And right on the heels of the IPaq 6310 is this new looker from Motorola, which is barely half the size of the Ipaq, and has barely half the features. The box that it comes in is apparently from The Fucking Future.

Specs-wise the phone is decent, but not groundbreaking (you can check out a rather superfluous bit of animation here that attempts to outline some of the phone’s feature … a simple table would have sufficed, but I guess their in-house flash animators needed to earn their keep). Anyway, it’s really the paper-thin, anodized aluminum body that will sell this US$700-800 mobile, with the modest featureset being more of a bonus than anything else.

What’s interesting is that those busy bees at Moto also unveiled the mPx220 yesterday, which takes the opposite direction and chooses the Path of Conservative Body Design and a Shitload of Features instead. Specifications (thankfully, in a nice table form) can be had here, among many, many other phone sites.

I guess I’m still in a convergent sort of mood, but somehow that Razr only appeals to me on a very shallow, design-lust level. I can’t really see myself spending $800 on a device that doesn’t support stylus input or Wi-Fi, at the very least.

Sure looks mighty purty tho.

That brand-new Ipaq that everybody has been talking about for like, a year, was finally launched a few days back. I’m feeling pretty peeved because I was waiting for this model to come out like 6 months ago, and I was supposed to trade-in my old phone and ipaq 2210 to get it. I had it all figured out, but the model itself never showed up, and ruined everything.

This was supposed to be the convergent device of 2004, with connectivity options positively spewing out its ears. I’m pretty sure it’s the only device currently out there that supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPRS, GSM and SD-IO, plus it even has a VGA camera to boot. At around US$600, it’ll probably be in the PhP35,000-Php40,000 range here, making it a close rival of the Ericsson P900.

Now the only question is, how am I going to get my hands on one.

You can check out the reviews here:

• PocketNow
  
• GigaOm
  
• BrightHand (overview)

No, I wasn’t there, but the Defamer was, and he wrote up another exceedingly obnoxious (read: fucking entertaining) article about it. I particularly loved this bit:

Bruce Willis likes to wear a baseball cap to deflect attention from the fact that the mother of his children knows what Ashton Kutcher’s penis tastes like.

You can ready about the rest of the merrymakings here.

Caught Imelda today at Eastwood, the documentary directed by Ramona Diaz. The movie got tied up in court for a couple of weeks before finally being released to the public, so I figured, what the hell, it must be at least marginally controversial, right?

The whole thing was more or less “narrated” by Imelda herself, from her beach house in Leyte or the inside of her trailer, starting from her childhood all the way up to her court appearances a few years back. Most Filipinos will already be familiar with most of her story. The parts you didn’t know about (but which this documentary tries to reveal) are largely irrelevant bits of trivia, like how she sang for Irving Berlin, and how she’s written a self-improvement-type book in the style of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (although with a substantially greater number of bullet points and diagrams).

It’s a nice primer on the former first lady, but you have to wonder if every “definitive” documentary is plagued by this much tedium and mediocrity. Do I really have to see her giving out her pictures to street children, or having her pictures taken with some random pedestrians? (Certainly once or twice is acceptable, but the movie is peppered with this redundancy.) It was also a bit troubling that the director chose to end the movie with an overly-long segment on Imelda’s shoes, which is such an obvious way of doing it and is pretty shameless, imo (at least in a pandering-to-the-audience sort of way).

It’s a bit of a stretch to justify to one’s self why this documentary was made at all, because it tells you nothing of consequence about Imelda, aside from things which you could more or less surmise from simply being a Filipino citizen born within the past 2 and a half decades. It took no real sides and offered no serious conclusions; I believe it was a bit too worried about being objective to even venture a hypothesis. This wasn’t, after all, a documentary from the BBC, so there was no obligation to be unbiased (i.e., for as long as you didn’t muddle the facts, I believe it’s ok to put forth a concrete opinion with works such as these).

In short, it was a decent documentary, but given that it did little more than lay out the timeline of Imelda’s life and career, I think I’d rather have just picked up the Cliffs Notes.

In a fast followup to my recent post about the craziest-PDA-of-2004, this site has gotten any exclusive interview with the CEO of Novinit, which is the (French) company behind the Jackito.

A few bits are real standouts:

[Interviewer]: What is the difference between a PDA and your TDA?

[CEO]: Current PDAs are more or less downsized PCs. In a way, the Jackito is an upgraded version of a Gameboy. They are different classes of products. You don’t need a huge manual to use our TDA.

I’m not sure what planet this guy is from (oh, right … France), but I am a loss why he would think that a “downsized PC” is a bad thing, or at least, something that his company and product shouldn’t be aping. And I honestly cannot remember the last time I even saw anyone even holding their PDA’s “huge manual”, let alone reading it.

[CEO]: The first tactile digital assistants were built for the military by Litton Industries back in 1978. At this time, this device weighed 1 kilogram, cost about $10,000 and consumed 9 watts of power. In the last 25 years, we worked with American and Asian companies to improve the technology. Now a Jackito is 20 times smaller, 20 times cheaper, and consumes 60 times less energy. And of course, it’s incredibly more powerful.

25 years of evolution and they’re still 4 years obsolete.

Sigh.

I think the key issue here is that Novinit is almost criminally unaware of what the current handheld market is looking for, i.e., improvements in battery life, screen resolution and processing power (in that order, imho). And I don’t believe “thumb-operated UI” is very high on that list of must-haves, unfortunately. On the other hand, they did say that the Jackito is a different class of product. So if they’re not aiming to rival PDAs, where are they planning on positioning themselves exactly? In the $600-calculator market?

Yowza! Built-in elf ears!

Spotted this new PDA over at Brighthand today. The Jackito’s (gotta love that name) spec sheet reads like a Palm from the late 90’s … 2.5mb of RAM! 16mb of ROM! Black & white screen! $600! It’s as if the past 4 years never happened.

Of course, what the manufacturers are banking on is the simple fact that this little johnny-come-lately doesn’t require a stylus to operate. *collective gasp*

… no, it can’t read your mind. What it does, in fact, is let you operate it with your finger tips, something that I didn’t know anybody wanted (although obviously, everybody must want this thing, otherwise, why would they make it right?)

Yeah, you read that right: your fingertips. You know, like people are already doing with their display-protector-enhanced PocketPCs and Palms. Hell, you could even go all-out and buy one of these wonders, for like what, $5.

But wait! They made a whole new OS for the Jackito (and no, it ain’t called the Pockito), that is “oriented around allowing the Jackito to be used with the fingertips.” Yeah, well, at 600 big ones for a PDA with prehistoric specs and no third-party software, it better be.

This is some serious vaporware we’re looking at, kids. And with its release anticipated to be within the next three months, they’ll have just enough time to realize their mistake.

Or so one would hope.

“[Film] can only teach us new understandings by forcibly denying us old ones, and that can be bewildering. [It] can only freshen and quicken our responses by altering our habitual modes of perception, and that can be disorienting.”

- Ray Carney

The Films of John Cassavetes

I’m not a Mac user, nor do I ever plan to be one, but I have a great deal of respect for their CEO Steve Jobs, and his often rambunctious ego. This coming week’s Newsweek features a look back at Jobs’ music-revolution-in-a-box, the iPod, but what I really like is the soundbite at the end:

“There are lots of examples where not the best product wins,” [Jobs] says. “Windows would be one of those, but there are examples where the best product wins. And the iPod is a great example of that.”

The smartphone currently vying for title of Phone With Price Closest to a Full-Blown Laptop has just been revamped: the Sony Ericsson P910 features a built-in QWERTY thumb-board on the reverse side of its keypad, 64mb of internal memory and has a color-depth four times that of the P900. The last line on the linked article is peculiar: “It is expected to cost about what the P900 does.” So, it’s not supposed to be an additional entry into the P-series line, it’s supposed to replace the 900 completely. Man, i wonder how the folks who have P900s right now feel :(