The official death toll was recorded as 1,746 people, but that was only an estimate, because the survivors had already begun to bury victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had fled corpse-filled villages and were hiding in the forest. This bizarre story discusses what happened and how it is being prevented from happening again.
Filed under: Cellphones, Features
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:
Last week’s fake iPhone delay memo may have served as a rare marketplace laboratory. When Apple announced that Leopard was slipping four months, the investors mostly shrugged, but news that the iPhone was being delayed sent Cupertino’s Apple tumbling faster than the one that fell on Newton’s head. (However, of course there are no perfect lab conditions in the market, and the reaction may have been compounded by this being a second delay for Apple’s OS.)
Yes, Apple is a latecomer to the handset market, but the iPhone is early to market in some ways. Had Apple not announced it back in January, it might not have stood out as much from an increasing wave of touchscreen handsets from LG, Samsung and others. But the most ostensible reason for Apple to launch the iPhone is to strike back against a rash of music phones that enjoy the luxury of prime pocket real estate and carrier subsidization. Although the distribution of such phones is growing every quarter, they haven’t yet seemed to slow the sales of iPods.
Over-the-air wireless services offer promising capabilities such as song identification and the untethered building of playlists on the fly. Handset manufacturers, though, are still several years behind in terms of Apple’s technology — or at least marketing — if last week’s official unveiling of Motorola’s handsets was any indication. Motorola touted the superiority of its ROKR Z8 “media monster” over other music phones due to its use of USB 2.0; Moto also spoke of the benefits of being able to swap out multiple microSD cards without having to remove the Z8′s battery in order to provide users with nearly infinite storage.
Continue reading Switched On: RAZR d’être
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Transportation, Wireless
[Via Physorg/AP]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Portable Audio, Wireless
We’re sure this has precisely nothing to do with the Opie and Anthony situation, but we’re hearing that XM has temporarily stopped broadcasting — Orbitcast claims they haven’t had a signal since noon EST, with reports to them and us about service outages nationwide. Anyone else having problems with their XM feed? Sound off in comments!
Update: Orbitcast got the following statement from XM: “We are experiencing a temporary degraded performance issue, which has affected some of our customers. We expect to return to normal service levels this evening.”
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Household, Robots
While most other manufacturers claim to make our lives easier by offering a slightly-improved this or an all-in-one that, iRobot is actually down there in the trenches (both literally and figuratively, with those killbots and all) observing the average Joe, and serving up products that help eliminate some of our most mundane tasks without resorting to hired help. So it’s with no small amount of anticipation that we’ll be waiting for the company’s just-revealed, Holiday-time products, though the details released by co-founder and chairwoman Helen Grenier at the JPMorgan Technology Conference couldn’t have been more sparse: besides the fact that both models are most emphatically not floor-cleaning bots, all she would say is that they are “different types of robots with mechanical features,” according to Crave. Helpful. With such a vague idea of what to expect, the hunt is now on for these mysterious new automated domestic servants; we’ve got flooring, carpets, pools, and garages covered, so all that’s really left is a windowbot, a laundrybot, and most ambitious of all, Doomba, the no-nonsense, child-rearing nannybot.
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
