INQ Mobile's new phones: the INQ Chat 3G and INQ Mini.
(Credit: INQ Mobile)
Cellphone maker INQ Mobile is launching two new low-cost cellphones optimized for social networking applications to give mobile subscribers alternatives to more expensive smartphones.
INQ, which is owned by Hong Kong’s Hutchison Whampoa, …
Originally posted at News – Wireless
Advertising Age has taken a deep dive into Palm’s latest string of unsettling, polarizing ads — you know, the ones with the girl — in an attempt to explain the company’s intention with the creepy spots. The industry paper spoke with Gary Koepke, the co-founder and executive creative director at Modernista, the company which developed and produced the short clips. According to Gary, he’s happy that viewers find the commercials upsetting, stating that “The Pre is probably being talked about more than other phones right now because of the marketing and advertising, and that’s a good thing. Could the ads work harder to show exactly how the phone works? Yes, but we knew it would be polarizing people to have a woman not shout at them and tell an interesting story.” Apparently the agency is taking its own stab at Microsoft’s Seinfeld / Bill Gates strategy, which means viewers don’t necessarily have to like (or even understand) the ads… as long as they keep talking about them. Of course, that game plan may work for a company like Microsoft, which arguably has nothing to lose if they run a few ill-received spots. Palm, on the other hand, won’t get a second chance to make a first impression with a lot of people, and since its fortune is currently riding on the device these ads attempt to sell to consumers, it’s a pretty risky proposition. C’mon, how could the folks that brought you the Foleo be wrong?
Continue reading Palm’s ad agency ‘loves that you’re creeped out’ by new TV spots
Filed under: Cellphones
Palm’s ad agency ‘loves that you’re creeped out’ by new TV spots originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt may be gone from Apple’s board, but so far as the FTC is concerned, he’s certainly not forgotten. The government trade organization is going to press on with a probe of the two companies. “We will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies,” the director of the FTC’s bureau of competition, Richard Feinstein, said in a statement.
The organization commended Schmidt for stepping down, but will press on with the probe based on another person, one-time Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, who is splitting board member duties between the two companies.
“Google is in the sights of regulators,” said a former FTC Clinton antitrust lawyer told Reuters. “This is just the first of many instances where they are going to encounter regulatory scrutiny.”
This is Part 2 of a list of my favorite sounding CDs of late, in no particular order. My preference is for realistic-sounding recordings, recordings that allow the band to sound “live.” And sure, I still like a lot of recordings that are heavily processed, but I wouldn’t by any stretch use them to “test” the naturalness of a speaker.
The first half of the top 10 CD list appeared in the previous Audiophiliac.
A different kind of heavy metal music.
Savage Aural Hotbed, “Wreckquiem”
Talk about heavy metal, Savage Aural Hotbed is a (mostly) industrial percussion group. They rhythmically hit, scrape, or smash pipes, barrels, tenor and baritone snorkelhorns, electric power tools, and drums. I love SAH records for their dense textures and searing dynamics and this new one will give your system an aerobic workout while dazzling your ears with its mesmerizing charms.
Ms. Cash at her best
Rosanne Cash, “10 Song Demo”
OK, this one’s from 1996, but it’s withstood the test of time. True to the title, it’s just Cash accompanied by a small group of players, Production is minimal, so if your system is good enough the music can sound very, very real. The music’s a perfect 10.
Jazz that'll rock your world
Gerald Clayton, “Two-Shade”
Clayton’s nimble piano trio delivers hard-driving pieces and explosive improvisations that’ll push your hi-fi to the limit. The piano, bass, and drums balance is, musically and sonically, as good as it gets. It may be Clayton’s trio, but it’s a band of equals. The stereo image is set back, behind the plane of my speakers, so it doesn’t have the claustrophobic, up close perspective of most contemporary jazz recordings.
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Originally posted at The Audiophiliac
There once was a time when a 12 megapixel cameraphone would have been laughed at, and, though many are still smirking (guilty), they’re now a reality — a reality that Altek wants desperately to be a part of with its T8680 handset. Its face looks rather like a PMP with a 3-inch WQVGA LCD, but on the back is the standard sort of 3x pop-out zoom that you’d expect on a compact shooter, sitting next to a tiny xenon flash. It’ll capture unnecessarily high resolution images while being crippled to VGA video, play back MP3 and AAC files, and tune into the Weekly Top 40 over FM. Yes, it’ll even make calls, but with only tri-band GSM/EDGE support don’t expect to e-mail those gigantic pictures directly from the phone. The T8680 is expected to hit Chinese retailers in about a month for 3000 yuan (about $440), and probably won’t be making much of an appearance elsewhere.
[Via GSM Arena]
Filed under: Cellphones, Digital Cameras
Altek crams a dozen megapixels of wishful thinking into T8680 cameraphone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Remake It is a book on a subject dear to us at Gadget Lab: hacking. Not the computer kind, though, but the make-do-and-mend kind we do every day. The book, written by design-geek and Wallpaper editor Henrietta Thompson, gives illustrated, step-by-step instructions on turning old CD spindles into bagel-holders, old Macs into aquariums and garden hoses into, well, you’ll find out.
If some of those sound familiar, that’s because they are. Henrietta is an old friend and hit me up for some suggestions. Apparently there’s a project to do with old inner-tubes in there, my signature material. Even the book itself can be transformed into something else. Henrietta says that “You could buy it. We hope you will like it. But even if you don’t you can always repurpose it as a trivet.”
I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out in November, and it’s nice to see this kind of home-style hacking going mainstream with some decent design instead of the usual blurry photos. The most ironic thing is that this new repurposing craze is exactly the kind of thing your grandparents would have done when they were young, every single day. $20.
Product page [Amazon. Thanks, Henrietta!]
Product page UK [Amazon]
A US government panel, summoned by el presidente to review the future of human space travel, has expressed strong support for introducing fuel depots into Earth’s orbit. Refueling between stops is expected to cut down significantly on the weight of spacecraft and, accordingly, eliminate the need to engineer ever more powerful rockets to launch missions. It would then be up to private companies to compete — and NASA already knows a thing or two about privatizing space missions — by reducing costs and developing more efficient methods. While by no means the only potion NASA has bubbling, if the panel concludes in favor of orbiting gas stations, they will form the backbone of all future extraterrestrial exploration. So we’re just letting you know in advance — we’re nice like that.
Filed under: Science
Orbiting fuel stations proposed for trips to the Moon, Mars, and beyond originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Everyone’s trying to pinpoint exactly what pushed Eric Schmidt to leave Apple’s board—or Apple to oust him—but whether it was Google Voice or the FCC doesn’t really matter. Eric Schmidt shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Schmidt’s presence the Apple board of directors has been conceptually weird from the start, but in the last year or so, he’s been treading in dangerous territory. Many saw these concerns crystallize when the FTC invoked a century-old antitrust law that prohibits “interlocking directorates”—essentially, the sharing of leadership between two competing companies to investigate the companies after Google announced Chrome OS (an investigation which is still moving forward, despite Schmidt’s exit). The NYT, discussing the issue in May:
Antitrust experts say that investigations of interlocking directorates rarely lead to major confrontations between companies and the government. Executives typically choose to resign from the board of a competitor if it poses a problem rather than face a lengthy investigation or a bruising legal fight.
The thing is, until just now, Eric Schmidt didn’t step down, nor did he seriously talk about it. He didn’t feel he had to, because of a disingenuous loophole:
Under the Clayton Act, interlocking directorates are not considered a problem if the revenue from products in which the companies compete is less than 2 percent of either company’s sales.
Google’s competing services are generally free, including Android and the upcoming Chrome OS, and therefore don’t directly account for much—or depending on how stubbornly literal you want to be about it—any of the company’s revenue. This should have be a clear cue to step the hell aside, but it wasn’t taken that way. Schmidt was comfortable staying, and wasn’t afraid to say so as early as last week.
In an interview printed in the Mercury News on Friday, Schmidt said “the board question can be solved by recusing yourself, which I do with the iPhone,” hardly talking like a guy who was about to walk away. He was comfortable with this relationship; the regulatory bodies, the public and, most importantly, Apple, were not. It’s hard to imagine Steve Jobs, or Apple’s various board members, taking kindly to the consistent surprises they were getting from Google. As they saw it, the iPhone begot Android, Safari begot Chrome, and in a small way, OS X begot Chrome OS. Steve Jobs didn’t waste any words in their press release on Schmidt’s departure, and made these concerns pretty clear:
Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished.
Chrome OS was announced in May, and Android in November of 2007. To Jobs and Apple, Schmidt’s overlapping interests were old news; to Schmidt, it’s safe to assume they were ancient history.
The Google/Apple relationship has been steadily getting more awkward since people first started talking about it, and at a fast clip since Schmidt’s been onboard. The relationship was unnecessarily strained as it was, but now Schmidt’s company is giving Apple some serious headaches, all the while looking like the innocent party in a confusing PR nightmare that’s drawn the wrath of the FCC. Granted, they deserve it, but having a Google CEO to step over only muddles the issues. It bears repeating: nothing good could’ve come from Schmidt staying. He’d either be accused of collusion, sabotage or both—his presence was a lose-lose proposition. He didn’t seem to mind, but it looks like Apple finally did.
Drawing a thicker line between these corporate structures is good for everyone, no matter how this plays out. If Apple and Google turn into direct rivals, they need distinct management. If they want to continue working together, like they do on browsers, iPhone software, or some as-of-yet-unannounced project—Apple could sure as hell use Google’s help with their cloud efforts, for example—they need the exact same thing.
The ability to optionally install games on the Xbox 360’s hard drive is something we’ve been jazzed about for some time, because while the machine’s DVD drive isn’t terribly slow, it isn’t terribly quiet either — and who has time for progress bars? However, those of us still rocking older, 20GB machines quickly discovered that the 6-plus GB install files of some games put a real hurtin’ on what little disk space we had left, leaving us to choose between reducing load-times while exploring the Urban Wasteland or deleting all those random demos we keep forgetting about. Microsoft has a solution, and this time it’s not a moderately less expensive new hard drive. Included in the upcoming Xbox 360 dashboard update, due one week from today, is a previously unmentioned feature that shrinks those game installs, sometimes by a huge margin. King of Fighters XII went from 3.4GB down to 703MB, while Raiden Fighters Aces is now just 484MB. Any of you early bird previewers finding other titles that have trimmed the fat?
Filed under: Gaming
Microsoft’s big new Xbox update makes some game installs much, much smaller originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In Japan, the PS3 comes in silver, black, and white.
(Credit: Sony)
The rumors of the impending arrival of a new PlayStation 3 are growing more fierce as new hints seem to turn up almost daily in the blogsphere. The latest discovery to pop up is what appears to be …
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