After the release of the first handset with a Google’s Android platform the other day, buzzing all over the net right now is about the unveiling of the new touch phone of Nokia this coming October 2. This new phone which is code named as “Tube” will be expected to battle iPhone 3G in the market. I guess this will be another expensive phone from Nokia.
For the past months, other companies (like Samsung, Eriksson, LG) aside from Apple releases touch screen phones. However, Nokia until now stays on the traditional screens. With the popularity of capacitive touch-screen technology that makes great clarity of picture in known touch screen cellphones (like iPhone 3G and LG’s Prada), Nokia had no choice but to release their own version of this kind of phone. It seems that they are the only cellphone company that is left behind by this kind of technology.
It started with China then it spreads everywhere! The Melamine Scare is now everywhere! I don’t understand why there are people in the world who sacrifice the lives of young people just to gain a lot of money. Imagine the reason of the two culprits who put melamine on the leading milk in china for babies was to make a great quantity of milk to produce and released in the market. They didn’t even consider the fact that babies will be the one who will be affected by this irresponsible decision to gain. The effect is the whole China business and products made in China were greatly affected. With the previous Toy scandal, canned good meat scandal, other bad image about China’s products and this, melamine scandal will be the worst of its kind scandal that will really kill the industry of China. All over the world, from US, Canada, Asian countries and other places in the world started to question and even recalled the products of China from their stores. Some (or majority) of the countries even banned Chinese foods due to this melamine issue. Tsk! This will be a great problem for them to face for so many years and it will be very hard for them to recover. Even they put the culprits to firing squad, the effect and damage made were already done. They just can’t undo it.
Philippine Web Awards (PWA), the popular award giving body that recognizes best Filipino created-websites, made a major face lift or restyling on their website. Their new design of the website is really remarkable opening it with three cute animated cartoons bringing the three letters P W & A on the center of the page. I have seen this change when I checked on my status on my nomination of www.bleuken.com for the blog category. Actually its funny that I nominated this blog despite it does not have any amazing features (graphic design and quality content ) that will attract them to qualify it even during elimination. However, I still nominated this blog and spend about P250.00 because I just want to participate to a prestigious event like this in the Philippines. The feeling of being listed as the official PWA nominee is enough for me to consider in joining the said annual awarding event. Right now I am not yet officially nominated because they are still processing and confirming the requirements I have passed.
The New Look of Philippine Web Awards
I think the website is made for people to be praised and not for search engines to be raised because it was excellently redesigned (almost 100% of the pages were made in Flash and animated) but it was not optimized to be read properly by search engines. If you will explore on each page of the website, almost all the title of the page were set to “MAIN” making it to be read as only one page by search engines. Maybe the designers did not see this small detail and / or the management were so excited to release this new look and did not consider the SEO or internet visibility aspect of the website. I hope they correct this one so that they will not face any search engine visibility problems later.
With the emergence of the Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone 3G in the world, it seems that the future is the touch screen technology. Microsoft Surface also uses touch screen technology. If in case Microsoft Surface reaches the Philippines, I hope we could have it as our electronic blackboard for our computer laboratory so that it will be easy for us to make class demonstration and introduction of the computer lessons. It’s cool that you simply touch things on your e-board and you can undo, redo, copy and paste, write on it without leaving any ink smudges on your hands. Hi-tech!
Regarding touch screen tech, actually this technology is already present for several years already. People usually used it when they do transactions on Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and the only new on this age is that you can have the touch screen on top of your hands. But do you know that LM3LABS is developing a new technology on their laptops that incorporates a touchless navigation. Touchless! No more oil and dirt build up on the screen cause by touching. The said new feature of the laptop is called “AirStrike” (i thought it was a PC game). AirStrike uses tiny charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras integrated into each side of the keyboard to detect user movements. This Airstrike-equipped laptop will be available next year (in other countries and I don’t know here in the Philippines, even MS Surface I’m not sure if it is already available in the Philippines).
Another touchless technology concept that was applied for patent by Nokia last year after the realease of iPhone was the Nokia S60 3D Touchless device control interface. This technology from Nokia uses Ultrasonic Transducers (USTs) which arrayed around the perimeter of the display. Ultrasonic transducers emit ultrasonic sound waves that propagate through air. When finger gets into the path of these waves, the signal is reflected back and detected by the transducer. This is just a concept and the much awaited Nokia Tube (1st Generation Nokia Touchscreen, my guess) might not feature this concept yet.
Today Apple announced on their website (which can be found at http://www.apple.com/support/usbadapter/exchangeprogram/) that they have determined that the previously released iPhone 3G ultracompact USB power adapter were faulty and might cause an electric shock risk. Actually there’s no reported incident or accident yet that involved this released accessory of iPhone 3G. In this connection Apple urge iPhone users to replace the USB power adapter that they have purchased. According to the website the exchange program of this adapter will start by October 10 this year.
How can you determine if you have purchased the faulty iPhone 3G ultracompact USB Power adapter? Well, the new adapter that will replace the adapter with a problem has a green dot on the device (as shown on the picture). So if you don’t have that green DOT on your adapter, don’t use it to avoid the problems that may cause you later. Instead wait for the 10th of October and exchange it to Apple’s nearest retail store or via Apples’ website.