Actually you can make $9.99 in buying this Nokia 6682 from Amazon if you send for this rebate…. Of course you’ll be giving it right back to Sprint for the included service plan over the next two years.
But hey, it’s becoming more and more easy for the everday user to pick up a Flash Lite enabled device. So go get one before the offer expires.
With tax-free day in Massachussetts, I decided to bite the bullet and pick up a Mac Mini for er, my son. That’s actually him holding it. Despite being asked if I wanted applecare about 30 times, the experience in buying it was pleasant. It was my first real purchase from an Apple store and I have to say that they were friendly and knowledgable. I guess I may be a different kind of customer, since when I go to make a purchase, I know exactly what I want. A lot of times I think they feel the need to educate if not sell to their customers. Of course if I had the time, I could educate them in more than a few things, but enough with my geek ego.
So anyway, one sanfu. The first one I got was a lemon. It had all sorts of hardware errors, random restarts, the works. So I brought it back expecting a fist fight and instead found myself walking out with a new one within 5 minutes. Good enough for me.
Right out of the box, the little guy is money. It came with iLife06 and the Front Row app, and while it’s understated compared to what I’m used to, XBox Media Center, it holds up pretty well as a media center portal. The fluidity and intuitiveness of the UI is top-notch. And as far as everyday tasks, the performance is far better than average, even with the Core Solo 1.5ghz processor. Of course I’ll be cracking it open to upgrade the ram (which I’m told is harrowing), and seeing what the machine looks like nakie soon. I’ll share some pics.
One thing that really hits home though with the Intel processor is backwards compatability. It reminds me of the Macworld I worked at in the early 90’s when they released the PowerPC based Power Mac’s. Back then, you slowly started seeing apps originally built at 68k to support the old 040 architechture start to offer new native binaries for the new hardware as well. Of course back then we didn’t have Rosetta, which allows for G4-G5 apps to work with the new Intel macs.
In loading up a couple non-Intel compiled apps, I definitely see a performance hit. Especially with anything that relies on hardware, like games and such. But the good news is like the 68k conversion, we’ll soon have native binaries for everything we need within a year or two to reap all the benefits of these newer, faster chips.
Haven’t PC’d it yet with Boot Camp, but I already went through the process on my brother-in-laws Black Macbook, and like everything else Apple, it was easy. I’ll be doing this to the Mini when my son finishes his webpage using iWeb. Even a six-year-old wants his own webpage these days.
I just picked the Miglia TVMini HD for, er, research. With this little box you can bring HD anywhere you go with a Mac laptop, provided there are terresial HD signals available. Here in the Boston area, we have about 20 channels that can be pulled down and stay locked in. Most of the programming comes in at 720p, but almost all primetime content comes in at a beautiful 1080i.
The other amazing trick it does is pull down non-encrypted HD signals off of a standard cable line. So basically, for the $6.95 a month I pay for basic cable, I get access to all the bells and whistles that you need an HD cable reciever for and don’t have to rely on the included antenna. It even picked up some weird on-demmand content. The Batman Returns still you see below was just randomly playing, even at one point it rewound for about a minute and started again. Hey, whatever, I’ll take it.
The picture quality and the playback is truly stunning, even at standard definition. The included software also allows for the recording and conversion for just about any format you can think of (Divx, Quicktime, wmv, H.264). It even has an Ipod button that will send your recorded video there in one click.
My idea for this is to pair it with a Mac Mini and go DVI into my plasma at a native resolution 0f 1280×768. Since it provides full integration with Apple’s Front Row, I can then surf, schedule program records with TitanTV (also free), and export to burn to DVD all from my couch. Now if Apple were really smart, they would integrate this functionality into the Mac Mini. Who would need a Tivo when you have that?
Mariam Dohlkawala from India Games has written this great article for Adobe on shared objects. When Flash Lite 2 came out it was really a giant leap forward, adding a lot of much needed new feature sets. One great one is shared objects allowing for data storage locally on the device. With this you can easily save data such as high score, user preferences, you name it. India Games continues to ride the bleeding edge on Flash Lite content and games, so check it out.
RobToole.com 