You’re in a new city, you no speaka da lingo, and you fancy a pint. You can either talk loudly in English in the hope the locals will understand, or you can use your phone to find where there’s cold beer and hot women.
The new Rough Guides java application has info on 330 cities in 22 European countries, with points of interest like restaurants, sights, bars, cafes, hotels and music and theatre.
You can also add comments like “I’ll be here at 7pm,” or “they spit in your food here,” and send a map to friends also using it.
You pay how much, English pigdog? It costs just £4.50, and downloading new cities is the price of a couple of texts. Worth it to avoid annoyed locals directing you to El Grothole.
Surfers: Is the sound of the waves beginning to pall? Strap the cleverly named SwiMP3 (do you see?) to your arm and go surfin’ in the USA. Or Truro, if money’s tight. If you have no money at all the 3m underwater survival rate on this player also means that bath time can be to the blissful sounds of Belle and Sebastian.
Now granted, the 256MB capacity is so low you almost feel embarrassed for it and with its ugly, outsized, unresponsive buttons, the SwiMP3 is far from sexy. The circular shape looks more like a child’s watch than an MP3 player.
The terrifyingly flanged headphones- we swear we felt them touching the brain- are by far the worst we’ve tested straight from the box. With so much echo, lord knows what they’d sound like in the ocean.
Battery life is also pretty poor. You’ll get 10 hour playback, but compared to other players on the market that can last for up to 30 hours such as the Samsung T10 this is pretty poultry.
But hey, how may other players cam survive up to 3m underwater? Exactly.
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming
Sorry Gizmondo, your dreams of a resurrected user generated gaming platform were just usurped by Nokia. Straight outta Espoo comes Nokia’s Yamake (a mashup for “you make the game”) for their N-Gage platform. With it, Nokia says players can “create their own games” from a range of “mini games” by adding user generated text, pictures, sound clips and movies. Games can then be shared via the N-Gage Arena and via MMS between N-Gage compatible S60 devices. The press release specifically mentions the creation of mini games “such as” pictures puzzles and quizzes — so no, we’re not looking at user generated, 3D first person shooters upon initial release. In fact, without any images or video to accompany the press release, Yamake sounds more like a user customization platform than game creation platform. Still, we’ll cut them some slack on this initial release. One thing seems pretty clear though, this ain’t your mama’s sidetalkin‘ N-Gage; Nokia is playing for keeps this time around.
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Filed under: Cellphones
So it looks like Pieter Knook, SVP of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business, is out, according to the WSJ. We’re not entirely sure why he’s retiring (when we met him last year he seemed sprightly enough), but he’ll be replaced by Andrew Lees, VP of Server & Tools Marketing and Solutions Group, a man that’s spent the last decade on MSDN and TechNet stuff. So, you know, the guy clearly knows the mobile space inside and out. The move comes just in time, too — what Windows Mobile really needs right now is somebody to come in and make it more business-centric.
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Filed under: Laptops, Storage
Sharp just introduced their latest, itty bitty blue laser. While maintaining the same 3.3-mm diameter of their previous package, Sharp’s new GH04P25A4G semiconductor laser manages to boost the power to 250mW. That little trick should make 6x recording speeds to dual-layer BD media in laptops a reality. They’ve also announced a similarly speced 5.6-mm (GH04P25A2G) jobbie for desktops. Both are shipping now in ¥50,000 sample quantities with mass production set to begin in April. That translates to about 462 US dollars — not that the US manufactures CE equipment anymore.
[Via Impress]
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