The phone-terrain now gets one more drop in its pail. Now it appears that Sony Ericsson failed to hide from view its brand-new phone from a spark of camera for so long. According to FoneArena, in the past days there was a Sony Ericsson phone that was leaked for everybody to feast eyes on.
Tagged as ‘Kanna’, the eye-catching device runs on Symbian S60 5th Edition OS and comes equipped with a 3.2-inch touchscreen display, a highly impressive 8.1-megapixel camera and Wi-Fi connectivity, reveals FoneArena.
Seemingly, other leaked details of the new Sony Ericsson Kanna include 360 x 640 pixels resolution, QWERTY keyboard, microUSB port, and that weighty 8.1-megapixel camera with autofocus.
It seems that, the satiny phone is a sister of Kurara. The compelling camera further lends support to 720p HD video recording and also features a 3.4mm audio jack.
The newest offering from Sony Ericsson is likely to be announced at the Mobile World Congress, on February 14, 2010.
Are you bored by the status updates of your friends? Do you want to get rid of your online teenage years and delete your MySpace account? Are you tired of living your life so that you have something to tweet about? Then get reality back, and commit social media suicide with Web2.0 Suicide Machine.
In a spectacular way The Dutch website created by your unfriendly neighbourhood medialab moddr_ is designed to end users' social lives on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.
No, users don't deactivate their account. The website makes a feast out of the assessment as it shows you how it unfriends person after person on Facebook, or removes bit by bit the people you follow on Twitter.
The purpose of the social media was to make it richer, but we all know that they were never meant to replace social life. However, now that the early elation about social media is over, people are starting to use them more effectively or are stopping using them at all.
You only need to select the social network on the website, enter the user name and your password to commit social media suicide. Next to your profile picture on a memorial page that Suicide Machine maintains, you can send out your last words there.
The project seems to be quite successful. According to Suicide Machine's figures, 56,243 friends have been unfriended, 202,386 tweets have been removed and 856 people quit their online lives, since its launch in December.
But Facebook didn't see the funny side of the site. Facebook has started to prevent its use by blocking Suicide Machine's IP address yesterday, thus making it impossible to use the website to unfriend people.
"Web 2.0 Suicide Machine collects login credentials and scrapes Facebook pages, which violates of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities”- in a statement the social media platform said. “We've blocked the site's access to Facebook as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR."
The computer students and hackers from Rotterdam, troop behind Suicide Machine, try to find a way to work around the problem. Seppukoo, a service that enabled users to automate the process of deleting their profile, was closed by Facebook last week.
So while Suicide Machine works well with Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, the only option for Facebook is at the moment to die hard.
When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, remember to do one thing: Look up. A full moon will be shining down from its highest point, illuminating the landscape.
``It will be so clear it will take your breath away,'' said Jack Horkheimer, host of the PBS show Star Gazer. ``It will be super bright and super high for us.''
It will be the second full moon of the month -- a phonomenon known as a ``blue moon.'' A full moon on New Year's Eve last occurred on Dec. 31, 1990; it won't happen again until 2028.
Horkheimer, 71, held a ``Howl at the Full Moon'' party 19 years ago for families with kids in his Miami neighborhood.
``They came in their bath robes and pajamas,'' he said.
``It was the most fun New Year's Eve I ever had in my life. Those children are now adults, and they still remember it.''
Horkheimer encourages families to ring in 2010 in similar fashion.
It appears that the modern woman is now more in love and more reliant on their mobile phone than they are their boyfriend. But the man in their life does rank higher than their laptop and iPod. So that’s something.
According to The Daily Mail, online pawnbroker Borro recently surveyed 4,000 women about what they’d be willing to pawn to raise much-needed cash.
Four in 10 of the respondents said they’d be “devastated” if they lost their phone, more than the number who’d be gutted to lose either their boyfriend or best friend. Can this possibly be true? Do women really hold their mobile phone more dear to their heart than their current squeeze? Women only place Mother and Photographs above their cellphone.
Borro CEO Paul Aitken commented:
The list certainly threw up some surprises with boyfriends featuring below photos and mobile phones. It’s understandable why mums come out top though – they are there to lend an ear, offer support and a best friend to many girls. Photos hold fun and significant memories which could be devastating to lose and a mobile phone keeps women connected and it’s always by their side.
I’m now going to have to do what every male in a relationship is going to – ask my girlfriend whether she loves her phone more than she loves me. Or maybe I shouldn’t, as the answer may not be very appetizing to hear.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the hugely popular video game which had sold 1.4 million copies within 24 hours of being released in Britain, has topped Amazon UK’s list of top selling items in 2009.
Amazon.co.uk has revealed that Modern Warfare 2, is one of the two video games, second being Fifa 10, that have gotten 2 slots in the list of top 5 best-selling items on Amazon this year.
Brian Mcbride, the managing director at Amazon.co.uk, said that "Clearly with the success of Nintendo's Wii console, many families have a games console somewhere in the house. It's no longer just for teenagers. Lots of the family sit around and play games."
Modern Warfare 2 which incidentally has received a 94 percent aggregate by Metacritic, edged out the DVD of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince to get the top spot on the list which placed the DVD of Michael McIntyre Live 2009 on the third position with SanDisk 8GB SDHC Secure Digital Card and Fifa 10 getting the 4th and 5th position respectively.
The Sony Ericsson W395 is a budget music phone that channels the music playing skills of the outfit’s Japanese parent, and stuffs them into a cheery handset with a low pricetag. But is it low enough? Read on and find out in our full Sony Ericsson W395 review.
If you’re in the market for a simple Sony Ericsson phone which will double up for your music on the commute, you’ll be right at home with the Sony Ericsson W395. Build wise, it’s a fun little phone to pop in your pocket. The slide is smooth and snappy, the keypad is quick for firing off SMS missiles, and the two megapixel camera is borderline passable for slapping on a PC screen. There’s no 3G though.
We love how the Sony Ericsson W395 echoes the look of Sony’s Walkman line more than any other phone from the mobile spin off, from the curved edges to the central track controls and dedicated Walkman button. The speaker is surprisingly good too, and the battery will go for more than a few days before needing a top up.
Beyond this though, there’s little new on the software front. There’s no Google Maps and there’s not even Facebook – all you can do is send pictures to Blogger.
You can probably guess what our main problem with the music oriented Sony Ericsson W395 is though. In fact, the only people who can’t are the design team at Sony Ericsson, who, even after eight long years have still not learned to put a 3.5mm audio port in, so you can use your own headphones.
The bundled buds don’t sound too bad, but are horribly plasticky, and come with a call answering toggle so high up the cord, it may well tug one of your buds out of your head. Oh, and needless to say, the memory card slot is Sony’s Memory Stick Micro format, so you can’t just swap out the microSD card on your current phone.
We’re tired of moaning about Sony Ericsson’s persistent design flaws now. There’s little wrong with what the Sony Ericsson W395 tries to do, but that limited feature set doesn’t quite cut it any more. If you’re already on a low end Sony Ericsson phone, there’s little impetus to upgrade here.
Today's Apple tablet rumor has an optimistic zing to it--and maybe that's a great way to close out a dreary 2009. According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. Lee worked for Apple more than ten years ago and left Google earlier this year, according to published reports.
That figure--10 million--seems awfully high for a consumer product that's charting unknown territory. The tablet (or iSlate or iPad, if you prefer) would target an untapped market, if rumors of the device's form and functionality are true. True, a few tablet-style browser/media players are either already on the market or are arriving shortly, but none has garnered anywhere near the attention of the Apple tablet.
I did some checking at Apple's site to see what sales figures were like for the iPhone in its first year. Here's the breakdown:
Q3 2007: 270,000 units
Q4 2007: 1,119,000
Q1 2008: 2,315,000
Q2 2008: 1,703,000
Add up the quarterly numbers, and Apple sold just over 5.4 million iPhones in the handset's first year. (I also tried to get first-year numbers for the iPod, which launched in November 2001, but Apple's financial reports didn't break down iPod sales back then.)
If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year.
Call me a pessimist, but that's hard to believe. Remember, the iPhone was entering a well-established cell phone market when it debuted in 2007. People had used cell phones for years. They liked cell phones and understood their value. Apple's pitch back then: The iPhone is better than any other cell phone on the market. Millions of customers agreed, and the rest is history.
The tablet? Well, that's a much harder sell. The iSlate is sort of a big iPod, but not really. It performs a lot of notebook-like functions, but it's not really a notebook either.
My point is that Apple will need to educate its target market. And that's why I seriously doubt the company expects to move 10 million tablets within a year.
Then again, Apple has proven the pundits wrong before. What do you think?
Whether the marketplace is ready or not, the Big Guns in consumer electronics are about to make their move at the dawn of the New Year.
Next Tuesday, Google is expected to announce its long-rumored Nexus One smartphone. It is undoubtedly designed to run the Google Android operating system for cellphones, which the search giant introduced more than a year ago. Android was envisioned as a major breakthrough in cellphones because it offered an "open" operating system – i.e., one that other companies could use and design applications for. At the time, this strategy was compared to that of Microsoft Windows, which broke the market hegemony of Apple's decidedly non-open OS in the mid-1980s and within a decade, turned Apple into a niche company. This time around, the new Android phones were supposed to break the hegemony of the Apple iPhone.
So far, it hasn't quite worked out that way with Android. A number of cell phone companies – notably Motorola, HTC, and Samsung – have adopted Android and seen impressive sales. However, this time around Apple, though still exhibiting much of its old "closed" and proprietary ways, has learned some important lessons over the last 20 years.
For one thing, Apple understands, better perhaps than any company on the planet, the importance of being not only perpetually innovative – but with a vast and loyal army of Apple fanatics behind it – to regularly take category-busting risks. Thus, the amazing run, beginning a decade ago, of the iMac, MacBook, iPod and iPhone. These landmark (and in the case of the iPod, historic) products not only were ambitious in their goals and beautifully designed, but they also exhibited multiple features that were so innovative that they forced the competition to spend years catching up – and by then, Apple had already moved on to the next breakthrough.
Military theorists like to say that the goal of combat is to get inside your opponent's "decision horizon" – that is, to move so quickly that the enemy can't respond in time before you have moved on to the next victory. That's exactly what Apple, at its best, has done to the consumer electronics world … and in the process has left competitors reeling, loyal customers thrilled, and not least, Apple regaining its lost market share and making its shareholders wealthy.
