Cellular South Readies NetBook Deal
I can’t tell you how impressed I was this week when I received an e-mail from Cellular South (our Mississippi-based cell provider for most of the phones in our office) touting an upcoming service — NetBooks. Pictured is what looks to be a 10-inch Dell Inspiron Mini, configured with a 160GB drive (current size as the one in my MacBook), Wi-Fi, 3G and, of course Windows XP.
Oops. Why would I be excited about a machine running Windows XP? Actually, I’m not excited about the Windows part. (Although they could do worse than XP.) I’m particularly excited about the fact that so many people have had luck running Mac OS X on a Dell Mini, and that my local cell phone company might make that prospect even easier for me by bundling the 3G wireless access. A little mini Mac OS X machine with unlimited 3G wireless is exactly the sort of thing that I probably don’t need — but that I wish I had anyway for my upcoming trip to Tucson, since I’m giving a presentation there and it would be very much fun to have the coolest gizmo in the room. (Shiny!)
And, OK, even if I couldn’t run Mac OS X on it, I’d probably still find a use for it — like taking it on sales presentations, sneaking off to the coffee shop to write opinion pieces or assigning it out to our reporters and interns who need 3G Web access while they report, blog and Twitter.
Assuming the data plan is as attractive as CS’ Blackberry plan ($50 a month for 500 minutes voice + unlimited data & text) then I may just be an early adopter.
InstantWatcher.com - TV Guide for ‘Watch Instantly’
If you’re spending as much time on Netflix Watch Instantly as I am (thank you Roku!), you’ll really appreciate this site: InstantWatcher.com. This very clever mash-up takes content from the Netflix API and marries it up with the YouTube API in order to show clips; it also uses the NYTimes’ movie reviews API to give you reviews and recommendations of the films available in Watch Instantly.
My favorite trick of InstantWatcher might be the “expiring” feature, which tells you what movies to hurry and watch before they fall off the Watch Instantly service.
InstantWatcher the brainchild of Daniel Chao, who has also developed the site KindleFeeder.com for Amazon Kindle users. Which, of course, I covet. (The Kindle, I mean.)
Roku Rocks
Something I’ve wanted since the holidays is what I’ve wistfully referred to as “the Box” — the Roku Netflix Player, which is designed, essentially, to connect your TV to your broadband cable connection so that you can view Netflix’s Watch Instantly movies and TV shows without cabling your computer to your TV. 
For a few years now, I’ve been connecting my MacBook to the TV probably at least a few times per week, first to stream iTunes content, then, later, to watch a fair bit of Hulu, then to watch Amazon On Demand. The service changed frequently, particularly when we wanted to watch a particular show — Battlestar Galactica — because the rights situation with BSG kept changing…first you could buy it on iTunes, then it was gone; then it was free on Hulu, then the number of back episodes was cut down serverly; finally, it was easiest to just buy Season 4 on Amazon and stream it over the MacBook wired up to the TV.
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UStream’s iPhone App for Inauguration
Yes, I’ve given up on my iPhone for now (that’s another, longer story) but for those of you still clinging to yours in locales better served by AT&T, check this out. UStream is planning a special iPhone application that will enable you to watch the Inauguration of Barack Obama live on your iPhone on Tuesday.
Might as well go ahead and download it, if only because you can.
End of an Era: Macworld
Apple announced today that Steve Jobs would not keynote the San Francisco Macworld Expo in January 2009, suggesting (a.) that there isn’t anything cool enough for Jobs to personally go public with and (b.) that Apple feels the tradeshow has runs its course in terms of usefulness to the company. According to the press release, this will be Apple’s last yearon the show floor, as well. The release cites the growth of their Apple Stores as a way for them to reach out to customers.
The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.
It’s been years since I’ve attended a Macworld Expo myself (I don’t remember how many, but certainly my last show was before I moved to Mississippi in 2001), but I remember them fondly, particularly as I was attending through the lean years, pre-Jobs, when there were few enough of us “Mac authors” still fighting it out with the PC snobs and the Apple dead-enders. I remember the Return of Jobs in Boston in 1997, although I wasn’t there for that one…I believe there was a QuickTime simulcast. I think I WAS there in 1998 for Macworld SF, and I’ve seen Jobs do his live thing a number of times since.
I remember the fight over moving Macworld from Boston to New York (I was there for at least one of those; I remember meeting one of my editors at a great bar on 9th Avenue back when I was living there) and then Apple’s subsequent pulling of the plug on that one, too.
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