Beijing Olympics Show

If you watched yesterdays opening of the Beijing Olympics, you won’t be disappointed with the light shows and the artistic presentations. If I can personally applaud the overall creative director of the show, I’ll applaud him and all the people who in one way or another contributed to that wonderful presentation to the world, and the thousands of participants which to me is a logistics nightmare. What especially send chills down my spine was watching the Giant Sky Footprints timed and properly aligned towards the Birds Nest Stadium. Well you have to find a copy of the show to appreciate it your self.

If you are the kind of person like me, you would probably think right now how they made the Amazing scroll on the walls and the floor of the stadium, Or why are the fireworks properly timed. Everything is synced including the lights and sound. The only glitch I Read more

Philips Xenium: Simply Wow

It’s all I can say for this less than 150USD mobile phone. It’s looks is pretty ok, it’s specs are pretty so-so, but the battery life is the premium here.

The best feature I found was the auto turn-on and turn-off at a desired time you set, not that it needs this feature to save power, it is just an added plus. The power bar is the common 5 bar type, which I wish would have been better with an actual figure and percentage numbers. That 5 bars signify 12 days of standby. Now divide 12 by 5 and that is roughly how you figure out how much time you have left.

It has a VGA camera which takes average shots, although it doesn’t look pretty nice on the Xenium’s colored screen since the screen is an Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED). Transfer the pictures on a computer and it looks pretty fine for modest use.

One of the actual stories connected to the Philips Xenium 9@9 is when a bunch of backpakers in China, in the Jinggang mountains last October 2001 were lost for 80 hours. One of them had a Xenium phone (I guess the older models), twenty hours later they were rescued thanks to an SMS exchange of the lost group with the rescue team.

Specifications:

SCREEN VGA, CMOS sensor
DATA Triband, GPRS, Bluetooth, micro USB (data and charging), WAP
MEMORY 2MB user memory with microSD slot
BATTERY Li-Ion 1790 mAh with up to 1,440 standby time and 17 hours talk time
DISPLAY 128×160-pixel, 65K-color, 1.8-inch TFT screen
SIZE 42×18.7×104.3mm, 108g

GTA4: Causes Real Death

A Thai Student Robbed and Murdered an old taxi Driver just to try if it was easy to do the same thing in real life what he was always doing in Grand Theft Auto. Polwat Chino, 18 (2nd from Right on photo below), an addicted player of GTA stabbed the 54-year-old driver ten times. He said he didn’t mean to do it but the driver fought back. On Police interview, they observed that the suspect has no mental problems but pointed out he did it because of the game and confessed to the crime.

He will be facing death by lethal injection if found guilty of the crime. Currently, all Thai distributors of the game has pulled out GTA4 off the shelves.

More of the article at dailymail.co.uk

DS: Burn Baby Burn

Read a Notice somewhere regarding cheap device chargers sold on ebay. Most of them for mp3 players your portable media devices, consoles and handhelds, even your mobile phone. Usually these products come from China with fake CE safety marks and haven’t passed through actual quality control. If you live in the UK and you happen have a charger for your Nintendo DS with the item number DE62347066, stop using it immediately. You can also visit Nintendo’s website and look for their notice regarding these chargers. Other devices may also be affected and most mobile phones too.

They may cause you to lose your device warranty or burn your whole whose. They have plugs that don’t fit nicely to your outlet and quickly heats up and eventually burn out or worst explode. This item number is the known one, but other types may have got in too. If you bought one which is almost half the price of the original, then that would be a sign you have the cheapo product. This is where “You Get What You Pay For” quote applies.

iPhone 3G Battery Tips

Just read in Yahoo Tech News some tips in making the iPhone less of a battery power hog. I decided to try it out on a test unit I luckily had with me today. My Conditions is that I turn back everything to default before trying the next tip and never actually using it after full charge.

Turn off push e-mail

(Tip Rank: 10 out of 10)
Push e-mail is one of the new features of the latest iPhone firmware and one of the worst battery consuming application as well. Turning it off really does save you power on the iPhone, not to mention it’s becoming one of the best Tips on iPhone 3G Care. Switch from push to “fetch” e-mail on your settings and choose 30minutes fetching. Try it your self and thank Yahoo for your new lease on battery life…

Dim the screen (Tip Rank: 6 out of 10)
Yeah, without testing I can surely attest to this, because all device which has a self-powered screen ot any screen with illumination or back light consumes power, so it will save you power if you dim them, you can even do this on your notebook computers and it will save you some juice too. Look under Settings then Brightness and set it to approximately half and Read more

Phone: The New Musical Instrument

What does a Musical Genius do with a bunch of Phones? No, not make a bunch of phone calls, but play them like musical instruments. See the video below and tell me if this ain’t pretty sick (in a good way).

Toyota Winglet don’t have wings

Just dropped by engadget today and was struck by the Segway like personal transport vehicle, let me call it PTV for short. Anyways, it is called by toyota a winglet, a bunch of discussions has ensued at engadget with the article “Toyota’s Winglet aims to usurp Segway, why we don’t know”

My personal opinion wouldn’t matter, but let me say it anyway. It looks hard to operate, and it looks like it’s supposed to fly or make it’s rider fly when you tumble… There are several version though, and I think I prefer the third one. (rightmost on the picture below).

The First reason is that it has a driving stick which is safer and easier to stand to, and the first one although looking pretty cool, seems too hard to ride on. Here’s a video I grabbed from engadget to see how it rides like:

Now, what do you think? Should you get one for your grandma? Which toyota said is it’s main target market for the Winglet.

A Reason to get a Nokia

Theres up to a 10% Price Cut on Nokia phones, now that’s a good reason to get the nokia mobile you have been salivating about. This is a move by nokia to put pressure on their competition.

This may also be caused by nokia feeling the pressure from increasing Samsung and LG market share. Mostly music and media phones were slashed-price but other units are discounted as well.

Now only if you could get your Nokia phone on a BestBuy vending machine… Oh wait, you can now do that on your way to the airport… See BestBuy Vending machine article in Gizmodo…