This is my new favorite site too. Thanks a lot, Mr. Dave. You'll gain two pants sizes just reading it. (A diverting exercise might be to calculate the total number of calories catalogued by the site.)
After signaling its intent to follow Apple’s wildly successful iPhone into the smartphone business, Dell’s first attempts to produce a phone have been rejected by the carries for being too dull and lacking enough differentiation to stand out in a competitive environment, according to a report.
A research note published today by Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu said that Dell’s new prototypes, capable of running both Windows Mobile or Google’s Android, simply didn’t interest the carriers.
You can’t just slap a touch screen on something and call it an iPhone killer, not even when it runs Google Android.
I didn't even think it was possible to produce a phone too boring for the carriers to support it. (I sure wouldn't have known it from looking at the field.) That's got to be quite an achievement right there.
Maybe after all these years, the industry is starting to notice a pattern involving products claiming to be "iPod/iPhone killers", even if they don't themselves word it that way...
Via Kevin D. at Dean's World, this 20-minute video featuring Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs is a must-see. It's just him on stage talking, and you don't even need to watch it; just listen.
It starts out as a funny story about lamb castration; but it ends up being a manifesto of sorts in defense of the concept of seeking something in life other than leisure and safety and ease. Definitely eye-opening, and definitely worth the time.
In the last few days I've been thrust into the unenviable position of trying to spec out a Dell laptop (long story). Just wrestling through the rat's nest that is their online store is enough to make me want to navigate Apple'sjust for fun. And at the end of it all I still don't know what it is I'm getting, whether the 15" Core 2 Duo from the Vostro line is really worth half as much as the 15" Core 2 Duo from the Latitude line which is worth half as much as the 15" Core 2 Duo from the Precision Mobile line or whatever. (Meanwhile, on the Apple side of the world, it's all 1066 MHz RAM and 250GB 7200-rpm drives as far as the eye can see. Just pick what screen size you want and go.)
And now, just to keep things simple, there's a new line: the Adamo.
Apparently it's supposed to compete with the MacBook Air, starting at $1999 (a stratospheric price in the PC laptop world where $400 is considered the low-end entry point) and touting itself as the thinnest laptop you can buy, with the likes of Rob Enderle calling it things like "a showcase for this commitment [to design and personalization] and a flagship product that will draw buyers to the brand". But whereas the Air gives you 1.6-1.8 GHz and NVidia graphics and everything else but an internal optical drive, the Adomo apparently offers:
...a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo U9300 with integrated Intel X4500 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD, and it all weighs four pounds -- a pound more than the MacBook Air.
And all that for $200 more than the Air's base price. Such a deal.
Plus it looks like there's an elastic net on half the cover, to hold maps and things. Unless that's the "magnetic cover that hides the Microsoft-required Windows authenticity sticker".
Yeah. Way to deliver that value proposition there, guys.
Brian Tiemann
