Hello and welcome to PPF: Product Placement Fail. In this feature we will highlight failed bits of advertising by tech companies. Please feel free to send yours in to digixav at gmail dot com.
AMD, AMD, AMD. When will you learn? People will not buy your products if you creep them out.
We have come across this video on the AMD YouTube channel that is attempting to attract customers to their Vision chips that run up to 9.6 degrees fahrenheit cooler than body temperature. How do they do this? They get a laptop with a seductive voice to talk to you. Prepare to be freaked out by the minute long clip below.
A new advert for the iPhone 4S has just hit Apple’s YouTube channel with a special celebrity guest. In the 30 second spot, Santa uses his iPhone’s virtual assistant Siri to guide him through his Christmas night. When asking how his day is, Santa gets reliably informed of his 3.7 billion appointments and is told not to eat too much by his wife. Watch the clip below or wait for it to hit your telly in the next week.
Technophobia is a column by James Hardy. Views expressed are not necessarily those of Digixav.
A couple of months ago I set up a Twitter account. I haven’t been on it since. I don’t have (much of) a problem with Twitterers. I just don’t really get Twitter. I don’t give a toss if you’ve just had a shit. End of.
To me, Twatter Twitter just seems to be away for random people to legally stalk you. In fact, it’s encouraged! Is that wear society is heading? Instead of actually having to follow them and duck behind a parked car every time they look round, you just have to use a computer. It takes all the fun out of it.
I could sort of understand if you’re a celebrity then in might be a good way to let your fans know what you’re doing. But for a normal person? Why would you want to post tweets? Are there seriously going to be that many people who want to follow you? Just use Facebook. It’s not that bad!
OK, I get hashtags. It could be kind of useful if people want to talk about the same thing on Twitter. Xavier tells me that he found out about Gadhafi’s death by monitoring Twitter trends but, as I write this, some of the UK’s trending topics include #askmamakelly and the rumoured name of Lady GaGa’s new tour. Granted, these make a welcome change from crazed teenage girls who shouldn’t even be on Twitter wishing their favourite auto-tuned wannabe popstars goodnight and threatening to kill someone for going out with Justin bloody Bieber, but still, who actually gives a crap?
Even worse than this is the type of Twitterer who is so obsessed with the microblogging service that they use them in normal written text. NOOO! It’s not right! We can still write like normal, sane human beings. We haven’t completely sold our souls to social networking. Or have we?
Example:
‘You think it’s OK to do that? #dickhead’
No! You’re the dickhead for using a hashtag in normal writing! You’re not on Twitter. Leave hashtags where they belong!
So please, if you’re ever writing on a blog/Facebook/whatever, never, ever use a hashtag.
It just pisses people off. Or is it just me?
#stopthehashtag
(Do, however, follow Digixav on Twitter. We welcome your hashtags there! – ed)
Image from DeviantArt
The Verge have reported that a shipment of 22 pallets of RIM’s underwhelming BlackBerry PlayBook has been stolen. The goods, valued at over £1 million, were in a truck that was taken from an Indiana truck stop while the driver took a shower last Thursday. The truck had no tracking equipment and as such the 5000 tablets that were intended for Ontario are currently lost. There is a possibility that the tablets may be hitting the black market in Miami, a hotbed for stolen goods. The FBI are investigating and it is believed that, of an alleged five suspects, police have the fingerprints of one. With RIM being forced into announcing that BlackBerry 10 powered devices will not hit the market until late 2012 and taking a $485 million hit on the tablet venture, things aren’t going too well for Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. Even after numerous price cuts and multi-buy offers, the BlackBerry PlayBook is still a piece of crap that nobody is buying, but some consolation can be found in that at least 5000 have been taken off RIM’s hands.
The world is changing. Brands need to have large social presences these days and Digixav should be no exception. As such, I am reluctantly announcing that Digixav is now on the Book of Zuckerberg. There you may ‘Like’ us and get our posts and other insightful ramblings delivered straight to your news feed or something. Following us on Twitter will produce similar events but with random tangents from the mind of Henry and, more often, myself. Subscribing to our YouTube channel will let you see our videos before we embed them into exciting new posts and if you use Google+ then you can find us here. We might be heading to LinkedIn soon but who actually uses that?
Enjoy the social networking stuff!
The DX Team
This weeks AOTW is Rainbow Rapture by Kindling Games. This is the first game to appear as my AOTW, and for a very good reason. It’s just about the most random, weird, trippy and truly fantastic Tiny Wings rip off ever.
Yes, it is yet another game where you slide up and down hills trying to get as far as possible. However this app deserves an AOTW not for originality, but for the fact that it has taken an old idea and made it different. The whole basis of this game is that you are a rainbow/cloud/god thing that helped to create the world and all its beauty. The humans, however, have taken your world and turned it grey and boring. Because of this, you have decided to destroy them.
By eating them.
There are three main power-ups in the game. these are car, oil and blimp. The car gives you a speed boost, the oil allows you to slide across the ground and the blimp makes you suck up people as you fly over them.
Have a look at our gameplay demo (filmed in our office) in the video below.
See? Get it NOW!
Rainbow Rapture, Windows Phone 7, Free or £1.29
Download from the Marketplace or visit the website
HP have announced that webOS will live on as an open source platform, much to the dismay of ousted idiot of a CEO Leo Apotheker. His replacement Meg Whitman announced the news last night, also confirming that hardware manufacture from HP will not be resuming but the OS will be developed by both HP and the community for OEMs that may want it. Rumours have said that HTC and RIM are among the interested parties and we will report on any news regarding this as we get it.
YEAH!
Engadget are reporting that LG and Prada have announced an event that will take place in London on Wednesday. The invite clearly states that the ‘Prada Phone by LG 3.0’ will be presented to the tech press of the world. The phone is rumoured to have the model number P940, an unannounced device that has already been benchmarked. The Antutu benchmarks say that the device will be running Android 2.3.7 and not Ice Cream Sandwich upon release and will come equipped with a 1GHz CPU. The FCC certifications for this phone say that it is 9mm thin and has a 4.3 inch display with ‘4G’ HSPA+ download speeds. Whether we see the same QWERTY keyboard as the Prada II remains unknown but we will all find out on Wednesday.
Technophobia is a column by James Hardy. Views expressed are not necessarily those of Digixav.
In spring this year, I bought a new phone. I’d looked around for a while for the best deal. As it turned out, I got a pretty decent one. Free phone plus £12 pounds per month, 1GB of internet, around 100 minutes and some (but not enough) texts with a 24 month contract on Virgin. I had a choice between a BlackBerry Curve 8520 and a HTC Wildfire S. I went for the BlackBerry. Not a good decision.
For starters, it turns out Virgin are a bunch of wankers. Over the summer, I went on holiday abroad. For this, I rang Virgin up and got them to turn my internet off so when I returned I didn’t have a phone bill which was in the squillions. After numerous phone calls, this went OK. When I got back, I rang them back up to get them to switch it back on. Two weeks later, nothing had happened. Many hours of frustrating phone calls to some call centre in Uzbekistan later, I finally got through to someone who seemed to know vaguely what they were talking about who assured me all would be sorted. Almost two months after my initial phone call, I still didn’t have internet. After many stressful hours of my life which I will never get back, finally my internet got switched on. And the signal I get is pretty horrendous. And a 24 month contract! What was I thinking? I am now stuck with a phone which I don’t like for the next 18 months.
Virgin hatred over, I shall move on to the phone itself.
First of all, the BlackBerry App World. It is appalling. The free apps you find which are actually worth keeping for more than a week are all but non-existent. I have found one so far: Pixelated. The fact that graphics, quality and controls are pretty limited on the phone is going to be a pretty big drawback for any app developers.
The internet on the Curve is slow. Seriously slow. It can take upwards of a minute just to load a page like BBC Sport. For a phone to be released in 2009 without a GSM 3G radio was an abysmal oversight by RIM, and it was something that I assumed would be present when I signed my contract. The camera on it is also pretty dire. I think it’s 2MP. The picture quality is very poor and it won’t let you record a video unless you buy a memory card. Some people do not have a microSD card handy, and I wouldn’t even want to film in jerky and blurry whatever the crappy resolution is.
The phone struggles with multitasking. Far too often that irritating little timer appears in the middle of the screen, signalling the fact that I won’t be able to do anything until it disappears, normally at least 30 seconds later. At times the timer just doesn’t go away, so I am forced to take the battery out and put it in again, which means the phone decides to take a good five minutes to restart itself. Sometimes, when it’s doing god knows what, it takes more than half a minute just to respond to me pressing the unlock key.
And there are annoying little niggles with it. When I press the mute button to unlock the phone, it takes me straight to the music screen. It’s small, but annoying. Although it has fixed itself now, for a while the zoom on the camera didn’t work. And when you open the QR code scanner, if you don’t scan a code then you can’t close it, so you are forced to take the battery out and put it in again.
As you no doubt know, a couple of months ago, BlackBerry service shut down, for no apparent reason. And it wasn’t a complete internet thing; I could still use a Flixster app to get movie reviews, even though it needs the internet to work. The communication from RIM was a nightmare. I thought it was just my phone until I asked other BlackBerry owners. Then, they announced it was back up and running. Which it wasn’t. A few days later, it finally got back on. There was no explanation from RIM, just an apology with a few crappy apps, most of which refused to run on my 512MHz CPU.
I am focusing on the bad bits of the Curve here. There are good points too. BBM is a very good service when nobody flicks a switch in Slough. The phone looks great, and feels sturdy and well-built. The trackpad works very smoothly, and the layout of the phone is great.
RIM can change for the better. With QNX and the promise of Android apps coming to BlackBerry devices will vastly improve the shoddy software experience. If the next generations of phones come equipped with ‘4G’ LTE and HSPA+ radios then the internet problems will be gone. If BBM can stay up and running whenever we need it and they open it up at last to owners of Android, iOS and other smartphones then it will become the dominant mobile messaging platform. iMessage and ChatOn will die. Design quality seems to be getting better as I would say the new Bold 9900 looks very nice and the touch interaction is useful and the cameras are much improved on newer devices. Dual core or even quad core chips will bring the hardware specs in line with the high end Android handsets and will make the software less laggy and therefore more desirable. It’s not all doom and gloom for RIM.
So, I wouldn’t say that BlackBerries are terrible phones. My 8520 is not bad. It just needs a lot of work on it. RIM need to give it a better processor, a better camera that we expect from new smartphones, a much better wireless antenna like the Pearl and fix the software bugs. They should speed up the internet and give the graphics an upgrade, and find a way to encourage app developers to use the App World more. When BBX launches, it will entice developers but RIM need to make some massive overhauls for them to stay around and forget about iOS and Android.
But, for now, I’m just stuck with this phone for the next 18 months of my life.
Bollocks.
Digixav 
