Nick Summers

  As he opened his keynote presentation today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Steve Jobs projected on the screen behind him an image of an iPhone, a laptop, and a big question mark between them.

 Steve Jobs is unveiling the Apple iPad, the company's feverishly anticipated tablet device, in San Francisco at this minute. NEWSWEEK Technology Editor Daniel Lyons is on the scene—and says the audience's reaction is surprisingly tepid. "I haven't been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation," Lyons e-mails.On to some serious observations.

Kimberly White / Reuters-LandovWith the unveiling of Apple's tablet computer less than 24 hours away, enough details have squirmed out of Steve Jobs's death grip to form a coherent picture of what the new device is likely to offer.

Of all the choice lines in Conan O'Brien's statement about the late-night mess at NBC─and there are plenty, from "terrible difficulties in prime-time" to "what I honestly believe is its destruction"─one of the most interesting concerns technology. "Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn't matter," Conan wrote. "But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more." Conan's right, and he's wrong.

ESPN announced this week that it is launching a 3-D sports channel. If other cable networks know what's good for them, they'll follow suit as soon as possible.Everyone knows that over the last decade or so, a digital tidal wave has replaced postal mail with e-mail, landlines with cell phones, and home newspaper delivery with news Web sites.

For cybersecurity geeks, it was a moment to celebrate. In May, as President Obama announced a new federal office to oversee America's digital infrastructure, he used language rarely heard in the White House. "We've had to learn a whole new vocabulary just to stay ahead of the cybercriminals who would do us harm: spyware and malware and spoofing and phishing and botnets," Obama said. (Today, he named his pick for the post.) Obama also reminded the audience that he knew of what he spoke: in 2008...

 At first, it's a little difficult to get interested in what Steve Wozniak and his partners at a startup called Fusion-io are hawking. They're storage devices.

Some people savor literature; others, fine wine. I prefer to relish the really exceptional sex scandals of our time.Right now, obviously, that's the Tiger Woods inferno.

Friendster announced a relaunch last week and, responsible journalist that I am, I wanted to sign up for an account and investigate the service thoroughly before ripping it to pieces.

 Like sex and salsa, sleep is one of those things that you never have quite enough of. You wish you'd turned in earlier, snoozed a little later, suffered fewer midnight interruptions from the baby and your partner's freezing feet.

Has Windows Vista reached out from the grave to foul things up one last time? Judging by lower-than-expected PC sales off the back of the Oct. 22 Windows 7 launch, it would appear so.

After Atari popularized the joystick in 1977, videogame developers spent years cramming more buttons onto the controller. Then along came Nintendo, with a motion-sensing controller for its Wii console that was less complicated, and more fun.

One of the many mind-boggling statistics about Facebook—300 million members, half log in daily, 8 billion minutes of use per day—is that the social network also happens to be the Web's largest photo-sharing service.

Found in the press room of the official Windows 7 launch event in Manhattan: a reminder of why we're all very, very glad to be rid of Vista.  

It's a hot afternoon in July on the AT&T Labs campus in Florham Park, N.J., and William Cheswick, on staff as a principal researcher, has been asked to open the summer lecture series on any topic of his choosing.

From this week's magazine:My password is gr8199. I've been using it for more than a decade, ever since a Web site first required me to create a string of six to 12 characters, with a mixture of letters and numbers.

Tough to remember but easy to crack, passwords are the weak link in computer security. Billions hang in the balance.

 The only force equal to the pace of innovation is our ability to become blasé about it. The first time a little box on my rental car's dashboard talked to a geosynchronous satellite and then told me where to turn left, I was amazed.

While the tech world waits in thrall for news of the fabled Apple tablet to appear, we should also hope that Cupertino continues to refine its current best seller, the iPhone.

Here's the first installment of Touch Yourself, the Techtonic Shifts iPhone app review column:Some iPhone apps, like Urinal Test, you download as a gag. Others meet some temporary need, like the U.S. Open scoreboard app.

In design, imitation is a funny thing. When Thing A looks like Thing B, it can be homage─or plagiarism. Tribute─or theft. The message from the imitator to the imitated might be, "Yep, you nailed it, the platonic ideal of this category, and I can't help but follow your lead"─or a more brazen "You did all the hard work of creation, and now I will shamelessly copy."But a lot of that is just academic banter for the design teams that work at Thing A and Thing B's companies.

Have you seen the new antipiracy video from the software industry? It is execrable! Outdated, kinda offensive, and embarrassingly unhip, the clip has a zero percent chance of achieving its goal of deterring illegal downloads on campus.

As people still struggle to explain exactly what Twitter is, one of the more compelling theories I've heard is that the service is actually a real-time search engine.

Ben Stiller attempts to explain Twitter to Mickey Rooney, just shy of his 89th birthday: Ben Stiller: See, look at this: "OMG, oldest daughter shaving legs for the first time!

From the Techtonic Shifts inbox, a classic ludicrous press release: The boating industry has known for years that the intimidation of driving and docking a boat, especially a yacht, keeps many people who enjoy boating from owning one themselves.

My musical aptitudes are somewhere in the vicinity of Helen Keller's, so you may want to take this with a grain of salt. But I really mean it: Spotify lives up to the hype.

 Part of the deal when you fall in love with the iPhone is that you clammer and coo every time Apple rolls out features that have been standard on other devices for years.

From the inbox, back on June 4: "The World's Greenest Gaming PC"Awesome, a green gaming PC that uses less energy!  As, you know, you sit indoors this summer with the A/C blasting, slamming Red Bulls packed with chemicals, lights blazing for your all-night gaming marathon. You know what's even greener than that? When you write about tech, you get a lot of p.r. pitches. Swing and a Miss lets us vent about the worst. 

Should Microsoft be worried about the search giant's new operating system? Not yet.

With the help of prison consultants, white-collar crooks like Bernard Madoff aren't treated like your average criminal.