Entries Tagged 'Soapbox' ↓

Palm’s rolled out its latest Windows Mobile phone – the Treo Pro. Reviews are mixed; some call it its most polished design to date, others call it a lacklustre, boring offering.

My personal experience with it – it’s certainly more streamlined than previous Treos, with good build quality and a nice, but not excellent, screen. Windows Mobile users might take a shine to it, but apart from that the phone doesn’t exactly redeem Palm’s failing fortunes.

And it’s boring. Unabashedly, undeniably boring. Is it a Treo? Or is it a Treo trying to be a BlackBerry? The Treo QWERTY thumb keyboards were what sold a lot of business users on the phone’s merits. But the keyboard in this iteration just doesn’t have the same level of comfort though it is a lot prettier.

There still is hope for Palm, or so it claims once CES rolls around. A super secret media-only event will show off what Palm calls its NEW-ness. It’s inevitable that it will be a new device. But the real question is whether it will be good enough to keep the Palm brand alive. Or will it just be another bland disappointment?

So I was loading up the Nokia Music Player to look for some songs to download (more on my experiences with that and the Nokia Music Store in a future post), and I notice the little button labeled ‘Comes With Music’, as you can see in the picture above. Look to where the big red arrow is pointing, if it isn’t too obvious. Now, the last time I loaded the NMP app on my home PC was a couple of months back when the app was still at V1.0. Just a few minutes ago, the app prompted me to download and install an update, which brought me to V1.1, and the Comes With Music button, which I hadn’t seen until today.

In brief, Comes With Music is basically a subscription service attached to a particular device (with the Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic being one of the first devices to sport the service). This service allows you to download and listen to just about any track available in the Nokia Music Store library, for a full year. Once the subscription ends, all the tracks downloaded are yours to keep on your PC and your Comes With Music device.

Clicking on the button lead me to a promo splash page, touting the awesome and |337 revolution that the Comes With Music initiative would bring to the mobile music scene, and the statement that the service would be available in Singapore real soon. More than likely this is to coincide with the official retail release of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Maybe during the first few weeks of 2009, perhaps?

While working sets of the 5800 XpressMusic have already been made available through export channels not directly affiliated with Nokia Singapore (see here for a good example), this is a launch i’m really looking forward to; not so much to try out a market-ready release of the 5800, but also how well the Comes With Music service works.

Macworld 2009′s coming up in a little over a month, and as usual, the Mac faithful are already throwing ideas into the wind on what Apple will announce in one of the most significant tech-related events to start off the year.

While i’m admittedly not the most knowledgeable around on all things Apple, come January 5th, i’ll be neck-deep among the hordes of Mac acolytes thronging through San Francisco.

Before that happens though, here’s my take on what Apple (i.e. Steve Jobs) will most likely talk about:

• Mac Pro – The Mac Pro’s been lying rather quiet, and since Intel’s gone and announced their Core i7 platform, this is a good time as any to finally bring some fresh blood to Apple’s high-end workstations. Nehalem, here they come.
• Mac Mini / iMac- The ‘forgotten child’ of Apple’s product lineup, the Mac Mini hasn’t seen an update since getting fitted with Core 2 Duo chips in 2007. It’s either Apple’s going to officially sink the product line, or announce an update. My gut says update, but with some of the new 65W quad-core chips from Intel. These babies make excellent media centers, and as they bring a more affordable side to owning an Apple-branded computer, cutting these out of the lineup wouldn’t make a lot of sense where product segmentation is concerned. On the other hand, Apple might also stuff these quad-core chips into their iMac lineup.
• 32GB iPhone / 64GB iPod Touch – More storage is always a good idea, and i’m hoping that Apple will ditch the 8GB iPod Touch while introducing a 64GB variant, pushing the 32GB model down the price ladder. Similarly, a 32GB iPhone would be very welcome; 8GB or even 16GB doesn’t really cut it, not when the 32GB iPod Touch’s already been around for quite some time.

What Apple’ll likely NOT announce:

• Snow Leopard @ Mac OS 10.6 - Initially announced during WWDC earlier in June this year, Apple’s latest big update to their operating system was stated as only shipping sometime mid 2009, likely in time for WWDC 2009.
• An Apple Netbook - Pricing themselves out of the market has never been one of Apple’s aims, not even with the ultra-cheap iPod Shuffle (US$49 on the Apple US online store, S$78 in Singapore). With that in mind, it makes no sense that Apple would announce a netbook product, and even less sense that they’d adopt the Intel Atom (if any) to power one.
• Blu-ray on a Mac – Forget it. Despite the death of HD-DVD, Blu-ray isn’t getting anywhere closer to toppling DVD. Apple’s always made it a point to go cutting edge, but at this point in time, Blu-ray is far from cutting edge, and still a little too expensive to appeal to the mainstream.

What do YOU think Steve-o will announce at Macworld?