What’s the best way to punish the same early adopter customers that helped make your service a success in the first place? If you’re Netflix, it’s charging them extra for renting Blu-ray. CEO Reed Hastings justifies this action by saying “consumers are used to paying more for high-definition,” basically punching this next generation of early adopters in the nads for doing what they love to do.
It looks like we weren’t the only ones not impressed with Meizu’s M8 iPhone ripoff — its booth at CeBIT was shut down by the local police and all products and promotional materials were removed. Yikes! Apparently some other booths were shut down as well, as this was part of a wider initiative to protect patent and copyright owners. What does this mean for the fate of our favourite junk copycat Chinese ripoff phone? Time will tell. Stay strong, my friends. UPDATE: The shutdown was actually due to a mistaken MP3-licensing issue and the booth is now back open. Apple had nuthin’ to do with it. Carry on! [Heise via Electronista]
It used to be that if you stayed at a hotel with a minibar, you could down some $15 bags of chips or whatever else was stored in there as long as you replaced them before you checked out to avoid getting ripped off. No more. Now minibars have motion sensors and scales built in, so if you so much as move an item you automatically purchase it. The latest offender is the minibar at the Wynn in Las Vegas.
Leave it to Chinese manufacturer BTL International to improve ripoff the iPod Nano design by throwing in a 2-megapixel camera. Outside of that, the device, dubbed the M2406, supports AVI videos, and MP3, WMA, WMV and WAV audio files. It also features a 2.4-inch TFT screen, a built-in speaker and six EQ settings. Internal flash memory ranges from 128MB to 4GB, but you could always supplement that with a miniSD card. [Product Page via PMP Today via Gadgetizer]
Despite making a Meizu phone that looks way too close to the iPhone to be a coincidence, the latest news about Meizu ripping off an artist to pimp their work is off-base. It’s true that someone placed Deviant Art artist Lithium Picnic’s photo onto a Meizu M8, but it turns out that the image was actually rendered by a fan on Meizu’s forums. Not that it makes things any more legit, but Meizu themselves aren’t to blame for this round of appropriating someone else’s work and calling it their own. [Meizu]
Oh yeah, we could totally see James Bond using this gigantic monstrosity of a cellphone. In our opinion, Roger Moore could have used this VIP 007 cellphone from China back in the ’70s, where it would seem completely futuristic and blend right in with the other tacky stuff they shoved into his films (call us Connery fans).
Featuring a gigantic antenna, a 2-megapixel camera, Bond’s “signature,” stars, and what looks like a horrific dog/sheep spawn on the back, this phone is a prerequisite for any spy worth his weight in yuan. – Jason Chen
007 Phone [Phonedaily via Akihabara News via uber phones]
Fusion Research’s new Genesis Server is a home theatre server that’s designed to store all your music and movies in one place so you can sort through them easily with a remote control. It comes in 1TB and 2TB varieties, and the menus are customisable, so you can get it to go with your decor. OK, that sounds pretty neat, if not the most original thing in the world.
The problem arises when they give you the price: $US8,000 for the 1TB version and $9,500 for the 2TB version. Wha-wha-whaaaat?!
Where do they get off charging this much for a server with a fancy interface? How can they justify charging $1,500 for an extra 1TB of storage when just yesterday we saw an external (not even an internal!) 1TB drive for $290? How does a company so out of touch with the current marketplace exist and stay afloat? Who is spending this kind of money on this crap?
