Isaiah's Tech

In the midst of this economic crisis I don't know who's willing to spend $887 USD on the HTC Touch Pro2 or $726 USD for the HTC Touch Diamond2. For those prices, I'd definitely rather get the Nokia N97. Greater specs, for just about the same price (more or less) as the Touch Pro2 - although I can't confirm that yet since it's not available yet.

[Engadget]

Yes, you heard it! Mac users are going to have wait until probably Fall for the Google Chrome for Mac beta. It sucks and you're probably all disappointed, but oh well. I have a Windows PC and you can hate me all you want. Mac's are still proving to be overpriced for me, with or without this economic meltdown. Basically, all of you Mac users are going to have to wait about a year after us Windows PC users got it. Nevertheless, I hope it overtakes Safari and Firefox's market share on Mac's when it is released. The first build could also have extensions, so it'll be interesting to see how Google plays this out.

[Gizmodo]

NEC is not a widely known PC company, but it doesn't really matter because they are going to stop selling their PCs anywhere outside of Japan soon. For the South East Asian countries, they will be shutting production and sales "as early as this July." NEC is really going downhill; they are expecting a $3 billion loss this current fiscal year. They sold 3 million PCs last year; meanwhile, 2.5 million of those PCs sold in Japan. NEC is planning on laying off 20,000 workers soon, thanks economic crisis. On a side note, I've never had a job before.

[Crunch Gear]

Ziff Davis of FileFront is going to suspend their operations "indefinitely" starting on March 30, 4 days from now. Their 10-year reign is coming to an end and they are blaming the economic crisis for this. Basically, the community has to download as much as they can until D-Day. There's more than 48TB of stuff to download, so you better hurry. BigDownload.com will have to pick up FileFront's slack now. We're depending on them now.

[Joystiq]

In early February, Mitsubishi suspended the production of their LaserVue HDTVs. Today, Mitsubishi has announced that they are mass producing their HDTV's yet again. No one knows why they stopped producing these monstrous TVs in the first place, but I think it had something to do with the economy's downfall. All in all, it's good to see that Mitsubishi has recovered from whatever problems they were having. Time to order your LaserVue HDTV's once again.

[Engadget]

Due to the economic crisis, OLED technology is suffering. OLED is scheduled to replace LCDs in the near future, but that might be pushed back a couple of years because of the economic crisis. While Sony put out their 11-inch OLED TV with a $2,500 price tag, Samsung looks to release their 14.1-inch OLED display in the second half of this year. OLEDs will start off slow, similar to SSDs in computers, but hopefully will gain ground on those LCDs. There is still a lot of research to be done for OLEDs to be perfected and you can read this article here, which talks about exactly what research needs to be done. I'm going to leave the discussion up to the professionals on Ars Technica because i would be spited if i misunderstood some of their article. 32-inch OLED TVs are delayed to a "maybe" for 2010, so we could be looking at 2 more years into the future here.

Microsoft is releasing their first product in the "new notebook accessories category" and it is the Microsoft Notebook Cooling Case (left). It does just what it says, cools down your notebook. The base / case is 1.16 inches thin and will be available this July for $30 USD. The Cooling Case will be available in black and white. Microsoft's next hardware product / peripheral to talk about is their Arc Mouse (right). These will be available later this month for only $50 USD. It will be available in 4 colours: Marine Blue, Deep Olive Green, Eggplant Purple, and Frost White.

At Sony Ericsson's press conference in China they announced their new flip / clamshell phone. The Sony Ericsson T707 (Elle) will have a 2.2-inch screen, Quad-band GSM connectivity / HSDPA 2100 connectivity, a 3.2 megapixel camera and it will also come with a 1GB card in the box. The phone looks kind of feminine, hence the name 'Elle' (French word for girl). There is no word on the price, but the phone itself should be available by the end of the year.

Tonight is the season premiere of the 13th season of South Park and it looks like they'll finally be taking their shot at the Jonas Brothers. It airs 10 p.m. / 9 p.m. Central tonight, so be sure to watch it!! I know i will, even though i'm not a huge fan of South Park. I did love their 'Make Love, Not Warcraft' episode though, but everyone and their mother did, so that's nothing too special to be bragging about. Maybe i'll need to torrent their seasons at a later date.

OLED Technology Suffering (and picture): http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/the-32-oled-tv-a-possible-new-downturn-victim.ars
Microsoft's Cooling Case (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5167303/microsoft-notebook-cooling-base-could-be-cooler
Microsoft's Arc Mouse (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5167312/microsoft-arc-mouse-special-edition-colors-salute-vegetables-nature
Sony Ericsson T707 Elle (and picture): http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Sony_Ericsson_T707_Elle_Revealed/551-99920-893.html
South Park Season Premiere (and picture): http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/2009/03/09/south-park-to-skewer-the-jonas-brothers/

This is a scary chart of what our economy has become. Job losses galore. I can't even get a job, so this doesn't affect me too much. Maybe the economy will make its turn like the other 2 years did. Then again, maybe not.

Skype's users are continually growing. Apparently, Skype is growing at a 330,000 user per day pace. Skype is owned by Ebay currently, but there were rumours of Google acquiring them over a month ago. I remember the days when i used to hate Skype. It would be unreliable when making calls and that's why i ended up choosing Ventrilo over Skype. A couple of years pass and my girlfriend ends up being on residence for university, so she tells me to try Skype out so that we'd be able to keep-in-touch. I was hesitant at first, since i remembered my first experiences. Skype came through for me and i thank them for such a good service. Without Skype, me and my girlfriend would hardly see each other. I also congratulate them on their success. Skype raked in $550 million USD last year in revenue, which was a 44% increase over the previous year.

My friend uses his Asus laptop for gaming, so i thought i'd talk about the new Asus N81Vg. This 14-inch laptop will be the first to have NVIDIA's GeForce GT 120M graphics card. This laptop will let you choose from numerous Core 2 Duo processors, will have: "up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, upwards of 500GB of hard drive space, an optional Blu-ray burner, 1.3 megapixel webcam and a battery good for three to four hours." Asus hasn't released a specific price for this laptop, so i'll tell you that information when i find out. This looks like an amazing gaming laptop, from my point of view.

Today, more news has surfaced about the LG Arena KM900. We all know about its 3D UI and its iPhone or Linux-like interface. The LG Arena looks like it will have multi-touch functionalities (Is Apple going to sue them?) and "web page zooming." LG will be spilling all of the Arena KM900's secrets on Monday in Barcelona for MWC. Personally, i think this phone will be decent. I think it has a chance against Samsung's flagship S8300 phone, since it has the multi-touch going for them. Although, i do still think the Samsung S8300 is a better phone overall. I guess i'm contradicting myself, but whatever.

Behold the gScreen TITAN M-1. This 15-inch dual screen behemoth may have been inspired by the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds. The TITAN M-1 will have the Intel QX9300 CPU, which is also found in Lenovo's W700-series systems. It also has 4GB of memory and 500GB of storage. Apparently, there will also be a 13.3 and 17-inch model, which will be released later this year. No word on price or availability of this system yet.

Economy picture: http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/joblosses26091.gif
Skype's Users Growing: http://www.pcworld.com/article/159279/skype_growing.html?tk=rss_news
Skype picture: http://netsecurity.about.com/b/2007/09/12/worm-spreading-through-skype-im.htm
Asus N81Vg (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/asus-n81vg-first-laptop-with-nvidias-geforce-gt-120m/
LG Arena KM900 (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/lg-arena-km900-hangs-onto-limelight-reveals-multitouch-capabili/
gScreen's Dual-Screen Laptop (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/gscreen-creating-rugged-dual-screen-laptop-for-animated-frogs-an/

 I am going to move away from new tech right now, even though i have a lot of important tech to talk about.

Lil Wayne is your favourite rapper? Yes, i already know that, but he is definitely not mine. People not knowing anything about Hip Hop / Rap have united by just hopping on the bandwagon. "Lil Wayne is the best!" Blah, blah, blah, that's all i hear nowadays. I used to like him, up to the point where he made a song named 'Canon'. 'Canon' was an amazing song and probably one of Wayne's best songs of his whole career, up to this point. 'Canon' originally got its fame underground and made its way to the mainstream market. Since the song / rap was so good, everyone started to love Lil Wayne off. I'm a huge fan of metaphors / similes, they are also called punchlines. Lil Wayne has many, many punchlines and that is what makes him so good (to me), but sometimes, i feel that his punchlines are too simple. Lil Wayne has become so mainstream that he's changed his flow to adapt to the everyday, regular mind. He's over-rated. Anyways, the point of this paragraph was to mention that Lil Wayne was nominated for 8 awards at the Grammy's last night. He ended up winning 3 awards, including: Best Rap Album (Tha Carter III), Best Rap Song (Lollipop) and Best Rap Solo Performane (A Milli). He was also involved in another award, which was for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group (Swagga Like Us). Congratulation Weezy!

Chris Brown looks like he's in some deep trouble. Chris Brown is being charged with assault against an unidentified woman. Many fans believe that it is Rihanna. Both of them were scheduled to be performing at the Grammy's, but had to withdraw because of these events. Rihanna's rep commented saying that Rihana is "well." Oh man, it'll be interesting to see what happens next as this investigation continues. Although, Chris Brown did turn himself in, he will be released on $50,000 USD bail. In addition, Rihanna has refused to file assualt charges on Chris Brown. Rumour has it that Chris Brown wanted to end their relationship, but Rihanna didn't.

With the current economic crisis, many people are fearing that the suicide rates will increase if the economic crisis gets worse. Hmm, could the recession be foreboding (foreshadowing a bad event) the end of the world? Doomsday? With everything going downhill, except the numerous technological advancements, and with the new president, this leaves one to wonder. Is the end really near? During, 'The Great Depression' decades ago, the suicide rates increased. This leaves many analysts in fear because of the possible suicide rate spike. I have a feeling that if the recession gets extremely bad, people will commit suicide. I also feel that people will commit suicide more now than during 'The Great Depression' because money is more important nowadays than it was before. Our earth also has a greater population now than it did then, so that could also play a factor. Anything is possible.

Looks like punching women is the new trend. Chris Jericho, a WWE superstar, punched a woman in the face. You can just watch the Youtube video below. It's amazing to see it unfold on video. Jericho loses it.



Lil Wayne at the Grammy's: http://allhiphop.com/stories/news/archive/2009/02/09/20842176.aspx
The Carter III Album picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tha_Carter_III
Chris Brown and Rihanna: http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.8532/title.chris-brown-turns-himself-in-to-lapd
Chris Brown and Rihanna picture: http://www.mediatakeout.com/2009/30480-mto_exclusive_rihanna_refuses_to_file_assault_charges_against_chris_brown__or_cooperate_with_investigators.html
Recession Means Higher Suicide Rate (and picture): http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1878044,00.html?iid=digg_share
Chris Jericho Punches a Woman in the Face: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rchemel/wwes-chris-jericho-punches-female-fan-4c
Youtube Video of Chris Jericho Punching a Woman in the Face: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci1ww2k2fa8