January 2008 Archives

From Gizmodo:

MediaStreet's 1GB eMotion solar-powered portable media player is already shipping for $169. That's a lot for a typical 1-gig audio-video player, but when you consider that this device can, according to claims, provide power for "most portable devices such as mobile phones, MP3/MP4 players, laptops, digital cameras" and presumably itself, it's chump change. We'll get to the bottom of this, hopefully getting a review sample in, but in the meantime, have a closer look and feel free to stretch your skeptic muscles.

I did a little searching on Media Street's website and couldn't even find the press release Gizmodo posted. It looks like vaporware right now, but I'm hoping that it comes to market. At $169, it would be a fabulous companion to the Eee PC that should be arriving this afternoon. UPDATE: The device is now showing up on MediaStreet's website, but there I still haven't found a way to order the device.

from News.com:

That Parallels technology is now available as a hypervisor that runs on a computer's "bare metal," a contrast to the previous technology that runs on top of a host operating system such as Mac OS X. The hypervisor approach, also employed by VMware's ESX Server, Xen, and Hyper-V, is generally preferred for servers to the guest-host model.

This could be a very cool product for those of us who are use multiple platforms depending on the task. I prefer to code while running OpenBSD, but use Apple's Aperture and Photomatix Pro on my Mac Pro for photography. Like everyone else, I'm also occasionally forced onto a Microsoft platform by a project's business requirements. While bootcamp and VMWare Fusion have worked well on the machine to meet my needs so far, the prospect of running a hypervisor on bare metal without OS X's massive resource needs is exciting. Since they're targeting Apple users with the product, they are going to have at least one significant challenge -- making sure that OS X can run multimedia applications at or near native speeds. If it can't, then I'd be better off with my current solution; while less elegant, it still allows me to use the Mac Pro as the media-machine it was designed to be.

I've decided to ditch my iPod touch. Sure, it's a fabulous media device if all you want to do is listen to music or watch video, but I was after a mobile computing platform; at the very least something that I could code for and use as a web client.

After about three weeks, I've given up trying to use it. While the whole "finger is better than a stylus" thing is true for point and click, the non-tactile keyboard is impossible to use for more than very rudimentary tasks.

I'm sure it would be fine if I had small hands, but at 6'5", my fingers covered several "keys" as I typed. So, at the same price point, I've ordered an Asus EeePC. It should arrive sometime next week.