Hasta La Gadget!

Geek.com: You can find almost everything online these days. After all, if you consider what’s available in books, music, and electronics online there is not a lot of reason to go to a brick-and-mortar store for these items nowadays. People still have few online choices when it comes to toiletries and home essentials though. At least, they didn’t until a new website called Alice.com was launched.

Alice.com specializes in offering online those home essential items that you would normally just go to the supermarket for. Yet, to call Alice.com just an online store would be discounting some of the cool features offered by the website. You can use the website to keep track of what you typically shop for with reminders to get more after a specific amount of time.

Alice.com offers household products online [Geek.com]

Ok Nokia, this is getting serious. The world’s largest cellphone maker just announced a 66 percent yearly drop in Q2 profit while lowering its 2009 market share target for its cellphones. Originally, Nokia had expected market share to rise in 2009, presumably based on a successful launch of the N97 flagship device. However, outside of a core group of S60 diehards, the N97 has been universally panned in both reviews and user forums alike. And with nothing but rumors of an Atom-based Nokia netbook on the immediate horizon, well, let’s just say that we’re suddenly concerned about the health of our friends from Espoo.

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia cuts market share targets as Q2 profits plummet originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has finally worked out how to push Apple’s buttons. According to Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, the company got a call from Apple asking it to stop running the Laptop Hunter ads after the recent price drop on the Mac product line. These ads, you will remember, show “real” people who want to buy Macs but can’t afford them, and they end up “happy” with a cheap, plastic Windows machine. Turner says the ads are working:

And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.)

I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, “Is this a joke? Who are you?”

This is great. You really know when someone is hurting when they call you up and beg you to stop. So will Microsoft be stopping? Of course not: “we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them,” said Turner.

Of course, he didn’t take long to lapse into more characteristic patterns. “[We]’re going to showcase this opportunity of Windows simplicity, choice, value, and partners,” said Turner.

This comes after the news that Microsoft is planning to open up retail stores right next to Apple stores, which like miniature design museums, and people hang out in them as if they were coffee shops. Is Microsoft planning on playing the dollar card in its stores, too, by only selling the cheapest machines? We don’t know, but we do know that we love to be on the sidelines of a good punch-up.

Transcript [Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 via Ars]

Forget Google’s Street View, which overlays a view of the street in front of you on… the street in front of you. No, for a look at what augmented reality applications can really do, and just why a compass is so useful in the iPhone 3GS, take a peek at New York Nearest Subway.

The application is simple. Extremely simple, which is all it needs to be when it includes the entire real city of New York within it. First, watch the video, and then, when you have finished picking up your slack, drooping jaw, read this: The app shows you where the nearest subway station is. Hold the iPhone flat and you get an arrow pointing to each of the city’s 33 lines.

This could be enough, but if you then hold the phone up in front of you it will overlay boxes onto the live scene coming through the iPhone’s camera. These boxes float and jiggle around as you move the phone and show you the direction and distance to the nearest stations, along with which lines run through them. If the application works nearly as well as the video demo suggests, this is certain to be a must-have download.

There is a London version also in the, ahem, tubes, and the company behind the application, Acrossair, is looking for bete testers for other cities in the US, Europe and Japan, including Barcelona.

The price is still unannounced, and the app is in the Apple submission process. Oh, and I almost forgot the obligatory mention of  Minority Report. There. Done.

Product page [Acrossair]

Sony already announced its intentions to bring more developers to the PSP platform at the big E3 gaming show last month. And the move to simplify its development tools was seen as a hint of new PSP applications beyond games. Now Develop has laid bare Sony’s PSP development strategy as explained by Zeno Colaço, Sony’s head of developer relations. According to Zeno, over 50 studios are working on “new kinds of games and applications” that will be sold via a “specially-branded separate area” of the PlayStation Store accessible by PSP and PSPgo owners. In effect, Sony is going after the kind of “snackable content” made popular by Apple’s App Store — inexpensive games and apps that can be downloaded in less than a minute for immediate gratification — according to Subatomic Studio’s Ash Monif. In fact, Subatomic, best known for its massive App Store hit, Fieldrunners, is developing a PSP-exclusive version of its tower defense game. Unlike Apple, however, Sony is charging for its PSP SDK in a bid to keep things, uh hem, “professional,” as Zeno calls it.

[Thanks, Calvin H.]

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Sony’s plan for “snackable” PSP game and application downloads revealed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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