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Despite all the (justified) grieve on breaking MacBook(Pro)s & crashing Leopards, this rumoured, ultramobile, flash-based sub-notebook would probably make me pull out my credit-card immediately… all rumours collected at Mahalo.

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another long expected, hot gadget got its official release yesterday: the Nokia N810 internet tablet, successor to the N770&N800 series. the most fundamental change of course is the folding keyboard, which together with the mozilla-browser (including flash-support) should offer a better & more complete mobile web-experience than lets say the iPhone. that is, if you’re near a wifi-access point, since the N810 doesn’t feature GSM/UMTS connectivity. you may however use your bluetooth-paired phone as a modem. since Nokia’s tablet-series is linux-based, there are plenty of 3rd-party applications to choose from.

btw, TabletBlog is a recommended read for anyone interested in these sort of devices…

I’ve first written about chumby over a year ago, and now it’s finally available (although the store is currently invite-only for folks who have pre-registered, which as it happens I have ). chumby is a hackable gadget featuring WiFi, USB-ports, integrated speakers, squeeze- & acceleration-sensors and a 3.5″ LCD-display. users may choose from more than hundred software-widgets which turn a chumby into a YouTube-client, an RSS-reader, a calendar or a Facebook-/Flickr-photoframe. since the product is designed to be open for both software- & hardware-hacks, chumby seems to be the perfect device to waste some time with. and for USD 180,- & free shipping I’m really considering getting one of those…hmm. some things I’ld like to do with chumby:

• monitoring your web-servers’ uptime (a la twittermon)
• remote-control my squeezebox, using the chumby to browse the music/video-library (thinking of the Sonos-remote control)
• use it as a streaming audio-client for online radio or on-demand archives like play.fm

what would you use this gadget for? do you think it’s any good? opinions welcome!

music recommendation has seemingly been dominated by Last.fm recently (new widgets, video-content, mashups), while competitor & innovator Pandora was less lucky being forced to shut down services outside the US. at yesterdays press-event at the Museum of Modern Art (SF), Pandora  reported back with an impressive array of announcements, including…

•   …a much needed revamp of their website, aiming to bring Pandora’s social networking-features to the attention of 6.9mio registered users
• …integration with  the Sonos Digital Music System, bringing personalized radio into every corner of your house (read my in-depth review of the Sonos at PLAY.FM)
• …a mobile WiFi-player jointly developed with SanDisk & Zing
• …and most groundbreaking - from my point of view - a deal bringing Pandora to Sprint-cellphones across the United States…music recommendation finally goes mobile!

related articles: Pandora, Last.fm

Simeon Simeonov has more details on a possible Google Phone (or Gphone). sources remain undisclosed, so its unclear if his claims on the Gphone’s vector-based presentation layer, the size of Googles product team and the planned distribution (involving multiple carriers in fulfillment of Google’s own marketing) can stand up to reality.

in what can be described as a precautious concession to the music industry, Microsoft decided to cripple the most interesting feature that might have put their recently released Zune media-player atop of Apples predominant iPod series: the ability to share tracks with other Zune-users over WiFi is restricted to DRMed songs purchased/rented from zune.net. transmitted songs can be played back three times within three days, before finally expiring. legal media without DRM-restrictions (f.e. podcasts) are excluded from WiFi-sharing - a major bummer, and - I guess - a major opportunity missed by Microsoft to own the areas of audio- & video-blogs.

it was only a matter of time until smart hacks allow zune-users to fully utilize the wireless capabilities of their devices. a workaround that popped up at Gizmodo today, allows wireless sharing of any filetype by renaming the files to .jpg. the catch of this ridiculously simple ‘hack’ seems to be, that both sending & receiving Zune have to to the renaming from a connected PC. however, I’m optimistic that when the Zune finally hits europe’s shelves in march 2007, we’ll have plenty of patches to overcome such restricitions…

yesterday, Sean Adams - CEO and founder of SlimDevices - announced the aquisition of his company by Logitech (see the SlimDevices forums or the official pressrelease). according to both companies’ statements, development of the Squeezebox- & Transporter network audio-clients will stay independently at SlimDevices, while Logitech will help distributing the devices - which already enjoy very good reputation among the geek-crowd - to a mass market. being an owner of a Squeezebox myself, I’m happy to hear that Logitech will continue the Open-Source-based efforts of SlimDevices, which produced hundreds of user-created extensions to date.

with recently released version 2.0 software-update, Sonos integrates support for Rhapsody’s music-subscription service with their network audio-player. while competitor Slim Devices supports playback of Rhapsody on their Squeezebox-players only when looped through a Windows XP PC running Rhapsody software, Sonos goes a big step further by enabling stand-alone access to the library. Rhapsody offers 2millions of tracks, genre-based- and customized radio and music recommendations - all browsable on the sleek Sonos remote. other than Rhapsody-integration, the software upgrade includes more internet radiostations, an alarm-clock & scheduled music feature, enhanced language support (french, italian, spanish) and several minor additions regarding format- & metatag-support.

update: Jeremy Toeman has an extensive hands-on review.

Apple’s ‘Showtime’-event focussed on digital media just ended 2 hours ago, and like with augusts WWDC keynote, I’m not too impressed with the outcome. check TechCrunch for a brief summary or Engadget for an extremley detailed live-blog + hands-on reports with all products.

as expected, iTMS now sells feature-movie downloads for as low as $13 (pre-orders and first-week buyers) and $15 (regular price) - that’s right in the middle of Amazon’s Unbox rates ($8-20). movies are encoded in 640×480 H.264 (nearly DVD-quality), include Dolby Surround, and can of course be put on any video-enabled iPod under the same DRM-restrictions as iTMS tv-shows. while this sounds fine, the downside is that - as of today - the iTMS is starting with a mere 75 movie-titles from several Disney-studios.

Apple supplements the iTMS with iTunes 7 (cosmetic changes on the user-interface, album-artwork and gapless playback - a feature I ranted about some time ago) and several new iPod-models. there’s a new aluminium Nano in four selected colours (remember the mini-days) a tiny, square successor to the Shuffle (very cool) and an upgraded 5.5G iPod (better battery life, lower price, more storage - yawn). still missing: the touchscreen-video-iPod which is rumoured about since…well, anyway.

one more thing - iTV (codename!), a streaming-client connecting to any TV-set is announced for early 2007. through a Frontrow-like interface, iTV will bring your existing iTunes-library to your living-room. iTV won’t include any storage itself, and it’s unclear if it will be able to access media-files on a non-iTunes-fileshare or NAS-device (probably not, and even if, there won’t be any support for your pirated backup-divx ).