As the good folks over at Aving now report, Samsung is prepared to showcase 53 new cellphone models this week at CommunicAsia 2007 in Singapore. You saw the right number - 53. And from one company, at that! Now, maybe I’m being simplistic here, but when I go into my local Cingular store and look around at the various phone models (which I could never afford, mind), I’m perfectly content with the 8-10 varieties they have for me to pick from. For that matter, pretty much all of my friends have one of about three or four phone models. 53+ choices just makes it more difficult than it needs to be.
When I browse through websites like Engadget and Gizmodo, it seems like every other post is about a new phone that so-and-so is releasing, or the new laptop just announced from [Sony/Dell/Compaq/HP/you get the idea]. That’s one thing I’ll give props to Apple for - they keep the riffraff out of their lineup. Real news is a cell phone that now supports Flash or Firefox browsing; not a cell phone that’s exactly like its predecessors, but has a different faceplate color and supports 960×720 photos instead of 640×480.
A message to Samsung: decide which phones you think will actually sell, and market those. I think it’s what we call smart business practices, but I may be wrong…
While we’re at it, why not cheer yourself up with Samsung’s corporate film from last year.
I never would have guessed this one: According to Ellacoya, a company that creates broadband networks for clients, HTTP internet traffic (with 46%) is barely beating out P2P networks (41%) as the largest source of bandwidth usage. And only two years ago, P2P file sharing accounted for 65% of the internet’s bandwidth - I had no idea porn and illegally downloaded anime were that popular.
But the real kicker for me - YouTube alone is the source of nearly 10% of all data transferred over the internet, or 20% of all HTTP data. One website that’s been around for only two years uses 10% of our bandwidth. Try to wrap your head around how big of a deal that is (YouTube: 1, Thailand: 0).
You can read the press release here, but it’s really not that interesting… Maybe I’ll just watch some funnymusic videos on YouTube instead.
I figure the readers of this blog could use a nice Patrick Stewart photo every once in a while, so I’ve dug one up for you, straight from the Patrick Stewart Network website. It needs no additional commentary.
As flash memory prices continue to drop, they are readily replacing disc media as the “chosen” form of inter-computer data transfer. You can already find USB sticks that can hold almost as much as a standard DVD disc for less than the price of what those ten packs of DVD-RWs used to cost. Now, we’re finally making a leap into the two-digit GB range, as Transcend showed off their 16GB memory stick at Computex 2007 last week. Ha, and to think I almost bought into that whole rewritable disc craze a few years ago. You can’t put those things through the clothes washer four times and still expect them to work, now can you?!?!
No word yet on how much this behemoth of a flash drive will cost, but it’s sure to be more than my flat-screen monitor went for.
This week, we’re going back to the roots of my obsession with European music videos. It’s Lordi’s new video of their hit single that won the Eurovision Song Contest last year:
