Jup, its out, and it's gorgeous.
But what? 2GB of memory and not upgradeable?
They certainly had a lot of squeezing to do to fit all into such a tiny shell, but once I upgraded to 3GB on my MacBook Pro I made an oath never to go back to 2GB again. I would have never believed it, but adding memory really is the best thing to do if you want to increase the your productivity. The difference is like night and day, even if you're working only in a few apps (ok, thats CS3 apps I'm taking about).
So no MacBook Air for me... :(
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Man, technology sometimes just moves too fast.
A few days ago, the Nokia N95 went on sale world wide and I got mine. Today, I got a newsletter from Nokia Forum with an interesting topic; Widgets go mobile. Apparently it's a framework to Web driven applications for the S60 platform, much in the same way as Apple's widgets or Microsoft's gadgets. Both from a user and developer perspective it totally makes sense. Use technologies you know (html+javascript) to develop connected application rapidly and launch them like they were applications on your mobile. But! I just bought the newest, coolest and most expensive phone multimedia device and WTF! Mobile widget's wont work on it! Cause mobile widgets come with S60 3rd edition feature pack 2, and my device only has feature pack 1.
God! It only took 4 days to make my shiny new device an old fart.
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2 years of chatter, and now it has finally been announced. The coolest gadget the planet has yet seen. I knew Apple would put out something spectacular, but boy, I had no idea... This must be the end of an era (The "smart-phone" era). It's still half a year till this baby comes out, but I don't think that the top three phone manufacturer trio will be able to deliver anything equally great, even if they had two years time to develop it.
I'm counting the days till I get one...
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I had a chance to play around with a prototype of the Nokia N95 at the Adobe Usergroup meeting last evening. It totally blew me away. It's really the first phone - err, sorry - multimedia device as they call them that can't wait to hit the shelves.
It's the first S60 device that has a fast enough processor to make using the phone fluent, nice hardware-accelerated graphics for smooth transitions and animations and a whopping 5 megapix camera and decent mp3 player.
But the best thing is it's GPS. When I first heard that the N95 was going to have map-software I thought that it would be painfully slow. But hey, they managed to put Google Earth into a device that is really small. It's 3D, looks good, renders fast and fetches detailed imaginery while you're zooming in. I don't know which countries their backend supports (I heard that it would be many), but I had no problem fetching a route from Helsinki to Turku.
Really, you gotta look out for this one. Truly remarkable.
Uh, and it has Flash Lite 2.0 installed.
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Huh, the Japanese did it again (or is it the Koreans this time?)! The worlds smallest Windows XP-running gadget - the OQO Model 1 - weighs a little under 400 g.
Makes you wonder when machines will take over the world. In just a little over 15 years we've come from the first mobile (?) phone - the Nokia Mobira (using analog NMT), with a weight of about 5 kilos (a friend of mine just bought one for 3€, hehe) to this little OQO beauty making Skype phone calls over WIFI.
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Err - Hello Nokia!
Just before the holidays Nokia put a Flash splash-screen onto their main site, Nokia.com. I figured they would have removed it in the next few months, since in my humble opinion it's just an obvious hindrance. One rollover and two clicks to get me to the real front-page is just too much.
Anyhow, I bought a Motorola V3 from Bangkok. I always wanted to try something different since I've been using Nokia's mobiles my whole life and the design of the V3 was appealing. And I'm glad that I tried it out. Now I can go back to my S60-powered phone and am a lot happier with it (with all the little flaws it still has), since the interface of the V3 was just really sad.
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Now I know what the Japanese have been doing all this time, working around the clock, sleeping in tubes so that they can get back to the office at five in the morning.
This little baby weighs only 0.85 kg and is made out of carbon fibre. They created the ultimate notebook - thin, lightweight, beautiful, powerful - but then.....
... They won't share it with us! It's only available in Japan! Gaarrrrrrr! Browsing through Dynamism.com, the only site that imports Japanese tech-dolls for the US market, is see lots of other marvellous gadgets, take the Sony Vaio U70 for example, a 0.6 kg pen-operated err, notebook?, pda?, err, kick-ass thing. Quickly I realise that the western world is WAY behind when it comes to electronics. Just take a look at the Clie PEG-VZ90 (whoever came up with that name should be shot). The first thing it says is "*Available in Japanese Language only*". Damn you Japanese! I want one too!
The next moment I realise that I'm browsing for tickets to Tokyo. "Watakushi-wa Tuomas, desu. All your gadgets are belong to me!"
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Nokia announced yesterday their first non-mobile-phone-gadget since they focused on mobile communications (for those that unfamiliar with Nokia's history, they did all sorts of things from cables to wellingtons in the early days).
The Nokia 770 looks like a great device for internet-browsing. I'm a little confused that they decided inculde Flash Player 6 instead of 7 (FP7 does exists for Linux, doesn't it?), but I'll get me one if the price tag is somewhat acceptable.
The only thing that's missing is 3G (or even GPRS), so you have to find a Wi-Fi hotspot whenever you want to browse the web. But that's where the Nokia 7710 comes in.
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While waiting for long-lasting batteries, Toshiba announced the next best thing: A battery capable of charing itself to 80% of full capacity in just 60 seconds. Also, the battery will lose only 1% of it's capacity after 1000 charging cycles.
Great stuff, but I'm still waiting for wireless electricity...
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A Japanese company called Solid Alliance markets a range of USB memory sticks called FoodDisk. The idea is something that, I think, they can only invent in Japan: the memory sticks look like Japanese food items, like sushi rolls or fried shrimp. How about a shrimp with a 128 Mb memory? "Oh no, wait, that's not real sushi... Damn it, you ate my documents! Spit it out!"
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The Adidas-1 running-shoe features a microprocrssor capable of performing 5 million caluclations / second. The magnetic sensor monitors changes in weight, pace and surface type 1.000 times / sec and a tiny motor adjusts the heel cushion to an ideal level.
Beleieved to retailt at about 190€, this pair of shoes is a must for all sports-enthusiastic geeks (if there are any).
As usually technology has it's drawbacks: Now you need to replace the batteries for your shoes every 100th running-hour.
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Just a few months after Samsung, Nokia and Macromedia today announced that they've signed a license agreement that will integrate Flash into the Series 60 platform.
This is great news and I've been waiting for this announcement since early 2002 when Flash Player support was announced for the Nokia 9200 Communicator. The 9200 was far from mainstream and thus was not very appealing to developers, and even Samsung's license agreement didn't get me excited, since at least here in Finland there's really no point in developing anything for mobile phones other than S40 or S60 (with about 80% market share).
I hope Nokia will be quick to pre-install Flash Lite on all devices. It will still take a few years for Flash on the mobile to be so widespread that it will make sense to develop carrier-independent applications with it.
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Cyndustries has announced a custom modular synthesizer built around the new Apple Mac mini. The Cynthia Macintosh is a combination of a Mac mini and a touch-screen controlled liquid crystal color video monitor. The Cynthia Macintosh is available only by special order.
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Shortly after the introduction of iPod shuffle people are truly eager to get their hands on one. Check out the Amazon.com Early Adopter Electronics-page, where (to date) iPod shuffle players take rank #1 and #2. All in all 9 products in the top 20 are iPod-related.
Dell's CEO Kevin Rollins is still not impressed:
"It's interesting the iPod has been out for three years and it's only this past year it's become a raging success. Well those things that become fads rage and then they drop off."
Read his full interview at silicon.com.
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Mobiblu/Hyunwon DAH-220 is a Korean-made MP3 Player. The name of the device maybe doesn't sound as cool as Apple iPod, but the player itself is cooler than most other MP3 devices out now. What makes it so cool is that the player looks like a normal, oldskool cassette tape, and actually works like one, too. With the remote control unit with backlit LCD screen, you can carry the cassette-like player with you and use it as a normal MP3 player with expandable 512 Mb memory. But once you put the cassette in an analog tape player, you can play the music files on the player like a normal cassette, using the tape deck's control buttons. The player can record, too: the direct encoding function of the player and the line in plug enable you to encode direct from any music source.
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