Research in Motion is trying to woo developers by giving a free BlackBerry Playbook tablet to coders who port their Android application for its BlackBerry Tablet OS.

The promotion, announced on Twitter by Alec Saunders, RIM’s vice president for developer relations, comes as RIM struggles to generate interest in the Playbook in the face of sluggish sales.

In the U.S., the company put the tablet on sale again this week, slashing the price of its 16 GB Playbook to US$199, down from an original retail price of $499. The 32 GB model is now $249, down from $599, and the 64GB model now retails for $299, according to the company’s website.

Developers who are registered with BlackBerry App World are eligible for a 16 GB Playbook if they port their application and submit it to BlackBerry’s App World between Feb. 2 and Feb. 13. RIM is requiring that applications meet its BlackBerry App World Vendor Guidelines.

Later this month, RIM will release the 2.0 upgrade for the Table OS, which the company previewed last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The new version will have the BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps, which will allow Android 2.3.3 applications to run on the device.

Other improvements include native applications for e-mail and contacts, a noticeable omission when RIM released the Playbook last year.

Android applications must be repackaged in the “.bar” file format. RIM has published a set of tools for developers to ensure the applications are compatible.

RIM warned that some of the APIs in the Android Software Development kit may not be supported or only partially supported by the BlackBerry Runtime for Android.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com

Sony said Wednesday that executive Kazuo Hirai, who runs the company’s core consumer products division, will be promoted to CEO and President from April.

Hirai, a charismatic Sony veteran who has long been groomed to lead the company, will take over from current CEO Howard Stringer. Stringer will continue as chairman of the board of directors after the handover.

Hirai, 51, is widely credited with leading a turnaround in Sony’s PlayStation business, after taking over just after the launch of the PlayStation 3 game console. He is fluent in English and will become the company’s youngest leader since its founder, Akio Morita, according to local media reports. When Sony promoted Hirai to his current role from April of last year, Sony said its management changes were aimed at “empowering the next generation of Sony’s management.”

The management shuffle comes a day before Sony is due to release its earnings for the October-December quarter. The company said in November it expects losses of well over a billion dollars in its current fiscal year through March, after saying several months earlier it could make a ¥60 billion (US$770 million) profit.

“The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses – primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains,” Hirai said in a news release announcing the leadership change.

Howard Stringer, a former television executive who was knighted in 2000, has led the company since 2005, when it was struggling to achieve profitability. He oversaw the cutting of about 10,000 jobs and slashed numerous product companies, while selling off company assets to raise cash and closing factories. The selection of a foreigner to lead a beloved Japanese company like Sony was seen as controversial domestically, and he was sometimes criticized for not spending enough time in Tokyo.

Japanese companies often make key personnel changes in April, when most begin their fiscal year.

This week’s tsunami of tech earnings, led by Apple’s jaw-dropping quarterly report, has given market watchers something to cheer about and also points to industry shifts around tablets and cloud computing.

The fourth quarter of 2011 was not kind to all vendors, as economic concerns affected spending on tech and floods in Thailand continued to have ripple effects on the global component supply chain. These were some of the main reasons analysts were expecting a soft fourth quarter for 2011 and slower growth for 2012.

For example, a few weeks ago, Gartner announced that it had lowered its 2012 forecast, with IT spending expected to rise only 3.7 percent, compared to the prior forecast of 4.6 percent growth. Highlighting faltering global economic growth and the eurozone crisis, brought on by enormous debt in countries including Greece and Italy, Gartner said global IT spending in 2012 will total US$3.8 trillion.

But the actual results from the fourth quarter have sparked some confidence in tech. At the close of Thursday’s trading, tech stocks on the Nasdaq were up a healthy 7.77 percent since Jan. 1. By Friday afternoon, Nasdaq computer stocks had inched up another 0.5 percent. Bellwether vendors, including those with strong results this week, have been rewarded with a jump in share prices. For example, EMC shares were up by $0.14 to $25.79 and American Depository Shares of SAP were up by $1.01 to $60.29 Friday afternoon. Apple, recently regaining its position as the most highly valued company on the planet in terms of market capitalization (share price multiplied by number of shares), was up by $1.21 to $445.79.

Apple, reporting Tuesday, is the superstar of earnings season so far, beating expectations for sales and profit and surging past forecasts for iPad, Mac and iPhone, all of which set sales records for the company.

The company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record net profit of $13.06 billion, compared to revenue of $26.74 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion in the year-ago quarter.

“Apple posted remarkable December quarter results,” according to T. Michael Walkley and Matthew D. Ramsay in a research note for Canaccord Genuity. Looking ahead to the rest of the calendar year and also at 2013, the analysts wrote: “We believe Apple is well positioned for very strong C2012/13 sales and earnings growth driven by new product introductions, including the pending refresh of MacBook Air, the iPad 3 launching this spring, an LTE iPhone likely in CQ3/12 and potentially Apple TV exiting C2012.”

The earnings report signaled two trends in IT: the rise of tablets and the imminent end of Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise. The report made it clear that Apple sold more iPads in the fourth quarter — 15.4 million — than any PC manufacturer sold personal computers.

Samsung said Friday profits shot up in the three-month period through December, with a big boost from its burgeoning lineup of smartphones and tablets.

The Korean electronics manufacturer said it booked 4 trillion won (US$3.6 billion) in net profit, up 17 percent from a year earlier, while revenue rose 13 percent to 47.3 trillion won.

Samsung’s products range from large-screen TVs to semiconductors, but its mobile division was the star of the latest quarter, generating nearly half of its operating profits.

The company cited strong performance in its Galaxy handset line and flat-screen TVs. Samsung said it will continue to broaden its smartphone lineup with both high-end models like the Galaxy S II and mass-market phones like the Galaxy Ace. It will also try to create new product categories, as with its Galaxy Note, a 5.3-inch mobile device with a stylus that it bills as something between a phone and a tablet.

“We are actually generating new demand in the Note category. That will be continued based on our hardware competitiveness with the addition of brand and user experience,” said Younghee Lee, a vice president in the company’s mobile division during the earnings call.

The Note launched in Europe late last year and is due out in the U.S. soon with AT&T. Samsung said it will continue to come out with devices that run on high-speed LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks, which it has been faster to embrace than rivals like Apple.

The company’s success across a wide range of consumer electronics has come as many of its competitors attempting the same thing have faltered. Sony, which presents its quarterly earnings next week, is on course for a US$1 billion loss in its current fiscal year through March.

Samsung said that even with the strong showing over the holiday season, overall 2011 profit slipped 15 percent, weighed down by its large component businesses, which include DRAM and NAND flash memory as well as the LCD panels used in TV sets and monitors.

The quarterly earnings were in line with the guidance the company released earlier this month. Samsung’s fiscal year coincides with the calendar year.

As it has in the past, Macworld will host the Macworld Live stage at Macworld|iWorld. Starting Thursday, January 26, those attending the show or watching Macworld’s live stream can see some of their favorite editors interviewing and interacting with well-known individuals from the world’s of technology and the creative arts. You’ll find a link to that live stream on Macworld’s home page starting on Thursday. Here’s what you’ll find on stage:

Thursday, January 26

11:00 — 11:50 AM: iFixit Live

Macworld’s Chris Breen and the folks at iFixit talk about repairing your broken Apple gear.

12:00 — 12:50 PM: Playing in the Sandbox: Developing for Apple’s App Stores (Or Not)

Macworld’s Dan Moren and a group of developers discuss developing apps for Apple’s App Store and Mac App Store.

1:00 – 1:20 PM: BrainShark: Play PowerPoint Properly on your iPad.

A sponsored session led by Jay Wilder, Director of Freemium Product Marketing, Brainshark

1:30 – 1:50 PM: Soonr: Smart ways companies are using the iPad to do business faster.

A sponsored session let by Martin Frid-Nielsen, Co-founder and CEO of Soonr

2:00 — 2:50 PM: Macworld Pundit Showdown

Macworld’s Philip Michaels hosts a panel of experts who square off in a battle of punditry, tackling the burning issues of the day and scoring points for hard-hitting answers.

3:00 — 3:50 PM: iPhone Film Festival

Macworld’s Jason Snell and the managers of the Original iPhone Film Festival talk about iPhone filmmaking. The grand prize will be revealed on stage.

4:00 — 4:50 PM: The State of Apple

Macworld’s Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and John Gruber discuss where the new, Tim Cook-led Apple will go in 2012 and beyond.

Friday, January 27

11:00 — 11:50 AM: Creativity in the Digital Age

Chris Breen is joined by painter Bert Monroy, photographer Eduardo Solér, and musician Steve Lipson to talk about the effect technology has had on their creative work.

12:00 — 12:50 PM: Mac 911 Live

Macworld’s Serenity Caldwell hosts Chris Breen, Ted Landau, and Dan Frakes to discuss today’s major Mac and iOS troubleshooting issues.

1:00 – 1:20 PM: Dolly Drive: Simplifying how Mac users use the Cloud

A sponsored session hosted by Anthony Palermo, Creator, Dolly Drive and Dave Hamilton, CEO, The Mac Observer

2:00 — 2:50 PM: iPad Art Fight

These days there are plenty of households with more than one Mac, plus any number of iOS devices. But maybe you’d like to have access to all the media you store on your Mac on your iOS device or on one of the other Macs in your home. You could sign up for iTunes Match, but if you don’t want to pay the $25-per-year fee and you’re only interested in streaming over your local network, maybe iTunes Home Sharing is all you need. Here’s how to set it up.

Download Macworld Video #166

• Format: MPEG-4/H.264

• Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)

• Size: 10.4 MB

• Length: 2 minutes, 57 seconds

Show Notes

Apple’s Remote app is free and works with any device running iOS 3.1.2 or later.

To subscribe to the Macworld Video stream via iTunes, click here.

You can also see a complete archive of all our videos on Macworld’s YouTube channel. Subscribe to that channels and you will be notified whenever we post a new video.

Or just point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: http://feeds.macworld.com/macworld/video/

Show transcript

This is Macworld senior associate editor Dan Moren and I’m here with our weekly video tip. Today, I’m going to show you how to set up iTunes Home Sharing.

Like Apple’s $25-per-year iTunes Match service, iTunes Home Sharing lets you stream media from an iTunes library to your iOS device, Apple TV, or another computer. But there are two key differences: as the name suggests, Home Sharing only works over your local network, and, unlike iTunes Match, it’s completely free.

To set up iTunes Home Sharing, you’ll first enable it in iTunes on your Mac. To do so, go to the Advanced menu and choose Turn on Home Sharing; you can also click on the Home Sharing icon under the Shared section of iTunes’s sidebar. Either way, you’ll be prompted to enter an Apple ID and password–it’s important to note that all Home Sharing features are keyed off this Apple ID, so you must make sure to enter the same one on every device you want to use.

Once you’ve enabled the feature, your other computers with Home Sharing will appear under the Shared section. Clicking on a computer will reveal the iTunes Library of that machine, which you can search, browse, sort, and play just as you normally would in iTunes.

At the bottom of the screen, however, you’ll find a few additional options. For example, you can filter the song listing to show only tracks that don’t exist on this computer. And, if you select a track or multiple tracks, you can download them to the local computer by clicking the Import button. You can also use Home Sharing to automatically transfer new purchases from one of your other computers, so that every time you buy something from iTunes on one Mac, it appears on another.

Apple’s education announcement is all over the news, with suggestions ranging from interactive textbooks to ebook publishing tools (gee, those sound familiar). Some, however, say that it’s all over-hyped–so clearly we should be looking forward to the next next Apple announcement. The remainders for Tuesday, January 17, 2012 are almost excited enough to consider going back to school. Almost.

Apple to Give a Lesson About Textbooks (Wall Street Journal)

As with the week leading up to any Apple event, speculation is rife about what the company will announce. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says Apple will roll out interactive textbooks along with partnership deals with major publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Also, the company is expected to release a themed Smart Cover made out of a brown paper bag.

Apple to announce tools, platform to “digitally destroy” textbook publishing (Ars Technica)

Along the same lines, Ars Technica says that Apple plans to “digitally destroy” textbook publishing with its new initiative, which will include GarageBand-style tools for creating ebooks. I think perhaps I’m most looking forward to the great stompbox effects for microeconomics and organic chemistry.

Apple’s education event is getting seriously over-hyped (Fortune)

But there’s always a killjoy, isn’t there? Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt says that the event is “seriously over-hyped,” pointing specifically to the Ars Technica article, which he says “got it wrong.” Apple’s not interested in destroying the current textbook industry, but in working with the companies behind it in a harmonious fashion. Just ask the music industry! Wait. Bad example.

Rumor: Apple to hold ‘iPad 3′ & iOS 5.1 event in early February (AppleInsider)

Despite the looming event in New York City, it’s never too soon to talk about the next Apple announcement. Japanese site Macotakara is saying that an Apple event will be held in February to launch the iPad 3 and iOS 5.1. We just need to wait for Tim Cook to finish personally assembling and coding them, as he does all of Apple’s products.

Scott Forstall is Apple’s ‘CEO-in-waiting’ says new book (Fortune)

Funny curtain hacks are something GeekTech is no stranger to: last January, Niklas Roy created a privacy curtain that drew attention to his studio rather than stop people staring in. In all seriousness, curtains are sometimes the trickiest part of a home automation project to wire up. So, this new Arduino-based curtain idea by Jamie Zawinski may be a useful hack to you.

Jamie automated his bedroom curtain because he figured given the large size of his window, the sudden movement of the curtains in the morning letting the light in may actually wake him up. The curtain works wiring Arduino Ethernet and DCHP to a Seeed Relay Shield. The ethernet port reacts to basic command such as open, close and toggle, plus, when Jaime doesn’t want to use a computer to control the curtain, a big toggle button. The blind cord is pulled up by none other than an Add-a-Motor Model 80 Drapery and Blind Controller, something that’s a bit more readily available than the other parts.

While Jamie is pretty pleased with his newest home automation addition, the downside is that it was one of the more fiddly and frustrating hardware hacks he attempted. In addition, he has no videos or full images of the curtain doing it’s thing just yet.

However, you can check out his blog to see more close-ups of the various parts needed for the project if you would like to give it a go yourself.

Do you have any cool home automation setups? Drop us a line and show us!

[Jamie Zawinski via MAKE]

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Years ago CEA stopped letting the public into its huge annual gadget show in Las Vegas, but the conference still attracts a fair share of non-industry people looking for the hottest new stuff.

Take stuntman Horace Knight. He claims to have been in practically every football movie ever made and also teaches stunt motorcycle driving at the famed Willow Springs track.

“I’m overwhelmed,” he said from the sidelines of CES. A first time attendee, Knight was visiting the show from Los Angeles in hopes of finding the latest GPS technologies. He uses GPS devices mounted to his motorcycle that display his progress around a track on a map. He can use that map to show his students how to drive the track, rather than simply explain it to them.

Knight was also on the lookout for GPS devices that he can use on the motorcycle so he can record and refer back to the optimum speeds for doing certain stunts.

Watch a video of some of the show attendees here.

Raymond Macdonald, who works on car audio systems for Muntz Cartridge City, has been to every CES show since 1974. While he attends to see the latest in car audio systems, declining business has spurred him into a decidedly less high-tech direction.

These days, Macdonald has been doing some creating and restoring of eight-track tapes, the recording technology that faded away in the 1970s. In fact, a popular rock band that he declined to name recently hired him to produce one of its recent albums on a limited number of 8-track cassettes. They’re collected typically by people who repair old vehicles and want to keep the original 8-track cassette player, he said.

There’s not much about 8-track cassettes at CES, where usually only the most cutting-edge technology is on display. And since the aftermarket car audio industry has consolidated and is shrinking, Macdonald is considering skipping future CES conferences.

Still, plenty of people are wandering the halls in Las Vegas, really, just for the fun of it. Chris Cooper and Alex Burt are friends from Minneapolis who were admiring stylish humidifiers on the show floor on Tuesday. “I think I’m going to stay here all day,” Burt joked, soaking up the steam from one humidifier to combat the dry Las Vegas desert air.

Cooper has been coming to CES for about four years, starting by accompanying his dad who attended to help a friend set up a booth at the show. Cooper and Burt work for Delta Airlines so were able to fly into Las Vegas on standby. They said they’re at the show just to look at the cool products on display.

People attending CES just for fun may be few and far between, but you’d be hard pressed to find out by reading the color-coded badges attendees must wear. Badges indicate who are buyers, exhibitors, engineers, press and the catch-all “industry affiliate”. That last one tends to be the badge worn by people who are not sent here by their employers.

“When we look at the badge, sometimes the badge doesn’t indicate who they really are,” said Rick Mansour, the director of sales and marketing for Prime Wire and Cable, based in California. “Sometimes they’re looking for different [personal] needs of their own, and professionally.”

Sony on Saturday denied a report that it has decided to promote the head of its consumer product division, Kazuo Hirai, to lead the company from April.

The company was responding to an article in Japan’s main business newspaper, the Nikkei, that Hirai would replace current President Howard Stringer. Sony issued a terse press release that it had made no official announcement or decision.

Questions over the leadership of Sony, viewed domestically as a barometer for Japan’s tech industry, have surfaced as the company struggles with deep financial losses. The firm said in November it was on course to lose over a billion dollars for the current fiscal year, weighed down by its TV business and the strong yen, after predicting just months earlier it would make a hefty profit.

Hirai, 51, who led a turnaround in Sony’s PlayStation video game business, is widely seen as next in line to lead the company. The charismatic executive, who is fluent in English, would become its youngest leader since the late founder, Akio Morita, according to the Nikkei.

In the announcement of his promotion to his current role from April of last year, Sony said its management changes were aimed at “empowering the next generation of Sony’s management.”

Hirai has recently appeared at many key events for the company, including the announcement of its second-quarter results in November and the launch of its PlayStation Vita in Tokyo last month.

Japanese companies often make key management changes in April, when most begin their fiscal year.

Last month, Sony said its financial forecast may change again, due to the sale of its share in a joint venture with Samsung Electronics to produce LCD panels.