via kickstarter.com

This is really slick. Not just the product itself but also the way Kickstarter has, well, given this project a huge kick start. I don't normally wear a watch but I may just think about it now.

On a side note, this is designed by MINIMAL, a design shop in Chicago. Some really great designs coming from here. Didn't realize that they were the ones behind the iBelieve lanyard for the iPod Shuffle from way back in the day. I can't find their site any more but I remember them also having a very clean single page design for ordering it.

I've just started playing the latest Professor Layton game for the Nintendo DS - Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. It's a puzzle adventure game where you go through the story exploring your surroundings and solving short brain teasers along the way. Extremely engaging and well written story line mixed with very simple and easy to understand game play (some of the puzzles are hard but there's a good hint system to help you along). The game uses the DS's touch screen well which leads me to wonder, why aren't more games like this popping up on the iPhone? As with all things, I'm sure it's a money thing since most DS games are priced between $20 - $35 versus the iPhones $0.99 to $9.99 range. Still, if Apple wants to seriously market the iPhone, iPod Touch, and possibly the iPad as great gaming devices, they need to move beyond the casual games like Doodle Jump and Angry Birds and cultivate more professionally designed games from real game development houses.

This is pretty cool. Staying at the Holiday Inn by Camden Yards and the alarm clock has an iPod charger/dock. Plays music just fine and charged up my iPhone, too. Nice!

Follow up to my post yesterday about the Google Chrome OS. First off, read the excellent Fake Steve Jobs post about the new OS and we agree on most points - he just presents in a much funnier, insightful, and entertaining manner.
 
Second, the rumblings are that Eric Schmidt needs to leave Apple's board because of potential competitive issues. He currently recuses himself from board meetings that deal with the iPhone due to Google competing Android product. Will he now recuse himself when there is talk of Mac OS? So pretty much he's just there to discuss iPods? Seems like a waste of space in my opinion. However, my prediction is that Schmidt does not leave Apple's board. This leads me to believe that the Google Chrome OS is not really going to be an OS in the traditional sense of the word which means it doesn't really compete with Mac OS and for that matter, Windows. Let's remember, it's basically Linux with the Chrome browser bolted on top. The real point of the Chrome OS is to push more Chrome installations and not to beat Windows. Believe me, it takes more than just having a superior OS to take significant market share away from Microsoft. Look at Mac OS and the ahead of its time BeOS. Both were better operating systems yet couldn't even make a dent in Windows. I hardly doubt ANOTHER Linux variant is going to fair any better.

CrunchGear has a demo video from CES of the Palm Pre. Overall, I think it looks pretty cool. Definitely a huge step up from where the PalmOS was before, but I can't help but feel like it's a very "Me, too" product. The Card View method of viewing applications is nice and there are some pretty nice innovations on the Contacts side of things. If you don't currently own a touch screen smart phone, I think the Pre is a very viable alternative to the iPhone, Blackberry Storm, or anything from HTC.
 
Rumor has it that they are going to price the phone at $399 SUBSIDIZED, which would put it at the high end of touch screen smart phones. A quote from Palm CEO Ed Colligan, as reported by Peter Kafka, when asked if Palm considered pricing the Pre at $200 or below to compete with the iPhone was "Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product?" Well Ed, you don't really have a significantly better product. You can make the argument that the Pre is as good, at best slightly better than the iPhone (though I wouldn't). In other words, I wouldn't switch to the Pre from my 1st generation iPhone because there's nothing that much better in the Pre. And let's not forget that anything that can be claimed to be better on the Pre can easily be copied in future iPhone software updates.

As someone who has had a litany of smart phones, it took a significant feature or service improvement from one device to another for me to make the switch. I started with the original Sidekick, moved to a color Sidekick (for the color, of course), then to a T-Mobile MDA (Edge performance increase plus more flexibility in adding apps on Windows Mobile), and finally to an iPhone (my first video iPod plus all the amazing UI features). I even bypassed an upgrade to the 3G iPhone because faster data speed wasn't enough for me to pay extra for essentially the same UI. Suffice it to say, simply being a little bit better (if at all) is not enough for someone to want to pay $100-$200 more for a Pre than a 3G iPhone.