iPhone and the End of PC Era. Steve Jobs is a great storyteller. If he were a fiction writer, he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Tom Clancy and John Grisham. Mesmerizing in prose, master of the climax. Today’s performance at the Macworld Keynote was no different. We hyper clicked, reloaded websites and traded SMS messages trying to find out more details about new iPhone, the real thing, not the poser that came to market a little while ago. And how he teased us, taking two hours to let us know that it will be available in June 2007.
And even though it is going to cost an ungodly amount, there is a good chance we might get one. “From this day forward we’re going to be known as Apple, Inc. That also might be the epitaph of the PC era. Dropping Computer from its name is a sure sign that Apple, from this point forward, is a consumer electronics company, a mobile handset maker – one that also makes computer hardware and software as well.
Quotes via Engadget. LoudHush. Comverse demos Second Life on mobile phones. Comverse demos Second Life on mobile phones Thu Feb 8, 2007 1:24pm PST By Adam Reuters SECOND LIFE, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Software firm Comverse Technology has created an application that runs Second Life on Java-enabled mobile phones, along with other software that allows integrated SMS and instant messaging and the streaming of mobile video directly in-world. “People are spending more and more time in virtual worlds,” Daphna Steinmetz, head of Comverse Innovation Labs, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.
“We want to bring closer the first life and the Second Life.” The software was developed over the last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. “On IPTV you can actually do most of the things you can do on the PC because the screen is very large, and the remote has lots of keys, so you can jump, fly, write a message,” Steinmetz said. Opera Mini™
Cloud Art. News Corp wants to get into the education market and plans to introduce a tablet for students called the Amplify Tablet. The Amplify Tablet will be a 10 inch tablet running Google Android with a custom user interface and educational software. It’s manufactured by Asus, but it will be sold under the Amplify brand (much like the Asus-built Nexus 7 tablet is sold by Google). It features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, an 8.5 hour battery, an IPS display, and a 5MP camera.
According to the spec sheet, it’s “similar to the Asus Transformer Pad TF300TL), The tablets will sell for $299 and up, and News Corp will also charge schools a subscription fee for software and support. A higher-end Amplify Tablet Plus, for students who do not have wireless access at home, comes with a 4G data plan and costs $349. On Wednesday at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Texas, Joel Klein, a former New York City schools chancellor, who leads the unit of News Corporation made the official announcement.