Hey, guys. I, John Biggs, will be in Hong Kong and Guangdong next week (November 30-December 5) to visit some folks and would love to meet up with Web 2.0 and gadget purveyors in mother China. If you would like to chat, drop me a line at john @ crunchgear.com and let me know what’s up. I’m thinking about doing an informal meet-up on Thursday so advice on places to meet in Hong Kong are welcome.

Look forward to hearing from you all and “Ni Hao!”

If you were a hardware manufacturer and your new phone was a ROMist’s delight you’d be all like “Our phone plays Doom and totally plays Super Mario Bros. 3.” Right? You’d be bragging from here to Scranton.

Well, Nokia tried to do that with the new N900 and got in huge trouble with Nintendo. They showed a video of an SNES emulator running on the device with this voiceover.

“There’s already a bunch of great retro gaming emulator apps available for you to download,” says the video, which shows buttons that appear to open emulators for systems including Nintendo’s Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES and SNES.

Ummm, right. Good choice. Nintendo is probably going to totally sue them out of business now. You know they should have just shown Altered Beast on a Genesis emulator and been done with it.

via EdgeOnline

But these Orbeos OLED lights are as bright and efficient as any LED or CFL, but are both warm, diffuse, and dimmable. I might choose them over regular bulbs just because they have the best of all worlds.

They’re extremely flat, so they can go just about anywhere, but that same flatness means they won’t work to illuminate a whole area unless you have a few. Some OLEDs, however, are flexible, and once they can stretch the matrix into a light bulb-esque shape, you might be able to put them into your regular sockets.

[via OLED-Display.net]

You can now run Chromium OS, the open source developmental version of Google Chrome OS, on your Dell Mini 10v. Don’t have one? Neither do I, so don’t feel too bad.

It make take some time to set up. For one, the download (an image file), as put together by a few of Dell’s Linux guys, weighs in at 7.5GB. Not only will that take a while to download, but you’ll also need a flash drive with at least 8GB of free space on there—another thing I don’t have. You’ll also need access to another Linux-based computer (well, any computer that can run the “dd” command) to get everything up and running.

Beyond that, it does appear to be fairly painless to instal. You download said image file then copy it from the Linux computer using “dd” to the flash drive. You take this flash drive, stick it into you Dell Mini 10, and away you go!

What’s your reward for going through all that? Running Chromium OS, of course. Think of it as Google Chrome OS, but way alpha.

I’m going to file this under the “Why would you bother doing that? Because you can” category.

via Liliputing

The Call of Duty franchise has sold over 55 million copies of its games across platforms to date, and that number is only expected to rise with the holiday season upon us.

Even with the criticism leveled against Modern Warfare 2 because of the graphic nature of one of its levels, the game is being hailed by critics and will most definitely be in the running for game of the year.

The games are published and owned by Activision, and the two main developers have been Infinity Ward and Treyarch, but others have had a hand in some of the spin-off and hand-held versions of the games.

I suppose that these projections, which we may safely call optimistic, are based on geometric growth (unwarranted) from one year’s figures (essentially invent) and failed to take into account the patent illegality of their entire enterprise. Needless to say, these numbers were not met. Psystar sold a fraction of a fraction of what it promised investors, so even if it were to escape total destruction by Apple’s hands, it would simply be dismembered by its mysterious creditors.

I would have welcomed a Psystar laptop, the planned hardware which was to make up the bulk of their fantasy sales, since our own Psystar desktop worked perfectly well. For all I know, Biggs is still using it. I’m writing this on my MacBook Pro, but I know that I as well as many people I know would welcome a cheap, yet non-hackintosh, OS X laptop.

Oh well. This story held our interest because, deep within, we felt it betokened the inevitable confrontation between Apple lovers and the sternly limited Jobsian world they’ve come to live in. You can be sure that this isn’t the last we’ll hear from clone-makers, which seem, like domestic weeds, to continue to sprout in the areas you thought were clear and cultivated. In fact, the wild but unpredictable growth of dandelions like Psystar, PearC, and Power Computing (remember them?) will continue because, let’s be honest, if you could pay less for your Mac, you would. That’s called a market — and damn the EULAs.

Despite what the Internet said a few weeks ago, Microsoft tapped Family Guy to advertise Windows 7. The first one aired last weekend, but the video above and the one after the jump have just been posted to YouTube proving the partnership isn’t dead after all. Watch and enjoy, but don’t expect anything edgy and hip.

[via Gizmodo]

Interrupting your Thanksgiving Day weekend (and my Team Fortress 2 Sniper marathon) with a quick deal that will appeal to many of you (I should hope). You know Steam, right, Valve’s digital distribution deal? There’s a crazy, multi-day Black Friday sale going on right now that includes Left 4 Dead 2 at $37.99 (25 percent off the regular price) and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for $2.49 (75 percent off the regular price). A vanilla bullshit at Starbucks costs more than that.

Keep in mind that this is a multi-day sale. It started yesterday, and will continue for a few more days. My advice is to check the Steam site every morning for the next couple of days lest they sell, I don’t know, Half-Life Source for 75 cents or something.

There’s probably a million and one such deals online. I recommend you keep your eyes on a site like cheapassgamer.com for Black Friday/Cyber Sunday/Cyber Monday deals.

Back to sniping.

Yoichi Wada is the president and CEO of Square Enix. Square Enix is a very big video game developer and publisher, responsible for games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts. Hence, his words mean an awful lot. His latest words: console gaming, as we know it today, has only a few years left in it. The future? It’s all about the network, baby!~

The background: Yoichi Wada gave an interview to MCV, a British publication. Good on him. It’s not exactly a wide-ranging interview, instead strictly focusing on the future of video games. Considering his job title, you’d have to assume he knows what he’s talking about.

The big points: physical media (DVD-based games and the like) has no future, so you’d better be cool with things like Xbox Live, PSN, or Steam; 2005 will be seen as the year that everything changed, when console manufacturers changed their mentality from being primarily hardware/console-based to network-based (Xbox Live and eventually~! PSN); Final Fantasy XIV, which is an MMO, may well be more important for Square Enix than Final Fantasy XIII since it’s part of the “new wave” of online, social games.

OK!

Now that that’s out of that way, well, yeah, Wada is 100 percent correct. Console gaming, as we know it, or even used to know it, will die either with this generation or the next. Think of your Xbox 360 and PS3: they’re basically low-end PCs, especially in the 360’s case. (Though I think it’s safe to say that the PS3 has some life left in it, it’s just going to take someone with a lot of money to actually develop a game from the ground up for the system. I’m thinking God of War III will be that game.) Microsoft is most up-front about this: play with Twitter or Facebook! Watch Zune movies! Have a party with your friends! Oh, also, it can play video games, too!

The Xbox 360 came out four years ago. If it weren’t for Xbox Live, or the constant updates the system has seen via software updates (the NXE, Netflix streaming, Twitter/Facebook, etc.), we’d be clamoring for info about the next Xbox already. When was the last time you read so much as a thinly sourced rumor about the next Xbox?

In other words, we’re going to be with the current generation of consoles for a little while, which speaks to Wadas’ point: from 2005, the network matters just as much, if not more so, than the consoles themselves.

(Incidentally, I’m currently in the process of building a gaming/new main PC to replace a 3-year-old iMac for this very reason: why should I play Team Fortress 2 with, what, 15 other people on Xbox Live (versus the several thousand on the PC version), or play Fallout 3 with no access to mods?. I just bought this monitor, and will be adding components as the weeks go by. Any tips (GPUs, CPUs, motherboards, etc) would be greatly appreciated.)

And then there’s casual games! Not everyone has the time required to play “hardcore” games like Fallout 3 or Dragon Quest, so why not fire up a round of Wii Sports, kill off some steam, then go about your business? Needless to say, game publishers make a nice chunk of change on these “simple” games, being that they cost so little to develop, making them fairly important for the bottom line.

If you want to get crazy, then you can think of things like the OTOY and OnLive and Spawn Labs, which promise, to varying degrees, HD-level games over a broadband connection. How well that actually turns out in the real world, who knows, but you can be guys like Wada are paying attention.

I don’t know, this is all over the place. The gist of it is this: we need to recognize that game consoles are little more than dumbed down, low spec PCs. That’s not an insult, of course, just a statement on their underlying technology. Soon, if not already, it’s going to be less about the number of gigaflops the system can process than wether or not you can play Fun Simulator 2 with 87 of your Twitter friends.

You know what I mean, right? I don’t know, too much apple pie yesterday~!

Flickr

As with most services on Xbox Live, only Gold subscribers get access to the streaming capabilities of last.fm. Since only paying users get access to the service, it seems probable that Microsoft and last.fm are involved in some sort of revenue-sharing agreement, although neither company will comment on this postulation. Either way, this partnership seems to be a great move by both parties. Microsoft adds more features, while last.fm has increased its (potential) userbase.

I have yet to use this service on my 360, but I’m sure many of you have. Sound off in comments and let us know what you think of the latest integration.

Official plot:
The last surviving descendants of three legendary clans are continuously transported to other dimensions to test their martial arts skills against an evil force that seeks to invade and infect the real world.

The movie (whose official site doesn’t work for me) is scheduled for release next year in the US and this is a one-minute promo trailer that features the music from Dark Knight of all movies. Maggie Q (the evil woman in Die Hard 4) plays Mai Shiranui.

Via Worst Previews

Hey, Bargain Hunters, what did you turn up? Report here which stores have the best deals and who actually has inventory. Don’t forget to add city and state info and we can add points to a Google Map this weekend.

Don’t forget to check out our Black Friday deals on CrunchGear.

The Roku is one of my favorite living room devices and it just got better. Now it’s $64.99 plus shipping and lets you watch Netflix, Amazon, and MLB content along with Facebook and Blip.tv videos. Good, good stuff.

Click through to figure out how to get the deal.

The Roku HD-XR Player retails for $129.99, but will be available for just $64.99 (plus FREE SHIPPING) on our Black Friday website when it opens on Friday morning. Details on how the offer will work are below:

1. Go to http://blackfriday.roku.com starting at 11:00AM Eastern Standard Time (8:00AM Pacific Standard Time) Friday morning.
2. Follow the instructions and enter the code “hdxrsteal” at checkout. The code can be applied to one Roku HD-XR Player.

Maybe it’s just me, but this dual-screen notebook Kojinsha started selling in Japan today [JP] looks very futuristic (and very cool) to me. The main selling point is that you get not one but two 10.1-inch LCD screens in a compact body (size: 280×210×19〜42mm, weight: 1.84kg). And you can even buy the DZ6KH16E, which looks like a normal notebook when you use just one of the screens, if you live outside Japan.

The two sliding LCDs feature 1,024×600 resolution and LED backlights each. The notebook also has an Athlon Neo MV-40 (1.6GHz) with a RS780MN chipset and an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card, 1GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), a 160GB HDD, WiFi, three USB ports, a 1.3MP web camera, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, slots for SD/microSD/MMC/memory sticks and a digital TV tuner (which will work only in Japan and parts of South America) on board. Kojinsha says buyers can expect around 4.5 hours of battery life.

Kohjinsha started selling the DZ6KH16E in Japan today. People living outside this country can get the notebook over at Geek Stuff 4 U for $1,111.28 (Windows and other extras make it more expensive). But remember this is a Japanese device, meaning you’ll have to live with a keyboard with a Japanese layout.

Thus the “Smartbook Zenide” in the variant of “Crystal” in a limited edition of 20 pieces For the price of cheap 2001, – EUR (in words: Euro two thousand and one), then there is also a bottle of champagne and an expensive suitcase. The fact that it is commonplace for a cheap netbook-from China, but this changes nothing.

Sanyo is in the news today, and again it’s about the company’s green tech power. The company today announced [JP] it will do everything to become Japan’s top player in the domestic solar industry by 2012 and eventually one of the top three solar companies on a global level. At the same time, the Nikkei reports [registration required, paid subscription] that Sanyo has succeeded in developing a solar cell that’s thinner than a human hair.

The company says it will benefit greatly from a new feed-in tariff program by the Japanese government introduced this month for green energy firms. Another factor for Sanyo’s self-confidence should be the speed with which it innovates. Their new prototype solar cell is just 58 micrometers thick, about one-fourth of most solar cells currently out there. (Sorry, there’s no picture available yet)

It’s made of two types of silicon whose structure Sanyo optimized to achieve a conversion efficiency of 22%. It’s said to be as bendable as paper, meaning it can be used for a variety of purposes, for example on uneven surfaces.

Sanyo says this technology might help reduce prices by as much as 25% when compared to solar cells available today. The company wants to commercialize the solar cells by 2020.