As Sony Corp. (SNE) scrambles to reassert its technological relevance, Chief Executive Howard Stringer is betting on a strategy for the electronics giant that focuses on adding online content to more of its gadgets.

Speaking at the first joint public appearance by Sony’s new management team since a shake-up in February, Mr. Stringer said the Japanese giant is “moving faster than we’ve ever moved” to meet parallel challenges.

Sony is racing to close the gap with technology companies like Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) that have used Internet services to enhance standalone electronics like digital-music players and electronic-book readers. Sony was a pioneer in both only to see it early advantage evaporate without a strong online component.

At the same time, Sony is trying to overhaul its core electronics division, a business encumbered by heavy overhead costs and an inefficient supply chain. This has put the company at a disadvantage to both conglomerates like Samsung Electronics Co. and upstarts like discount TV maker Vizio Inc.

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At its media event in early September, Apple (AAPL) threw down the gauntlet to Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp. (SNE). Dedicated gaming gadgets like the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable “seemed so cool,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, but “they don’t stack up against the iPod touch.” Now an industry research firm has come out with numbers that back up Apple’s challenge.

A study by DFC Intelligence, released on Friday, predicts that games for the iPhone and iPod touch (an iPhone without the cellular capabilities) will be the principal drivers for growth in the overall portable and mobile gaming market in five years.

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A month ahead of its release, Susan Boyle’s album has more advance orders on Amazon.com (AMZN) than any CD in the retailer’s history, it said.

The Sony (SNE) album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Amazon announced the pre-order milestone Wednesday, noting that her advance sales have exceeded those for such stars as Norah Jones, U2, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay. It also created a “store” for Ms. Boyle that includes her breakthrough clip in addition to a link to buy the $10 album.

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A new electronic book reader is expected Tuesday from book seller Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) that will challenge readers from Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Sony Corp. (SNE) with a color touch-screen and $259 price, according to a planned ad for the device.

The price for the reader, called the Nook, matches that of Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle controls about 60 percent of the burgeoning e-book market, according to Forrester Research.

Details of the reader appear in a full-page advertisement viewed by The Wall Street Journal in the New York Times Book Review section dated Sunday, Oct. 25. The advertisement says the Nook will enable its owners to “Lend eBooks to friends.”

A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

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Videogame publishers, pushing to expand their businesses, are making games that target girls and women a new industry battleground.

This holiday season, more games than ever are being geared toward female players. Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) is releasing the latest installment of its “Littlest Pet Shop” game for young girls and introducing a series of fashion-themed games called “Charm Girls Club” for older girls later this month. Sony Corp. (SNE) in August packaged a lilac version of its PlayStation Portable device with a “Hannah Montana” game, based on the popular television show about a girl and her secret pop career.

Publishers also will target women with workout games. Ubisoft Entertainment SA is introducing “Your Shape,” a personal-training game, and “Just Dance,” a dancing game, in November. Nintendo Co. hit the market with “Wii Fit Plus,” a sequel to its popular fitness game, in September.

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A lot of controversy has been brewing since the announcement of the Sony (SNE) PSP Go. Some of it valid, most of it skepticism and retailer anguish, but there’s some truth to both sides. It wasn’t an easy decision but something had to be done.

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Break out that mixtape. You know, the one with “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Thriller.” It’s the Sony Walkman’s 30th birthday.

And it got a present. Kind of. The modern Sony (SNE) Walkman digital music player beat out Apple’s (AAPL) iPod share of the portable music player market in Japan in the last week of August, according to a study by BCN, a Japanese electronics research firm. The Walkman took 43 percent of sales, compared with the iPod’s 42.1 percent, capping 241 weeks where the iPod reigned in Japan.

The study didn’t take into account sales of the iPhone, which researchers viewed primarily as a cellphone. But nostalgic Walkman aficionados might recognize the frenzy over the role of the iPod in popular culture.

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Sometimes the good news is the bad news. Or vice versa.

Consider, for instance, today’s call on Microsoft (MSFT) by Caris & Co. analyst Curtis Shauger.

In a research note today, Shauger warned that weakening Xbox sales were likely to hurt top-line results for both the fiscal first quarter ending September and for the June 2010 fiscal year. Shauger trimmed his Q1 revenue forecast to $12.3 billion from $12.8 billion; for the full year he goes to $59.1 billion from $59.9 billion. The cuts specifically reflect lower expectations for Xbox 360 sales, which he says are getting hit by a combination of Microsoft’s price cuts on the consoles, weaker end demand and competitive pricing moves by Sony (SNE) on the Playstation 3.

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I have to admit that this story seems so bizarre that I’m not quite sure I believe it. A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that the Nigerian government is apparently so upset by a Sony Playstation commercial that it’s demanding an apology from Sony (SNE) for allegedly “portraying Nigeria as a home of fraud where its citizens hardly do genuine business.” Must be quite a commercial right? The only problem is that the commercial does no such thing:

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It could change–and probably will when the first flurry is over–but, as I type, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest thriller The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardback on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy’s True Compass, the other hot book release this week, can’t be bought via Kindle or Sony (NYSE: SNE) or as an e-book at all.

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The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Anthony Gottlieb investigates …

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply.

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In our digital age, miniaturization rules. This is a welcome thing –in most cases. Squeezing two billion transistors onto a small chip? All good. Squeezing an enormous printed textbook down to iPhone-size? Not so good.

Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.

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Nintendo’s Wii has outsold rival game consoles. Now a new study says it also outlasts them.

The study by SquareTrade, an independent provider of warranties on electronics, estimates that 2.7 percent of Wiis fail during the first two years of ownership, compared with a 10 percent failure rate over that period for Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 3 and a 23.7 percent failure rate for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360. The Wii failure rate is not just low for a game console, but for any kind of consumer electronics, the SquareTrade study says.

The company said it came up with the results after studying failure reports for 16,000 game consoles purchased by SquareTrade customers.

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Google (GOOG) is taking its campaign to promote its Chrome Web browser up a notch, sealing an alliance with Sony to have the Web browser pre-installed on some Sony (SNE) notebook computers.

A Google spokesman said Monday that Chrome will be pre-installed on some Sony laptops. He declined to comment on financial terms of the deal and the geographic scope of the partnership, which he called a test. Sony didn’t return requests for comment.

Google will need a lot more than Sony’s relatively small computer market share to make a dent. As of July, Chrome accounted for 2.6 percent of the global Web browser market, according to Net Applications.

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You might argue that Sony (SNE) was visionary. In the fall of 2006, it introduced the first eBook with an E Ink screen–long before Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle rolled out with the same technology. The Sony Reader also connected users to an online store, solving a problem that had long bedeviled the e-book market–how do you get books onto your new device?

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