Music label EMI joins Universal as the second major label to sign on with Nokia’s “Comes With Music” digital music subscription service. This is a positive move forward and helps to legitimize what basically amounts to an $80 premium per device in exchange for one year of unlimited music downloads. The deal’s not all Chapstick […]

Music label EMI joins Universal as the second major label to sign on with Nokia’s “Comes With Music” digital music subscription service. This is a positive move forward and helps to legitimize what basically amounts to an $80 premium per device in exchange for one year of unlimited music downloads.

The deal’s not all Chapstick and back rubs, though, as the files are DRM’d and Nokia hasn’t announced whether it’ll pass the $80 cost on to consumers or if they’ll eat the cost themselves or try to get wireless carriers to foot some of the bill.

Apple’s reportedly eyeing the same unlimited music idea as Nokia except it’s only offered to pay a $20 premium per device, citing that the average iPod owner only buys $20 worth of music from iTunes. I’ve got news for Apple; if everything in iTunes was free, I’d be getting a lot more of my content from there — much, much, much more than $20-worth. If Apple can get the labels to agree to $20, fine by me. Superior, actually, because I’d gladly pony up $20 every year for unlimited downloads from iTunes. I’d be a much harder sell on the $80 thing from Nokia, though.

Nokia’s “Comes With Music” now comes with EMI [Ars Technica]

ShareThis

Via [crunchgear]

Share This

Share This

Beleaguered smartphone maker Palm lost $31.5 million this quarter, despite the Centro’s success—no surprise, given that their living-in-the-past handsets are losing marketshare, not to mention the whole deader-than-dead Foleo. [NYT]

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This

Share This

Ranging between $500 and $1,500, the tiny fellas of the Guy Robots project are part art, and all junk and heart. According to their creator, they don’t walk or talk or give legal advice, won’t harass your pets, emit ozone or pinch. Electro, the ready-for-anything direct current commando bot pictured here, likes folk dancing, and is proud of his infrared vision amongst other things. I reckon this is the nerd’s version of going to pick a dog from the hound pound. More descriptions below the gallery.

There’s Euclid, who uses his antennae to converse with whale pods, spot welder Shock is a believer in pet neutering and Slim who, like me, is a reptile taxidermist who spends his spare time playing backgammon, doing macramé and Russian literature. Buff-yet-dumb Gyro is a hard worker who once removed the lug nuts from every vehicle in the Yankee Stadium’s car park. And then there’s Mitch, who suffers from lower back pain, and Konrad, who’s currently in therapy.

All of the figures, which range between six and 20 inches, are made from reclaimed items from places as diverse as aerospace and avionics surplus suppliers, scrapyards and long-haul microwave equipment recyclers. And then there’s the stuff just found on the street. [Guy Robot via swissmiss]

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This

Share This

Owners of Rock Band for the Xbox 360 and PS3 will be happy to know that the fine folks at Harmonix have just issued a big software update for the game. I’d check this myself but, like an idiot, I accidentally sent my own personal copy of Rock Band back to GameFLY instead of […]

Owners of Rock Band for the Xbox 360 and PS3 will be happy to know that the fine folks at Harmonix have just issued a big software update for the game. I’d check this myself but, like an idiot, I accidentally sent my own personal copy of Rock Band back to GameFLY instead of the copy of Assassin’s Creed I rented. I don’t want to talk about it but I’m patiently waiting to see if GameFLY can track down my game and return it to me unscathed.

Kudos to the dev team at Harmonix for the update, though, which “fixes some of the common issues [they’ve] been reading about on rockband.com, but also introduces a cool new feature!”

From the Rock Band forums…

“Here’s what you’ll find in the update…

• (New!) Music Store: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.
• Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans” achievement.
• More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So” or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.
• Improved phoneme recognition: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or “Blitzkrieg Bop”, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.
• Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.
• Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!
• Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only” wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.”

Looks pretty cool. I’ll be itching to update mine if and when I ever get it back.

State of the Band - Rock Band Software Update Finalized! [Rock Band Forums]

ShareThis

Via [crunchgear]

Share This

This week at TreeHugger: We pull the wraps off the Giant Twist Freedom DX, a nice, normal-looking bike with an electric secret. Want to listen to music, but don’t want to have to remember to charge your player? We’ve got you covered. Lastly, the one and only Poweriser, that you use to “Powerbock,” is back; after popping up (ha-ha) a year ago, they’re taking Europe by storm and even have their own social networking site. Bock on.

The Giant Twist Freedom DX pretty much works and looks like a regular bike — it even has those classy fenders that the chicks love — with one small exception that’s difficult to see (and we think that’s a good thing): a torque sensor that monitors your pedaling and controls a 250-watt DC motor located in the front wheel. Power comes from two 26-volt lithium-ion batteries, and provides range of up to 75 miles. Ready to crank? The sensor tells the motor to back off. Feeling lazy? The motor kicks in to overdrive and all of the sudden it’s a bicycle you don’t have to pedal. And it’s got a ticket for the real world; they’re set to come out in May with a price tag of about $2,000.

If you’re ready to get down with your bad self but don’t want your tunes and mp3 player tied to the grid, here are two media players that’ll shake you all night long without need for a traditional power supply (that’s right — you: 1; your electric utility: 0). Get jiggy with the Media Street eMotion, (above, on the left) runs for nine hours after 12 to 15 hours of charging; in direct sunlight it can play all day; the Eco-Player (on the right) cranks out 40 minutes of playing after one minute of cranking.

Lastly, after first appearing about a year ago, the Poweriser stilts are taking Europe by storm and popping up everywhere around the world. Fans of the crazy bouncing stilts — which might be the coolest, craziest form of human-powered transportation we’ve seen to date — are all meeting up in Germany in a few weeks, and users of the Powerisers, who are called “powerbockers” (after their inventor, Alexander Böck) even have their own social networking site. But the real fun is to be had on YouTube, where some of the more adventurous ‘bockers have uploaded videos of themselves performing feats of strength and other wacky craziness in acrobatics and extreme sports. All we have the ability to say is this: Bock on!

TreeHugger’s EcoModo column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This

Share This

The Swiss Peace Knife concept is designed to be the … um, Swiss Army Knife of pocket first aid kits. Using that distinctive form-factor for a band-aid dispenser, pill box, disinfectant spray and even a whistle seems a genius idea, to me. Might even be pretty useful, for outdoor sporty types. You’d just have to make sure that you were carrying the Army version if you came across a horse with something stuck in its hoof. It’s just a concept, for now, from designers Qian Jiang, Yiying Wu and Carolina Flores. [Yanko designs]

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This