News for Tuesday, 9 August 2005

Creative, the first portable device manufacturer to adopt Microsoft's Media Center format with the Zen Portable Media Center, decided to get rid of it for its next Zen Vision player. According to some executive of the company, sales of the first player were disappointing.
Proposing its own software suite, Creative will release in September a more complete player, able to decode DivX natively and adopting CompactFlash to empty camera CF cards, a format forbidden on Microsoft Media Center.
But Creative is not that crazy, though they refuse to stick to Media Center specs, the new Zen Vision supports WMA with DRM and WMV.
The question is, what are other multimedia players going to do? If they follow Creative on this path, the Media Center is dead, at least in its current version, which is too centered on Microsoft technologies.

Thanks to Pil for the news :)
Skype has been working on a portable phone prototype, working on a WiFi network to get access to Internet.
This "mobile" phone wouldn't use any operator's network, but Internet and Wifi, currently spreading so fast everywhere.
Simply enter your Skype account parameters on the phone, and all your contacts are available.
Skype having planned to implement its communication protocol with video, I let you imagine the further possible developments to such a prototype.
Soon phoning for free? :)

Here is what Laurent discovered:

Apple has an incredibly efficient tool for monitoring repairs of your machine through a website. You just have to enter your dispatch number and ZIP code to know the evolution of the repairs.
However, it's somewhat astonishing that they prefer running such an application not on WebObjects but rather on its competitor, Bea Weblogic.
https://selfservice.apple.com/index.html

Indeed, Weblogix is among the best servers for Java applications, since even IBM uses it, though it has its own J2EE server that's even more in direct competition with Weblogic than Apple's one. That kind of situation will always make us smile...