Get The Most From Your Gadget Life!
Finally, the amazing 2008 is over, and a brand new year is upon us. 2008 was a great year to gadgetify yourself. We had the iPod Touch, the iPhone 3G, the Kindle (though it was released in 2007), the cool new Canon cameras, and the Eea. Which was your favorite product? What gadget category did you spend most money on? Please share your thoughts.
P.S. Happy new year!
There were rumors about the future of Zune just a few weeks back. Now we know why. Microsoft will be releasing their 120 GB Zune device to replace the 80 GB Zune product line. One thing that Zune needs though is a major software upgrade. I have personally never been able to get anything right with the Zune software, and here is hoping that the new Zune software will justify the cost for the Zune.
Navigon is continuing its quick-fire navigon GPS releases with the introduction of 7200T. If you are not faamiliar with Navigon GPS, they are known for the virtual reality views and life-time traffic update. Navigon 7200T has more 3D features, more advanced text-to-speech functionality, and has a slimmer physique. This GPS will be released to stores in mid to late Septempber 2008.
If you can’t beat them, smear them, right? At least that’s what Mr. McCain is using against Senator Obama. But it seems Verizon is also learning its lesson from the Senator by adopting the same strategy against the new iPhone. Electronista is reporting that Verizon has prepared a cheat sheet for its salesmen so they could point out the deficiencies of the new iPhone and explain how great the Verizon phone are to potential iPhone buyers. I wonder if Mr. McCain will be paid by showing companies how to attack celebrities (an iPhone is certainly one in the phone industry) [Of course Verizon will have a hard time sending the Senator a check for obvious reasons].
It is tough to be in Nokia’s position right now with Apple getting clean shots on Nokia’s babies such as N95 with its iPhone product line. N85 and N79 which will be replacing N81 and N78 are both improved in a few areas as Cam quality and GPS. They are also rumored to be more affordable for people who are trying to get their first smart-phones. Now I wonder how many people will get the N85 instead of the new iPhone.
Story Via {Electronista]
It was just a matter of time. With all the social aspects behind communities such as Flickr, it was inevitable that someone would come up with a social hardware. That’s exactly what Picwing is. How it works is that you create Picwing email on Picwing.com. Then you can connect that to your social digital photo frame and bam! You have a social photo frame ready to go. If someone sends an email to your Picwing email, it will immediately show up on the frame. Now you want to keep your e-mail to yourself and your circle for obvious reasons, but this is a very cool feature nevertheless. Who says technology is boring.
Well, we didn’t know till last week that you could actually enforce Open source rights. After all, when you label yourself open, you expose yourself to unnecessary risk. But a U.S. circuit court of appeal has set the precedent where you can now enforce open source rights if people do not respect it. I think that’s fantastic for the future of open source as you would want to have your copyrights respected. Now, if you change an Open Source code, you have to make it available to the public, but I am pretty sure that if you use an open source technology to develop a completely different solution, then you may not have to disclose your source code. Obviously there are different licenses out there and not many laws available but you can be sure that precedents will be set for these issues in the near future.
For this week at least, X-Box is simply dominating the Japanese market. The good folks at Joystiq are reporting that X-Box 360 sold closeto 25,000 unit for the past week, whereas PS3 and PS2 combined for about 18K units sold. Somewhere in the carribean Steve Ballmer is dancing hard (maybe even naked who knows!).
Are Gadgets becoming too complicated? That’s what Metro claims to have happened according to latest research. As the competition gets more intense among the gadget makers around the world, it is absolutely normal to expect devices that have so many features that even the makers don’t know all of them. If you have bought a top of the line camcorder recently, you probably have seen the 2000 manuals that they provide you with. In truth, gadgets should be intuitive and convenient to use. Geeks will always figure out hwo gadgets work, but I doubt everyday guys and gals will invest too much time in a gadget that is too complicated. Would you?
So what is the most complicated gadget that you have worked with?
So there are rumors going around the web about the reason why Phil Harrison has left Sony. It seems the talks of PS4 has burned the poor guy out. Now the expectations for the Sony PS4 are huge. Obviously there are rumors around that PS4 will try to take the concept of social gaming to the whole new level (sort of like the transition of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0). You can also expect more interaction between the console and the players (but details are not yet released). I can tell you what PS4 won’t be – a big black box with huge fans. But that’s all we can tell at this point.
