Devices Site

What can $7 get you today? Other that two cafe du jour from Starbucks or seven Double Cheeseburgers from McD’s Dollar Menu (before taxes), you can also sign up with Rogers and Fido for their unlimited mobile browsing plan that comes with a 3-year contract. What’s the catch? Well, this plan is reserved only for “PDAs such as Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices, PC cards and non-Rogers certified devices are not eligible.” In addition, hooking up with third party apps is also forbidden - other than browsing, data usage will set you back by $0.05 per KB. That pretty much sums up how sucky and draconian the measures are, that you’d be better off without it IMHO.

While the whole world is all tied up about Microsoft’s shocking bid to enslave Yahoo!, Time Warner’s Internet arm AOL is also busy with its own acquisition of online affiliate marketing network buy.at. As usual, the company did not disclose the financial terms.

Just like the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, AOL wants to boost up its Internet marketing operations and achieve its overall goal of becoming the one-stop shop for online advertisers.

Unlike the popular pay-per-click and display advertising models, buy.at is an online marketing network powered by a commissioned-based scheme. Here, advertisers will only pay its affiliates or Web publishers once a visitor responds to its ad and take the necessary action such as purchase. 

Read [Reuters]

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Posted Feb 6th 2008 2:57PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment
Spotted at CES and out this month in Korea, Samsung’s 3D-capable plasma is going to be making an appearance Stateside in March. The 42-inch and 50-inch PN42A450P TVs use the TriDef 3D tech from DDD Group, which costs $200 for two pairs of 3D glasses and the TriDef 3D software. Samsung’s calling this the “world’s first 3D-ready flat-panel HDTV,” but didn’t leave out the other fixins like a 15,000:1 contrast ratio, 18-bit color processing and three HDMI-CEC plugs. No word on cost, but you can’t put a pricetag on those migraines.

NVIDIA has finalized a deal that will see it acquire the physics technology company Ageia Technologies Inc.

Ageia is best known in the gaming community for its PhysX software and PhysX card. The PhysX software is currently being used and developed for use in games on PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and the Wii. It is now expected that NVIDIA will integrate PhysX support into its GeForce range of cards, allowing for direct physics acceleration through a graphics card.

Speaking of the acquisition, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA, said:

The AGEIA team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are—creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences … By combining the teams that created the world’s most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce®-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world.

Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of Ageia, also commented:

NVIDIA is the perfect fit for us. They have the world’s best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience.

Specific details as to the terms of the deal and the price paid for Ageia have not been divulged. But NVIDIA has said it will release more information regarding the deal during its quarterly conference call on February 13.

Read more at Vnunet.com and the NVIDIA press release.

Matthew’s Opinion

With Intel owning Havok and NVIDIA now owning Ageia, AMD is the odd one out. The company may own ATI, but it has no dedicated physics software company on board.

When the PhysX card first appeared, it was very expensive and only supported a few games. The card disappeared, but the software SDK continued, and it has clearly impressed games companies due to its use across so many projects. PhysX is a recognized name with gamers, and it has technology NVIDIA can use, so the acquisition is a win on both marketing and technology fronts for the graphics company.

It will be interesting to see how much the PhysX brand means to NVIDIA. We could just see it clearly identified on the graphics card packaging and marketing as “now with PhysX.” It may be more drastic than that, however, with the next range of GeForce cards actually called GeForce PhysX.

I love to cook, and I love tech gadgets, so when I see funny little kitchen tech like this it always catches my eye. It seems when Chinese designer Zhu Fei wants to shoot some flavor into his food, he means it–literally. Fei is calling his kitchen hitman gadget the Spice Gun, and according to him, “Spice gun is different from the other casters, it has more fun!”

The Spice Gun looks like a big red oversized revolver with three chambers to load your culinary ammo or spice if you prefer. Then with the pull of the trigger the gun uses compressed air to rotate the chambers and spray seasoning on your intended victim–be it chicken, fish, steak, or whatever you want to kick-up or rather blast-up for dinner.

Currently only a concept piece, the Spice Gun cannot be bought in stores just yet. If you have been thinking, however, about going postal on your next meal, you’ll want to keep an eye out for the Spice Gun when it finally goes retail.

Read more at DVICE.

So, I’m sure by now you have probably read my experience of helping Santa get a Wii for my kids for Christmas in addition to getting two more Wii’s for family and friends. It seems part of the reason for my struggle and the struggle of many others were Wii-sellers. These are the folks that have been snatching up the Wii whenever it becomes available to resell it on eBay or Amazon for US$50 to US$100 over retail or more.

MSNBC had an article profiling one of these Wii-sellers and I’m sure like me reading the article will leave you pretty disgusted. I’ll give it to him–he makes some pretty valid points about providing a service since many people didn’t want to do the leg work to get a Wii such as getting up early, waiting in line, stalking stores for shipments or hunting for them online. Where he lost me was when he acknowledged that he worked with a co-worker to jack up the price of one of his auctions. It sounds like he didn’t have to do it after that first time, but he already let the cat out of the bag.

Look, if you want to buy a Wii and resell it on eBay then I suppose it’s a free market. Just don’t have people fraudulently jack up the price of your auctions. Also, next time your kids want something for Christmas and you can’t find it without paying US$100 over retail to a reseller just appreciate the fact that you created a new market. Everything comes around in life. Give a Wii, get a Wii without profit. The gift will be returned.

Read more from the MSNBC article.

Posted Feb 6th 2008 7:51AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: CellphonesThe German state of North-Rhine Westphalia wants its €41.3 million (about $60.5 million) back. The reason? Germany wants the corporate subsidies given to Nokia back in 1998 and 1999 for its plant in Bochum. The very plant Nokia is about to shut down at the cost of some 2,300 German jobs. Nokia responded to Germany’s demand saying that it is “astonished” and “Based on the facts available to the company and Deutsche Bank, its advisor throughout the entire period, both parties feel strongly that such an attempt is without merit.” Of course, Nokia won’t hurt too badly if forced to pay out. Nokia’s new Romanian plant is expected to cost just a tenth of the Bochum plant to operate. Nokia also posted a staggering $2.6 billion in profit from the last quarter alone. The German authorities know a cash cow when they see it.

Read — Reuters’ take
Read — Nokia response in full

After six months renting, house-hunting and finally moving into a new home, emptying the final box was a liberation. Sealed within, moreover, was  something sent in last year but forgotten amid the home-moving craziness: The fanless, Wii-sized Zonbox. Joy!

With it up and running again, I’m reminded what a great little supplemental computer it is.

• It has 512MB of RAM, integrated video, 6 USB ports and 4GB of Flash storage. And it’s very small.   

• It’s so quiet as to be a little unnerving: I’m used to hitting the on switch on a computer and hearing something to indicate that it’s waking up.

• Forget the official selling point (a super cheap computer allied to an online storage subscription, with minimal local storage) and think of it as a computer for every room and every (light-weight) purpose—if you’re prepared to do extra work. File storage, retrogaming, serving web? It’ll handle all those.

• They’ll sell you one without the storage sub for $300. With the 2-year storage subscription it’s $99.

• It runs a standard Linux distribution, albeit a pruned and well-manicured one. Straying from the pre-installed apps, the web, and email, gets you quickly into irritating sysadmin territory.

• Reasons to stay away, if you’re looking for them: low specs, no integrated optical drive, only 4GB of flash storage.

• There’s a similarly-themed laptop edition. We recently gave it a favorable review.

• It uses only a few watts of power, so is very cheap to run.

• It’s a good cheap second computer for the kids, or when the other half is doing the taxes.

• Bearing in mind that the offical Zonbox is fitted with a tailored Linux distro that won’t give you too much lip, you can get much the same thing from other vendors. The raw hardware seems to be made by CuteBox, but it doesn’t sell direct. Another company selling it is Thin Teknix, which calls it "The Chimp." A third alternative is the $280 Linutop, which is even smaller, but it doesn’t look quite as nice and has lower specifications: an AMD Geode CPU, 256MB RAM and only 4 USB ports.

Posted Feb 6th 2008 12:01PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Cellphones
Took long enough for the limited offering to go national, didn’t it? Unlimited everything, the holy grail of phone plans, is now available everywhere at Sprint. The Sprint-powered Helio has had an unlimited everything for a while now, and just cut the price to $99 a month, while other carriers have piecemeal “unlimited” offerings like text messaging or in-network calling, but Sprint is the first of the big four to offer a true unlimited everything plan. For $119.99 a month you get unlimited voice, texting, web, email and picture mail, though no mention is made of MMS. The plan should be available now.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

Sporting giant Adidas have taken its first step into the world of electronic sports by releasing a limited edition pair of Halo shoes. I don’t know about you, but these definitely aren’t up to my taste. Still, if you’re a Halo fan and hope to snag one of these, do look out for a pair at the nearest Adidas store. In exchange for $110, you will be able to complete your Halo fanboy transformation with a can of Mountain Dew in hand.