As I promised ear­lier, I would write a review about TOMTOM. I have had the device now a couple of months, although I find the device the eas­i­est to use cur­rently avail­able in the indus­try, I have some real com­plaints, actu­ally I only have two. On the hard­ware side the bat­tery life, which is really shame­ful! I know I can charge the device with my cig­a­rette lighter but thats not really the point of a portable device. With modern Lithium-​Ion bat­ter­ies nowa­days you can expect bat­tery life of 5 hours or more. While it charges quickly, after less than two hours on the road the little bat­tery indi­ca­tor at the lower right would start to flash yellow… bugger. My second com­plaint is about the soft­ware, I would rather see TOMTOM write a native Cocoa appli­ca­tion, JAVA tech­nol­ogy is okay, but one way or an other, JAVA pro­gram­mers seem only to be able to pro­gram buggy and crappy pro­grams, that’s at least my expe­ri­ence. I have tried mul­ti­ple times using the TOMTOM Home soft­ware, it can brick your TOMTOM (the famous blink­ing red cross)! Luck­ily I had backed-​up my device so it wasn’t a prob­lem. I can repro­duce it every time. The soft­ware really sucks balls big time! SO should you buy a TOMTOM? I would say yes, it’s always right in find­ing my loca­tions, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, is really easy to use and when I buy a new car I don’t have to migrate or redo all my data or settings.

Due to the nature of Adobe Flash plugin, Adobe’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware would need to be recom­piled and opti­mized for the ARM archi­tec­ture for run­ning on mobile devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch, so is stated by many web­sites. Quick­time wasn’t build from the ground up to sup­port these devices either (power and memory con­sump­tion wise). But not all QuickTime’s codec’s are sup­ported only H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-​Complexity ver­sion of the H.264 Base­line Profile…(see iPhone Specs for more infor­ma­tion). My ques­tion is: IS THIS TRUE? Adobe is oper­at­ing on Apple’s play­ground (Format Wars). HD-​DVD has left the build­ing in favor of BR-​DVD. But the dig­i­tal format for video isn’t decided yet! H.264, Win­dows Media or Adobe Flash. Adobe has an install base of 90%> it even comes bun­dled with Mac OS X. Quick­Time is installed on every com­puter with iTunes (Apple’s Trojan Horse) and every Mac. Apple and Adobe are com­peti­tors busi­ness wise: Final Cut Pro isn’t one of Adobe’s favorite appli­ca­tions. Apple is expand­ing hor­i­zon­tal in the soft­ware market. Rumors even point to trou­ble in the mar­riage of Apple/Adobe when Apple released iPhoto. Apple had to down­grade iPhoto’s fea­tures. When Adobe bought Macro­me­dia, there was no com­peti­tor left in the market and com­pe­ti­tion is always good! Either Apple will solve our prob­lem or Adobe will the market demands a solu­tion. I am not a big Flash fan as you prob­a­bly know so I am not cheer­ing on Adobe side.

The Inter­na­tional Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show 2008 just launched today in Las Vegas! It will take place Jan­u­ary 7-10. A lot of gad­gets & good­ies will be released during these days. One I would like to show you is this enter­tain­ment system called the Lady­bug from Vestal­ife.

There’s simply noth­ing quite like the Vestal­ife Lady­bug. Flip out the speaker “wings” on this sleek, high-​tech device and you have an iPod-based enter­tain­ment system fea­tur­ing a built-​in sub-​woofer for lots of bass, a dig­i­tal ampli­fier and one of the coolest soft-​touch fin­ishes you’ve ever expe­ri­enced. Sit it on a counter. Take it with you. The Vestal­ife Lady­bug is designed to be part of your life.

My trusty Log­itech MX1000 died on me today, so I had to replace it. I fired up Safari and vis­ited the Log­itech web­site. After drop­ping my eye-​ball on the MX Air Recharge­able Cord­less Air Mouse, I chose the MX Rev­o­lu­tion, I don’t see myself Wii-​ing-​up those Pho­to­shop doc­u­ments.

So we’re now cruis­ing at dig­i­tal full-​speed 2.4GHz, flaw­lessly fight­ing those pixels with the Advanced Laser Engine. This mouse made me think of the Apple Pro Mouse com­mer­cial: “Born To Be Wild“, the only dif­fer­ence is the Apple Pro Mouse is (a still)born, this mouse is wild.

Sonnet released a 21-in-1 Mul­ti­me­dia Memory Card Reader & Writer. The ExpressCard/34 is a simple and fast solu­tion for moving files between your elec­tronic devices’ memory cards and Mac­Book hard drive, with no cables required. This device works with the most pop­u­lar memory card for­mats, includ­ing Memory Stick, MMC (Mul­ti­me­dia Card), SD (Secure Dig­i­tal), XD-​Picture Card, and all their variations—wide com­pat­i­bil­ity enables you to work with memory cards used in devices such as dig­i­tal cam­eras, cell phones, MP3 play­ers, dig­i­tal pic­ture frames, and more!

For all ya gadget lovers out there, Dane Elec announced the future avail­abil­ity of a pencil allow­ing record­ing your text as you write it.
The system is based on 2 com­po­nents: a pencil and a small USB key (on the top) which fea­ture micro­phone and elec­tron­ics able to local­ize pencil’s posi­tions and move­ments. Vector-​based infor­ma­tion are then recorded on the 1GB NAND memory included, you will then simply trans­fer the writ­ten text to a com­puter thanks to a ded­i­cated appli­ca­tion (Mac OS X ver­sion avail­able).
The ZPen should be avail­able for Q1 2008 and its price is announced around €129.

I am the lucky owner of an iPod touch. I’ve bought the device for mobile enter­tain­ment (music & video). Apple deliv­ers a very crappy user expe­ri­ence with their Quick­Time Trail­ers site: I can’t play their default trail­ers, I am being for­warded to their ’special’ iPhone sec­tion, where I get the ultimate-​postage-​stamp-​sized-​crappy-​compressed trailer there is avail­able. Maybe it’s one-​size-​fits-​all con­cept isn’t bad for the “iPod fatty” user, but the qual­ity on my iPod is shame­ful! What hap­pened to all those lovely pixels? Let me decide if I want to down­load the 640×336 ver­sion or the 320×172 ver­sion. I can do it on my desk­top, so why not on my iPod? Okay, 320×172 is small, but that doesn’t mean that the qual­ity has to be so crappy!
So think you can do better huh…! Well yeah! I haven’t got the RAW-​DV footage but I’ve taken the 480p ver­sion to show my point. Even the recom­pressed mate­r­ial is better then theirs. Here’s are the two files for com­par­i­son: the orig­i­nal Clover­field Trailer (320) versus the recom­pressed Clover­field Trailer (640). Just put them on your iPod for com­par­is­ment.