NEW YORK — Research in Motion’s turnaround effort has hit yet another roadblock: The BlackBerry maker said Wednesday that it is delaying a much-needed update to the PlayBook tablet’s operating system until February 2012.

The PlayBook has sold sluggishly since its April debut and drew criticism for its unfinished feel. One major oversight: The tablet lacks built-in apps for key functions including e-mail, calendar, address book and BlackBerry Messenger access.
Those updates are coming in PlayBook 2.0, which RIM executives have cast as a Big Bang overhaul.

“The great thing is that we can upgrade the PlayBook,” RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis told analysts on an earnings call last month. “The PlayBook 2.0 release is going to be something that [customers are] looking forward to, and I expect them to be very, very happy with. … I think our customers have been waiting for the native e-mail, calendar and contacts.”

They’ll have to keep waiting. On last month’s earnings call, RIM executives referred to the software’s “upcoming” launch and said that they would show it off at RIM’s developer conference, held last week in San Francisco.

RIM did demo OS 2.0 at BlackBerry DevCon, where it handed out PlayBooks that included a beta version for developers. But consumers won’t get the update until next year.

“As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch … until we are confident we have fully met the expectations,” PlayBook senior vice president David Smith wrote in a company blog post late Tuesday.

And even with the delay, the OS 2.0 will still lack a key feature when it’s finally released: the popular BlackBerry Messenger service. Smith wrote simply: “We’re still working on it.”

Shares of RIM (RIMM) ended the day almost 7% lower.

The delay could further crimp the PlayBook’s already disappointing sales. Last quarter, RIM shipped just 200,000 PlayBooks — a significant drop-off from the 500,000 shipped in the prior quarter. By comparison, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) sold 11.1 million iPads in its latest quarter.

Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) temporarily slashed the PlayBook’s price to $299, a $200 discount, late last month. Office Depot and Staples have also offered their own deals.

RIM was counting on PlayBook 2.0 to “reinvigorate” sales, Lazaridis told analysts last month.

But its troubled tablet is just one of a myriad of problems plaguing RIM. Earlier this month, the company suffered what executives later called the largest-ever BlackBerry outage.

The service disruption started in Europe, the Middle East and Africa on October 10. The next day it spread to South America. That night, RIM assured customers that the glitch had been identified and was “now being resolved” — but the following day it got worse as customers in the United States and Canada were hit. Service was restored after three full days of outages.

Meanwhile, RIM’s sales are flagging, and its stock is down nearly 64% year-to-date. Some disgruntled investors are agitating to remove and replace RIM’s board. Small activist shareholders, including Canada’s Jaguar Financial Corp., are pushing the company to sell itself.

NEW YORK— If nature calls at 8.00 a.m. on your Starbucks run, good luck trying to use the bathroom. Chances are you’ll find long lines, an out-of-order sign, or a loo hog who ties up the facilities a touch too long.

So the crew behind Cloo came up with a proposed solution: An app that lets you rent a pit stop. Pull up your iPhone, click a few buttons, and find a nearby person willing to time-share their toilets. Cloo’s founders claim they’re actively developing this app and plan to release it early next year.
Strange? Yep. But it’s just the latest and oddest example of a broader trend: apps to let you share everything in your life. We’re not talking about sharing your thoughts through tweets or Facebook status updates. These apps want you to rent out your home, your car and even yourself.

Rent-your-home site Airbnb, which launched in 2008, was one of the early pioneers. It has now booked more than 3 million nights on the service and lists property rentals in nearly 20,000 cities around the world. Investors sank more than $100 million into the venture in a recent funding round.

Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing service that allows users to rent out their vehicles when they’re not using them, took home the grand prize at TechCrunch Disrupt in May. Meanwhile, the tech community is buzzing about Skillshare, a New York-based service that allows anyone to become a teacher and make extra cash coaching others on their hobbies and skills.

And then there’s TaskRabbit, which lets you rent out your spare time. Customers can hire TaskRabbits to do everything from running errands to drafting love letters.

“I think people are going to become more comfortable about the idea of sharing things between their neighbors both online and offline, and so I see all of these markets really [becoming] more mainstream,” TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque says.

Zaarly falls into a similar category. The new company serves as a marketplace that allows people to outsource tasks and buy products from people in their community. Its big bet — that traditional e-commerce is evolving — drew a $14 million investment this week from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“I’m a big believer that we’re going through a pretty macro shift in the economy,” says Craig Shapiro, founder of Collaborative Fund, which invests in early-stage “collaborative consumption” startups. “For so long we were ingrained to own stuff — it was hyper consumption. I think there’s a massive change, and we’re at the beginning of sharing resources.”

One of Shapiro’s investments is Rentcycle, a company that stops short of peer-to peer rentals and lets people rent equipment, clothes and other goods from local stores.

CEO Tim Hyer thinks we’re in the beginning phases of a shift.

“The recession was a big force in this movement. The idea of people just having less money to spend and less resources forced people to live within their means a little more,” he says. “Rather than putting a lot of investment in things, you can pay for access rather than ownership.”

But Hyer isn’t yet offering peer-to peer rentals, mainly due to security concerns.

Underlying all of these sharing apps is the question of trust. Before I open up my bathroom to the public, I’ve got to know who I’m letting in the door. The last thing you want to do is rent out your home to a meth addict — one recent Airbnb horror story. And what happens if your TaskRabbit shows up with a weapon?

But Busque thinks that the evolution of social networks like Facebook has helped make the technology smarter, and in turn, safer.

“Five years ago there’s no way we could have built TaskRabbit and leveraged the technology pieces that we’ve done today — things like social networking, mobile platforms and location-based analysis are all key components to building trust really between people,” she says.

After one woman had her house ransacked after renting it on Airbnb, the company created a $50,000 insurance policy and doubled the size of its customer support team. To reassure those concerned about renting out their vehicles, Getaround teamed up with insurance giant Berkshire Hathaway.

Shapiro thinks that as the trend continues to grow, people will begin to develop an online reputation similar to their financial reputation in the credit realm.

“Instead of measuring financial health, you need to be able to look someone up and say ‘is he trustworthy’?” he said.

That’s a top item on his wish list for the Collaborative Fund’s portfolio: A venture with a good formula for measuring trust online, to facilitate transferring it from the online world to the offline sharing realm.

“That’s the area we’re really looking at from an investment perceptive,” he says.

But ultimately, it’s up to people decide how much they’ll share — and where they’ll draw the line.

NEW YORK — Amazon’s third-quarter earnings sharply missed Wall Street estimates, sending shares 17% lower in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Amazon earned $63 million in the quarter that just ended, representing a 73% decline over the same quarter a year earlier. Per-share earnings were 14 cents, far short of the 24 cents per share forecast of the analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Sales for the quarter that ended Sept. 30 came in at $10.9 billion, which was in line with analysts’ estimates.

In a post-earnings conference call, Amazon chief financial officer Tom Szkutak said the earnings decline came down to spending on expansion: “We’re investing in a lot of capacity. That’s what we’ve been talking about a lot the past few quarters.”

Amazon is planning to open 17 new warehouses, Szkutak said. The company has also been shelling out cash in other sectors: the new Kindle line, its Web hosting business, digital content and more.

Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) focused on the positive in its earnings release, talking about last month’s unveiling of four new Kindles — but it didn’t provide any specifics beyond the vague statement that Kindle Fire tablet pre-sales have been so strong that Amazon is “building millions more than we’d already planned.”

Amazon has never revealed sales figures for the Kindle line, which competes with other dedicated e-readers including the Barnes & Noble (BKS, Fortune 500) Nook, the Sony (SNE) Reader and the Kobo, as well as Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) multipurpose iPad tablet.

The company’s “worldwide electronics and other general merchandise” sales, where Kindle is lumped in, rose 59% compared to last year, reaching $6.3 billion.

Outlook: Amazon often sets an almost comically wide range for its income forecast, and this time was no exception.

Fourth-quarter operating income is expected to come in somewhere between a loss of $200 million and a gain of $250 million. Either way, Amazon is expecting a drop from last year’s fourth-quarter operating income of $474 million.

Net sales are expected to be between $16.45 billion and $18.65 billion. Analysts had been expecting a range of $16.88 billion and $19.2 billion.

Kindle Fire: Amazon’s real iPad rival, the Kindle Fire tablet, goes on sale November 15. The $199 device, which was unveiled nearly one month ago, has a 7-inch display and runs on a heavily customized version of Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android operating system. The Kindle Fire offers Wi-Fi connectivity, but no 3G or other cellular connection. It also lacks a camera and microphone, two features found in most rival tablets.

Pricing the tablet at just $199 won’t net Amazon a wide profit margin, but the company is willing to get tablets into customers’ hands for cheap — and then make money selling them content like e-books, apps, videos and mp3s.

Amazon hopes its low price will attract more casual customers who aren’t willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for an iPad, Motorola (MMI) Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Amazon also unveiled a new line of Kindle e-readers during its Fire event, the cheapest of which is a $79 ad-supported entry-level version — another bargain-basement price that could attract more customers.

A fully integrated Apple television, one of Steve Jobs’ final visions, might be on the way soon, according to multiple reports.

In “Steve Jobs,” a biography of the late Apple co-founder released Monday, author Walter Isaacson writes that Jobs told him he’d finally figured out a way to make a TV practical. He said it would wirelessly synch with other Apple devices.

“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” he told Isaacson. “I finally cracked it.”

On the same day, analyst Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities issued a report titled “A Full-Blown Apple TV Is On The Way.”

In it, he says the book confirms what his multiple trips to China have suggested. He said Ticonderoga has seen evidence that early stage prototypes of an “Apple Smart TV” are already making their way through Chinese factories.

“We believe a product could hit the market in the coming quarters, opening up a new growth category for Apple and driving sales of existing products that play into the Apple digital ecosystem,” White wrote.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg cited three unnamed sources saying that Jeff Robbin, the software engineer who built iTunes, is in charge of developing the television set.

The news service quoted another analyst, Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray Cos., saying that the iPhone 4S’s Siri voice-command app could be integrated into a TV system.

Since 2007, the company has made a product called Apple TV, a set-top Web-streaming box that competes with rival Google TV and independent offerings like Roku and Boxee. But compared to hits like the iPhone and iPad, it has largely underperformed, leading Jobs last year to acknowledge that Apple TV has “never been a huge hit.”

In September, Apple slashed its price from $299 to $99, but even that hasn’t made the service a household name.

In his report, White notes that a refresh of Apple TV set for later this year has been scrapped, potentially signaling the television system’s pending arrival.

With little notice, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign has been quietly laying the groundwork for an online social network that could be a crucial weapon in his battle to take the White House.

Called MyMitt, the platform is tucked away on MittRomney.com, accessible only if you choose to register on the Action page and unadvertised in any proactive way. There’s no button pointing to it from the homepage, and the MyMitt Action Center looks like it’s only partially finished.

Nevertheless, close to 100,000 Romney supporters have created an account on MyMitt, a substantial number at this stage in the race. Here’s why this could be a big deal.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign built its own social network at My.BarackObama.com. Known as myBO for short, the platform made it easy for Obama supporters to create their own profiles on the campaign website, to write their own blog posts, start or join interest groups, organize their own house parties and, most important, initiate and track their own fundraisers.

Two million people eventually joined, and 35,000 generated more than $70 million in campaign contributions from their own personal networks. Enabling your supporters to visible share their enthusiasm with each other is a powerful way to grow a political network. Even more useful: The myBO platform also allowed the campaign to figure out which supporters were the most passionate activists and to concentrate attention on these “super-volunteers” for a variety of vital tasks.

While Obama’s re-election campaign brags about getting its millionth individual donor, basks in its 23 million-strong Facebook following and spends millions on building a sophisticated online campaign operation, it might be tempting to write off the Republican presidential.
But this doesn’t worry Mindy Finn, who ran Romney’s online operation in 2008 and this year worked on the now-defunct Tim Pawlenty campaign. She said, “Don’t count out the Republican campaigns in this area yet. Several of the Republican campaigns show promise of going toe-to-toe or besting the Obama operation by the time they would come out of the primary as the nominee.”

Right now, MyMitt isn’t nearly as robust as MyBO, but the seeds are there. Built on the Drupal content management system by the campaign’s own tech team, MyMitt lets supporters make donations, create their own fundraising pages to rally their friends around, purchase official campaign gear or volunteer by making calls from home on behalf of the campaign.

On October 15, the campaign held a National Call Day for volunteers to “share Mitt’s pro-growth message and build support.” About 37,000 calls were generated by a couple of thousand volunteers.

That may not seem like much compared with the 3 million calls the Obama campaign says its volunteers made between the beginning of July and the end of September. But Zac Moffatt, the campaign’s digital director, says the call-day effort showed that the Romney operation is able to activate volunteers from all 50 states.

Moffatt, whose firm Targeted Victory rose to prominence running online operations for Republican candidates like Marco Rubio in 2010, is reticent to provide many details about the Romney campaign’s plans for MyMitt. “We want to make it a platform for people to engage with,” he said.

When I suggest that this kind of user-centric toolkit isn’t standard operating procedure — the Rick Perry campaign offers only a personal fundraising page, for example, and Michelle Bachmann makes volunteers fill out an online form and wait to be contacted — Moffatt demurs.

“Every campaign is going to create a single log-in for their supporters,” he said. Maybe he’s suggesting that MyMitt isn’t worth paying attention to. Or perhaps he doesn’t want his competition to realize they’re in danger of being lapped.

NEW YORK Sam Palmisano will step down as IBM’s CEO at the end of the year and will be replaced by longtime company executive Ginni Rometty.

Palmisano’s tenure was an extremely successful one: After taking the tech giant’s reins from Lou Gerstner in 2002, Palmisano transformed the company from a systems and services firm into a supercomputing and analytics mega-machine.
The makeover paid off. Shares have soared 73% during Palmisano’s tenure and IBM’s revenues have more than quadrupled in his nearly 10 years at the helm.

Palmisano will remain as chairman of the board when Rometty takes over as CEO on Jan 1, 2012. Rometty currently serves as IBM’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, overseeing IBM’s Global Business Services unit.

Rometty “is more than a superb operational executive,” Palmisano said of his soon-to-be replacement in a prepared statement. “She brings to the role of CEO a unique combination of vision, client focus, unrelenting drive, and passion for IBMers and the company’s future. Ginni is the ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century.”

Rometty, who has been an IBMer for 30 years, has been credited with spearheading IBM’s growth strategy by getting the company into the cloud computing and analytics businesses. She has also been at the helm of readying Watson, the Jeopardy! playing computer, for commercial use.

“There is no greater privilege in business than to be asked to lead IBM, especially at this moment,” Rometty said in a written statement. “Sam had the courage to transform the company based on his belief that computing technology, our industry, even world economies would shift in historic ways. All of that has come to pass.”

But for those who think Rometty will maintain the status quo at IBM, she noted that isn’t in the company’s blood.

“Sam taught us, above all, that we must never stop reinventing IBM,” Rometty added.

Rometty ascension next year will mark another milestone: The nation’s two largest technology firms will be run by women. Meg Whitman took over as Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ, Fortune 500) CEO last month, giving her oversight of a business with annual sales that topped $126 billion last year. IBM has annual sales of around $100 billion.

“Rage” starts off full of promise and beauty but finishes with clunky game mechanics and an ending that was probably the most disappointing I’ve experienced in years.

The new first-person shooter game from id Software draws heavily from the developer’s pedigree for producing intense action and violence in titles such as “Doom” and “Quake.” Players start out as survivors in a world hit by an asteroid and wake up from a cryo-sleep inside an ark on a planet full of mutants and tribal clans.

The scenery is both gorgeous and dangerous. The surroundings are wide open and encourage exploration. The level of detail in even the smallest rock really immerses the player in a world that has lost hold of civilization as we know it and is struggling to survive.

Once players get to “cities” where clans have gathered, the graphics continue to shine. At one point, water droplets from a broken overhead pipe cloud your vision temporarily as small furry creatures scramble around your feet.

Other characters in the game are equally impressive-looking, with individual features that make them very lifelike. Everything moves naturally, and there are very few moments where something looks out of place, even in this post-asteroid world.

While non-player characters do look alive, it is when they die that the graphics break down. Dead enemies will often fall through walls or desks, and multiple bodies will occupy the same space, making it seem like you’ve just killed a three-headed, six-armed, six-legged person. Those are the moments that distract from gameplay.

Combat is varied and brutal. There are plenty of weapons to be found and used to blow away enemies. Although there are only four slots to keep weapons handy, the game allows access to your weapon locker at any time, allowing you to mix and match your selections to your opponents.

From a wingstick (sort of a three-legged boomerang) to a crossbow with exploding arrows to assault rifles and machine guns, players will have many options to exact bloody damage. Each weapon also has a variety of ammo choices that can pierce armor or explode on contact.

A crafting system lets you create health bandages, grenades and remote-controlled bombs, which comes in handy when funds to purchase these things are low. But it does force you to scavenge and pick up everything you can when walking around.

The story is pretty basic at its core. You awaken from the ark and are expected to be humanity’s savior in this godforsaken world. Your player moves from city to city as you try to stay one step ahead of the Authority, the military force that acts as the ruler of the planet.

Despite the game being filled with extra missions and plenty to do off the beaten path, the story tries to hurry you along to the next plot point. Non-player characters are constantly reminding you that the Authority is ready to invade their city if you remain too long or telling you to hurry to complete your mission because time is of the essence.

Most of the missions are what you’d expect from a wide-open game: fetch-and-return quests. You are often directed to a location (oh, and use a vehicle, because walking takes WAY too long) and have to kill either mutants or another clan, retrieve some item and return. The quests aren’t repetitive in their detail, so each one does hold your interest, plus each presents an opportunity to scavenge for more crafting ingredients.

As the game’s story develops, you discover that your bio chip from your sleep time in the ark holds the key to surviving the future. Eventually, you become part of the Resistance, whose mission it is to overthrow the evil (?) Authority and make the world better for all survivors.

The game will offer tips along the way during loading screens. One reminds players to save often.

Do it. I’m not kidding.

The automatic checkpoints are spaced so far apart as to be nearly useless. Many a mission was restarted because I neglected to save after 30 minutes of gameplay and died. Pausing the game to save after every battle ruins the flow of the action.

Ultimately, you are tasked to take a disc to the Authority’s main city, upload data to a satellite and wake up people who are sleeping in undiscovered arks. Why they would automatically join the Resistance side is never really explained, nor is how the Authority managed to retain a full army complete with futuristic weapons after the asteroid hit.

Without revealing any details (no spoilers!), the ending was probably the most unsatisfying and disappointing I’ve experiences in years. When the credits started to roll, I actually shouted at the screen, “Are you kidding me?!?”

After developers obviously invested a lot toward environmental and combat graphics to make the game as immersive for the player as possible, I was stunned by the lack of an ending and answers to obvious and lingering questions. I felt like I just walked out in the middle of a movie.

“Rage” is a beautiful game that lovingly renders a post-apocalyptic world, drawing them in and making them feel part of the whole. However, graphics issues with dead characters and an ending that is weak and incomplete makes players feel like the audience of a magician who just told everyone how he did all his tricks.

“Rage” is available now on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. It is rated M for mature due to blood and gore, intense violence and strong language. This review was done using the Xbox 360 version, which comes on three disks: two for single player and one for multiplayer.

Smaller tablet computers that are significantly more affordable and portable than the iPad are finally starting to hit the United States — and they could hit a crucial sweet spot in the consumer market.

Recently Kobo announced the new Kobo Vox, which costs $200. That’s the same price as Amazon’s recently announced The Kobo Vox starts shipping Friday, while the Kindle Fire won’t start shipping until November 15. The Barnes & Noble, which costs about $250, is already available in stores and online.

Although marketed mainly as e-book readers, all three of these consumer devices are actually small tablet computers (7 inches long) that run the Android mobile operating system and use Wi-Fi — no carrier data plan or contract required. So theoretically, they can do much more than just let you buy and read e-books.

This makes them potentially powerful tools for people who want access to the Web, apps and more — especially people who face economic or other barriers to using smartphones or computers. Small, inexpensive, easy-to-use tablets could become an important bridge to help people cross the digital divide and gain expanded access to education, jobs, community, and other resources.

The grand vision of tablet computers is that, ideally, they’ll allow the average, non-geeky person to do most of what can be done with a laptop computer — in a way that’s much easier to learn, use and carry around.

Certainly this is the case with Apple’s iPad, which sold 11 million units in the last quarter alone.

But at this point, iPads start at $500 — about what you might pay for a brand new 32-inch flat-screen TV at Best Buy, and twice or more what PC netbooks cost at most retail stores. From the perspective of typical consumers, especially given the current economy, that’s a significant luxury investment.

This month there are fresh rumors that Apple may be planning to introduce a smaller and less costly “iPad mini.” But nothing is confirmed, so don’t hold your breath.

The tablet market is growing fast, and its dynamics are shifting quickly. According to a new report from Strategy Analytics, in the last year Android tablets grew from 2% of the global tablet market to 27%. Meanwhile, the iPad’s global tablet market share has dropped from 96% to 67%.

That doesn’t reflect a decrease in the iPad’s popularity, but rather that consumer demand for tablets is not one-size-fits-all.

In fact, size is a key issue for people shopping for tablets. The iPad measures roughly 7-by-10 inches — too big for a typical pocket or purse, and nearly twice the size of the basic Kobo Vox, Nook Color and Kindle Fire models. Digital devices that aren’t as easy to carry around tend to mainly get used only at certain times of day, in certain settings.

For this reason it’s questionable how “mobile” larger tablets like the iPad really are.

Aside from the Vox, Fire, and Nook Color, there are lots of other small Android tablets available. But so far these products have faced various challenges in the consumer market:

Cost: The Wi-Fi-only version of Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab costs about $350, which is on the pricier side. The carrier-branded versions cost much less to buy up front if you agree to a two-year contract. For instance, Verizon currently sells the 7-inch Galaxy Tab for just $200, but data plans cost $30-$80 per month, and there’s a $350 early termination fee.

Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, is selling a small Android tablet by Arnova for just $99-$129 in a small pilot program — but for that bargain-basement price you have to agree to a one- or two-year newspaper subscription, costing up to $13 per month.

Device quality: This is an issue for the cheapest tablets. For instance, one reviewer noted that the touchscreen performance on the Philly.com tablet is less than stellar.

In contrast, the Nook Color has been getting generally favorable reviews for device quality. The advance Kindle Fire reviews are also mostly positive.

Android’s learning curve: This can be an obstacle for some. The straightforward Android experience that comes with tablets by Samsung, Motorola, Lenovo, and other manufacturers can be daunting to typical consumers — especially the majority of U.S. consumers who don’t yet own a smartphone. A more constrained but dependable out-of-the-box user experience can be simpler to learn and can make the average consumer happier, at least initially.

Gadgets that are more complex or open-ended tend to confuse or frustrate average consumers — which generally isn’t good for sales. Despite the high relative cost of Apple devices, and the fairly closed nature of the Apple ecosystem, there’s a lot to be said for “It just works.”

However, most “pure” Android tablets do offer one key advantage over constrained e-reader tablets: direct access to Google’s Android Market, where there’s a virtually unlimited choice of apps.

The Fire, Nook Color, and Philly.com tablets only offer apps through their own markets, not the Android Market, which means they can block the installation of competing apps, such those from other e-book vendors or publishers.

Also, even though Kobo touts that its Vox will offer access to “over 15,000 apps,” the company has not clarified whether that will be through the Android Market or its own app store. Which means it’s possible that you may not be able to install the Kindle e-reader app on the Kobo Vox — at least, not without “rooting” the tablet to remove vendor controls, which can be a formidable technical hurdle.

The coming year — especially the 2011 holiday season — will probably indicate whether smaller tablets will play a leading role in the U.S. digital media landscape. If these devices start becoming as commonplace as iPhones and Kindles, they may become popular and powerful tools for the delivery of mobile services for health, education, jobs, and more.

Sure, you can use a small, cheap tablet to read books, watch YouTube, and play “Angry Birds.” But maybe someday lots of people will be using these devices to get a college degree — or perhaps to learn to read in the first place.

While it lacked the winding queues and applause normally associated with an Apple launch, the release of Steve Jobs’ authorized biography still made a splash.

It hit stores earlier than planned, as publishers Simon & Schuster moved to meet the wave of public interest in Jobs following his death. Before it was even unveiled, the book was a blockbuster.

“’Steve Jobs’ is currently our Number One best seller on both the Books and Kindle Best Seller lists,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year.”

At a book store in New York, the prospect of learning more about one of most enigmatic figures of recent times was enticing – even if not all is rose-tinted.

Best tidbits from the Steve Jobs bio

“He was a pretty conflicted personality himself,” one shopper told. “From what I’ve read he was very difficult to work for. And yet look at what he got from pushing his employees that way. It’s the contradictions within him.”

The sentiment is echoed by author Walter Isaacson, who told 60 Minutes Jobs could be “petulant and brittle.” Isaacson was granted more than 40 interviews with the Apple co-founder as his hand-picked biographer.

Jobs’ wife told him not to “whitewash” his life and he exercised no control over the content of the book.

The sheer access to Jobs helps create as definitive a portrait as we are likely to get: His drive, genius and rivalry with other tech giants such as Microsoft and Google.

It also reveals other dimensions to his personality: Sensitivity to criticism over the iPad and regret over not getting cancer treatment earlier.

For Apple devotees and the wider public touched by his death, the book offers the chance to reconnect with the man who helped define our relationship with technology.

And that connection could mean more than just book sales: Sony snapped up the movie rights earlier this month.

NEW YORK The Netflix nightmare continues. Shares plunged 35% on Tuesday after the video service revealed that it lost 800,000 subscribers in its difficult third quarter.

Netflix (NFLX) earned $62 million, or $1.16 a share, on a record $822 million in revenue in the quarter that just ended, beating analysts’ estimates. But shareholders focused on the sharp decline in subscribers and high costs for international expansion.
Analysts promptly downgraded the stock Tuesday morning, with one calling the report a “nuclear winter scenario.” Shares finished the day at $77.37, after nearly topping $300 in mid-July.

Shares started the year around $180 and rallied in the spring thanks to a growing subscriber base. But Netflix kicked off last quarter on a sour note by announcing it would begin charging separate prices for its DVDs-by-mail and streaming video plans, resulting in a big price hike for Netflix customers.

As a result, for the first time in years, Netflix’s U.S. customer base shrank. Netflix had 23.8 million total U.S. subscribers as of Sept. 30, down from 24.6 million three months earlier.

By the end of the ongoing quarter, which wraps up Dec. 31, Netflix said it expects to lose even more subscribers. It forecast that it will have 20 million to 21.5 million streaming customers and up to 11.3 million DVD subscribers in the U.S.

Perhaps even more concerning: Netflix’s streaming video service expansion into the United Kingdom and Ireland, announced earlier on Monday, will make the company’s overall business unprofitable “for a few quarters” starting at the beginning of 2012.

Downgrades pour in: The dour report led JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth to downgrade Netflix shares on Tuesday to “neutral” from “overweight.”

“The long-term potential for streaming-only in the U.S. and international markets remains intact,” Anmuth wrote in a note to clients. “[But] start-up costs in Latin America and UK/Ireland are likely to come in much higher than we anticipated.”

Anmuth also expressed concern about rising content licensing costs. He lowered his price target on Netflix to $67 a share, a steep drop from his previous target of $205.

Susquehanna Financial was even more bearish in its note, which was titled “The End of the Road.” Analyst Vasily Karasyov cut Netflix to “negative” from “neutral,” citing both the subscriber decline and the international costs.

“Looks like the nuclear winter scenario is playing out for NFLX,” Karasyov wrote. He cut his price target to $60 from $124.

Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney cut shares to “neutral” from “buy” late Monday night, calling Netflix’s situation “a major reset.”

Mahaney had upgraded Netflix to “buy” in May, but he admitted in his note Monday that “our call has been drastically wrong