not this year. Despite the move, Raney says: "Our relationship with Microsoft is solid."

Verizon is the most popular carrier in the United States.

One analyst believes that the announcement is certainly not a positive, but also not the end of the world. Says Michael Gartenberg of the Altimeter Group : "The more carriers and the more devices they can bring early on, the more chance they have for mainstream success, but not having Verizon will not make or break it. Look at the iPhone -- you don't need Verizon to be successful in the U.S. in mobile. On the other hand, it would be good for Microsoft to count Verizon in as a named partner early on."

Microsoft and Verizon had a recent collaboration, the Kin smartphone devices, but sales were extremely low and Verizon shipped back their excess inventory to Microsoft just two months after launch.

Globally, Microsoft has fallen to a 9.3 percent share of the smartphone market, trailing iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian.

Permalink | Comments

---

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has said this week that the company will begin to sell video game cutscenes as full-length movies in the near future.

The company plans to sell the movies for "$20 or $30," making them more expensive than the average Blu-ray disc.

Speaking at the Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference, Kotick says games like StarCraft II have such spectacular in-game cinematics that the publisher could edit them into a single full-length feature film which would then be distributed digitally to fans.

Kotick expects to begin selling said films within 5 years.

"If we were to take that hour, or hour an a half, and take it out of the game and we were to go to our audiences, who we have their credit card information a direct relationship, and say to them 'Would you like to have the StarCraft movie?," the CEO asked.

Continuing, Kotick says (via IGN): "My guess is unlike film studios that are really stuck with a model that goes through theatrical distribution and takes a signification amount of the profit away, if we were to go to an audience and say 'We have this great hour and a half of linear video that we'd like to make available to you at a $20 or $30 price point,' you'd have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever."

"Within the next five years, you are likely to see us do that. It might be in a partnership with somebody or alone, but there will be a time where we'll capitalize on the relationship we have with our audience; deliver them something that is really extraordinary and let them consume it directly through us instead of theatrical distribution.

"If we were to deliver a film digitally this way, I'd say an extremely high percentage would then go to the theater and watch it again."

Permalink | Comments

---

Despite their best efforts to hide the existence of the handheld, Mortal Kombat's executive producer Shaun Himmerick has said this week that the company has a "PSP2 in the house."

Himmerick had been asked if the developer was creating a game for the PSP or for the 3DS, or both.

His response: "We're not launching day one on all consoles like that. We are looking at them; we have a PSP2 in the house and we're looking at the engine, like what can it support."

"Always a big thing for us is the performance. We're running at 60 fps, what can we do and do we have to build all the art assets over. We're definitely looking at them. PSP2 looks like it's a pretty powerful machine. We don't have a 3DS system in house yet, but we're looking to get one, and we'll certainly look at what its power is."

If the company is already sending PSP2 units out, before Nintendo is sending out the 3DS (which has been officially launched but not priced), there is a chance the handheld could be here in time for the holidays.

Sony took the time to respond to the news, saying: "We haven't announced any news on PSP."

Permalink | Comments

---