A small Taiwanese company has tried to promote its new Action Pad tablet by getting an actor to portray Steve Jobs with wings and a halo. Disgusting.
Category / Tablets
RIM introduce the Bold Team to personify BlackBerry users
RIM, continually failing, have released this infographic describing the users of their devices. If you are for some reason still using a RIM thing, which one are you?
GoGo Girl, The Achiever: “Saving the day with a brilliant strategy”
Justin Steele, The Advocate: “Always ready to stick up for his friends”
Trudy Foreal, The Authentic: “Not afraid to call it as she sees it”.
Max Stone, The Adventurer: “Able to jump out of a plane…”
Engadget pointed out that this sounds suspiciously like RIM itself, so we can only hope that with BB10 they will hire ad guys who are actually beyond adolescence.
RIM’s new CEO is not the right man for the job
Earlier this week, RIM quietly announced that Thorsten Heins, their Chief Operating Officer, would replace Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis as the sole CEO of the troubled company behind the BlackBerry. The Bavarian has been at the company for just 4 years and has still yet to even see the OS of the future that is BBX BB10 in action. He seems rather boring and doesn’t see the need for drastic change in Waterloo. What planet is this guy on? I wish him the best of luck in turning things around, but I’m not too optimistic. Watch his official introduction video below and judge Thorsten for yourself.
Apple’s massive numbers and some context
App of the Week: Crazy Survival
This week’s app of the week is Crazy Survival by Techsoft Ventures.
In this game you play as a small stick figure that has to avoid a large number of bouncing balls coming from the left of the screen. At the start of every game you have ten lives, with each hit removing one life. Although this is a simple idea, I have never played anything like it before. The simple controls (an arrow to each side of the screen) make getting good at this game fairly simple but mastering it is something completely different. My personal high score is only around 250 while the world record is in excess of 800.
This game is just what you need from a mobile game – quick, simple and addictive, and that is why we are proud to call it our first cross-platform app of the week.
But no Android. Sorry.
Crazy Survival, BlackBerry/iOS/Windows Phone, Free
Download now from the App World, App Store or Zune Marketplace
Why I hate Android
I loathe Android for many reasons. I can’t help it, and I apologise for that. I have my reasons, and I believe they are valid, so here we go.
iPad 3 rumours suggest the obvious
Rumours are abound that Apple have begun to produce the next iPad, imaginatively named the iPad 3. Bloomberg are saying that 3 knowledgeable people claim that the device will come with a quad-core A6 processor, a high definition ‘Retina Display’ and support for LTE. This is all set to hit stores in March or April and, from the award-winning iPad 2, this stuff just seems like a natural progression for Apple. The company are set to hold an education event in New York next week, where textbooks for iPads are expected. A cheaper ePad has been speculated by some forum posters on The Verge and none of this stuff sounds too far-fetched to me. We will find out what Tim Cook has up his sleeve in due course, but no Apple launch would be complete without crazy speculation, would it?
The Poll: What is your favourite thing from CES?
CES time!
The annual Consumer Electronics show, or CES, takes place this week in Las Vegas and we will have daily roundups of the new products announced at the show. We sadly won’t be there this year but we will still get you all the news. Expect to see:
- Nokia Lumia 900
- Victorinox 1TB USB flash drive
- HP Envy 14 Spectre
- Ultrabooks
- Tablets
- Smartphones
- Stupid high-resolution TVs
- More…
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Enjoy the articles coming up,
Xavier
The incompetence in tech retail
Let’s face it. We all buy technology of one form or another. Many of us buy our gadgets online for savings and sheer convenience, but sometimes you need to actually try something before you buy. High street stores are everywhere these days, complete with friendly and ‘knowledgable’ salespeople to guide you to the right products and decisions, but not all is as it seems.
Circulating around Digixav are numerous stories of employees at leading British retailers not having a clue about the products and services that they are trying to sell to the public. Here I have compiled a list of some of the worst of our experiences for your entertainment and warning. Remember that all of these stories are true and have been witnessed by the Digixav team.
- A hand scribbled description note for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc in a Carphone Warehouse store stated that the phone was sporting an ‘8.1 mega pixle’ rear camera.
- Advertising material in a Carphone Warehouse store shows BlackBerry Curve specifications with a dummy model of an HTC Salsa, thus confusing two smartphones that could hardly be more different.
- After his chain had been featured in an advert for the new Motorola RAZR, a Phones4U employee had no knowledge of the device other than its name despite the fact that people had come in requesting it.
- A label for a Lenovo desktop PC in Currys states that its 2nd generation Intel Core i3 CPU is 2.7x faster than your old PC. This is very misleading as the i3 chip is in fact slower than many processors that have been available for a number of years.
- The entire sales team of one Currys store had no idea of how the Kindle 4 lighted covers worked as the contact points had changed from those of the Kindle Keyboard. How can they try and sell a case for £50 if they have no idea how it works?
- A dummy Samsung Wave II is on display in the Carphone Warehouse with no explanation as to what it was.
- A Currys employee was left confused as he had no knowledge of what a flash drive was. He had to be reminded that it was the correct term for a memory stick.
- Another upside-down price tag in Currys. I see these whenever I visit my local branch.
- In December 2011, a Carphone Warehouse employee said that he did not expect the Lumia 900 to launch in the UK as, in his words, ‘it has been out in America for ages’. I played along with this, and he stated that it was just the 800 with a ‘4G’ LTE radio inside and at the exact same size of 3.7″. This is clearly incorrect as Nokia and AT&T are set to unveil this device at CES at Las Vegas on Monday. Another Carphone Warehouse employee since informed us that the database confirmed an 8MP rear shooter, a 4.3″ screen and 512MB RAM, but we cannot be certain if these specifications are genuine.
In conclusion, don’t believe everything you hear in tech shops. If you are in such an emporium and you hear an incompetent buffoon misleading a fellow consumer, don’t be afraid to butt in and steer them on the right path. Not all salespeople are terrible but the retail industry lacks people with a passion for technology and this is a sorry state for it.
If you have your own high street tale of woe, leave it in the comments or email it to us here.
Digixav 