After having printed so many negative stories about Sony lately -- concerning its battery debacle, Blu-ray delays, and factually-questionable marketing, to name a few -- we're overjoyed to report on a company policy that will be sure to please gamers planning to pick up a PS3. Yesterday it was revealed that the wireless (and rumble-less) SIXAXIS controllers would not sport user-replaceable batteries, and given the fact that lithium ion cells only have a finite number of charges in them, it seemed that users would have to shell out $50 every time one of their gamepads crapped out. Not that this is necessarily a huge deal in a world where $300 iPods are also considered disposable, but it would still be kind of a slap in the face after throwing down $500 or $600 for a console with a purported 10-year life span. Well Sony feels for you starving gamers, so even though the party line is that "it'll be many years before there's any degradation in terms of battery performance," a spokesperson confirmed to Gamesindustry.biz that "we will be providing a service to exchange these items." Unless the service consists of an CSR giving you directions to the nearest GameStop, it would seem like Sony is planning on replacing dead controllers for free, which is a pretty nice feature in this world of planned obsolescence. Congrats on making the right decision here, Sony -- now is there any way we can get you to reconsider tossing a few decent cables into the box as well?

[Via Joystiq]

We love it when a plan comes together. You may remember how a few months back we reported that Cox Communications sent a questionnaire to its (non-cable) customers asking them if a TiVo-powered DVR service would convince them to make the switch from satellite; well apparently the response must have been a resounding "yes!", as the two companies have officially announced a partnership that will enable Cox subscribers to gain all of that TiVo goodness with little to no effort on their part. Beginning sometime in the first half of next year, Cox digital cable customers with DVR service will have the option of downloading TiVo software directly to their existing set-top boxes -- no aggravating service calls required. It seems like everything is going right for TiVo these days: they've got Comcast and Cox under their belts, the Series 3 box almost out the door, a shiny new Emmy to flaunt, and a courtroom victory against Echostar that (assuming it holds up) will make investors very happy. TiVo Deathwatch, be gone, and let the TiVo House Party commence!

Hot on the heels of last week's WiBro rollout in South Korea, Colombian long-distance operator Orbitel has teamed up with hardware manufacturer Siemens to deploy Latin America's first WiMax network in the city of Cali. The long-range wireless network, which will be duplicated in fourteen other cities in the upcoming months, employs Siemens' WayMax@dvantage (that's not a typo) system of base stations, modems, and monitoring and control gear to ensure interoperability with future devices based on the IEEE's 802.16e-2005 standard. WiMax is a particularly attractive option in countries whose wired infrastructures are still rather limited, allowing service providers to essentially leapfrog right over current broadband solutions and offer high-speed connections with considerably less capital expenditure. Orbitel is currently selling several service packages ranging from $39 to $325 per month, which supposedly buys you download speeds in the range of 2Mbps.

[Via GigaOm]

Although there are already numerous options on the market for filling up your non-iPod DAP with digital content, Tower Records has managed to find what it thinks is an untapped niche of music aficionados who are looking for both better sound quality and more variety than current solutions are offering. Enter Tower.com/Digital, a Puretracks-powered service going live today that company executives say will leverage the experience and industry connections of the nationwide retail chain to give music fans access to a "broad and deep catalog" with tunes not available from other sites -- even if the other sites offer more total tracks than Tower's 1.2 million. Plus, the WMA-formatted downloads are said to be encoded at a higher bit rate than songs from competing services, and can be burned to disc for playing on "many existing CD players." Despite their supposedly higher sound quality, Tower.com/Digital (they've got to rethink that name) tracks will still sell for the usual 99 cents, with whole albums also adhering to generally-accepted pricing and going for $9.99.

[Via Cnet]

In much the same way that Coinstar machines have revolutionized the way we deal with accumulated change, Kodak has unveiled a new commercial scanner that promises to batch-digitize stacks of old photos and assign them rudimentary chronological metadata. Introduced on the occasion of the EasyShare line's fifth birthday, the so-called "Scan the World" technology will be incorporated into modified check-scanning machines for initial deployment as stand-alone kiosks or behind the counter at drug stores, which can currently turn your bits into atoms, but not vice versa. According to Kodak, the scanners use software which is able to identify different photographic paper for estimating the decade in which the picture was shot, and can even group pictures featuring like individuals through facial recognition. Future versions of the application will also incorporate OCR capabilities for reading watermarks or handwritten notes on the back of photos, further improving the accuracy of the tagging engine.