Hasta La Gadget!

Have you been searching for just the right kind of iPod / iPhone dock to add a touch of class to your lion’s den? Well Rotaliana has you covered. If the perfect compliment to your collection of Conrad Plank-produced bootlegs involves anodized aluminum, a secret door which becomes a light, and the soft glow of an LED clock, you’ll want to check out the Diva. The oddly shaped dock features embedded speakers and an AUX input, but we have a feeling you’re not laying down the €360 (or about $513) for this thing because you want to hook up your MiniDisc player. If you do take the plunge, let us know how it feels to have your music shooting out of a mutated traffic cone.

[Thanks, Bernard]

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Rotaliana Diva iPod / iPhone dock vamps up your situation originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on May 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft’s original goal was to sell one million Zunes by June 2007. It’s mid-May and they have already sold one million Zunes which shows they’re right on track with where they expected they’d be nine months after launch.

As their first entry into the portable media market, I’d say that the Zune has done fairly well. Especially considering that the iPod already had such a massive portion of the media market to begin with.Certainly, the Zune hasn’t turned into the “iPod Killer” that it was once dubbed, but it’s doing good. Not great, but good.

I am surprised however, that I have yet to see anyone using a Zune. I live in a college town and have seen iPod after iPod in the hands of college students but have yet to see anyone with a Zune. I guess when put into perspective, one million Zunes really isn’t THAT much in the grand scheme of things. I’ve of course seen them on the shelves at various stores, but that’s as close as I’ve gotten to seeing one in public.

So, have any of you seen a Zune making a public appearance?

(Photo above is the latest color: Watermelon Red which joins the pink, white, black, and brown colors, or of course the Halo 3 special edition.)

Source:Zune-Online.com

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Related Posts:

• Save Some Green, Get a Zune
• Microsoft Tries to Buy Their Way Into iPod Market
• A Look at the New Zune 2 and Zune Flash
• Zune Software Available For Download
• 2nd Generation Zune Coming This Year?

The last fiscal quarter wasn’t kind to Microsoft’s iPod killer. The company’s non-gaming entertainment group took a 42-percent tumble in that time, a number analysts are chalking up almost entirely to a steep drop in Zune sales.

Said analysts are also largely recommending that the company abandon what has largely been considered a pet project. “If Zune were going to make a strong move against the iPod, it already would have,” IDC’s Susan Kevorkian told MarketWatch.

Some are suggesting that Microsoft think less iPod and more iPhone, moving ahead. “Microsoft should abandon Zune and follow Apple’s strategy to try to make its presence felt in the high-growth smartphone sector,” Tradition Capital Management LLC VP George Kurian told the site.

Ho ho ho! This little plastic iPod-shaped eggcup is called the eiPOTT. The Ei part means egg in German. The Pott part you can guess. It’s actually a rather appropriate shape for an eggcup: The clickwheel holds the egg and the recessed “screen” takes either a generous dose of salt or the cracked remains of the bashed-in shell.

What’s more, while this looks like yet another concept design, it’s actually a real, shipping product, and as even Apple can’t really claim that anyone would mistake this for a real media-player, it’s likely to remain on sale. At €7.50 ($10.60), it even carries a genuinely high, Apple-style price-tag.

A challenge: The first person to hack one of these into a real MP3 player wins a Gadget Lab Pat on the Back™.

Product page [QED Design via Core77]

You should be refilling that popcorn bucket right about now. While we thought the next round of the Pre / iTunes syncing fiasco would probably be something simple like Apple releasing another quick patch, Palm has stepped it up a notch by complaining to the USB Implementers Forum over what it sees is “improper use of the Vendor ID number” by the gang at Cupertino. What the company means is that when an ID is applied for, a form is signed that states:

“Unauthorized use of assigned or unassigned USB Vendor ID Numbers and associated Product ID Numbers are strictly prohibited.”

The implication here is that Palm believes Apple is violating this stature by disallowing certain Vendor IDs — namely, Palm’s — from using iTunes. So how’d Palm manage to “fix” that syncing hole Apple managed to fill? From the looks of it, by misrepresenting its own Vendor ID, so that the Pre now shows up as a iPod / mass storage device made by Apple (ID 0x05ac) as opposed to one by Palm (ID 0x083) — hence the complaint. Of course, lying about your own ID would seem to break with the aforementioned rule, too, so what we’re left here is some muddled grey area and Palm apparently being okay with fudging some data to correct what it sees is an injustice. If anyone’s curious, DVD Jon points out that the root USB Node is still identified as “Pre,” so we very likely could see another round of these shenanigans in the not-too-distant future.

Finally, now’s as good of a time as any to take a look at some of the peripheral casualties from this war of attrition. In an essay on his personal site that’s been circulating the interwebs, Marc Deslauriers outlines the pangs he and the Linux community have felt over the years trying to use iPods on the open source platform, surmising that Apple is intentionally and repeatedly seeking ways to block non-iTunes programs from syncing in any way with its devices. This story is far from over, and as ugly as it looks now, it’s probably only gonna get worse.

[Via Digg and Pre Central]

Read – Marc Deslauriers, “Goodbye Apple”
Read – Palm’s lodges complaint with USB IF
Read – USB Vendor ID application
Read – Palm Pre USB hack confirmed

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Palm complains about Apple to USB governing body, while Pre / iTunes sync “fix” is explained originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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