The Brazilian gaming industry; not exactly the best place to start a console business as piracy is rampant and the country suffers from a very high penetration of illegal pirated media vendors and a low per-capita income which makes game prices some 20 times higher than in the US.

So what can come out of a situation like this? The Zeebo console, of course! The console looks retro, with an equally ugly game-pad to match, but it’s not aiming to be the next PS3 or even PS2 for the matter. No, the console packs about as much power as a PSP, with OpenGL compatibility. The most interesting point of the console is their 3G connectivity, which falls back to EDGE or GSM if no 3G is available.

The console represents the next wave of console gaming, which is wireless streaming games, where all media is downloaded directly from a Zeebo network. The reason is that this will keep costs low as well as solve the distribution problems for traditional shrink-wrapped games in Brazil.

Read the rest of this entry »

ASUS have been in the PDA business for some time how, but they have shied away from headline-grabbing releases, preferring to keep their loyal customers updated via tidbits released here and there. But their latest P565 PDA is sure to turn heads when it’s launched next year.

For one thing, this smartphone will be powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 (WM6.1) and run on 3.5G, which is nice but many people have had bad experience with WM6.1, as it is generally slow and sluggish. Well, ASUS plans to remedy this situation in the most basic way possible: throw more processing power at it.

Read the rest of this entry »

You can easily check a website’s PageRank and Alexa rank in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Just install and use the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar. In Firefox, if you do not like the Google Toolbar, you can use a nifty plugin called Searchstatus to do the job effectively - this is one of my favorite plugin for Firefox.

Unfortunately, up until now Google Chrome, still doesn’t support plugins. So, as much as I love Chrome, when I need to check a website’s PageRank and Alexa rank, I still need to switch to Firefox. Not very time saving of course.

However, big thanks to the boys at chromefans.org, they made available a Javascript Plug-in that allows Google Chrome user to check the PageRank and Alexa rank of websites, effortlessly!

Good thing is, this javascript bookmarklet can be used in any browser, even FireFox, Safari and Internet Explorer. Simply drag and drop the bookmarklet (go to chromefans.org to get it) to your bookmark toolbar and click on it when you want to check the rankings. Really easy to install and use… go get it, Chrome users!

The USB 3.0 specification, a next-generation high-speed connection standard is coming out way! The specs will be formally announced next Monday at the first SuperSpeed USB Developer Conference in San Jose, CA. It will then be handed over to early adopters who plan to design products utilizing the much faster USB 3.0.

Guess what, USB 3.0 is expected to be 10 times the speed of USB 2.0 or roughly 5 gigabits per second.

Looks like this will be good for a lot of applications, such as transferring and backing up huge files! Can’t wait for products supporting USB 3.0 to hit the market.

Read more on Cnet.com.

The latest hand phone from Sony Ericsson’s walkman series is the W705, a clone of their C705 series which, while isn’t as cool as the Sony Ericsson phone used in James Bond, has its own charm and style that appeals to generations of young adults out there.

Sony has a history of porting over their other series phones into the W-series, slap on some Walkman software on it and sell it to you at a higher price. It all began back during the days of the successful K750i model, upon which they made the W800i which is based exactly on the same internal structure as the K750i, albeit with a different outer casing. Most people hated the orange styling and went for a K750i instead and then flashed the firmware to the Walkman series. And today you can do exactly the same and avoid paying a hefty premium for the Walkman series altogether.

Read the rest of this entry »