Ulf Waschbusch, who was Google’s Mobile Product Manager until he recently left for MySpace Mobile, thinks the T-Mobile G1 sucks for a variety of reasons. He also points out the good stuff, but after seeing what’s wrong in terms of interface, enterprise integration, data plan and its other flaws, especially compared with the competition, I absolutely agree with his views:
If you’re flying one of Europe’s many discount carriers and you’re not violently hungover, you’re probably doing something wrong–the cabins of those single-class A319s are bubbling tempests of unshowered, throbbing rage that always seem a fraction of a degree away from boiling over. Now on your sunrise flight from Krakow to Berlin, you can enjoy constant mobile phone blabbing from up to six surrounding seats thanks to the good folks at Ryanair, 3, and O2.
Say what you will about Windows Vista, but we think it’s a little outlandish to advertise the product on a toilet. In an unnamed Russian city, ads for Vista appear right on the porcelain reading, “Windows Vista – the digital future starts here.” We really hope it’s an advertising agency’s version of a prank. Otherwise, Microsoft appears to be after that “I pee standing up and often drink so much that I puke” demographic…which is probably pretty broad, honestly. [English Russia via CrunchGear]
Nine of the top ten selling notebooks on Amazon right now are netbooks. (The other spot is taken by Apple.) Call them underpowered, complain about their screens, but there’s a reason why every PC manufacturer in the world has jumped on the netbook bandwagon.
In a stunning move, the folks at Asus appear to be adding a fairly significant feature to one of their netbooks–built-in 3.75G HSUPA connectivity to the Atom-powered 8.9″ Eee PC 901–without spinning off another 5 different model designations. The 3.75G chip will be in all 901s that ship from October onward.
According to the South China Morning Post, in China the iPhone 3G won’t have 3G or Wi-Fi. China Mobile wants Apple to disable these two features. The first because they don’t have a 3G network in place. The second nobody knows or can imagine why, but it simply makes the iPhone an almost-useless shiny brick. [Cellular News via Gadget Lab]
While SanDisk has made no official announcements, their 16GB MicroSD cards are popping up for sale at various internet retailers (at various prices, we might add). Ranging from $US80 to $US220 (we’d go with the $US80), prices will settle with more availability. But we’re pretty excited to toss an iPhone’s worth of flash storage into any fancy smartphone we like. Plus, whenever we pop a tiny MicroSD card into one of our gadgets, it always feels like we’re in the future. [mymemory via internettabletalk Thanks tipsters!]
Content producers of pretty much any ilk were excited to get news of the highly refined, newly hardware-accelerated CS4 product line, but probably missed this key feature buried deep in the release notes: multitouch trackpad support.
Motorola doesn’t seem to have a great plan for the mobile space in the next few years, and these spy shots do little to assuage our fears of imminent crappiness. I mean, there’s nothing immediately wrong with what we’ve heard and now seen of the Q11—GPS, Wi-Fi, and 3G are standard fare for smartphones (and even feature phones) of the day—but there’s almost definitely nothing exciting. galleryPost('motorolaq11', 6, '');
Rail-happy Japan, a country that probably takes great joy in watching America’s embarrassingly slow and fitful adoption of high-speed and maglev trains, will be graced with new breed of green, 300+ kph trains by 2010. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, the designer of these new trains, isn’t promoting speed as the main selling point—Japan railways have seen much faster hardware fly down the tracks before—but instead is emphasising its environmental benefits.
