What’s wrong with people these days and getting arrested for pirating movies? It’s not that hard. Anyways, a 21-year-old male was arrested in Australia under suspicion that he recorded the movie on his mobile phone, which was uploaded to the Net and downloaded more than 3,000 times. This was the first copy to hit the Web and was traced to a home in Sydney. Sucks to be that guy. Pirated Simpsons movie traced to phone [The Register] → Read More
Research firm Gartner is predicting that SMS will become obsolete or at the very least become insignificant by 2010. Duh. The report may only apply in Australia, but it isn’t very hard to see the correlation here in the U.S. Mobile e-mail is becoming more prevalent every day with Joe Shmoe picking up a BlackBerry or some other smartphone with e-mail capabilities. You may be led to believe differently with Verizon reporting 10 billion text messages sent/received in June, but that’s only because they charge you up the ying-yang for e-mail usage. → Read More
Traveling in a fried-out combie On a hippie trail, head full of zombie I met a strange lady, she made me nervous She took me in and gave me a 3.6Mbps mobile e-mail device running on Australia’s Telstra network. That’s what’s coming to the Land Down Under, according to ZDNet Australia. Not a whole lot of other details except that it might have built-in GPS and Wi-Fi and should be available early next year. The Telstra network offers what it calls “Next G” — basically a 3G network capable of 14.4Mbps download speeds. The Telstra BlackBerry will cap out at 3.6Mbps, though. Still should be plenty speedy. RIM working on Next G BlackBerry [ZDNet Australia] → Read More
Spotted on Perez earlier today, Nicole Kidman is indeed doing a Nintendo DS commercial. Not only is she a terrible actress in this commercial, but the whole thing doesn’t even have an ounce of humor in it. It’s very plain. Shame she went from being such a great actress to this. Acts of De$paration [Perez Hilton] → Read More
Quite the rumor to wakeup to, I’m not sure if I believe this or not. Microsoft Australia of all companies has tipped off a retailer (Myer) that a new version of the Xbox 360 will soon be coming to stores and to prepare for it. The new 360 will feature HDMI out and an included 120GB hard drive, as well as a dark black paint job—Xbox 360 2.0 if you will. This rumor even comes with a price and release date: Supposedly $749 AU ($580 USD) in early April. We’ll continue to monitor this one and see if any more details surface. Rumor: “Official” word on 120GB+HDMI 360? [Xbox 360 Fanboy] → Read More
Trashers: you now have something better than Guitar Hero to satisfy you: The Air Guitar T-shirt. Seems those Aussies down under have come up with a shirt bound with sensors on your elbows and sleeves to measure arm and body movements. You can create chords, rub out power ballads, and mimic your favorite Maiden riffs all by moving your arms as if an actual guitar were beneath you. The device looks like a normal shirt and could open up millions of possibilities for performance art. Check out the video that shows one of the creators rocking out. Air guitar T-shirt: cotton-picking? [Yahoo! News] Video: http://www.csiro.au/csiro/content/file/pfn4,,.html → Read More
The Korea Times is reporting that following a similar move by the Aussies at Qantas, Korean Air has banned Dell laptops and Apple Powerbooks and iBooks from its flights. The decision comes at the heels of recent widespread issues with exploding laptop batteries. Laptops from Sony, the makers of the questionable battery, remain unaffected because they were apparently using better, non-exploding batteries in their laptops. Fortunately at least, Dell and Apple users can avoiding checking their laptop by simply removing the batteries. This is certainly a more agreeable option, because checking your electronics as baggage seldom ends up favorably. Also, it’s unclear why this affects only Powerbooks and iBooks, because MacBooks have been exploding just as efficiently as the other two. Anyone have a theory about this oversight? Edit: Upon further reading, it seems seems that the oversight was mine. MacBook batteries were apparently recalled for reasons other than explosions. Sorry for the confusion. Korean Air bans Apple, Dell notebooks on board [Think Secret via Engadget] → Read More
San Francisco, CA
