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RIM Intros the BlackBerry Presenter, Say Goodbye to Laptops

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Screen shot 2010-01-07 at 3.34.39 AM

RIM has just launched it latest smartphone accessory,  the BlackBerry Presenter – a small and light device that you can easily plug into a projector or monitor to display a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation. You then control the presentation using your BlackBerry phone. Sounds cool? It certainly is, handy and useful as well.

Utilizing Bluetooth connectivity, the BlackBerry Presenter connects with your BlackBerry smartphone. As such, it allows you to move freely when doing your presentation, that is within the 30 feet range. This allows you to easily control your presentation – navigate through the slides, view speaker notes, loop presentation slided and reference information on one slide while displaying another.

The BlackBerry Presenter has the following specs – supports NTSC and PAL video formats, S-Video and VGA video cable, micro USB connection, and support for various display resolution – VGA, SVGA and XGA. It doesn’t need any additional file processing as you can do your presentations directly without tweaking your presentation on your PC.

No details on availability yet, but if you’re keen on getting the BlackBerry Presenter, it will set you back for $199.  It works with most BlackBerry models except BlackBerry Curve series and BlackBerry Pearl Flip series.

Originally posted on January 6, 2010 @ 4:00 pm

Kindle is the Most Gifted Item on Amazon Ever

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Screen shot 2009-12-27 at 5.24.46 AM

Amazon should be thankful for the Holiday season as it can rest easy on the stress brought about by Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Sony PRS e-Readers.  It looks like there are more Kindle owners right now than before as it is now the most gifted item on Amazon. And if this is not enough, on Christmas Day, Amazon achieved quite a record-breaking sale on Kindle books than the printed ones.

And no one could be more pleased than Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos as he claims:

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history. On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading.”

I could just imagine Dan Brown grinning from ear to ear right now, since his new book “The Lost Symbol” is among the top-selling Kindle books on Amazon. And so did Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help.”

Going back to Amazon’s Holiday shopping report. It was noted the Amazon’s sales peak was on Dec. 14, when consumers flock to the site and ordered 7 million units of various Amazon products. Amazon shipped to over 178 countries on this day.

Aside from the Kindle, the 8GB iPod Touch, Garmin nuvi 260W 4.3-inch GPS unit are also among the hottest-selling Amazon Electronics products.

So, did you get any of these items as a Christmas gift?

Read the full Amazon PR here.

Originally posted on December 26, 2009 @ 5:38 pm

Google’s Two-Pronged Mobile Strategy and the Future of Chrome OS

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Nexus One

When the unlocked, Google-branded Nexus One handset hits the market next year, Google unleashes a two-pronged attack on the Apple iPhone. On one hand, normal people will continue to buy subsidized but locked Android handsets provided by the cellular service carriers. That’s the space the iPhone plays in right now.

On the other hand, hardware geeks will buy expensive but unlocked Google phones provided by the Mountain View powerhouse itself. Thanks to Steve Jobs’ five-year dark bargain with AT&T, that’s a space in which the iPhone simply will not compete.

Thus, Google’s mobile platform allows third parties to maintain walled gardens (carrier-branded handsets with contracts) while maintaining a completely open playground (unlocked handsets). They take on two imporant market segments simultaneously: the common consumers who flock to the walled gardens, and the early adopters in the playground who influence the common consumers. Time will tell if such outflanking will make a dent in the iPhone’s market share.

In the meantime, you have to wonder what the Nexus One bodes for the direction of Google’s upcoming browser-based operating system, the Google Chrome OS, slated for release almost a year after the Nexus One. The potential parallels are certainly intriguing.

Chrome OS will come bundled as an OEM release with very specifically-designed SSD netbooks from various computer manufacturers. Those machines would directly parallel the carrier-locked Android handsets provided by various cellphone manufacturers. If the parallelism holds, could Google release its own hardware for the Chrome OS, the same way it’s now releasing its own hardware for the Android mobile OS? As demonstrated by the Psystar case, Apple is willing to do the latter (provide its own hardware), but not the former (allow branding from third-party manufacturers). The Mountain View geniuses would outflank the Cupertino tyrants once more. Could Google’s two-pronged mobile OS strategy serve as a miniature version (no pun intended) of its future two-pronged desktop OS strategy?

Either way, the current geek hullabaloo over the Nexus One undeniably proves one thing: the existence of a strong demand for Google-branded consumer hardware among the influential blogging-and-twittering digerati. Google can leverage that demand in future consumer hardware projects. We can still expect the bulk of Google Android’s market penetration to come from the carrier-locked handsets, but the geeks will continue to generate buzz about the Google-branded handsets. That’s why T-Mobile and Verizon, who both carry Android handsets, aren’t freaking out right now: the buzz around the expensive Nexus One will help drum up sales for the subsidized G1 and Droid.

Though the actual manufacturing of the Nexus One has been contracted to HTC, there is absolutely no HTC branding on the Nexus One. It’s a Google-branded phone, through and through. High-end hardware manufacturing as word-of-mouth marketing is not a new concept. Though not traditionally a hardware provider, perhaps Google will become the next industry titan to apply that concept — for both Android and Chrome OS.

(The photo above is courtesy of Engadget.)

Originally posted on December 14, 2009 @ 4:50 am

Ouch! DROID Beats iPhone for Time’s Gadget of the Year

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Android fans, rejoice! Time Magazine has just published its Top 10 Gadgets of 2009 and surprisingly (yes it surprised me) Motorola’s “recently” released DROID is the no.1 gadget of the year. Now, how is that possible?

No offence meant to Android fans and DROID users. But how could a gadget that was released only during the 4th quarter of the year possibly become “the gadget of the year?” Even if Time didn’t bother to explain their criteria for choosing this year’s gadget of the year from among the other gadgets that were released and became so popular this year, there’s no way that DROID can become the gadget of the year.

Or perhaps I’m not aware of how far the Moto DROID has affected the mobile consumer market. According to Time Magazine:

The Droid is a hefty beast, a metal behemoth without the gloss and finish of the iPhone, but you don’t miss it. The Droid’s touchscreen is phenomenally sharp and vivid, it has an actual physical (not great, but good enough) keyboard, and best of all, the Droid is on Verizon’s best-of-breed 3G network.

But how many users does the Moto DROID have right now? I mean, how many people have already seen if not used it?

Anyway, in case you want to know, Time’s top 10 gadgets of 2009 are the following - Motorola DROID, Nook (another controversial choice), Dyson Air Multiplier, iPhone 3GS, Canon EOS-1D Mark IV, Dell Adamo XPS, FinePix Real 3D W1, Casio G-Shock GW7900B-1, Beats Solo by Dr. Dre and Panasonic G10 Series Plasma HDTVs.

Originally posted on December 9, 2009 @ 5:25 am

Joo Joo, the Web Slate Formerly Known as CrunchPad Gets Previewed

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Remember the CrunchPad? Well, in case you didn’t catch the news yesterday, said tablet has just been christened Joo Joo, the web slate, tablet or whatever you may want to call it.

Now here’s the news, after announcing that they are pushing the release of the JooJoo after their deal with Michael Arrington didn’t work out, Joo Joo’s developer Fusion Garage has just demoed that actual tablet/web slate to CNET as Fusion Garage’s CEO showed his Joo Joo.

From what we can observe from the video, the Joo Joo functions and behaves like Time Inc’s tablet device which was demoed recently as well. You would really think that both machines are one and the same.  Are they or are they not the same device?

Anyway, CNET has the following observations about the Joo Joo – slim and pleasing to hold hardware, gorgeous screen display, curved plastic back, slim and thin form factor and has no any other buttons except the power switch.

In addition, the JooJoo is loaded with a Linux-based OS but not to perform as a full operating system: Linux is only integrated to launch the web browser.  Fusion Garage should have worked out a deal with Google, as the Chrome OS definitely fits the Joo Joo to a tee.

Additionally, Joo Joo’s browser can run Flash scripts as well as HTML extensions. It won’t run non-web apps though.

In other words, Joo Joo is basically a made-for-web device with a hefty price ($499). Anybody willing to shell out that amount must be pretty rich or simply gadget-savvy-geek.

There’s no doubt that the Joo Joo is a pretty cool and innovative device. But I couldn’t help but plea with Apple to hurry up and brings us the rumored Apple Tablet please.

Originally posted on December 8, 2009 @ 2:44 am