If anything, Minox does a decent job of aping its big name counterparts in looks and feature set — if only it wasn’t on average a couple years late to the party. The Minox DC-8011 seems to be a perfectly passable budget compact, with an 8 megapixel CCD, 2.7-inch LCD and electric image stabilization. It even measures in at under an inch thick and offers 4x optical zoom, but that’s about as exciting as things get here — which is to say, not very exctign. No word on price or availability, but we’re not really sure that’s much of a loss.
Popularity: 17% [?]
The latest member of LG’s storied Black Label line — other alumni being the Chocolate and the Shine — is starting to break cover, and for what the slider might lack in sheer visual distinction, it makes up in technical prowess. The as-yet-unnamed slider promises to be the thinnest 5 megapixel cameraphone in the world when it launches, featuring a reinforced glass touchscreen up (just a little Glimmer-esque, if you ask us) front and a shell constructed from carbon fiber. Other than that, LG’s being a little stingy with details at this point, saying that it’ll unveil the handset’s name later this month — hopefully along with pricing and a full spec sheet. The phone will hit Europe first with a number of other launches across the globe thereafter, finally hitting LG’s own South Korea in the second half.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Creative’s executive team will be coming in to quite a mess Monday morning, thanks to its VP of Screw Ups, Phil O’Shaughnessy. Friday morning, he posted a warning on the Creative customer forums that told programmer Daniel_K to stop writing his own drivers for their X-Fi sound cards. The cards still won’t work on Vista over a year after the OS was released, because Creative hasn’t released drivers for them—but by Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s account, Daniel_K is “stealing” from Creative by making the cards work. Then the weekend happened.
Over the weekend, Creative’s forums have exploded with posts from angry customers who have sworn to stop buying their products. There’s already a boycott site up at boycottcreative.com.
A Creative Forum poster named “youAREkidding” summed up Creative’s stupidity quite nicely:
imagine what would happen if 10%, just 10% of the people who will read about this, be in a store somewhere, see someone about to buy a Creative Labs product, and say to that potential customer. “If you have Vista, Creative has non-functioning drivers for it, there was a guy who created a Modified driver, but Creative made him stop distributing it, and there are still no workable drivers for Vista.” Some people might laugh at him, but the majority of computer perhiperal buyers don’t know squat, and if they hear it from someone who presents themselves in a knowledgeable manner, they may actually think twice about it. Creative loses another sale.
So, yes, Daniel may very well have stepped on some copyright rules, and Creative had the lawful option of doing what they did. Score 100 on the law, score minus several millions for not doing the job themselves in the first place, and putting someone like Daniel in a position
where he had to do what he did, just to get the customers of this company happy
Its really a very bad thing to be done by creative
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Popularity: 14% [?]
A new era has dawned. More than a year later than anticipated, Emirates says that the world’s first authorized cellphone call was made by a passenger during an Airbus A340 flight between Dubai and Casablanca. Once the aircraft reached cruising altitude, passengers were permitted to make and receive both calls and text messages. Emirates plans to fit additional aircraft with the interference-blocking AeroMobile system later this year while adding BlackBerry and “other data services.” To keep the annoyance factor to a minimum, the flight crew requests passengers to silence their ringers and will shut off the in-flight service when appropriate.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
Japan’s trade and economy ministry is now officially investigating the explosive nature of the iPod nano. The culprit is model MA099J/A — AKA, the old black and white plastic model already reported to spew “chest high flames,” cause bedroom fires, and explode across the floor. The Japan incident occurred in January when an iPod nano reportedly “shot out sparks while recharging.” At this point, all odds are with the nano’s lithium ion battery. Apple Japan has been ordered to investigate the issue and report back to the ministry with the cause.
Apparently, the Japanese ministry “strongly warned” Apple for failing to report the incident (as required by law) when it occurred. Apple’s filing with the ministry came on March 7th.
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Popularity: 12% [?]
We’ve seen phones that push the boundaries of chintziness, but this newfangled MP7 phone really shows what humans are capable of when they’ve no motivation to assemble a decent product. Granted, most everything here is lost in translation, but the blatant “Blue tooth” logo on the front pretty much sets it up for disaster. Nevertheless, this GSM handset reportedly comes in silver or black and features a 320 x 240 touchscreen display, a 1.3-megapixel camera, built-in FM tuner and support for some form of mobile TV along with the elusive “MP7″ format. Best of all, this marvelous gem of handset engineering can be had for $599.90 (or a dozen easy payments of $59.99)
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Samsung promised it was coming in March, and here she blows. The Spinpoint M6 is the first standard-height 500GB 2.5-incher available, at a lean 9.5mm, meaning you can cram it into most existing laptops unlike the 2.5-inch 500 giggers from Fujitsu and Hitachi. Samsung’s using some Perpendicular Magnetic Recording tech to cram everything in, stuffing three 167GB platters into the 5400rpm drive. The M6 goes for $299 and is shipping now. If DVD burning is more your pace, Samsung also just announced an “industry fastest” 22X DVD burner, the SH-S223. The SATA drive can stamp a 4.7GB disc in 12 minutes, and does dual-layer discs at a respectable 16X. No word on price yet for that one.
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Popularity: 11% [?]
Like they say, all’s well that ends well — and that’s certainly true in the case of a gamer named Nathaniel. If you’ll recall, the Xbox 360 owner had sent his very personalized console into Microsoft for repairs, making very clear that the signed and drawn-on system had great sentimental value to him… which the technicians in Redmond promptly ignored. After the console returned to him wiped clean of the aforementioned “value,” it seemed like all hope was lost. Luckily, the kind souls at Bungie have taken it upon themselves to try and right the wrongs perpetrated in this case, and have mailed Nathaniel a super-ultra-mega awesome package, featuring a Legendary Edition helmet signed by most of the Bungie studio staff, the soundtrack disc signed by Martin O’Donnel, a jacket, t-shirt, limited edition wireless controllers, and much, much, much more. Hit the read link to get the full story, and check out Nathaniel’s thanks to the gaming community and Bungie.
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Popularity: 7% [?]
DigiTimes is back with another Taiwan industry rumor. This time they have HTC launching MID handsets in 2008. No surprise there as HTC jumped into the UMPC game long ago with the Shift. Of course, the whole thing becomes suspect when their source claims that MIDs will be “squeezing the market share currently enjoyed by UMPCs.” Everyone and their monkey knows that UMPCs don’t account for enough market share to warrant joy.
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Popularity: 5% [?]
