hardware - page 51

Motorola’s Rokr is a stinkr, according to Mobile Tracker.

“One of the first things I noticed about the ROKR E1 was that it is very slow when iTunes is playing music. This holds true if you’re inside iTunes or if it is hidden. For a phone with music features being so central, this is a fatal flaw. My unit couln’t even keep the play time counter working smoothly (see video). When iTunes is playing a song menus are also slow and I easily typed faster than it could keep up with. Navigating through menus is also painful–count on a second or two after you touch a button for it to respond.

… I’m happy to report some good news though, the speakers on the ROKR E1 sound amazing. Great quality and even bass (it has a bit of rumble when you hold it). Everyone I showed the E1 off to was impressed by the built-in speakers. The idea of stereo speakers on a device this small should be ridiculous, but they sound great. Of course you’ll run through the battery faster using the speakers, but this is one thing that even the iPod cannot do.”

Victor Agreda, Jr. , who normally posts over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, kindly posted some predictions over here about Apple’s announcement in New York Wednesday, saving me the trouble.

Victor writes:

“The PowerBooks will get iSights, as will Apple LCD monitors. We’ll see a sort of iPhoto Pro, but mostly it’ll be a cataloging tool with great RAW support.

Also some other software surprises, and of course, the updates to the G5 towers (dual core dualies, yeah baby!).

You heard it here first for some reason.”

About the anticipated updates, analyst Rob Enderle said: “Apple is very good at getting people revved up into a frenzy to buy something from the company even if they’re not sure what.”

Girl hacker Neisha Erin Stadelhofer managed to get Mac OS 7.5 running on her PSP. She loaded a 680×0 emulator on top of an x86 emulator. It’s not exactly snappy: it takes four hours to boot up.

Spotted on Flickr, a homemade iPod speaker system from someone called ianbrown42 (surely not the great Ian Brown):

“These are remote iPod speakers I scratch-built for my wife’s iPod shuffle. It’s all scientific glass and aluminium construction. The sub-woofer is an inverted glass dome, and a fresnel lens from a rail-car. The guts of the thing is borrowed from a stock computer amp, whilst the speakers themselves are Apple Pro’s.”

“You can see from this alternate view that the tripod legs are made from aluminium garden trowles, polished up.

You can see the CD player I used to test it in the bottom right corner – this thing is huge, and weighs a ton (15 kilos).

The sound is pretty good, as you would expect of apple speakers, but the sub-woofer thumps a bit. Overall a fun project!”