It’s official. Apple’s made a habit of producing long, large and reasonably thorough introductory videos for major new hardware and software they’re releasing.

It’s great for hungry fanboys and tech journalists who can’t get it elsewhere, and I guess for the growing number of folk who want a look at the stuff before plunking down coin for the new stuff coming out of Cupertino. Largely overkill, the hype usually should be enough for other manufacturers, but Apple tends to go overboard about these things (hey, new iPhone TV ads are still coming out up to now, man). Don’t have a problem with it, though.

Recently, some of the better ones have been the iPhone and iPod Touch guided tours (although they need serious help sourcing less awkward hosts for these things - less of the hand gestures, guys! And seriously, we’re sick of the black t-shirts.)

Now, they’ve just released on the Apple site a half-hour video for OS X Leopard, which is coming out on Friday. (For which I will take off from the Tokyo Motor Show and sneak out to the Ginza Apple Store on the 26th to see how they do a product rollout in Japan.) Cool. Us fanboys anticipate these videos like sequels to the Transformers movie.

Watch the Leopard Guided Tour in different resolutions or download it (108mb for iPods and 379mb for the bigger version) here.

From the Now-We’ve-Seen-Everything Department

Your friendly Nameless and Shameless Chinese Cloner Corporation has made a Nintendo Wii clone called the Vii, according to Engadget China.

The clone apparently can do a good approximation of the Wii, although no one has really gotten their mitts on one to review it yet. The Chinese Engadget site is as yet untranslated so we can’t make out much, but from the looks of it, it looks and works a lot like the real thing. From the available pics, some of the games are called Happy Tennis, Alacrity Golf, Fry Fish, Bird Knight, Fever Move, and my favorite, Free Craps.

Try and read through the Engadget report here. They even have a couple of videos.

More on the Vii later.

I’m at the Epson North Luzon Business Conference up here at Fort Ilocandia Resort in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, and while this event is wall-to-wall business, one of the things that floored me is an entertainment device. From Epson? Damn straight!

It’s called the Epson EMP-TWD 3 Home Entertaiment Projector, and it’s meant for creating a home cinematic experience, not a stuffy old Powerpoint presentation. It’s more for watching 300 the movie rather than charting 300 sales targets for the year.

What makes it different? Senior Manager Mike Mondragon tells me that there’s a world of difference between a projector made for a business presentation than one made for watching movies or TV, or for playing video games, and the EMP-TWD 3 is right at home doing the latter.

At first glance looking like a medium-sized subwoofer, it is actually a projector with integrated speakers and a DVD player. If your hackles rise up at the thought that what is Epson doing making a DVD player - stop worrying; they’re the first to say that their core compentencies lie elsewhere; the DVD player part is a JVC product.

It connects by a single cable, and has a high luminance that you don’t even need to turn down the room lights to use it. Imagine Halo 3 on this thing.

The best part? It costs less than half you’d pay for a large LCD monitor that you can’t lug around and adjust sizes with. Cool stuff.

The many preliminary bouts are a bit long and wearying. Bored, I pulled out the iPod and found a free signal labelled Gateway Cinema (why they’d have one here is beyond me) and began surfing. The mere fact I can do this on an iPod and not a laptop or smartphone or Blackberry is no less short of amazing.

That this is even doable underscores the usefulness of such a device that is neither a laptop or a smartphone. It’s way handy and convenient for times like these so you can surf, blog or email easily anywhere with wifi with just this one gadget. I’m liking this thing more and more and I’m beginning to think that its most significant weakness - not being a phone - is actually its greatest strength.

More in the forthcoming review. In the meantime I have to go. Manny’s fight is about to start. Kyla’s singing.

It should be a no-brainer prediction that one of the high-capacity optical formats will be included in an impending iteration of iMac (nice alliteration, huh?) or other new Mac, but its still anyone’s guess which of the two warring standards Steve-O will side with, and we won’t likely know until the next Macworld Keynote. (Blu-Ray is emerging as the dominant format, but you never really know with notorious contrarian Jobs.) But for those portable Mac users with ginormous storage needs, you don’t have to wait (well, maybe a month): Fastmac’s got a solution.

Fastmac announced yesterday their new slim, low-profile, slot-loading 2x Blu-Ray burner upgrade for Mac laptops. Now Mac users can enjoy burning 50GB worth of files at twice the speed, or watch a growing number commercially available BD movies like PS3 owners can.

The new burner is also Adobe certified, and supports Blu-Ray video disk authoring on Mac OS X. It works with the following models:

iBook G4
iMac G5
iMac Intel
MacBook Pro (17-inch)
Mac mini
PowerBook G3 Pismo
PowerBook G4 Titanium (667 Mhz or higher)
PowerBook G4 Aluminum

The burner works with Roxio Toast 8 Titanium or Adobe Premiere CS3 for Macs. It’ll be shipping within the month but is already available for pre-order on the FastMac site for a cool US$1K special introductory offer.

If you’re the kinda geek who likes wood trim on the dashboard of your car, you might like Audio Technica’s new flagship, top-of-the-line headphones - the ATH-ESW9 Sovereign Wood Headphones, the cans of which are made from Japanese Hokkaido cherry trees. Really.

They are really attention-getters and will be out on the market on October 19. The wood will set you back a steep US$379.

(Via Audio Junkies)

(Via WIRED)

The infamous Chinese cloner Meizu (who came out with the iPhone clone M8, and whose claim against cloning was that they announced their version four days before Apple’s announcement of the iPhone - hah!) has come out with an iPod Touch clone dubbed the Meizu M7. For all intents and purposes as much a clone of the Touch as the M8 is a clone of the iPhone, and has similar features.

This brazen announcement was made once again by Meizu president J. Wong on his company’s forum - it’s in Chinese, but you can get Google to translate it for you.

It’s 48 x 89 x7.3mm (1.9 x 3.5 x 0.3â€

The wonderful folk at the Embraceware blog thought up a way for you to stream videos stored on your Mac straight to your iPhone so you can watch it there (and ostensibly over the net as well).

You can head over to the site for the instructions, and for more info. In case you want to jump right in, we reproduce Embraceware’s step-by-step here:

Step 1
Open “Sharingâ€

]]> http://blogs.inquirer.net/m-ph/2007/09/22/stream-movies-to-your-iphone-from-your-mac/feed/ http://blogs.inquirer.net/m-ph/2007/09/16/100-olpc-now-188-so-far/ http://blogs.inquirer.net/m-ph/2007/09/16/100-olpc-now-188-so-far/#comments Sat, 15 Sep 2007 16:30:47 +0000 Adel Gabot http://www.m-ph.com/laptop/100-olpc-now-188-so-far/

The MIT-engineered One Laptop Per Child computer that was widely praised for costing just a hundred bucks now costs almost twice that, according to the non-profit group in an announcement last Friday.

The OLPC laptop is meant for international release for schoolchildren in depressed and developing countries, in a noble effort to improve education. Among its benefits, aside from the low cost, is low power consumption, built-in wifi, a display readable even in bright sunlight and a mechanism to charge it by hand via a crank. Initial customer-countries are Brazil, Libya, Thailand and Uruguay.

From $100, the price has crept up to $130, then $148, then $176, and now stands at $188, and there is no end in sight yet for the computer being manufactured by Quanta Computer Inc. of Taiwan. Spokesman George Snell of OLPC says that rising component costs and currency fluctuations are driving the costs up, but says the group will try to not let it get past $190. For now they have a buffer of $2.

It was too good to be true anyway. Let’s all continue to pray for the project’s success.

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