So yeah, there was this guy “Ben Heckendorn” (fantastic surname by the way…) whom decided that he wanted to beat all the DS and PSP owners in the world by making the ultimate portable gaming console. And he did. A portable Xbox 360. Looked good, and deserved a place on the pedestal of greatness forever. And all was good.
Then, Microsoft unleashed the Xbox 360 Elite.
Mr Heckendorn (Still rocking the surname of greatness), decided to take things to the next level. Ben worked hard to cram another 360 into another case to make a far superior Xbox 360 Elite Laptop. A self-contained unit, similar to a laptop in that there’s a mounted screen, built-in camera, keyboard etc, except it’s a 360 Elite. It works exactly how a 360 would do, except it’s in laptop form. Absolutely fantastic.
He is a living legend that should be hired by a large electronics company to come up with the greatest stuff imaginable. Microsoft, pay this man money and make this commercial.
Do you own a Wii? Do you own a Wiimote? Are you a really geeky person that needs to see the latest in future gaming technology using today’s tech? I’d suggest watching this…
Johnny Chug Lee has somehow managed to destroy everyone else’s normal thought patterns, bent time and space, and probably had a Happy Meal for breakfast, by making a damn realistic 3D effect with a Wiimote and some safety glasses.
It’s probably unrealistic for anything to be released in the short term that takes advantage of this idea, but I would absolutely love to see this used in the future. Imagine, a decent Time Crisis game where you have to actually duck or hide around a pillar. Metal Gear Solid with you peeking around the corner in first person view. Tetris with damn realistic blocks.
The one thing I have found with keyboards on mobile phones is that my gargantuan hands just won’t fit properly. I have fat fingers and large hands, which means despite navigating a computer keyboard very well, the same can’t be said about the small and cramped cellphone keypad. Add in the fact that I’m one of those people that just can’t stand to send a text message without proper spelling, punctuation and grammar, and text messaging becomes a personal hell. If only there was some way to get a bigger and full keyboard into a mobile phone…
Now, although there is the Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard that projects onto a surface a full Qwerty keyboard, it doesn’t help you when you’re in the middle of the street with no flat surface to place the device on in order to use it. Although that is an answer, it’s not really what I’m looking for.
Nokia, in their latest Patent filing, shows off a new way to get a keyboard onto a phone, by using what appears at first to be a sideways-folding clamshell style handset. That in itself would be nice, but they’ve gone one better. Thanks to some magical hinge work, they’ve worked out how to get the screen to be at an angle, making it a bit easier to see what you’re typing. The extensive space available means a full keyboard could be placed, albeit not a full-sized one.
It is a step in the right direction, and if this really does make it into handsets, I’d be more than happy to try it out.
So. Yeah. Coca Cola is doing a contest to win stuff. Entering codes via text or the website enters you into a draw. Every minute they give away 15 iTunes song credits, and every hour they give away an 80GB iPod from Apple, and you get entered into both draws automatically.
I like Coke, funnily enough, so I just bought the smaller bottles instead of the larger ones, not only for more entries due to liquid volumes, but also because the smaller bottles had 2 entries each. I’ve tried a few times between 2am and 3am (partly because I have late shifts at the moment, partly because I doubted that many people would be awake or bother to put codes in at that time), entering a few labels to see what the wins to labels ratio is. In total, I had 104 entries (52 labels, half are me, half are picked up from friend’s bottles whom didn’t bother with the contest. At least I didn’t scavenge the bins at all…) winning me 96 song credits. That is an admirable ratio, with 9/10ths of the time getting a song.
However.
Last night, I decided to go a bit overboard, and bought 10 bottles from Tesco, because they were on some 2 for £1.40 offer. 10 Labels, plus an extra 6 I had sitting here anyway, making 16 labels, 32 entries.
Last night, I won 31 songs. I was a bit bummed out from missing that one song.
Until I got an e-mail at 3:01am.
From Coca-Cola Music.
Subject Line: “Great News - an 80GB iPod is yours”
…
My immediate thought was “…Wha? Really? I didn’t think many were entering at that time, but that few for me to actually win the iPod?!”. Closely followed by “…this claim form on this website is a bit of a pain to fill in. How do you click that Submit button?” (because it took me 5 attempts, on both my Mac and my PC, using multiple browsers. Eventually did it by tabbing down to the button and hitting Return)
So. Yes. It appears I now have an 80GB iPod coming. I can now replace my fairly crappy 1GB MP3 player with something that more than does the job.
Filed under: Gadgets, Japan — Malcolm Owen @ 11:25 am
The random browsing session last night yielded a strange, if fantastic, alarm clock. You see, it tells the time, it wakes you up, and the world continues to turn.
However.
This clock has what can only be described as a “Fun” way of forcing you to turn it off. It wakes you 3 minutes before it is due to go off, and then you must “cut” the right wire on the bomb interface, lest a large “Bang” will sound, waking everyone in your neighborhood. Failure constitutes running out of time (Dude, 3 minutes to pull apart 2 plugs…) or by pulling apart the wrong combination of wires (Ahh, so that’s what the lights on the side are for…).
Now, I advise not importing possibly the greatest alarm clock in history, because you will be labeled as a terrorist, despite it’s payload being a large noise. This may be awesome, but you don’t want months of interrogation just to get it…
