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The Best Tech You Can't Get in the US
DigitalDame2 writes "The US isn't always on the cutting edge of technology. We see a new product release that has just the blend of styling and features we've been looking for, but alas, it's only available overseas. From the Thanko MP4 watch to Sony's OLED TV, these are the hottest new gadgets to drool over, that you can't get here."
.... Is available at ThinkGeek.com. This watch:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/8e18/
Is the same one listed in the PC Mag article:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=217864&s=1562&a=217876&po=13,00.asp?p=y
So it looks like you can get at least one of these items in the US.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Yeah, it's a bunch of whiz-bang crap without any real value. The prime example is the "MP4 Watch". Besides apparently not supporting MP4 (but who really knows, at this low level of journalism) it's stupid in the first place. It's not like it's hard to make a crappy little MP3 player, glue some straps to it, and call it a "watch". Whoopdy-do.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
As an aside, responding to your post since it's (indirectly) referring to the watch.
Thinkgeek sells that OLED MP4 Watch.
It sucks.
The headphones and USB cable jacks are proprietary. The headphones have the Motorola style cellphone jack, but buying a third party earbud for your headphones with that kind of jack will result in one channel being dead... presumably because the contact for Mic on the cell hands-free bud is the contact for the other speaker according to the watch. Bad.
The sound quality on the watch is also horrendous. Crackling with music that could be considered "intensive." Not even the overcompressed stuff we complain about... but just varied, sonically. Low volume stuff would crackle if it just happened to have a full sound in range.
Video isn't standard. It uses a proprietary codec that is basically a codec with really bad compression. Lower bitrates bring the size down, but the video quality really suffers. The Crazy Frog video was included with the watch (ANOTHER reason not to buy it! FIE!) and the 4 minute video, at highest quality, took almost 900MB.
The strap is very clunky, tends to get caught on just about anything and isn't replacable with a standard watch band. Broken strap? SOL.
Horrible, horrible watch. Don't get it.
Captcha: Betrayer. Sorry ThinkGeek and Slashdot. But the product does suck.
The number of active duty men and women in the U.S. armed forces as of Jan. 31, 2003
Let's not forget what the US military DID in the 1990s. Despite commentators on Fox News (and members of the Republican Party) surrendering to Milosevic and wondering how many body-bags there'd be in the former Yogoslavia, there were no combat deaths at all in Kosovo for the US. None. Nada. Zip. You get the idea. A country with multiple warring factions and we got the job done with no losses.
Sounds like they were playing smarter, not harder, back then. Sounds like a tactic they should be using today.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
I think I know one of the people who works for one of the firms that make watches like this, and he doesn't like them either ... :)
As for the video codec, all "MP4"-* products from China have more or less the same one. No compression, proprietary (but quite simple, if I remember correctly), limited to jaggy framerates, low resolutions.
But the real reason why the person I know doesn't like these devices is because they're heavy, have little battery-life, and broke rather spontaneously. AFAIK, the built-in flash memory may also be faulty more often than you'd expect.
BTW, if I haven't made it clear enough, these watches are relatively common gadgets in China, and not really affiliated with ThinkGeek.
I think I'd like one anyway, but please with a calculator, or hell, ARM processor, wifi and UMTS or something (so I can make beowulf-clusters out of them), GPS, lasers, and whatnot.
Just a few more years, I think
Hell, we're jealous of the platforms and powertrains the European models get! There's an amazing amount of innovation that goes on in the Big Three and its supply satellites. However, the vast majority of what they invent can't or won't be sold here because either:
A) some dumb cluck Congressman decreed that every American-built car must include $GIZMO that would completely invalidate, destroy, etc. said innovation; or
B) some dumb cluck marketer decided that "Americans will never buy" said innovation, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Every year, if you read the News and the Free Press coverage of the Detroit auto show, they're absolutely drooling over the scores of shiny, slick new models, and then it turns out that it's all destined for the European and Asian markets. Meanwhile, we just get the same lame sedan, minivan and SUV retreads with the same lame 3.0L V6 and 4.7L V8 that we've gotten every new model-year since 1997. Is it any wonder that everyone else's imports are eating our lunch?
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
Nearly every cellphone sold in Japan has the English language included. The only localization that needs to be done is switching out the OneSeg TV tuner (for TV-capable models) for a US/Europe-based digital tuner, and switching out the FeliCa RFID chip for whatever the US/Europe uses (and for HK/Singapore, which uses FeliCa already, it's just a matter of creating the application to tell the phone how to respond to their specific readers). On the other hand, Japan is behind in service a bit- only 2 providers offer unlimited M2M (and on one, unlimited M2M is a separate service plan so you can't buy a minute package and then M2M), Softbank and Willcom. Willcom is also the only provider in Japan with rollover.
OSx86 FTW
When you say America, what are you saying? I am american; I live in Argentina.