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Did Orange France VP Unintentionally Confirm the Apple Tablet?

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While the folks at Apple is pretty much determined to keep their silence  about what is going to be announced  during the big Apple event on January 27, there are some who just couldn’t keep what they know to themselves. Or perhaps, it’s just us tech bloggers who don’t want to keep silent that sometimes we jump into conclusions hurriedly?

I’m talking about the rounds of talks that are going around the Internet right now saying that Orang France VP Stephane Richard who may been misquoted to have confirmed the Apple Tablet during his interview with French radio station Europe1. According to the interview when Europe1 asked Mr. Richard about Orange France’s partner Apple planning to launch a tablet with a webcam, Mr. Richard replied – “yes.” He also replied yes when the Europe1 announcer said that the said Apple Tablet will benefit Orange users.

The interview was in French and was loosely translated by some as follows:
Jean Pierre Elkabbach: “According to the weekly Le Point, a few days your partner Apple will launch a Tablet with a webcam”

Stéphane Richard: “Yes”

Jean Pierre Elkabbach: “Is that Orange users will also benefit”

Stéphane Richard: “Yes”

That simple answer alone was enough for bloggers and journalist to create a big fuzz and so news that the Orange France VP confirming the Apple Tablet caught fire online. [Read more…]

Originally posted on January 11, 2010 @ 5:00 pm

RIM Intros the BlackBerry Presenter, Say Goodbye to Laptops

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Screen shot 2010-01-07 at 3.34.39 AM

RIM has just launched it latest smartphone accessory,  the BlackBerry Presenter – a small and light device that you can easily plug into a projector or monitor to display a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation. You then control the presentation using your BlackBerry phone. Sounds cool? It certainly is, handy and useful as well.

Utilizing Bluetooth connectivity, the BlackBerry Presenter connects with your BlackBerry smartphone. As such, it allows you to move freely when doing your presentation, that is within the 30 feet range. This allows you to easily control your presentation – navigate through the slides, view speaker notes, loop presentation slided and reference information on one slide while displaying another.

The BlackBerry Presenter has the following specs – supports NTSC and PAL video formats, S-Video and VGA video cable, micro USB connection, and support for various display resolution – VGA, SVGA and XGA. It doesn’t need any additional file processing as you can do your presentations directly without tweaking your presentation on your PC.

No details on availability yet, but if you’re keen on getting the BlackBerry Presenter, it will set you back for $199.  It works with most BlackBerry models except BlackBerry Curve series and BlackBerry Pearl Flip series.

Originally posted on January 6, 2010 @ 4:00 pm

Palm Unveils Pixi Plus, Pre Plus, and 3D Games for Palm Pre

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PalmPre 3D Games

It seems that Palm including its WebOS has just been reborn. Thanks to the CES 2010, Palm is bringing out some new good things up on its sleeves.  First is the launch of two new Palm smartphones – the Palm Pixi Plus and Palm Pre Plus. And second, some new  3D games are now available for Palm Pre.

Palm Pixi Plus features a nice streamlined design with simple navigation, 16GB of storage and a Touchstone Back Cover available in four colors – pink, green, blue and orange. While the Palm Pre Plus also have similar features with the addition of Wi-Fi connectivity. Both Palm smartphones will be available on January 25 on Verizon Wireless.

In addition, Palm also launched a new webOS app called Palm mobile hotspot. This app lets you turn your Palm Pixi Plus or Palm Pre Plus into a mobile Wi-Fi router. Up to five Wi-Fi enabled can access the internet through the Palm smartphone serving as a router.

As for the 3D games, Palm also announced several new 3D games which are available right now for download to the Palm Pre phone series. These 3D games include Need for Speed Undercover, The Sims 3, MONOPOLY, Asphalt 5: Elite Racing, Let’s Golf, Glyder 2 and X-Plane.

With the smartphone market heating up with the release of the Nexus One, and the iPhone still up and about, it’s a good thing that Palm is awakening from a deep slumber.  These developments will certainly help them catch up with the iPhone and possibly prevent the Nexus One from getting to much of the smartphone market share.

Originally posted on January 8, 2010 @ 8:00 am

Kindle is the Most Gifted Item on Amazon Ever

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Screen shot 2009-12-27 at 5.24.46 AM

Amazon should be thankful for the Holiday season as it can rest easy on the stress brought about by Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Sony PRS e-Readers.  It looks like there are more Kindle owners right now than before as it is now the most gifted item on Amazon. And if this is not enough, on Christmas Day, Amazon achieved quite a record-breaking sale on Kindle books than the printed ones.

And no one could be more pleased than Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos as he claims:

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history. On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading.”

I could just imagine Dan Brown grinning from ear to ear right now, since his new book “The Lost Symbol” is among the top-selling Kindle books on Amazon. And so did Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help.”

Going back to Amazon’s Holiday shopping report. It was noted the Amazon’s sales peak was on Dec. 14, when consumers flock to the site and ordered 7 million units of various Amazon products. Amazon shipped to over 178 countries on this day.

Aside from the Kindle, the 8GB iPod Touch, Garmin nuvi 260W 4.3-inch GPS unit are also among the hottest-selling Amazon Electronics products.

So, did you get any of these items as a Christmas gift?

Read the full Amazon PR here.

Originally posted on December 26, 2009 @ 5:38 pm

Google’s Two-Pronged Mobile Strategy and the Future of Chrome OS

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Nexus One

When the unlocked, Google-branded Nexus One handset hits the market next year, Google unleashes a two-pronged attack on the Apple iPhone. On one hand, normal people will continue to buy subsidized but locked Android handsets provided by the cellular service carriers. That’s the space the iPhone plays in right now.

On the other hand, hardware geeks will buy expensive but unlocked Google phones provided by the Mountain View powerhouse itself. Thanks to Steve Jobs’ five-year dark bargain with AT&T, that’s a space in which the iPhone simply will not compete.

Thus, Google’s mobile platform allows third parties to maintain walled gardens (carrier-branded handsets with contracts) while maintaining a completely open playground (unlocked handsets). They take on two imporant market segments simultaneously: the common consumers who flock to the walled gardens, and the early adopters in the playground who influence the common consumers. Time will tell if such outflanking will make a dent in the iPhone’s market share.

In the meantime, you have to wonder what the Nexus One bodes for the direction of Google’s upcoming browser-based operating system, the Google Chrome OS, slated for release almost a year after the Nexus One. The potential parallels are certainly intriguing.

Chrome OS will come bundled as an OEM release with very specifically-designed SSD netbooks from various computer manufacturers. Those machines would directly parallel the carrier-locked Android handsets provided by various cellphone manufacturers. If the parallelism holds, could Google release its own hardware for the Chrome OS, the same way it’s now releasing its own hardware for the Android mobile OS? As demonstrated by the Psystar case, Apple is willing to do the latter (provide its own hardware), but not the former (allow branding from third-party manufacturers). The Mountain View geniuses would outflank the Cupertino tyrants once more. Could Google’s two-pronged mobile OS strategy serve as a miniature version (no pun intended) of its future two-pronged desktop OS strategy?

Either way, the current geek hullabaloo over the Nexus One undeniably proves one thing: the existence of a strong demand for Google-branded consumer hardware among the influential blogging-and-twittering digerati. Google can leverage that demand in future consumer hardware projects. We can still expect the bulk of Google Android’s market penetration to come from the carrier-locked handsets, but the geeks will continue to generate buzz about the Google-branded handsets. That’s why T-Mobile and Verizon, who both carry Android handsets, aren’t freaking out right now: the buzz around the expensive Nexus One will help drum up sales for the subsidized G1 and Droid.

Though the actual manufacturing of the Nexus One has been contracted to HTC, there is absolutely no HTC branding on the Nexus One. It’s a Google-branded phone, through and through. High-end hardware manufacturing as word-of-mouth marketing is not a new concept. Though not traditionally a hardware provider, perhaps Google will become the next industry titan to apply that concept — for both Android and Chrome OS.

(The photo above is courtesy of Engadget.)

Originally posted on December 14, 2009 @ 4:50 am