Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Shining a light on moves in the tech world so insane, Who’s on Crack is here to throw around accusation.  Accusations about who we suspect narcotics inspired their latest to-market ideas.  As companies vie for your attention and more importantly your dollars, it helps to back up a few steps to ask, “what the?”.  Here are the biggest blunders this week:

Microsoft admits to copying off Apple’s paper
Did Palm hire “Crazy Eddy”?
Blockbuster shows desperation
Web TV finally here?

Mac rules, so we copied it.

This week, Microsoft apparently copped to being inspired by Apple’s OS design.  From Bill Stiteler’s post quoting Microsoft’s Partner Group Manager Simon Aldus : “What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7—whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format—is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. [Emphasis added]”

Aldus went on to mention they built this on top of Vista.  At this point you’ve got to wonder why he stops there?  Why not take the cab all the way to Crazytown and spout off how Microsoft purposely crippled Vista or how every time someone buys Windows 7, Microsoft shoots a puppy.  Or perhaps that Redmond HQ is built on top of a secret underground lair where Ballmer has taken to dressing up as Darth Vader and babbles about dominating the galaxy.

Can you imagine sitting in MS PR department when this bit of news comes in?  Here is the play by play:
MS PR guy 1: “He said what???”
MS PR gal 1: “No f’n way?”
MS PR guy 2: “Somebody check the gosh-darn calendar, it isn’t April, right?”
MS PR gal 2: “We are so TP’ing this guys house tonight.”

Palm prices are so low, they are practically paying you to take it

Fact: I am smitten with webOS.  But $29 bucks to get your hands on a super-slim Palm Pixi model with the hot OS that is actually fun to use?  Come on, there is a catch right?  According to Robert Nelson, there isn’t:
“Now I am going to go out on a ledge here, but maybe the Pixi or future similar models will end up being the savior of Palm. Maybe Palm is going to take up the role of the low priced smartphone company. And if that is that case, I guess being available for a bargain price through Walmart makes sense.”

Crazy Eddy was a guy in the New York area that did lame commercials in the 80s and was eventually thrown in the pokey for tax evasion.  This price thanks to Wal-Mart and Palm is amazingly low.  Yes, a $99 is tempting.  A $49 refurbed iPhone is even more tempting but $29 for a great smartphone?  Either they are reading Gadgetell or come up with schemes in a smoke-filled room where “munchies” are served 15 minutes after the meeting starts.  Impressive or insane?

Blockbuster says SlotMusic was genius

Oh boy.  Remember when SlotMusic was pushed on us?  Back at CES we giggled for what seemed like hours about it.  Apparently, Blockbuster thought it was the bees knees and is looking to rent movies the same way.  Ugh.

Our Robert Nelson says, “Blockbuster has decided to begin testing a new pilot program that will allow in-store visitors to rent a movie on an SD card. The plan is simple, those entering a Blockbuster store will be able to bring in an SD card and rent a movie by way of a self-service kiosk. The movies will of course be filled with DRM and will expire after a pre-selected amount of time.”

There is some logic here fore netbooks that lack a DVD drives or those dying to watch something on a device that is actually too small to watch it on (judgment call).  But for everyone else, this is a go-nowhere idea.  Robert adds customer service isn’t the strong suit of Blockbuster and there just isn’t enough people that care.  Dead on arrival, back to the drawing board guys and gals.

Web TV could be here.

Did you hear the wall come down?  Not the Berlin Wall, I refer here to the wall around your TV.  It was just shattered.  Thanks to TVs with web widgets and home theater pcs, that wall is no more.

A big culprit may be the Dell Zino HD.  This cute little device is primed to sit in your a/v shelf and bring the goodness of the web to your HDTV.  Our Shawn Ingram explains, “The Zino HD looks like it could be the computer of choice for any home theater setup for easy access to all those videos on your computer.  Pair it with Boxee, Hulu, Netflix and iTunes, and you have almost everything you could want viewable on your HDTV.”

The key here to go mainstream is ease of use.  Here we may still have some issues as consumers switch between a remote and a keyboard but this unit looks good enough to get geeks and their kinda-geeky counterparts on board.  Starting at just $229 and so cute, what is not to love?  Dell must hate the cable companies.

So now it’s wait for Boxee, buy a new TV with web widgets or spring for this cute box.  My money is on this box.