*FACEBOOK VIDEO OFFICIALLY SUCKS*
We had a ball at the Britney concert. We had rocking floor seats, and as you can see from the video, some pretty hot up-close sexy time with Brit :)
If you’re planning to see the concert, you may not wanna watch, as this previews quite a bit of the show.
Highlights? Seeing the cage scene up close. And we were right by the exit ramp, so getting within 10 feet of Britney was pretty effing sweet!
The world finally begin to really see the Samsung Omnia HD in action in Barcelona last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And let me say, it’s looking pretty darn slick.
How’s that, you ask? Let’s start with an 8MP camera, face/smile/blink detection, LED flash, etc. But that’s not the stunner… this sucker RECORDS 720P HD video. That’s 1280 x 720 pixels @ 24 frames/sec. It has a gorgeous 3.7-inch (360×640px) OLED touch-screen that is CAPACITIVE… like the iPhone (most other touch-screen phones are resistive technology). 8/16 GB storage, stereo bluetooth, 3.5 headphone jack… and this sucker supports all the high-res video formats, including DIVX right out of the box. Nice.
The Samsung Omnia HD is shaping up to be the *real* next generation of camera phones? It could well be. No Xenon flash, sadly. But with that video recording, and that screen… I could be more forgiving.
While I haven’t owned a Samsung phone before, I’ve used many at my work… we have *many* handsets there. While I’ve never been a huge backer of their old phone UIs – or Windows Mobile, that you’ll find on most of Samsung’s higher end models, recently– the Omnia HD is a breath of fresh air, since it runs the latest and greatest Symbian OS, with Samsungs fancy tweaks on top of it. Samsung is doing it with the Omnia HD, like we saw Sony Ericsson doing it with the Idou.
Let’s just say, where the iPhones and the Palm Pres don’t excite me, the Omnia does. It’s looking like a master of content creation… not just consumption..
I’m hoping to get my hands on one in the next month or so – cross your fingers for me. If I do find my way into one, expect to an extensive review, and some sweet, phone-made HD video and photo content coming from this camera-killer very soon.
Say hi if you see me!… I’ll be on the floor :)
Favorite part of the video above? 4:00 minutes in, where she jumps in a cage and starts thrusting.
THAT’S my girl.
I’ve had people ask me what’s noteworthy in the iPhone 3.0 software announcement, and what I’ve thought about it all… so here’s the opinionated cheat sheet I’ve thrown together. In the form of a game.
Items towards the top, are the most Cool / Anticipated / Unforgivably-late-but-still-lusted-for. The ones on the bottom aren’t as easy to get giddy over. So feel free to read until it gets boring and you fall asleep. Consider how far you’ve gotten - before you passed out - to be The Hot List.
And let me know how far that is in the comments. I’m curious.
- Copy, Cut, and Paste (Jesus. Christ.) If you’re still awake, and still interested, you could watch the entire keynote presentation of these features. THE END
- Stereo Bluetooth (here come the GOOD wireless headphones!)
- Push notifications (for real this time, they swear)
- MMS support (welcome to 2003! I’ve never been so excited about MMS.)
- Emailing multiple images simultaneously (next, make a camera that doesn’t suck)
- Accessory Applications (black sheep of the crew… has huge potential)
- Tethering built in on client side (up to your carrier, now)
- Landscape keyboard in mail, text messaging, etc. (thanks for seeing the light)
- Apps can use maps, enabling turn-by-turn directions (I have to BUY a map app?)
- Peer-to-peer via Bluetooth (might be cool for games… song sharing? No way.)
- Spotlight on home screen searches content on your iPhone (seems rushed…)
- In-App purchaces for subscriptions, new levels of content (clever! $$$)
- New search in big apps, like contacts (*stares blankly*)
- Wi-Fi auto-login (*dozes off*)
- Voice memos (*twitches and wakes self up*)
- Stocks including story ticker (*sits up straight in chair*)
- EAS policies (*ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ*)
- Revoke certs (asklfasjkjkafdsjajksddafsjjk <— *asleep on keyboard now*)
- Languages
- VPN on demand
- Streaming audio and video APIs
- OTA profiles
- Media scrubber
- Parental controls
- Call log
- Auto-fill
- iTunes login
- iTunes account creation
- Create meeting invites
- Anti-phishing filters
- EAP SIM
- LDAP
- Live streaming
- Audio/video tags
- Encrypted profiles
- YouTube accounts
- YouTube subscriptions
- YouTube ratings
- 1,000 new developer APIs
This video will give you a GREAT idea about what this device is like… probably in too much detail for some folks out there, but for nerds like me… I eat this up. And as we saw with the iPhone demos/commercials, high-quality touch-screen UIs deserve video demonstrations to get a good idea of how things really work in use.
Rarely do we see such a crisp, in-depth walkthough of such important devices, until *right* before their release. This video shows some of the awesome things the Palm Pre is bringing (and even the iPhone 3.0 software won’t be!) like true multi-tasking, unobtrusive notifications, unique hardware gestures, and data-merging between all your contact sources (on-phone, exchange contacts, facebook friends, etc), and true universal search.
The "cards" UI for multitasking, combined with the gestures, really do make the OS feel less like a collection of buttons and bars, and does make the screen focus on the content. And the clever way of making even the top icons of the screen (battery, signal strength, etc), seem like part of the hardware… another nice touch.
I’ve watched a lot of Palm Pre coverage, but this one was worth sharing. Even if you don’t want a Pre yourself after the video, you can thank them for lighting a fire under Apple’s seat, in a way that hardware specs couldn’t… in their home-turf of software/UI design.
Pretty awesome stuff.
If you saw today’s news on the iPhone 3.0 software, you can *definitely* thank the Pre for Spotlight being thrown your desktop. Expect a few more similar features being exposed in the coming months, in time for Apple’s likely iPhone hardware refresh.
She doesn’t need a huge budget to put on a hot show… but imagine if she had one! And she opens her concert with my favorite track! It was meant to be.
So who has extra tickets? I don’t want to disappoint her by not showing up! :)
UPDATE: had to source a new video - the other was taken down.
