One of my old favourite gaming webcomics, PvP Online, has been doing a few strips about mobile check-in apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. Brent, the resident Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) fanboy and general snob, claims mayorship of the nearby coffee shop, only to be ousted by teenage coworker and BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)-user, Francis. I’ve been following these kinds of apps pretty closely lately, and the mentality that is required to drive them to such success is pretty aptly captured in these comics. Anyway, start reading here, and brace yourself for hilarity.
That continent to our far-east, or near-west, sure does a good job of creating novel gadgets that no one else in their right minds could possibly imagine. Take China’s latest creation, the cigarette lighter cellphone, for example. Someone may have come up with the idea of putting a cigarette lighter into a cellphone while smoking a fat dubie at some point, but that idea probably died in a room filled with sweet ganja smoke. Leave it to some random Chinese phone maker to key in on the obviously empty cellphone-as-lighter segment and create something we now know as “The Machismo!”
No joke, that’s the name of the phone. It’s a tri-band GSM phone with (gasp!) dual SIM support. It features a 2.5-inch touchscreen, a camera that tops out at 1.3-megapixels, and includes a built-in cigarette lighter. Best of all, the cellphone lighter will only set you back $68.51. We’d pick one up just for the novelty factor. That is, of course, if we could bear to stand the pointed fingers and shameful laughter this phone would draw.
Chalk this one up as unusual if you must, but I have to categorize it as ‘geeky cool’ without a doubt. Artist Andrew Bell has teamed up with the good folks of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Dyzplastic to produce some pretty darn cool looking Android figurines. The first edition features 12 figurines, and are lovingly ‘blind boxed’ in sets of 16… so you’re never sure which figurines you’re going to get! Cool!
No pricing details have been made available yet, but you can bet I’m going to keep my eyes open for these ones. The figurines are said to be available at some point later this month. In the meantime, feel free to ogle the additional pictures below.
Shameless Note to Google: Me thinks I need a box set of these for my office.
Star Trek fans will instantly recognize the stern-but-fair steely gaze of Patrick Stewart, better known as Captain Picard. As a part of a new PBS program called digital_nation, Stewart explains that he can’t distill parts of his life down to 140 characters, but still embraces the mobile lifestyle with the iPhone and mobile e-mail. As a gamer, I’m glad to hear he’s holding off on playing video games for fear of becoming horribly addicted. Right on. There’s a lot of other recognizable personality in the program, and they’re all available online, so check ‘em out.
I, and everyone around my age who loves to dress casually, has and wears hooded sweatshirts, commonly refereed to as hoodies, on a fairly regular basis. The UK media portrays people who wear such garments as young vagabonds, hoodlums who are going to destroy decent society, but look at the video below and tell me what you see. It’s Steve Jobs, and he sure as hell isn’t wearing a black turtle neck, it’s a hoodie.
For all the shit people give me, and the youth, about how informal and how vulgar such a simple garment is, I think this is a testament to the fact that there is nothing wrong with our “style”, that perceptions have changed, and it is not us who have to adapt, but you.
So wear your hoodie with pride, because if the CEO of a 50 billion dollar a year company can wear one and feel no shame, then you should too.
iTunes Italy’s number two app is causing a lot of controversy after its release last week. Disclaimed to be a strictly historical (and in no form a political or ideological tool), iMussolini has racked up over 1,000 downloads per day. The iPhone app gathers up audio, video, and text of the infamous fascist dictator, for easy mobile access. I had never really considered the history app market as a big thing, but when you take big figures like this that everyone has heard of but maybe not necessarily had the time to read up on, and make their story mobile-friendly, there’s a lot of potential for legitimately teaching the world at large. If you’re wondering if Mussolini would actually be good reading, here’s a snippet of his declaration of war on France and England from 1940:
This gigantic struggle is nothing other than a phase in the logical development of our revolution; it is the struggle of peoples that are poor but rich in workers against the exploiters who hold on ferociously to the monopoly of all the riches and all the gold of the earth; it is the struggle of the fertile and young people against the sterile people moving to the sunset; it is the struggle between two centuries and two ideas. Now that the die are cast and our will has burned our ships at our backs, I solemnly declare that Italy does not intend to drag into the conflict other peoples bordering her on land or on sea. Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Egypt take note of these my words and it depends on them and only on them whether or not they will be rigorously confirmed.
Hooah. Beyond deleting a few offending reviews praising Mussolini, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) doesn’t seem to have any plans to censor the app from iTunes. In order to counterbalance some of the social backlash, 25-year-old developer Louis Marino is hoping to release something similar for Gandhi next.
You know when Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s mobile operating system is capable of controlling the movements of a $3000 Japanese robot, it’s only a matter of time before even bigger robots fall under Android’s devious sway – throw in a dash of self-awareness, and you’ve got a dystopian future where an amalgamate mothermind of Android phones independently controls legions of disposable (yet deceptively adorable) robots and Christian Bale cusses off coworkers in between the dropping bombshells.
For now, though, this 9” PLEN robot can do stuff through a standard directional or an accelerometer-controlled joystick interface on an Android phone, like hug (crush), kick (violently), walk (with grim determination), turn (on its oppressive human overlords), and even do a little dance (in celeberation, over the smouldering corpse of mankind). PLEN can get mobile thanks to a skateboard or a wheeled-foot attachment, but we didn’t see any controls for those in the Android app, and good thing; the last thing I want are robots using the shattered cities of our civilization to pull wicked air in a 1080 goofy-foot ollie.
Now this is a fashionable accessory that no self-respecting BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) user can be without. If you’ve got a spare $50 kicking around and want to have a couple of BlackBerry 8800’s hangin’ out around your wrists, look no farther than the ‘PDA Smartphone Cufflinks’ from Cufflinks.com. These beauties are 3/4″ by 1/2″ and are nickel plated and enamel. A bullet back closure keeps the cufflinks secure and good-to-go. If you want to pick up a set, head on over to Cufflinks.com.
Happy Friday, everyone.
Note: There’s also a set of ‘Smartphone Cufflinks’ available, which are obviously inspired by the iPhone. Check ‘em out.
Most unboxings around these parts involve the stuttered fumbling of tech bloggers making banal comments on wires, headphones, and chargers. With any luck, they’ll make a lame attempt at humour while the device is booting up, but even those tend to fail miserably. But you know who does a real unboxing? Do you know who can truly unleash the beast contained within? Who can shed packaging with surgical (yet furious) skill?
By Simon Sage on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 2:32 PM PST In Random
I bet you Jesus always got five bars, even on AT&T (NYSE: T). Deep in London’s financial quarter, St. Lawrence Jewry is modernizing its old “Plow Monday” ceremony (which would involve blessing farming equipment for the new week of work) in order to bless parishioners’ laptops and smartphones for their own, albeit less arduous, labour. Someone warned the priest not to use the holy water sprinkler, right? Reverend Canon David Parrott says “It’s the technology that is our daily working tool, and it’s a technology we should bless." Wow, right on.
One of my old favourite gaming webcomics, PvP Online, has been doing a few strips about mobile check-in apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. Brent, the resident Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) fanboy and general snob, claims mayorship of the nearby coffee shop, only to be ousted by teenage coworker and BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)-user, Francis. I’ve been following these kinds of apps pretty closely lately, and the mentality that is required to drive them to such success is pretty aptly captured in these comics. Anyway, start reading here, and brace yourself for hilarity. 
That continent to our far-east, or near-west, sure does a good job of creating novel gadgets that no one else in their right minds could possibly imagine. Take China’s latest creation, the cigarette lighter cellphone, for example. Someone may have come up with the idea of putting a cigarette lighter into a cellphone while smoking a fat dubie at some point, but that idea probably died in a room filled with sweet ganja smoke. Leave it to some random Chinese phone maker to key in on the obviously empty cellphone-as-lighter segment and create something we now know as “The Machismo!”
