Results tagged “gadgets”

Sometimes your new electronic gadget isn't as new as you'd think it would be. One patron of the Carrefour in Jinqiao got a bit of a shock when he opened his “brand new” camcorder and found over 30 minutes of the Jinqiao Carrefour staff's Spring Festival Christmas party on it. Source:Jonathan Chambers

With Christmas right around the corner, many of you will be looking for gifts for that special princess (or queen) in your life.

2009 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for China's mobile market. All that excitement over Google's Android phone is finally making its way to China. On the right you see a sleek new gadget codenamed "OPhone" that is making its rounds on gadget forums lately. Said to be a joint effort between Lenovo and China Mobile, this is the first in a series of phones that will be "based on China Mobile's OMS (Open Mobile System) which is essentially Android + TD SCDMA (China's home-grown 3G standard)." ITProPortal says the phone is expected to debut sometime in February or March.

Finally after much hype and news, the Meizu M8 is due for release on December 8th. The guys from PC Online have had the chance to test it against the iPod Touch (because iPhones are not legally available in China yet).

Steven Lin of Youku Buzz informs us:

It’s rumored that the Meizu M8 will be on the shelf later this month with a 3.3 inch 720×480 touch screen (much higher than iPhone’s 480×320) and compatibility with most mainstream multimedia formats you can find online (who needs Apple’s iTunes Store any more?). And my friend from Engadget China told me, the price would be RMB 2300 (USD 335).

If there's one business model that's sure to ride the current economic storm, it's a shop which sells nothing but useless gadgets.

Rumours have already started circulating that China Mobile will be the carrier to introduce the HTC G1 Android phone to China. Launched last Tuesday by T-Mobile in the States, this phone is the first device to run on the Google develop platform Android.

This one's for all you fans of Chinese counterfeits gadget freaks. From Engadget.com:

After what feels like centuries of waiting (and suffering through that painful CeBIT demo), we finally get to see the Meizu M8's OS in action... and it's not as bad as you think. Sure, the interface is totally derivative of the iPhone, and there is that pesky cursor floating around, but all-in-all it looks like the company has managed to knock out a decent -- if incredibly familiar -- UI for its long-delayed phone. Still, there's some low rent hilarity in this video. Our favorites? The smattering of soft porn pictures and video, and Meizu CEO and all-around bon vivant Jack Wong revealed in a reflection...

Tech super blog TechCrunch tells us of a rumour swirling around that China Mobile will be "offering the iPhone at a heavily subsidized discount in order to court the massive Chinese population". An article at it.hexun.com which cites a member of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) as its source says:

China Mobile will procure the handsets for their full price, and then on-sell subsidized handsets to consumers. The source explained that China Mobile could buy a 3G iPhone from Apple for USD 299 – an example price – and then sell the handset to users for USD 199, treating the additional USD 100 as compensation to Apple. [Translation by Marbridge Consulting]

Check out John Pasden's helpful tips here (and be jealous that your company doesn't subsidize the purchasing of cool smuggled gadgets).

From Beijing-based techie Frank Yu: "iPhones for sale in Beijing. 1st Gen 8 gig iPhone USD 735. 2nd Gen 8 gig 3G iPhone USD 1,176. The Older iPhones rose almost 42% since 3G." [Source]

"'As soon as we get it from Hong Kong and bring it over and unlock it.' ... Asked about claims that the new iPhones could not be hacked, he replied: 'The Chinese are very quick at unlocking iPhones. They used to say that the PSP couldn't be hacked as well, but we hacked it,' referring to Sony's PlayStation Portable game console." We believe the price they quote for an iPhone — 3,000 kuai — is for the earlier model. Story says new iPhones are going for upwards of US$860 in Thailand and US$600 in Hong Kong, where users must sign a two-year contract. [Source: IHT]

This coming Saturday, Antidote will be hosting Knifehandchop from Toronto and Sulumi from Beijing. Antidote organiser Michael Ohlsson aka DJ Ozone explains why he invited the two DJ's:These guys are producers, not just DJs. I've always been interested in music that is current, innovative, cutting-edge ... but also accessible. Not just experimental noise. And I love to share this new music with people. The music that Sulumi and KnifeHandChop are doing is very different from...

Those sounding the death knell for an Apple, China Mobile iPhone partnership maybe a bit premature. On Friday, a China Mobile spokesperson in Hong Kong confirmed(in Chinese) that discussion between the two sides is still ongoing, but didn’t elaborate on any details. China Mobile has bluntly stated that it has no intention of sharing subscription revenue with handset manufacturers, the core of Apple’s business model. And as the overwhelmingly dominant carrier in China, it is...

Maybe. China Mobile’s CEO Wang Jianzhou confirmed that his company has been in discussion with Apple to bring the wildly popular handset to China, “because our customers like this kind of fashionable product,” said Wang. But, negotiations have stalled over Apple’s subscription revenue sharing business model. In Europe and the US, Apple receives a portion of iPhone users’ data/voice revenue from their wireless carriers. China Mobile, with its 350 million user base and de facto...

Want your 6min 40sec of fame? Have some interesting ideas that you've been dying to share with the world? Then put together 20 powerpoint slides of 20 seconds each (no boring lectures or grandmother's tales please), and get in touch with the organisers of Pecha Kucha Night volume 8 at info@far-china.net.

It’s been a while since we had any Meizu M8 news, but shame on you for thinking those damn brilliant reverse engineers down in Shenzhen weren’t hard at work. Two months after iPhone’s US launch, Meizu revealed the user interface scheme for its upcoming touch screen phone. J. Wong, the company CEO posted the following pics on an internet BBS. Looks pretty slick, but also quite a bit like the UI of iPhone. Not surprisingly, Chinese fans of Meizu are pretty excited over the release, but folks over at Engadget aren’t nearly as thrilled, and understandably so.

A few weeks ago, an American teenager made headlines by unlocking the American version of the iPhone, which is strictly limited to use on the AT&T mobile network in the U.S. The 17 year old published his work on his blog, forever cementing in place in the annals of nerdery. With the iPhone unlocked, iPhone users can use to phone on any GSM network, as used in Europe and Asia, free them from AT&T's...

From Wired we found this story about a 71-year-old Xinjiang man that can conduct 220V electricity through his body, allowing him not only to power up six 13-watt light bulbs and cook fish with his bare hands, but also heal people with arthritis and back problems!

From Digg.com:

Continue reading "The latest thumbdrive from China"

If you are a text message addict like us — 10 fens do add up fast, we have some good news for you. For a limited time, China Mobile (all you 134-139, 158, 159 people) is offering free SMS service with just one string attached: download its new instant messenger client, 飞信/Feixin/Fetion (Chinese for “flymail”). The IM, at least in its current incarnation is nothing to crow about, but it does have one ass kicking feature you won’t find in MSN, Gtalk or QQ: Free SMS within the China Mobile network, PC to mobile, mobile to PC, and of course mobile to mobile. Download the PC client here, and mobile client here (under your cell phone’s brand and model number). Mac fanboys need not despair, pop in a virtualization/emulation software and you can get in on the free loving too.

Shanghaiist can’t wait for the iPhone. Of course, we aren’t willing to drop the $500 ($600 for 8 GB model) required to tout the latest and greatest from Apple just quite yet. After all, who actually bought the first generation of iPods back in 2001? The iPhone won’t work in China for a long while thanks to it being exclusively paired to AT&T’s mobile service and, strangely enough, won’t feature a removable SIM card. What we are excited for, though, is the rush of touch-screen copies and look-alikes that are sure to hit the market in the coming months.

Forgive us if this is old news for you, but we just recently discovered Gmail Mobile, and we are loving it. Basically, it's a tiny app for your mobile device that allows you to read and respond to your email and open up attachments — all very quickly (much faster than trying to look at Gmail through your phone's internet browser). This is just what we needed, since we use Gmail for all of our email and were having trouble getting our @shmobile.com email to work properly on our phone. Speaking of phones, we use a Sony Ericsson k750i, but we think this should work on most phones with GPRS service. Here are some other requirements, according to Google:

As June 15th (iPhone launch date) draws near, for us tech enthusiasts, it could only mean one thing: We are that much closer to the launch of Meizu’s Minione, formerly known as the M8 (or the iPhone clone). Actually, we have no idea when the freaking thing will be released, but its gotta be getting close, and yesterday, from Uberphones, by the way of Gizmodo, we gleaned a few more juicy bits about the Meizu offering:

This is a little old, but we have a feeling many of you haven't seen it yet. From what we have read and seen (front row last month at Yunfeng Theater) of ?uestlove, drummer for The Roots, we always thought the man also known as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson would be a pretty cool guy to hang out with. And then someone told us to check out his blog on MySpace and now our new goal in life is get invited to one of ?uestlove's cookouts should we ever leave Shanghai and move back to rockin' Conshohocken. His blog is an entertaining and honest glimpse into the life of a celebrity, although it seems as though he's not really sure if he feels like a celebrity yet.

From Engadget, a post titled "iPhone cases (not clones) already in China":

We've all seen those fancy-shmancy bidet/toilet combos from Japanese-brand Toto. Heck, we have even enjoyed using one every once in a while (that seat-warming feature is really nice on a cold winter's morn). We believe Kelly Chen, the Hong Kong starlet who informed us (via danwei.org) that she trusts her private washing to Toto's premium bidet technology. But we have always felt that something has been missing from Toto's tech. After pondering long hours in the library (bathroom), unable to get our thoughts (feces) out, we realised just what it is that Toto lacks.

A few days ago, we linked to a BoingBoing post entitled "Buddha Machine: spiritual, generative transistor radio." Well, Shanghai blogger Swiss James, who is, naturally, "an Englishman born in the year of the Horse," recently bought six of these plastic chanting contraptions and videotaped them for us all to see and hear (he used his close proximity to Jing'An Temple as an excuse).

We admit it — we kind of like old wind-up tin toys. We only have one, though. It has ping pong players who go back and forth and it really used to scare our dog. Well, the International Herald Tribune recently published a story ("A trip into China's past, through its toys") about a museum filled with such gadgets from the first three quarters of the 20th century. The Museum of Shanghai Toys, naturally, is in Singapore. A snippet:

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the brainstorming session that resulted in this contraption: