June, 2009

Sony reportedly has planned to make a new product that combines the functions of the company’s portable game player, the PSP and Sony Ericsson’s mobile phones, in an effort to better compete with the iPhone and iPod Touch, which have become popular platforms for games among their owners.

It is not a secret that iPhone and iPod Touch owners like to play games and by average iPhone and Touch owners have 10 games on their devices, and so this is how portable gaming giants respond.

But Sony Ericsson, Sony’s phone-making joint venture company, has denied the report and said that is is merely speculative, so the company did not comment on rumors, speculation or future product announcements.

The report was made after the launching of the third-generation iPhone and the latest upgrade to its mobile operating system, which are appealing to game developers in particular. The newest software enables in-application purchases, that could easily be applied to unlocking new weaponry or additional gaming levels.

Additionally, many game developers have expressed excitement over the new graphics capabilities of the iPhone 3GS, which allows for better 3-D graphics.

It is agreed that traditional gamers are not likely to give up their big-name titles and D-Pads for a cellphone, but the wildfire successes of Apple’s App Store is having an effect on the gaming industry. In October, Sony plans to release a new version of its flagship portable gaming device called the PSP Go that won’t use cartridges at all; rather it will deliver software directly to the device - just like an iPhone.

In May, Nintendo of America said that the company did not have plans to add phone functionality to the Nintendo DS or any of its hand-held game devices.

Ngmoco, a publishing company that creates titles solely for the iPhone, thinks the iPhone one-ups the hand-held as a gaming platform. For the most part,  the company feels like the iPhone and the iPod Touch have all the necessary pieces to be a killer gaming platform - a unique blend of inherent device capability coupled with usability.

Seiko Epson Corporation, announced begins mass-producing “world’s smallest” LCD. As we have told you in June 16, about “Epson Begins to Produce WUXGA HTPS-TFT Panel, WXGA Panel” now Epson’s official started volume production of the smallest XGA high temperature polysilicon TFT for 3LCD data projectors, the data projector market in business, where presentations are becoming increasingly common, and in the education market, where information communication technology is becoming more widely applied.

The new 3LCD chips will enable projectors to deliver 2000 to 2600 lumens of brightness, using a liquid crystal material with high light-resistance and by further increasing the luminance of panels with an organic alignment layer, increasing the number of pixels (for a given size) helps, but so does increasing the pixel quality, as the pixels get smaller an L3P05X-91G00) is approximately 23 percent smaller than its predecessor, and the 0.55-inch panel boasts natural XGA (1024 x 768) resolution.

As many as 1,500 prisoners at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, the Philippines, swayed and stomped again on Saturday in a tribute to their idol, Michael Jackson, after being told about Jackson’s death on Thursday in Los Angeles.

They hired professional choreographer Gwendolyn Lador to teach them the dance, and practiced for nine hours Friday night and into the wee hours of Saturday morning for the show. They took breaks only to eat or when it rained.

A mass of 700 Cebuanos and foreign tourists watched the performance from a second-floor corridor, swaying to the music and applauding as the inmates, dressed in orange prison T-shirts and sweat pants, stomped and clapped in unison in the hilltop prison, behind thick stone walls topped by electrified razor wire.

Other numbers included “Ben,” “I’ll Be There” and “We Are the World.” The inmates then held up a 5-by-10 foot (1.5-by-3 meter) tarpaulin showing Michael Jackson holding a sword with his name written below it. Others waved the flags of the Philippines and other nations.

“Thriller” has attracted 24.3 million hits since it was posted two years ago, with nearly a million of them in the 24 hours since news of Jackson’s death spread.

In Taiwan, two top Michael Jackson impersonators donned fedora hats and sequined outfits Saturday, moonwalking to “Billie Jean” in their own tribute to the pop star.

Acer seems poised to acquire Dell as the world’s second-largest seller of personal laptop computers, which, if it comes true, will certainly enable Acer to follow only Hewlett-Packard (HP).

No Taiwanese firm has made an achievement so fast and more effectively than Acer. To reach the number 3 spot in the global laptop computers business, Acer went through a corporate reinvention that offers fodder for business-school case studies.

For nearly 15 years, Acer suffered from a split personality. One part of the company built computers for other PC sellers that would then put their labels on the machines. Another part of Acer sold very similar computers under the company’s own brand.

The arrangement created obvious conflicts, Acer executives say, with the group responsible for the Acer-branded products competing against the customers of the manufacturing arm.

In 2000, Acer began cleaving off its manufacturing division. A year later it formed an independent company called Wistron to handle these operations. A smaller, nimbler Acer emerged, outfitted with a new logo and lofty, global aspirations.

With a clean slate, Acer made what looked like counterintuitive decisions. It decided to focus on laptop computers for consumers, and to sell them through partners and retailers, avoiding any kind of direct sales.

This approach placed Acer on a distinctly opposite path from Dell, which was the PC industry’s major success story in 2000. Dell had surged past rivals like Compaq, I.B.M. and H.P. through an ultra-lean direct sales model that hinged to a large degree on shipping desktop computers to big businesses.

In the subsequent years, however, computer retailing shifted in favor of Acer. Consumers now buy more computers than businesses do, and these buyers tend to prefer laptop computers to computer desktops. The advantages that Dell once gained by mixing and matching components for customers at its factories have faded as consumers have flocked to stores to buy preconfigured computers.

Acer’s ascent has accelerated during the global economic slowdown. The company made an aggressive move into the market for netbooks - the small, low-cost laptop computers that have been a rare bright spot during the worst slump the PC industry has ever faced. Dell, which depends far more on PC sales to businesses, has struggled as companies have avoided buying new computers.

Last year, Acer’s market share grew by three percentage points, to 10.9%, while Dell gained just 0.1 percentage point, to 15%, according to the research company IDC. Acer has continued to narrow that gap this year, claiming 11.6% of the market to Dell’s 13.6% through the first quarter.

Acer can keep growing, especially in the United States and China - the two most prized regions for PC sellers. In addition, he’s steering Acer into cellphones, arguing that the growing similarities between smartphones and laptop computers play directly to Acer’s strengths.

In the meantime, Acer has snatched the mantle of quick-moving, lean operator from Dell. Be it wireless technology or super-thin laptop computers with a long battery life, Acer often ships computers with new features before any other large PC maker.

When it spots a hot trend started by another company - netbooks or small laptops, for instance, were the brainchild of Asustek, a fellow Taiwanese company - Acer follows in force, bombarding the market with low-cost in Aspire One Acer mini laptop products.

Today some media reported Acer is taking aim Dell and Hewlett-Packard laptop computers market and today, although the economy crisis still bump into the world but, Acer confidently introduces Aspire M5800 and M3800 desktops, H235H display.

The Aspire M5800 tower features an 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad with 8GB of RAM, 1.5GB GeForce GT230 graphics, a 740GB drive and HDMI, come for $800 tag price and the Aspire M3800 and X3810 working on 2.5GHz Pentium and integrated X4500 graphics, the price of $450 in a tower or $529 in a low-profile case. While in the new display acer gives the the 23-inch H235H, which offers 1080p resolution, 2ms response time, a 160-degree viewing angle, and 100,000:1 contrast ratio, come for $239 tag price well.

Only some tens of thousand applications available for Apple’s popular iPhone and the iPod Touch are likely to attract extensive usage, a report said recently.

According to the report, Mobile advertising platform AdMob tracked the popularity of more than 2,300 applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch used by the more than 15 million members in its network.

AdMob said 5% or 116 of the applications had more than 100,000 active users in May. It said 14% or 322 applications had between 10,000-100,000 active users as 54% or 1,244 applications had less than 1,000 active users.

The average iPhone user in AdMob’s network accessed four applications in May, AdMob said, whereas Apple’s online App Store offers more than 50,000 applications and has notched up more than one billion downloads since it opened a year ago.

Further AdMob said the vast majority of the applications in its network were free applications and the pattern of usage may be different for paid applications. Like in many other forms of media, the most popular applications generated the majority of usage by consumers, AdMob said.

It said the App Store ranking system feeds the success of these top applications, some of which were accessed by more than one million users in May.

Pinch Media said after conducting a study in February that fewer than 5% of iPhone users were still actively using an application a month after downloading it and that only one percent of total downloads have a long-term audience.

Games were used for longer periods than any other type of application, the study found, while tens of thousands of applications for the iPhone have been created by independent developers, but Apple has strict control over which ones are featured in the App Store.

Void LP Player concept record player uses a carrier and dock outfitted with a magnetic and auto-calibrating control, the Void LP system carries into thin air to playing music, design by Rhea Jeong used little ball contains a needle, amplifier, and speaker, it was inspired by “Vinyl Killer,” a little VW Bus.

The Void LP Player available in Japan for 9800 Yen, or about $100 but you may get it at your home with shipping cost $120.

Via: Engadget, The Rock and Roll Star.

I think you don’t trying it to your device, although it’s amaze, perhaps his lucky shot, capturing video poolside with his iPhone 3GS in the pool.

YouTube expects mobile uploads to increase after the launching of iPhone 3GS considering that iPhone owners really have awareness of multimedia.

It did not take one year since the original iPhone was introduced that it had become the most popular cameraphone on photo-sharing site Flickr, and that lead has only grown further two succeeding and more reasonably-priced repetations.

What is more, it seems that the consequence of the newly-launched iPhone 3GS on video may be no less thoughtful. In a post on the YouTube blog product manager Dwipal Desai and community manager Mia Quagliarello said that the number of videos uploaded to the sharing site from mobile phones has surged by 400% per day since the launching of iPhone 3GS’s last Friday.

Of course that’s a fairly significant hike, although it is only part of a larger increase of 1,700 percent over the last six months. The iPhone 3GS incorporates YouTube upload as part of its video-shooting and -editing features, and clearly the ease of use has paid off.

Mix that in with the over one million iPhone 3GS units already sold, and the device clearly has an opportunity to turn mobile video sharing from a niche into a part of our everyday life. Whether or not thatâ€s a good thing, well, weâ€ll leave that up to you to decide.

Apple was too cute in making disclosures about Steve Jobs and the company owed its investors more disclosure, but now things had changed as he was about to take a six-month leave.

Steve Jobs is really sick and even so sick that he has to take a leave. There is hope that he will return but perhaps he will not, and he may leave the office for six months but possibly longer or shorter. Besides, the kind of the sickness is unknown too.

Certainly the news is that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant a few months ago but it was not covered by the news media rather than being divulged by Apple,  and once again it is unknown about what it means. The question is, is it a separate problem from the pancreatic cancer he was operated for in 2004 or does it mean that the cancer has returned and spread?

The Times said today quoting pancreatic cancer expert Dr Richard Goldberg that the liver is the most common site for the spread of pancreatic cancer. Dr Goldberg added worryingly that the prognosis for someone with metastatic liver disease is not nearly as good as for somebody who has disease confined to the pancreas.

Steve Jobs retired from Apple or took a long leave which is actually his business and not his investors’. But he did not do that and instead he took a six-month leave which ended on Monday and he is reportedly back at work. So does it mean that is he fully back in the chair or is he a part timer? Moreover, is he involved only in big strategic decisions or is he back to his old micromanaging self?

When Steve Jobs officially returned to work on Monday, the board should publicize a simple and definite statement about what his health problems are, what his prognosis is and if all the problems will affect his ability to lead. If they do not, the Securities and Exchange Commission  (SEC), which supposedly is undertaking an inquiry into the way the company has handled preceding announcements on his Jobs’s health, should force them all to resign.