Motorola says to show new 3G mobile devices
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Motorola Inc. will show next
Tuesday new mobile devices based on 3G and Java technologies,
Chief Executive Ed Zander told an annual shareholders’ meeting
on Monday.
Motorola’s Gold and Diamond Phone
It’s bling time and Motorola is the culprit, launching a Peter Aloisson-designed V3i phone, made from gold-clad stainless steel and encrusted with 855 tiny diamonds.
I know they’re tiny because the phone ‘only’ costs around £5,000. Which is nothing really considering Aloisson designed the Diamond Crypto Smartphone which cost around £650,000, so this is really slumming it for him.
Still, it’s brash and ugly enough to appeal to the bling set where money replaces taste but garners you lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from hangers-on idiots and people that like to say things like ‘Oh My Gawd!! That’s like, just so, I mean it, utterly fabulous, y’know, and it goes so well with your ear-lobesâ€- or something.
Anyway there’s a cheapo version made from stainless steel – but also with the diamonds – for just £2,000. See a photo of it after the jump.
Or, if that boob-job, ass-lift, tummy-tuck, facial peel, colonic or botox shot cost more than expected, you can always go bargain basement with the £680 gold Nokia 8800 Sirocco.-Martin Lynch
Global mobile phone growth slows
Growth in world mobile phone shipments slowed in the first three months of 2007, led by Motorola, a report says.
FreeHand Gives Your Hand a Pocket
Spring is here, it’s warming up everywhere—well, almost—and you know what that means? There’s great running weather, and you’ll have fewer pockets. That’s where FreeHand can give you a hand. It’s a pocket for the back of your hand. Of course using such a convenience would mean actually leaving your house. Indeed, there is a whole world out there.
Store your credit cards, money, your cellphone or your iPod in there, always at the ready and right at your fingertips. Might be perfect for that pesky Motorola Q, whose buttons keep getting accidentally pressed while riding in a pocket, calling that same poor soul over and over again. Solving that problem alone would make it worth the $22 purchase price. – Charlie White
Update: Or I could just press and hold the Home button on the Q. That would lock it. Still, it’s a pain in the arse doing that all day.
Product Page [Venture Design Works]
Palm takeover interest continues: sources
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Palm Inc., maker of Treo smartphones
and handheld devices, continues to gather takeover interest
although an imminent deal is seen unlikely, several sources
familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
iPod Video a Flop? Plus, Our Field Test on Tiny Video Watching
Nielsen Media Research, that company that watches the TV watchers, did a study last month about Apple’s iPod and the amount of video that people are actually watching on it. The result? People are listening to a whole lot more music than they are watching videos on the portable players. Less than 1% of content played on iTunes or iPods were videos, and even among those who own a video iPod, only 2.2% of the content consumed was video. What does this all mean? According to the Hollywood Reporter:
Worst-case scenario: The panel is an early indication that TV and movies have limited appeal on iPods. Best-case scenario: While adoption of video may be proceeding more slowly than the hype suggests, there is tremendous upside ahead.
We’re thinking that people are using iPods so much, 2.2% of the huge amount of time spent with the things is still a significant number. But then, isn’t watching video on such a tiny screen a huge pain in the ass? I just spent over 50 hours in various airplanes watching all kinds of video on tiny screens, so let me tell you what I think, after the jump.
We’re thinking that people are using iPods so much, 2.2% of the huge amount of time spent with the things is still a significant number. But then, isn’t watching video on such a tiny screen a huge pain in the ass? I just spent over 50 hours in various airplanes watching all kinds of video on tiny screens, so let me tell you what I think, after the jump.
My impression of watching video on a small screen? It depends on how small that screen is and how desperate you are to be entertained. I’ve noticed that I have a personal threshold for the smallness of video that I can still enjoy. I tried a few different screen sizes in my informal field test, traveling half-way around the world and watching a lot of video. Along for the ride I had a Motorola Q which has a 2.25-inch 4×3 screen, an Archos 404 with a 3.5-inch 4×3 screen, and a Sony PSP with a 4.25-inch widescreen.
On a screen the size of the Motorola Q’s, it’s extremely hard to enjoy any sort of cinematic content, because it’s just too damn small. Trying to watch a football game in Los Angeles that I was receiving via EVDO using SlingPlayer Mobile was an exercise in futility, where the players all looked like tiny ants running around on the screen. About the only thing a screen that size is useful for is getting some talking-heads news information or something very simple. Either way, it’s hardly worth the trouble.
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Moving up to the next larger-size screen, the Archos 404’s 3.5-inch 4×3 screen was almost big enough for watching 4×3 content, but still leaves me wanting when watching letterboxed movies. It just seems like a waste of perfectly good video content to watch it on a screen that’s just 3.5 inches diagonal. The Archos screen had an unusually shallow viewing angle, not good if you want to watch a video with a friend. But this could have an upside, too—you won’t bother your prudish seatmate if you want to pull out that porn vid you’ve been meaning to watch but just haven’t gotten around to.
The Sony PSP is a different story. Its 16×9 screen is exceedingly sharp and is just big enough to enjoy movies. Of course, if you get suckered into buying a movie on the brain-dead UMD format, there is an upside to that: its video is exceedingly crispy-sharp. Even ripped movies from DVDs look like HDTV on this beautiful little screen. Watching movies on the PSP was far more pleasurable than with the other two examples I tried, and the audio sounds great with a decent pair of earphones, making me almost forget I was flying in a pressurized tin can six miles above the planet.
I did notice that the more desperate I got to be entertained on these interminably long flights (one was 18 hours long), the easier it was to tolerate the smaller screens. Plus, if the movie I was watching was really good, I could get so absorbed in the content that it didn’t matter much that I was only watching on a small screen. But this is only true with the PSP. Anything smaller than 4 inches, in my opinion, gets to be annoying to watch after a while, no matter what.
One other note: I found myself constantly wishing for some sort of stand or easel that could hold up each of these players on the tray table, because it gets tiresome to hold a player in your hand for hours on end while watching long movies.
Plus, when loading up the players with video, it’s quite an arduous process to convert a DVD into a movie that can be viewed on them, but that’s getting easier all the time, too.
Summing up, I believe there is a big market for location-shifting using portable video players, because people are sometimes desperate for entertainment. Plus, the threshold of pain varies from user to user; your mileage may vary.
Study: iPod video yet to play big [Hollywood Reporter]
Diamond-Encrusted KRZR For The Rich and Heartless
As if owning a Motorola KRZR doesn’t already make you a tool, why not outfit it with enough diamonds to make the regent of Siam jealous? That’s exactly what Peter Aloisson did when he created the KRZR White, KRZR Leopard and KRZR Roma, the last one being a nod to his love for all things Francesco Totti-related. The price for these little wonders varies on the number and purity of diamonds used; Aloisson’s other such luxury cellphones went for $1.3 million. Time to crack open the piggy bank or be content with your buy-one-get-one-free Verizon cellphone. Jump over the cliff for a few more pics.
Yes, nothing says classy quite like outfitting a cellphone with diamonds.
Diamond KRZR: a real work of art [Mobile-review.com] (in Russian) via Newlaunches.com
Top 5 Early Bird Luxo-Gift List
As soon as Halloween is done, it’s a sprint until Christmas. Never mind all that talk about Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that launches the holiday shopping season. If you’re planning to buy a luxo-sport gift for that special someone this year, you’ll want to avoid that herd of sheep, and get your shopping done early.
That’s why we’ve put together this quick list for the smartest shoppers of all: The Top 5 Early Bird Luxo-Gift List, with gifts priced from $1300 down to $200 listed in descending order. Start now. Avoid those maddening crowds, the relentless pressure, and avoid that sinking feeling when you hear that clock ticking, counting down the minutes until Zero Hour.
After the jump, pick out one of the top 5 luxo-gifts you can get right now, and get it all done ahead of time.
This is looking like the hot digital SLR for the season, with its 10.2-megapixel CCD, bigger and brighter viewfinder and excellent lenses from Nikon. It has an 11-area through-the-lens autofocus system, improved color metering, smaller size than its predecessor, and we don’t even mind that it uses SD memory cards instead of CompactFlash. You get your money’s worth for $1300.
4. Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS
We’re big fans of Garmin’s Nuvi series of GPS navigators, and this latest model stretches that screen out to 4.3 inches, the perfect compromise between portability and readibility. Like its brandmates, it gives you hands-free mobile phone calls and then there’s that outstanding Garmin user interface, easy enough to use in traffic but powerful enough to get you where you want to go. With its integrated FM traffic receiver that will warn you about heavy traffic or construction, and an FM transmitter that sends its navigational commands through your car stereo, it’s tough to beat for $999.
3. TiVo Series 3 HD Personal Multimedia Recorder
We’ve had one of these babies in-house for the past two months, and it’s the best digital video recorder we’ve ever seen. It’s the only THX-certified PVR and its video and audio consistently demonstrate that fact, plus it has that famed TiVo user interface that has no equal. Too bad it’s so damned expensive, at $800, but you can find one for $680.
2. Canon PowerShot SD900 10MP Digital Elph Camera
The form factor of the Digital Elph cameras from Canon is hard to beat, and this is the best one yet, the PowerShot SD900, with its 10 megapixels of quick-starting goodness and 3x optical zoom, you’ll see it all clearly now on a 2.5-inch LCD viewscreen. Sure, you can’t use many manual settings with this camera, but one of those digital SLRs can be awfully hard to fit in your shirt pocket, too. Best of all, you can find one of these trinkets for $383.
1. Motorola KRZR Cellphone
We know you want the latest smartphone, but that special person in your life is probably looking to simplify her cellphone situation. The KRZR is the way to go, fitting easily in the pocket ’cause it’s a lot smaller than the mainstream-popular RAZR, and will only set you back around 200 bucks with a two-year contract.
Enhanced MOTOSLVR L7e Sports EDGE Class 10, Push Technology
Sensing that the RAZR craze is dying a slow, painful death, Motorola is starting to pepper the market with all sorts of other horrifically name cellphones such as the just about to be released MOTOSLVR L7e. Slightly different than its vanilla MOTOSLVR brethren, the L7e distinguishes itself with a metallic blue paint job and some speed bumped features. Here you’ll find an MP3/AAC player that’s compatible with Bluetooth headsets, a 1.3-megapixel camera (yawn) and EDGE Class 10, among others.
Even nicer is the Push technology they’ve thrown on here: Push-to-share sends your dumb friends your even dumber photos and Push-to-talk keeps one lucky person always within the reach of your sharp talons.
This slightly upgraded SLVR should be in stores sometime before the end of the year. For what wireless carrier, um, we don’t know, but considering it’s GSM, you can probably rule out Verizon Wireless. Hopefully the cellphone performs better than its silly name would lead you to believe.
new MOTOSLVR L7e handset [Slashphone.com]
Motorola E9 Slim Candybar Invades Rumorville
Apple is sure going to be pissed when they find out Motorola is invading their turf in Cellphone Rumorville, U.S.A. These mockups of the E9 candybar phone have surfaced. Along with the mockup comes some mighty impressive specs. This phone will have a 2.4-inch display, 3.2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 1.2 and even Wi-Fi connectivity. No word on anything about this phone from Motorola, but we’ll keep you posted as the rumblings come in.
Motorola E9 [newlaunches]