Nokia’s hoping some star power and a little Nostalgia will you get you itching for an N97. The ad is a remixed version of ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ by LL Cool J. It’s full of snappy one-liners like, “don’t call it a comeback” and, “over the competition I’m towerin’.” If only your phone wasn’t $700, Nokia. If only. You can see the whole video below.
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Today Hillcrest Labs made good on a device they showcased back at CES 2007 – The Loop. It’s a wireless control device designed for home theater PCs, Apple TV, or the PS3 and comes in just one shape…a loop.
The circular remote sports just four buttons and a scroll wheel and makes use of an RF dongle to transmit controls to your favorite living room web browsing device. Essentially Hillcrest Labs took a look at a Wiimote and the way it controls the Wii menu systems and created their own. The Loop also senses motion, so you don’t have to be pointing the device at anything (how do you point a circle?). Just tilt your wrist in the direction you want to move.
For $99 you can get rid of that wireless keyboard and mouse rig in your living room.
With the release of the Kindle DX, plenty of folks have been asking the same question: will you get one? For me, the answer is no. I like the feel of a physical book in my hands too much to let a Kindle take its place. I also love used book shopping, where I can pick up classic (and sometimes new) titles for less than a buck.
It was this post over at Crave that really made me wonder, what would it take to get me interested in a Kindle? For me that question has a simple translation. When is it more convenient to have a Kindle than a book? The Kindle doesn’t have enough features outside book reading to make it compelling for reasons other than book reading, so I’m going to ignore them. For me, it comes down to convenience and the emotional experience I get from reading a book.
I like the reasons Stein gives for his own experience. Pulling a book out on the subway is much more cumbersome than flipping to the Kindle app on his iPhone. The appeal is the same in my life, but paying full book price for something I can only read on a Kindle or an iPhone seems ridiculous.
What I could really use is both – something like movie studios have been doing recently to attempt to combat downloads – adding a digital copy to the physical media. As it currently stands, downloading books from the Kindle store is incredibly restrictive, and if you lose your Amazon account, you lose your books as well. Offering an option to download the book when I purchase the physical media could change that, giving me control of the storage (and yes, distribution) of my media.
Obviously there are pirating concerns for Amazon, and they lose the sweet deal they have going now whereby they reap most of the profit from selling digital copies. It’s hard to imagine, though, that they wouldn’t see increased usage from this sort of change. The iPhone Kindle App becomes a lot more appealing when it means I can continue my reading without lugging a book around but still have the option to kick back and fill margins with notes when I get the urge.
For now, a Kindle is the wrong device for me. I can’t help but think I’m paying a fee to relinquish control of my purchase, and that just doesn’t feel right.
Coming between what are probably the two biggest smartphone launches of the year, Nokia unveiled their new contender to the throne, the N97. The Finnish phone maker packed their newest device with plenty of features you’d want in a decent phone. There’s just one thing they overlooked – price.
The N97 comes in at a whopping $700. Of course, that’s outside contract, which serves to explain the price. Plenty of cells, including this year’s big launches, would sell for that amount if purchased without a contract. The problem, for Nokia at least, is that American consumers are so conditioned to contract subsidized pricing that $700 is going to feel like a swift kick to the groin.
Feature by feature, the N97 closely matches the Palm Pre and the iPhone 3GS. It’s got 32GB of internal memory, a multi-touch touchscreen, and a slide out QWERTY keyboard. Nokia has said on several occasions that they would like to be more competitive in the U.S. market. How they hope to do that with phones at more than double the major carriers’ premium prices is beyond me.
You know what they say, though; freedom isn’t free, but aside from the folks who really despise contracts, I doubt you’ll see many N95s in hand this summer.
Despite the short list of Palm Pre apps available from the app catalog, plenty of folks are choosing Palm as their smartphone provider of choice. As soon as the application dev kit gets out, hopefully the list will continue to expand, including some new games.
In the meantime, take a look at this homebrew fix from a guy known only as Sargun. He’s managed to port Doom (at least the open source version, PRDoom) to the Pre, bringing demonized, gun-riddled hell to Palm’s newest release. Sargun used DirectFB to load the graphics through the Pre framebuffer and says getting the hack to work is fairly trivial.
If you’ve got some time on your hands, and decent geeky ninja skills, you should be able to get this (nearly) fully-functional game to your Pre without much trouble. I hope you also sport some TINY thumbs. The controls look…unwieldy at best.
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