Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Seattle's always quirky The Presidents of the United States of America make the first phonecam music video for their most recent hit song "Some Postman."

Apparently 12 phones were positioned at different angles to capture video of the band performing (at half speed to accomodate the poor recording quality). I think the phone model that's being used is the Sony Ericsson K750 with 2 megapixel camera. After capture, the video was transferred over Bluetooth to a Mac for editing. The music for the video was obviously recorded at a much higher quality than a phone could have captured.

Good stuff, definitely worth the 3 1/2 minutes it takes to watch and forward on to your geek friends.
ArsTechnica uses then abuses the iPod nano, and discovers that it will keep playing music even if you run it over with a car. In their tests, the display suffers only minor cosmetic damage when put through a series of "moving drops" (to simulate jogging / running / biking / driving) - they had to drop it from 9ft onto a cement sidewalk before it stopped working correctly. That should provide some solace to everyone that's experienced a cracked or scratched nano display, shouldn't it?

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Rent my DVR... well, not **my** DVR, but someone's.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

This looks pretty sweet... Harman Kardon Bridge iPod dock. Only $100, out for Christmas.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Since I'm sure it will be covered ad nauseum by every publication over the next few days, I'll keep my summary of the new Moto ROKR E1 iTunes phone brief... BORING!!

I'll take a 4GB black iPod nano please... same $249 price (actually 99 cents cheaper), no two-year service contract, lots more storage (1,000 songs vs. 100).

As expected, the ROKR E1 is just a minor update to the E398 - white instead of black plastic and an iTunes button. I've already got an E398... wonder if I can get the iTunes software for it?

It seems clear that Moto has several more iTunes models on the horizon. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is working with other handset vendors as well. Hope some of those are more revolutionary than this one. I would love to see a Nokia Nseries model that supported iTunes, but I think an Apple / Nokia partnership of this nature is unlikely considering their similar brand aspirations.

A couple of specific nits about the ROKR E1...

Use of TransFlash memory format sucks. This format is not as widely used, so higher price per MB than miniSD and harder to find. Good thing Cingular seems to be including a 512MB card.

Although the ROKR E1 commercials make it appear otherwise, I'm a bit concerned that the product descriptions make it seem like you have to manually pause the music when a call comes in:

  • "Pause music when you need to take a call" - Cingular's site

  • "You can even pause the music when your phone rings, so you won’t miss any incoming calls" - Apple's site


This should happen automatically... incoming phone calls trump everything on a phone. Period.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Went to Bumbershoot yesterday to see The Donnas and Garbage, and was disappointed to find that they aren't handing out wristbands this year to get into Mainstage concerts in Memorial Stadium. That practice has been an institution for as long as I've been going to the festival. This year, they're handing out tokens instead... same purpose, but not the same experience.
Looks like the Nikon P1 and P2, the first digital cameras with integrated Wi-Fi will be duds as they only allow you to transfer photos to a computer with special software installed. Not much of an improvement over USB, and probably better addressed by Bluetooth.

Kodak's upcoming EasyShare-One promises to offer support for uploading photos directly to their Ofoto EasyShare Gallery online photo service... cool. The EasyShare-One features a 4MP image sensor and 185MB of internal storage and is expected to be out in October for $600.

Think Nikon needs to partner with Shutterfly, Yahoo, or Yahoo's Flickr asap. Wonder if the P1 and P2 are able to support that or if we'll have to wait for future models?