Beatles songs will now be on American Idol, which is now on iTunes. Clearly the natural line of progression is to proclaim that the Beatles catalogue is one step closer to iTunes, right? I’d say that’s a leap of faith I’m not willing to take just yet. If word can leak about Prince Harry being in Afghanistan, then word should be able to leak about any potential Beatles-iTunes deal.
But if y’all wanna speculate, be my guest. It’s not like you can’t find the whole Beatles discography on every BitTorrent site out there anyway.
Hints that the Beatles iTunes launch getting closer? 1 to 2 weeks? [Macenstein]
So here we are less than a week away from the release of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK from Apple, and already people are getting cranky.
The good people at iLounge are pretty sure that at least three of aspects of the yet-to-be-announced plans are going to piss people off. But really, every time Apple does anything, people get pissed off.
The trio of issues is as follows: People are going to be upset that they can only download apps via iTunes, Apple will select exactly which apps iTunes will carry, and app makers won’t have access to the dock connector, so add-on GPS, Bluetooth dongles, and other hardware won’t be available.
The article breaks it down with details and, if you’re an iPhone or fellow iPod Touch user, definately worth a read.
iPhone/iPod SDK: Apple to approve, distribute apps, limit add-ons [iLounge]
A Circuit City employee discovered that new PS3 shipments have the CECHH01 model number. For those playing at home, that model number corresponds to the white PS3, which has been rumored for release here for some time now.
Supposedly retailers are to exhaust their supply of the current 40GB model that comes with Spider-Man 3 before whipping out the white model.
Is one random dude in a Circuit City trustworthy? We’ll find out soon enough.
White PS3 Due In March? [Kotaku]
There may be blood, but it won’t be on HD DVD.
Paramount clarified earlier reports concerning its upcoming HD DVD release schedule. The final two HD DVD releases will be Into the Wild (anyone see that? Opie seemed to like it.) and Things We Lost in the Fire. They are currently scheduled to be released next week. Paramount isn’t expected to release movies on Blu-ray until the summer, meaning we’ll be waiting an awful long time to see There Will Be Blood in 1080p. (Not that I don’t already have the DVD screener. But really, high-def or bust.)
Also, Bee Movie on HD DVD has been canceled.
Paramount Cancels Majority of HD DVD Slate (UPDATED) [High-Def Digest]
Clear the haze (from your bong), tweak your back (for an acid trip), and put down those hippie sticks (do you guys know what those were called? I forget), Deadheads. A handful of GD tracks are hitting Rock Band next week so pay attention.
Grateful Dead Pack (all songs by the Grateful Dead)
“China Cat Sunflower” (Master)
“Casey Jones” (Master)
“Sugar Magnolia” (Master)
“Truckin” (Master)
“Franklin’s Tower” (Master)
“I Need A Miracle” (Master)
All songs can be bought individually for $1.99 (160 Microsoft Points) or the whole pack can be purchased for $9.99 (800 Microsoft Points).
Rock Band Forums
Zenith is a well known and respected house in the world of horology. They made the first automatic chronograph and fell on hard times during the quartz crisis of the 1980s. They came back recently with some bold designs. Now, however, they apparently have been taking acid because this is one of the ugliest watches I’ve seen in a long time and probably costs more than my house. This thing has a 3D tourbillon, which has a little ring that rotates in three dimensions to offset the effects of gravity on the watch mechanism. It beats at 36,000 vibrations an hour — that’s a lot — and is made of Kevlar and titanium. Considering Zenith used to make watches for men and not snacks for robots, it’s sad to see how far this house has fallen.
Product Page via WWR
We haven’t covered patents in quite some time, simply because companies patent everything and that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll ever produce them, but this patent filed by RIM seems to hold some water. This basically means we’ll have bigger screen BBs (duh) that are possibly touchscreen as well. It retains the trackball, which I’m ok with, but it’s the rest of the patent that intrigues me.
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You may know voice actor John DiMaggio from hit cartoons such as Futurama where he’s the voice of the lovable robot, Bender. Speaking of which, has anyone seen the new Futurama movie that came out earlier this year? Any good? He also played Ballmer in “Pirates of Silicon Valley.” Anyway, it just so happens that he’s the voice of Marcus Fenix and Franklin in Gears of War. DiMaggio was recently interviewed by IGN and it appears that he was totally geeking out over it the whole time and decided to spill the beans on a couple of things coming up in the sequel. What secrets did he reveal?
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This trailer isn’t new new (I saw it maybe a month ago before I Am Legend), but it was recently put up on IGN and if you haven’t seen it, now’s your chance. The movie’s coming out on May 2nd, 2008 starring Robert Downey Jr. and directed by Jon Favreau.
Anyone gonna see it? Show of hands?
Iron Man Trailer, Videos and Movies [IGN]
How many times do you say to yourself, “All I want is a phone that works”? So you wonder why companies don’t take that into consideration.
There’s a cute little piece in today’s Old Gray Lady about how cellphone companies go about designing would-be hit phones. They hire focus groups, host weekend retreats and go to all sorta of extremes to try to figure out what Joe Consumer wants in a phone. Do you want a touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, slider or flip? It’s a tough job trying to get consumers to buy the same thing over and over again.
But phone design isn’t all haptic this, holistic that. Nokia is currently designing a environmentally friendly phone, one that’s made out of recycled metal and other materials; it would sell well on the Upper West Side.
Nowhere in the piece is reliability mentioned. No one addresses that fact that, for example, I can’t walk up certain sections of Sixth Avenue without my phone cutting out. Even better, why I can’t use the phone in the eastern half of my apartment. How about we work on that.
Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip [New York Times]
We first saw Tannoy’s i30 iPod dock back in January at CES and now we’ve been able to play with it for an extended period of time. Yeah, I know you’re thinking it’s just another iPod dock among the sea of thousands of iPod docks available now, but this UK-engineered dock is much different. It’s leaps and bounds above the rest. Miley Cyrus never sounded so good.
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Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel’s new CEO and the man in charge of turning the troubled company around, said in a conference call yesterday that Sprint’s still exploring the possibility of a WiMAX partnership with Clearwire.
“Sprint has an enormous asset—nearly 100 megahertz of un-utilized spectrum—and we have the opportunity to have a three-year head start with our Xohm service, true wireless broadband with multi-megabit speed,” he said, according to a mocoNews.net article. “We have had wide ranging discussions with Clearwire on potential relationships but no final agreements have been reached.”
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I wondered if people might enjoy a nice little CrunchGear-themed crossword puzzle. You can find the answers to the clues spread throughout the last few days of posts.
If you enjoy this, leave a comment and I’ll keep trying to set these up for Friday mornings if it seems like enough people are interested.
CrunchWord Puzzle for Friday, February 29th
A man with a stunningly Portuguese name (Nuno Teixeira) has designed an iMac with a curved screen. Called the iMac iView, the concept uses a curved screen because such a screen is better suited to the curvature of the human eye. If the idea sounds familiar, that’s because Alienware demoed a similar display at CES earlier this year. Biggs poo pooed the idea of such a monitor:
No availability or release date, but listen, kid. You have a long life ahead of you. There are girls to meet, beaches to hang out on, things to learn. Don’t be the guy with the big weird three-foot surround monitor. Just don’t do it.
The iView also has an LCD on the back along with two built-in Web cams. Again, she’s just a concept, so don’t get too worked up about it.
Curved iMac has your back… [Yanko Design]
Matt was impressed by the Surface back at CES so I’m inclined to go along based on his judgement. The Sarcastic Gamer gets up close and personal with the Surface’s first game called Firefly. Check out the video and see what it’s all about. It looks really neat.
Power suit, power tie, American Express card, neck-mounted Bluetooth headset. That’s the ticket right there, folks.
The RoadRunner Bluetooth headset with larynx microphone suppresses noise harder than a Fortune 500 company suppresses its cube-dwellers into a life of mundane paper shuffling and mandatory happy hours.
Your voice is transmitted directly from your voice box so the headset is a great fit for convertibles and motorcycles. Good for nine hours of talk time and apparently has a less than one-percent error rate for voice dialing (however that’s been calculated).
It’s around $80 US, shipping from the UK.
RoadRunner Bluetooth Communicator [Pro-Idee UK] via Gadget Review
CAV has some video from the upcoming Ubisoft Lost game, which I suspect will be a stinker on the level of TMNT for the NES. However, they do offer up some plot details including a secret “Hot Coffee” cut scene involving Jack, Ben Linus, the Smoke Monster, and Charlotte. It gets weird but near the end but not nearly as freaky as the Desmond/Crazy Jungle Dinosaur love scene near the end. Check it out!
Incidentally, wasn’t yesterday’s episode really good? They finally figured out that they can reveal information to us. We won’t tell anybody.
Exclusive Lost movies [CAV]
Facebook added a music service yesterday. Musicians can upload their songs, users can play them using the Facebook Music Player and later buy them using the provided iTunes link.
It’s almost like Zuckerberg & Co. saw what a cluttered useless mess MySpace turned into and said, “Yeah, let’s emulate that.” Call me cynical, crazy, uninformed, whatever the case may be, but I’m thinking Facebook is getting close to jumping the shark. The site suffers from feature creep. All these stupid little features and insecure applications—I was changing Biggs’ mood left and right the other day. Me changing his mood. Real secure site.—make the site look more and more amateurish every day.
I may have to ask Zuckerberg at SXSW why he’s riding his little site into the ground. Any other question ideas, leave a comment.
Facebook boosts musicians [Hollywood Reporter]
I was at Best Buy last night looking for some cheap Xbox 360 titles and stumbled upon the pre-order for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. I haven’t seen anything that tells me when it’s coming out and this tells us June. So mark your calendars, folks. (It’s too early to find an appropriate lyric to make this amusing for us all.)
After reading this article from The Register, it’s become blatantly apparent to me that leap year babies are A) mad as hell and B) not going to take it any more. I was born on the first day of February and would like to express my admiration for those of you out there who were born on a day in this great month so callously overlooked by many a web-based form.
Case in point, the automated birthday greeting sent out by Toys ‘R Us mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe. The long-necked jerk won’t send any well-wishes to those of you born on February the 29th, a day he considers “invalid.”
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