Archive for April 9th, 2008
Posted by: admin in Gaming
Oh, boy. EA has finally come out and announced a European release date for Rock Band, a game that has been out in America since last November. Sadly, that’s about as good as the news is going to get for European gamers; as I like to say when the American Idol champion is crowned, “It’s all downhill from here.” So here we go: Eurogamer has confirmed that Rock Band will be out in Europe on the 23rd of Might.
That particular Friday will see the release of the Xbox 360 version of the game — and that’s it. That’s right, folks: Rock Band will be a timed 360 exclusive in Europe; for now, all EA is saying is that PS3, Wii, and PS2 versions will follow sometime “later this summer.” Hm…I wonder if Microsoft had a hand in that. Regardless, the real kick in the nuts comes in the form of the bundling and pricing of the game and its peripherals.
For some reason that is unbeknownst to me, EA won’t give you the full package in one neat little box. That’s the way they did it in America, anyway ($169.99 for the PS3/360 “Rock Band Special Edition”). Across the pond, the “Instrument Edition” — which includes the drums, mic, and guitar only (no word on whether the pack-in guitar is wireless) — will cost you
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Posted by: admin in Tech News
Don sits down with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis to discuss why AMD is in deep trouble and an iPhone will be coming soon in the first segment and speaks with Linux about their feelings about the OS industry and especially Microsoft! After that, Don rants about why anti-video game political resolutions are absolutely ridiculous and much more!
Listen now:
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EPISODE 10
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…
source The Digital Home
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Ars.technia is testing the latest nightly of the new Firefox browser for mobile devices, codename Feenec, and it appears that it is significantly faster than the one in the latest public version of Nokia's Maemo operating system which runs on the N810 and N800 world wide web tablets. How much faster? How about a 6x increase in speed! The Mozilla team is saying that optimizations for the ARM architecture are progressing faster than that for x86, which doesn't surprise me, if you're going to focus on mobile then you have to focus on ARM!
Looking forward to testing this if it ever gets ported to the S60 platform of course.
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Posted by: admin in Tech News
Last week I wrote that Circuit City is in deep trouble and this day, BusinessWeek wrote up a news story claiming the retailer might have hired Goldman Sachs to help it find a company that’s willing to take this dog and turn it around. And while I’m not sure it will have such good luck doing it, it’s about time Circuit City executives wake up and realize that something needs to be done.
In case you haven’t been following the Circuit City saga, the company’s stock price has lost nearly 75 percent of its value in the past 12 months and although it was hovering at around $19 per share a year ago, it’s now languishing at about $4.50 per share.
But what’s more important than the financial crisis at the company is its inability to compete on too many levels with Wal-Mart and Best Purchase. Most notably, Circuit City is simply unable to compete at the executive level.
Let’s be honest — any company that has lost 75 percent of its stock value, has attempted a resurgence plan that failed miserably and is being pressured by major shareholders to oust its executives is nothing more than a poorly run enterprise. And as any shareholder of the company knows, the ideal way to solve that problem is to get rid of the anchors and find some new management that may actually know how to run a company.
…
source The Digital Home
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 Exhausted of having to resort to web-based solution for updating your Twitter account from your iPhone? Yea, me too. It's about time that somebody came along and launched a native, third-party application that puts the power of Twitter right on your iPhone. No more web-apps folks, this is a locally installed Twitter client.
Nicholas Pike's MobileTwitter has just launched on Installer.app through STE's application repository. Go check your Installer.app “Recent Packages” list, you'll see MobileTwitter hanging out there. Of course, you have to jailbreak your iPhone to get Installer.app up and running (not to mention the capability to actually install third-party applications), so get to it if you haven't already.
As it stands, MobileTwitter is a vast improvement over the Hahlo or PocketTweets web-apps solutions. And, Pike has more improvements planned down the line, so MobileTwitter can only get better.
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Well lookey what we’ve here. Hot on the heels of the Nokia Tube demonstration that showed off Espoo's touchscreen-based competitor to the multi-touch iPhone, here are some more details on the Nokia Tube.
Symbian-freak managed to score a live pic of the Nokia Tube in the wild. The S60 Touch-based handset from Nokia looks a bit awkward compared to the Apple iPhone, but then style and flair are Apple's forte. And, keep in mind that image is horribly sub-par and that the Nokia Tube is likely still a prototype and will benefit from further refinement from Nokia's design-heads.
Apparently, the Nokia Tube won’t be launched as a Nokia flagship handset. A higher-end touchscreen mobile phone based on the S60 Touch OS will be shipped “shortly after” the launch of the Nokia Tube.
Dusan managed to score some specs for the Nokia Tube, and he let me run with it. The Nokia Tube should be shipped as the Nokia 5800 Tube and will sport a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus. A 3.2-inch touchscreen display with 16 Million colors will go up against the iPhone's 3.5-inch multi-touch display. To handle communications duties, there's a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900Mhz) GSM/EDGE radio with 3G UMTS/HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, and some GPS thrown-in for good measure. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack and TV-out port on the Nokia 5800 Tube. And, just like the updated N82, the Nokia 5800 Tube will support geo-tagging of pics - a nicety allowed by the built-in GPS receiver. Anticipate all this techno-gadgetry at the end of 2008.
There's no multi-touch on the Nokia 5800 Tube, but there's definitely haptic feedback. It's unclear whether the haptic feedback is based on the localized haptic feedback technology that we saw with the Haptikos technology, or if the Nokia Tube will use the pseudo-haptic, whole-device vibration feedback that's been so popular on recent haptic-enabled handsets. I'm rooting for the Haptikos feedback technology that localizes screen-vibrations to the area of input.
Now, it remains to be seen just how well Nokia's first S60 Touch OS iteration will fare against the incumbent multi-touch OS on the Apple iPhone. Past demonstrations of S60 Touch have been a bit disappointing, but Nokia has stuffed the Nokia 5800 Tube with all the technological goodies that I've come to expect from the Finns - will the built-in GPS, haptic feedback, and 3G be enough to overtake the iPhone? Probably.
But then again, the 3G iPhone is believed to be launching well ahead of the Nokia 5800 Tube's year-end launch window. I can't wait to see the Nokia 5800 Tube hit the interwebs with some live, in-hand demos. Stay tuned for the latest on the Nokia Tube.
Keep reading for the spec-sheet breakdown.
Nokia 5800 Tube specifications
- 3.2-inch touchscreen display with 16 Million colors
- 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
- Quad-band (850/900/1800/1900Mhz) GSM/EDGE radio
- Bluetooth 2.0
- WiFi
- GPS
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- TV-out port
- 140MB on-board storage
- 111 x 52 x 14.5 mm
- 104g
- End of 2008 launch
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Well lookey what we have here. Hot on the heels of the Nokia Tube demonstration that showed off Espoo's touchscreen-based competitor to the multi-touch iPhone, here are some more details on the Nokia Tube.
Symbian-freak managed to score a live photo of the Nokia Tube in the wild. The S60 Touch-based handset from Nokia looks a bit awkward compared to the Apple iPhone, but then style and flair are Apple's forte. And, keep in mind that image is horribly sub-par and that the Nokia Tube is likely still a prototype and will benefit from further refinement from Nokia's design-heads.
Apparently, the Nokia Tube won’t be launched as a Nokia flagship handset. A higher-end touchscreen mobile phone based on the S60 Touch OS will be shipped “shortly after” the launch of the Nokia Tube.
Dusan managed to score some specs for the Nokia Tube, and he let me run with it. The Nokia Tube should be shipped as the Nokia 5800 Tube and will sport a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus. A 3.2-inch touchscreen display with 16 Million colors will go up against the iPhone's 3.5-inch multi-touch display. To handle communications duties, there's a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900Mhz) GSM/EDGE radio with 3G UMTS/HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, and some GPS thrown-in for good measure. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack and TV-out port on the Nokia 5800 Tube. And, just like the updated N82, the Nokia 5800 Tube will support geo-tagging of pics - a nicety granted by the built-in GPS receiver. Anticipate all this techno-gadgetry at the end of 2008.
There's no multi-touch on the Nokia 5800 Tube, but there's definitely haptic feedback. It's unclear whether the haptic feedback is based on the localized haptic feedback technology that we saw with the Haptikos technology, or if the Nokia Tube will use the pseudo-haptic, whole-device vibration feedback that's been so popular on current haptic-enabled handsets. I'm rooting for the Haptikos feedback technology that localizes screen-vibrations to the area of input.
Now, it remains to be seen just how well Nokia's first S60 Touch OS iteration will fare against the incumbent multi-touch OS on the Apple iPhone. Past demonstrations of S60 Touch have been a bit disappointing, but Nokia has stuffed the Nokia 5800 Tube with all the technological goodies that I've come to expect from the Finns - will the built-in GPS, haptic feedback, and 3G be enough to overtake the iPhone? Probably.
But then again, the 3G iPhone is believed to be launching well ahead of the Nokia 5800 Tube's year-end launch window. I can't wait to see the Nokia 5800 Tube hit the interwebs with some live, in-hand demos. Stay tuned for the latest on the Nokia Tube.
Keep reading for the spec-sheet breakdown.
Nokia 5800 Tube specifications
- 3.2-inch touchscreen display with 16 Million colors
- 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
- Quad-band (850/900/1800/1900Mhz) GSM/EDGE radio
- Bluetooth 2.0
- WiFi
- GPS
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- TV-out port
- 140MB on-board storage
- 111 x 52 x 14.5 mm
- 104g
- End of 2008 launch
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 It's not exactly the same as having full Java support on the iPhone, but it's the next ideal thing. New Zealand-based Innaworks has announced their beta-stage “alcheMo” application that’ll port Java-based games and applications to work on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
alcheMo grants developers to convert their standard Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) application and game source code into iPhone source code. It's not the same as running Java directly on the iPhone, but it's the next best thing.
“With the expected introduction of iPhone's AppStore in June, iPhone is emerging as a serious gaming platform. We are amazed by the effectiveness of the touch screen and accelerometer on enhancing gaming experience. We expect the early backers among game publishers to significantly benefit from their first mover advantage. alcheMo for iPhone will help mobile game publishers to reach the eagerly awaiting gamers with quality games on iPhone and iPod touch,” said Stephen Cheng, CEO Innaworks.
The capability to convert Java apps for the iPhone opens up an entire world of gaming for the iPhone. Any developers interested in beta-testing the alcheMo Java converter can sign up at the Innaworks website.
[Via: MacWorld]
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We've seen our fair share of watches masquerading as mobile phones in our time. It's pretty safe to say that most (if not all) cellphone watch solutions are too bulky or too garish to sport in each day life - assuming you’re averse to public ridicule.
Well, take a gander at the Van Der Led WM2 mobile phone watch. With a 1.3-inch 260k color touchscreen display, stereo Bluetooth, 240 hours standby / 300 minutes talk, and 1GB of memory, the Van Der Led WM2 is actually a decent looking, quad-band (850/900/1800/1900Mhz) watch phone. Forget Dick Tracey, this thing is nearly cool enough to sport everywhere. The keypad embedded in the wrist-strap is a little worrying for those of us that like to geek-out on the down-low, but the rest of the Van Der Led WM2 is quite striking.
A 300 EUR (about $471 USD) donation to Van Der Led will net you your very own Van Der Led WM2 mobile phone watch. The website indicates that stock will be available on April 14, 2008.
[Via: Engadget Mobile]
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 Motorola and Carl Icahn have made nice and the beleaguered handset manufacturing once-giant can return to trying to save the company from a slow death. The latest move to help right the horribly listing ship that is Motorola is the appointment of a new Chairman of the Board. Ousted CEO Ed Zander has been serving on as Chairman since his departure from the company's executive payroll. As planned, his retirement from the Board will be succeeded by former AT&T CEO David Dorman.
Come May 5, David Dorman will take over as a non-executive Chairman of the Board. As and MD and senior adviser at Warburg Pincus and Co, let's hope that Dorman's experience on Motorola's Board and the boards of CVS, Yum! Brands, and the Georgia Tech Foundation is just the thing that Motorola needs to turn their wayward ship towards greener pastures (to mix a couple metaphors). Cutting out the tumor that Zander represents is a good begin. The next step would be to get Brown to embrace technology and actually have an understanding for the mobile space.
[Via: MocoNews]
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