What Are The Most Stylish Laptops And Ultrabooks?
Laptop Buying Guide 2012: How To Find The Right Laptop For You
Spotify Finally Makes Its Australian Debut
Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time
HTC One XL Review: The Best Is Getting Better
The Lies Everyone Tells On Dating Sites
We love a good Star Wars remix in these parts, and especially dig freelance illustrator Mattias Adolfsson’s rendition of the story as told through Baroque era illustration. If Vader had the Death Star back somewhere between 1600 and 1750, this is how Lucas may have imagined the characters (with powdered wigs, rocking the counterpoint). [artist via superpunch]
Oh, poor Batman. His Batmobile from Batman Forever fetched less than half its reserve price on eBay after Warner Bros. put it up for auction. Expected to go for between $US600,000 to $US800,000, the Batmobile was only bid to $US297,000. Apparently Warner Bros. restrictions like “you can never, ever, ever, ever dream about driving this car in public” turned off some buyers. But we’re guessing what really happened was that car enthusiasts came to their senses and remembered, “wait a second, Batman Forever sucked”!
A new rumour claims that Amazon wants to take their Kindle e-reader international. And while such a feat isn’t a big deal for most of its competition, the Kindle’s Whispernet service (a free EVDO connection allowing the downloads of books, etc from the Amazon store) will need a new partner to work across Europe (along with some hardware revision). And as rumour has it that Amazon is in talks with Vodafone Chief Arun Sarin to make this happen, sell e-books to everyone, take over the world, etc. Buyer beware: our attempts to burn Kindles in protest just won’t have the impact of a good, paper book burning. [mobileread]
Here’s yet another Apple patent. This one has all the elements for creating the Greates Apple Rumor Theory ever, from multi-touch displays and gaming to multiple screens and media players. Clearly, we are witnessing the creation of the next nuclear-powered, worm-hole-inducing gaming platform with mind-reading capabilities. Or something like that. Really, after reading the whole text of the patent, I don’t have a clue about what are they talking about:
Jonathan Tseng, VP of marketing at Asus, promises an Eee in 2008. Like the simple, cheap Eee Laptop, it’ll probably have the Eee linux interface and it won’t have a monitor. [Digitimes]
Blockbuster really is falling back hard on its B&M outlets, so hard they’re missing half the point of digital distribution, which is not having to drive to the store to grab a movie. Part of their revival plan is to install kiosks at B&M stores where you can download movies straight to your portable media player. Awesome! Except that I have one of those at my house: a computer.
I wouldn’t really call having to trudge all the way to a Blockbuster location to jack my iPod or whatever player into a big blue box to download a movie “bypassing the need for…transferring videos from a computer.” It takes the worst aspect of each form of distribution—leaving your easy chair and middling quality video that’s not easy to throw up on my TV—and combines them into one totally not ideal experience. Better idea on Blockbuster’s part: integrating MovieLink’s direct download store with the Blockbuster site and services. That’s the way digital distribution is supposed to work. If I come to your store, I expect to walk out with a piece of shiny plastic. [Electronista, Flickr]
Too bad these babies probably aren’t seeing our shores. Acelabs’ do-it-all S3 “Handy” PMP is leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of the generic PMPs we see coming out of Asia, with a 2.8-inch, 260k colour QVGA touchscreen, FM radio and transmitter (for jamming wirelessly in your car), voice recording, image/text viewer and support for MP3, WMA and WAV audio-wise, and a mess of video formats: MPEG-4, AVI, Real, WMV, Xvid and ASF.
Storage comes via micro SD—up to 4GB—and a lithium polymer battery gives it 15 hours of music juice or 4 hours of video. No idea on price, but it does come in black, white or pink, and the paint job’s what really matters, right?
Kotaku’s editor from down under notes an interesting but totally unannounced feature following the update to the PS3′s freshly baked 2.0 firmware. Previously unsupported file formats (specifically Xvid and Divx) are not only detected by the PS3 now, but it magically has thumbnails and running times for the files. They still won’t play, so it might not mean anything, but Luke says it best: “Sony wouldn’t have increased the compatibility in there for shits and giggles. Would they?” Well, it is Sony. Who knows why they do anything anymore? Have you guys had similar revelatory experiences? [Kotaku]
Unfortunately this isn’t a Merry Christmas loopy-loo light show designed to inspire yuletide joy. Board speculation stakes it as a new error code for 360s stuffed with Falcon guts—whether it’s the same hardware failure deal as before but in prettier, less depressing colours or is an entirely new error is still up in the air, but when we get some confirmation we’ll let you know. [Logic Sunrise via Xbox-Scene via CrunchGear]
Given the shaky state of the WiMax unit of Sprint, the termination of its joint agreement with Clearwire to bring WiMax coverage to 100 million people comes as something of a surprise. The WSJ’s reporting that the “complexities of the transaction” and booting of Sprint’s CEO made it too hard for the pair to come to a final agreement.
While Sprint’s not in dandy shape, this is a bigger blow to Clearwire, the smaller of the two companies, which might need a hot cash injection from WiMax-backers like Intel to stay on track. Sprint “has given no indication that it will halt its WiMax plans altogether,” but it seems more than likely we’ll see some significant alterations of their plans along the lines of cost-cutting, given that money’s not growing on cellphone towers for them right now, and $5 billion’s a hefty bill to foot to go it totally alone on an unproven venture. [WSJ]
