If there’s a benefit to weak economies, it’s the promos retailers come up with to try and boost demand. At least that’s the rationale behind AnandTech’s Guide to Digital Cameras for the Holidays.

Makes sense actually:

the last couple of months have seen lower growth than expected.

That news means there will be many bargains in current Digital Camera models over this holiday season. Year-end is always a time of bargains, but they’re usually last year’s models. This year you will likely see sale prices on the latest and greatest. That’s good news if you’re in the market for a new digital camera this year.

There are also bargains galore on low-end point-and-shoot digital cameras. As prices have fallen on DSLR cameras it has pushed the P&S prices even lower. For the first time we’ve found a couple of point-and-shoot cameras we have the ability to easily recommend that are selling for around $100.

Check the whole guide here. From full-fledged dSLRs to point-and-shoots, this guide offers so much content (7 web pages worth!). So I’m slicing this post short to give you more reading time.

(image from AnandTech)

Tags: holiday buyer’s guide, holiday shopping, Panasonic Lumix DMC-L8

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The company apparently vowed back in March to give everyone a free soda if Guns N’ Roses released its decades-in-the-making album Chinese Democracy before the end of 2008.

Well, the album apparently came out today, so Dr Pepper is honoring its wager and, if you go to drpepper.com, you can register to receive a coupon for one free 20-ounce Dr Pepper or Diet Dr Pepper.

Well, in theory you can register. It looks like heavy traffic is bringing the site down to a crawl. I’ve been trying for about 20 minutes to get in.

Looks like it’s kind of working, though, so get your beverage.

UPDATE: Wow, I had no idea this was going to become such an epic undertaking. For what it’s worth, I was able to finally log on earlier today and register successfully for my coupon. But the site looks like it’s hammered now.

However, several people have mentioned in the comments that calling Dr Pepper customer service at 1-800-696-5891 is another way to register for the coupon. I’d advocate that approach.

UPDATE II: Dr Pepper has extended the promotion through 6 p.m. Monday. The Web site still seems slammed, though, so I’d advocate calling Dr Pepper at 1-888-377-3773 to get your coupon. That’s a different number than the one people in the comments were suggesting, but it’s the official line that Dr Pepper is asking people to use.

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No official confirmation from Verizon yet, but that’s the word on the street.

If you were thinking about picking one up on your way home from work this afternoon, you might want to call the store before you make the drive.

I’m getting a review unit this afternoon, so I’ll probably have some first impressions to write up Monday.

Early reviews from other sources say it’s good but not the revolutionary device that some expected. Here’s Mossberg’s Storm review from The Journal.

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Nokia, the world’s leading mobile handset maker, has been giving some blended signals about its research direction of late, an area where it spent more than $8bn in 2007.

Bob Iannucci, its first non-Finn chief technology officer, stepped down at the end of September after only nine months in the job. He’d been based in Palo Alto and was head of the Nokia Research Center there, from when it first opened two years ago.

Nokia has not given the reasons behind his abrupt departure and has not announced any replacement. 

However, it did announce at The Way We Live Next press day in Palo Alto on Thursday that it was continuing to extend its research labs network. Hollywood will be added as a location, joining Palo Alto and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US, two centres in Finland and others in the UK, China and Switzerland.

Henry Tirri, the current head of Nokia Research, said the new Los Angeles centre would focus on entertainment, one of three key areas of research he highlighted - the others being traffic and personal health. He said Nokia’s strategy and commitment hadn’t modified.

“The world hasn’t changed, the talents are global, we go where the top innovation happens,” he stated.

Rebecca Allen was introduced as head of the Hollywood lab. She was the founding chair and professor of UCLA’s department of design and media arts, a senior research scientist at MIT Media Lab Europe and the design manager for One Laptop Per Child’s XO notebook.

In the next year, she hopes to come up with some prototypes for how “Mobile Augmented Reality” can be developed for entertainment applications. The idea is that handsets in the future will have so many sensors, users will be able to see the world around them differently through their viewfinders and use their bodies and gestures more to give the device commands.

 In entertainment, this could mean some kind of alternate reality gaming and the new head also gave examples of enabling body movements, such as a hand on the heart being a command for making contact with a friend, while one on the back pocket would initiate a financial transaction.

The Palo Alto centre has been focusing on traffic and the power of aggregating data from sensors in phones. Its Mobile Millennium project, launched last week, is enrolling up to 10,000 motorists in a traffic monitoring system that uses GPS chips in phones to help build up a comprehensive picture of motoring conditions in the Bay Area.

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Looks like there’s a new gold rush, and it has a lot to do with the internets and companies’ newfound interest in tapping third-party development talent. Witness the case of Steve Demeter, who wrote Trism, made it available on the Apple App Store, and two months later, made $250,000. Demeter apparently spent the megabucks wisely, using the windfall to put up his own development studio.

Yahoo was right on the money when it stated “companies like Apple and Microsoft (with the Xbox 360’s new Community Games channel) have begun to provide bedroom developers simple, low-cost ways to develop on hardware that was once closed off to all but the biggest games makers.” At the same time however, let’s hope these fledging on the internet app stores do a good job of filtering out all the trash that they’ll no doubt have to deal with. Remember the $1000 iPhone App?

Tags: app stores, Apple App Store, Community Games channel, Demiforce, iTunes Store, Steve Demeter, Trism

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I’m testing WowWee’s new Rovio robot, and I’m impressed.

The neat thing about this bot is that it can connect to a Wi-Fi network so that you can drive it from any personal or smart phone with a Web browser.

A built in Web camera and microphone lets you see and hear the road from Rovio’s point of view, so you can literally remote control this droid from anywhere in the world.

Want to patrol your home with Rovio while you’re at work (or on a business trip on the other side of the world)? You can! And since the Rovio even has a speaker, you can speak into a microphone connected to your computer and have your voice pop out of the robot. Quite nifty.

If the personal you’ll use to drive Rovio is on the same network as the robot itself, it’s easy to set up.

But controlling Rovio on a separate network (i.e. Rovio on one wireless network, and you on another network) is a bit complicated, and requires delving into the settings on your wireless router.

So I’ll be digging into that functionality over the weekend, and report back next Friday.

But if you’ve any questions or comments from your own experience with a Rovio, let me know.

UPDATE: Robert Oschler sends a link to his site where he documents how to control a Rovio with a Nintendo Wii controller. Fancy!

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Need a flower vase and support for Wi-Fi, wired DSL, and VoIP? Then the STC Wireless Router is absolutely perfect! Coming straight at you from Saudi Telecom.

Yes, you can fill it up with water and place actual flowers in it. And from the looks of it, this router doesn’t have that big a footprint. Now if it could only hide the DSL and power cables really well…

(images from dezeen.com)

Tags: flower vase router, routers, Saudi Telecom, STC Wireless Router, vase router, wireless routers

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Depending how you define them, Finland’s Nokia is by far the largest supplier of smartphones.

But Nokia position in the business smartphone market has been constrained in the past because, unlike BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, it lacked the tools to enable companies to directly connect their corporate email systems to Nokia devices.

Now that is changing.

Nokia and IBM announced an agreement that will enable Nokia smartphones including more than 80m Nokia S60 devices already deployed, to access IBM Lotus Notes corporate email starting from next month.

In September Nokia signed a similar deal with Microsoft that enables Nokia smartphones to be tied into corporate Microsoft Exchange Servers and Outlook email systems.

As a result, Nokia claims that close to 90 per cent of corporate inboxes can now be accessed from Nokia devices without the need for third-party middleware, or perhaps most crucially in the current economic environment, any additional investment.

Nokia abandoned development of its own corporate email product this year, choosing to look for partners instead while focusing on developing phones for business users to better challenge RIM, the wireless email market leader.

RIM’s success in the corporate market reflects in part, its close relationships with telecommunications network operators and its success in persuading corporate customers and others to deploy its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software which provides a secure and reliable link into enterprise email systems including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Nokia’s latest announcements underscore the company’s determination to accelerate adoption of its smartphone devices, particulary its ‘E’ Series smartphones, in the face of increasing competition from RIM and other smartphone vendors including Apple with the iPhone.

In the third quarter Nokia sold 1.1m of its new full mini-Qwerty keyboard E71 phones, outselling RIM’s Blackberry Bold which is aimed at a similar high end market segment by bout five-to-one, according to Nokia. Since then however, the Blackberry Bold has been rolled out in additional markets including the US where it is exclusively on offer from AT&T.

Nokia’s Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange tie-ups level the enterpise smartphone playing field. Let battle commence.

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Despite all the iPhone hate, Apple’s laptops deserve all that love. Same with its desktops. Check out what retailers are planning to offer come Black Friday, which is tomorrow:

Note: MacMall and Amazon’s prices take into account the mail-in rebate.

Source: Mac Rumors

Tags: apple, Black Friday, Black Friday promos, iMac, Mac Pro, macbook, MacBook Pro

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Time Warner Cable has been going town-to-town over the past eight months, enhancing its HD lineup with these 11 channels: CNN, TBS, History Channel, Food Network, HGTV, A&E, Discovery, Animal Planet, National Geographic, Versus/Golf, Fox Sports SW.

Dallas, Plano, Richardson and Mesquite got them in March. Irving, Grapevine, Coppell and Lewisville got the same boost in July.

Now the wave of HD programming is coming these lucky towns:

• Addison
• Arlington
• Carrollton
• Cedar Hill
• Cockrell Hill
• Dallas Business District
• Dalworthington Gardens
• DeSoto
• Farmers Branch
• Garland
• Grand Prairie
• Hutchins
• Lancaster
• Pantego
• Rowlett
• Sunnyvale

The extra 11 stations are now available in all but three towns — Cedar Hill, DeSoto and Lancaster — which will get them in December, when Time Warner will bring all of its N. Texas systems up to 50 HD channels.

Why push updates in dribs and drabs? Because Time Warner inherited a very antiquated network here in North Texas and it has been working for well over a year to make needed upgrades. Rather than forcing everyone to wait for that upgrade to be finished, the company pushed service improvements as it completed work in individual towns.

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