According to Matt McAlister, IT magazine Infoworld is using del.icio.us to tag their articles and to provide links to related stuff by polling the del.icio.us RSS feeds for the chosen tags. As of now, they are only using tags of their own though, so the social component of the del.icio.us system is not really used.
Samsung’s new SCH-n330 is a very stylish mobile, aimed at younger, trendy consumers. It’s the first US mobile with Immersion’s VibeTonz touch sensations, making it beat to the rhythm of ringtones. This feature works on the 15 pre installed ringtones as well as special downloadable ringtones. The device will go for $69.99 with a two-year customer agreement at Verizon.
The N91, Nokia’s newest Symbian smartphone, features a 4 Gigabyte harddisk, capable of storing up to 3000 songs. Obviously the device is meant to be a top multimedia device, with a standard 3.5mm stereo headset jack for the included stereo headset with remote control and optional accessories from sound experts Bose, Harman Kardon, JBL, and Sennheiser. Throw in WCDMA, WLAN and Bluetooth connectivity and a two megapixel camera, and you have a great entertainment system, diguised as a stylish cellphone.
According to Engadget, the European launch for the Playstation Portable has been postponed to September 1. I don’t get what Sony is up to with a decision like this, as the Nintendo DS is readily available over here, and it might take a lot of the market share that the PSP would aim for. Well, maybe they hope nobody is interested in that ugly Nintendo device anymore by fall.
The social networking service Multiply just announced the launch of their social search application, allowing the user to search for content that has been published by people connected to the user.
This is an interesting approach to search. Traditional search engines have to deal with a great ammount of spam. Pagerank once was actually introduced to score a site based on the number of other pages linking to it. While this worked quite well for some time, it is by now subject to a lot of manipulation. The Multiply approach tries to take into account who is responsible for some web ressource, and how much reason there is for the person searching to trust the publisher, i.e. if that pubisher is part of the searchers social network. I wonder if Google is ever going to move Orkut in some similar direction.
By the way, I do have a Multiply Page for some time now, but never made much use of this. Maybe I should investigate this further.
Press Release
Most games with keyboard control provide the possibility to map controls to your keys of choice. But everyone knows the problem: With some games, no keyboard layout seems to fit right, and after some gaming, your fingers wind up in a twist.
The Ergodex DX1 Input System is a special keypad for gamers and might just be the solution to that problem. Whereas the game may let you choose which keys to use, the DX1 lets you choose just where those keys will be: It features 25 keys which can be placed anywhere and in any orientation on a special pad.
The fourth German Casemod Championships have just been finished. First place winners were Benjamin Franz (CaseModification) and Maico Bensien (CaseConstruction). The audience award went to Dirk Wand with an awesome wood and glass pyramid construction. Wood based cases have been very popular in this years competition.
Tired of typing SMS on that crappy numeric keypad? While some mobiles offer querty keypads now, this doesn’t seem to be the perfect solution either. With the P207, Samsung takes a different approach: Integrating text to speech in the phone. The device also features a 176 x 220pixel 262K color display, EDGE and a VGA quality camera.
According to Brighthand, palmOne’s next to be released high end PDA commonly referred to as LifeDrive is expected to hit the shelves as Tungsten X. It is also reported that the device will be equipped with 64 MB RAM instead of previously assumed 32 MB and with NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes instead of Real Networks’ RealPlayer. Tungsten X should hit the market in mid-May with a price tag of about $500.
Apostasy is a comic book made from Half Life 2 screenshots by a Blogger user calling himself BrashFink.
While computer games have been used to create movies before (called machinima), this is a nice proof of concept of their use as cartoonists tools.