The Full Enchilada

Google seems to want to become a mobile carrier, and it’s not a bad move. First there was “Google Voice”.

Then came the various G google smartphones, Nexus, etc…and ANDROID.

Google then realized “Android Fragmentation” really is a problem and they bought MOTOROLA mobile division, not just for the hardware but very much for coveted patents, after they lost bids for some other lucrative patents (like Nortel’s patents).

HP may want to further help Google and Android if the price is right. Google may very well be interested in purchasing WebOS and acquiring all the Palm patents HP currently owns.

Google may wait to place official bid on T-mobile since what’s the point of driving up the price if government regulatory measures may take AT&T out of the bidding wars? Many think the ATT and T-mobile deal may fall through, with government regulators citing antitrust monopoly fears if they allow it since then they would have a very hard time not allowing Verizon to buyout Sprint which would be the next logical move by the big guys.

If ATT is allowed to buy T-mobile then we’ll have only two major cellphone carriers after Verizon absorbs Sprint PCS. Whereas they would be much more inclined to allow another additional player to enter the business, ie Google. Then Google could bolster T-mobile and they could easily deny any potential Verizon bid or takeover of SPRINT. The end result would be best for everyone, there would still be THREE strong major cellphone carriers to foster good competition, well unless they like playing under the table with each other as LCD panel makers, graphics cards manufacturers and others have been known to do to “fix” prices higher on clueless consumers. (Sure government regulatory divisions love to fine them for such conspiracies, and they do, in the millions of dollars albeit a slam on the wrist considering the profits made by price fixing. It seems to be more of a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship though between these giant law breakers and the regulatory institutions.)

But don’t fight the Google, resistance is futile!

And they’re not so bad either, when’s the last time facebook gave you even a penny for all the advertisement money they made off you? At least google spreads some of the love around!

Keen an eye out on ebay as greedy merchants and BestBuy and other employees try to unload their hoarded stash of $99 HP Touchpads at a nice profit.

Many merchants have decided not to sell their stock at the $99 price, Newegg has said they won’t be selling it at the discounted price, many wonder if they will send it off to HP or what they’ll do with their stock of touchpads, its anybody’s guess what all the merchants out there will do. Some might decline new shipments due them for various reasons.

The smart buyer will refrain from paying more than $99 and not be tempted by the scalping on ebay and other sites. Be especially cautious for fake phishing scam sites setup to lure in the desperate pad chasers.

HP will likely try and sell this off as meaning there’s still interest in WebOS and try to dangle some of their PALM patents in front of GOOGLE for a nice sell and profit, they figure they’ll make up the loss on the $99 devices from selling off whatever patent portfolio they got from acquiring Palm.

Do yourselves a favor and find another $99 toy and start getting some sleep instead of hitting F5 nonstop on every touchpad distributor’s site or wasting hundreds on gas money driving to all the BestBuys, Sams Clubs, and Walmarts in your state! It’s an addiction, and another cool nice $99 toy will cure you, try it!

Everyone’s waiting to hear news of the last remaining batches of HP Touchpads slated for delivery to distribution centers. Stores seem to be very tempted to use fake in stock numbers to perhaps gain new customer data, email addresses, house addresses and other valuable info which might help them turn a bargain hunter into a real profitable customer for them.

The web is full of complaints with stores canceling orders in mass, claiming some inventory accounting error, but which errors were deliberate and which were honest? Most high volume distributors have pretty good inventory accounting methods and the opportunity to grab MILLIONS of potential customer data might be very enticing.

Of course there are plain phishing websites popping up just to steal credit card numbers from the naive desperately trying to score a bargain. Interestingly many customers, and in reality ‘potential’ or would-be customers since we have no real numbers as to how many HP Touchpads were really sold at the $99 and $149 dollar discounted price, many of these customers never had much interest in a tablet before, some are not even too techy, they are simply addicted bargain hunters. For some its an unending obsession at finding the craziest ‘deal’ whether for bragging rights or to fulfill the scrooge within.

Either way, perhaps we shouldn’t let them down? How about posting on here the location of any store or website that has some more HP touchpads in stock? Yep, can do! : )

HP does want to prolong the frenzy instead of dropping them all in one batch, they will have another batch or two coming.

Keep in mind many stores will prefer to force people to come down to their store in person instead of giving the deals their online websites. This means you may have to hit all your local stores in person if you’re really desperate. They like to force you to come since if they do run out of stock, they have a chance to sell you something else since who doesn’t like a good ice cream when they’re depressed and exhausted? After the let down on the HP Touchpads, they can show you some other ‘deals’ on the products they do have in stock and many times you buy because you dread going back home empty handed! You want some new toy to tinker with

I’m kind of amazed at how so many people bought into the stupid technology talks behind Apple and Steve Job’s decisions. The superiority of one technology over another has absolutely nothing to do with their decisions against Flash or Java or Admob or anything else they’ve gone against.

It’s purely about creating a monopoly and killing the competition. Just think of it, if they allowed Adobe Flash or JAVA on their iPhones, tons and tons of Games and Applications could be run from INSIDE a Browser, no need to pay Apple to put an App in their App store. By simply killing Java and Flash, Apple has prevented millions of browser Apps from doing business as usual, as on the Desktop, through web browsers. In one easy stroke of the pen, everyone must know pay Apple to get on their App store and keep giving Apple a good percentage of their profits. Now they can force all those online content providers to go through them on the App Store to reach their customers on the iphone or iPad.

It’s brilliant! Isn’t it!? That’s why Steve Jobs gets the big bucks!

Have you ever wanted to send a quick text message, of YES or NO? Perhaps you’re in a board meeting and can’t fiddle with finding some microscopic keys on your software keyboard!? It’s simple with the “Doodle Text!” Android App available on the Android Marketplace from http://www.doodletext.com

Well then just Doodle Text! Yes Doodle Text for Android comes to the rescue with an easy way to doodle an quick short answer on your phone and easily send it via MMS sms picture messaging. MMS stands for MultiMedia Message Service, while SMS was simply Short Message Service which supported just text. With Doodle Text you can quickly and easily text doodle photo messages. Just draw or write with your finger quickly and hit send. We do hope they offer a paid version soon without advertising but who can complain about free!

Another great feature is it can let you send text messages from an office with bad phone reception, it can send texts over a WiFi wireless connection instead of the phone network, and this also means you can send out unlimited doodle mms messages for free.

For those who like drawing, painting it has some pretty cool effects also. You have a lot of freedom customizing effects and its really fun, you simply do a long click for a couple seconds on one of the effects which takes you to the customization options. The shader effect lets you choose two different colors to draw with in an interesting way, like candy canes and you can even select two effects and combine them together for even more interesting effects.

So perhaps when you’re also taking a break from Angry Birds, you’ll do some Doodle Texting!

Though meant for good, to clean up the spam from their search index, many legitimate websites appear to have been abruptly hurt with the latest changes. Some have reported that name brand websites, huge companies, such as Amazon and other retailers have made huge gains but smaller websites have been hurt. Content ‘pushers’ apparently have not been affected much or as much as they should have been.

This brings on a valid question: Where does Google stand in 2011? Is there any viable competition to compare search analytics with?

We propose there are a few to compare with:

1. http://Bing.com
2. http://Blekko.com
4. http://Baidu.com (China)
5. http://clusty.com (now Yippy)
6. cuil (NOPE, cuil is DEAD)

Are you tired of scrambling to finish writing all those Christmas and Happy New Year greetings cards for the Holidays? Frustrated with your printer jamming on your envelopes, mixing up addresses, having to run out to the post office and buy more stamps, and tired of paying a fortune by the time your done!? (Birthday cards, and greeting cards in general aren’t cheap, Hallmark and others make a nice profit it seems and even stamps are almost 50cents a piece these days, send a couple dozen holiday wishes and you’ll easily spend a couple hundred!!)

Doodle Wish
Well, I decided this ain’t (sic!) the stone age anymore, so I decided to send digital Holiday wishes this year, and it didn’t cost me a dime! You can use the same mobile app for Android I used, it’s called “Doodle Wish” and it’s available on the google Android Market. The image at the top was a bundled template that came with doodlewish but the android app easily lets you use any background to create your greeting card and add that personal doodle wish. You can take a photo to use as the background or select any image from your phone’s albums or start with a blank canvas and draw your own from scratch. I find its best to start with a photo background. Give it a shot, it’s Free!
Doodle Wish, for Android mobile phones

It was time.

I needed a ’smart’ phone. I had an iTouch, so it was going to be Android based not iPhone.

Luckily, even though I was on Tmobile, I wasn’t on a contract. Strangely though, it seems Tmobile stores have no idea about Tmobile.com sales and offers because when I happened to visit a local tmobile store to compare the Samsung Vibrant with the Google G2 and mytouch 4G, nobody told me tmoble.com was offering the Google G2 for free. (yes, with some fine print I’m sure, had to be a new contract etc and likely they wouldn’t waive the $35 activation and may even charge sales tax on highest msrp value around) It was later from home that I found out about the deals from browsing the tmobile website.

Unfortunately, even though I was on contract, I didn’t qualify since tmobile only wanted to offer that to ‘new’ customers, In other words, if I wanted to go from no contract to signing on for a 2year contract, they wanted to charge me $199 for the Google G2 instead of giving it for ‘free’, and yes I talked with Tmobile support. In fact a nice guy there even confirmed for me that, yes, I should do what I was thinking of doing to get the best deal…

What was I thinking? Well, I thought, why not just cancel my current tmobile service, and then go and sign up for a new 2year contract and get a nice FREE smartphone!? I found that BestBuy was giving the Google G2 for FREE also and the deal didn’t end on Cyber Monday like with Tmobile.com though they still charged for $35 activation fee and sales tax on the full price of the phone. This would bring the total cost to about $85 or so….but that’s not a bad price to pay for a brand new tmobile Google G2 phone with keyboard.

Wirefly had similar deals but they didn’t last as long, and what bothered me was that Wirefly seemed to ‘force’ you to buy into the “Unlimited” $30/month data plan. They would not sell you the phone at the advertised $49.99 plus tax without the $30/month data plan, and yes they charged the $35 activation also.

The sweetest deal came by way of Costco. Yes, thank God for Costco. No waiting for mail order, picked it up in store, price was $49.99 plus tax on retail (but their retail number was $399.99 which is set lower than other places) and Costco reimburses the $35 activation. The Google G2 actually was $69.99, but you can get the mytouch 4G for just $49.99 which is just as good if not better, but for the lack of a physical keyboard. So you can walk out of Costco with $86 less but a nice brand new mytoch 4G phone that would cost you about $550 + tax, almost $600 to buy on Amazon unlocked. Initially you do get a assigned a brand new phone number with your new 2year contract, but you can easily get your old number back by requesting it from your carrier. During the process, I once did a live chat with an operative that disconnected on me when I mentioned that it was a bit dishonest to list on their website that ‘A Web service is required in order to access this phone’s Web functionality and features, including Internet access and e-mail.’ when in fact they force you to enjoy those ‘features’ whether you want to or not, ie they won’t let you buy the phone without a data plan. On the other hand as I mentioned, on the phone I had talked to a very honest and helpful gentleman, and later I did talk to a pleasant support person on chat who helped fix some issues.

It is recommended to turn off “Mobile Network” ie 4G/data on the phone if you only have the 200MB/month $10/month plan since 200MB can go by fast and then surplus charges may be exorbitant. Since the phone has wifi, disabling Mobile Network isn’t a big deal if you’re around wifi spots often.

I didn’t explain how I made up my mind between the Samsung Galaxy S/Vibrant (which Costco was selling for $0.01, yes for one penny!), the Google G2 and the mytouch 4G….it will be the next post…so far the phone (mytouch 4G) has been great!

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the new KINECTS motion controllers released by Microsoft.

KINECTS are revolutionizing the gaming industry. KINECTS enabled games, sometimes called KINECTIC Games or Kinetics Games if they are not just specifically for Microsoft KINECTS controllers only.

KINETICS is a physics term of the motion of bodies, so Nintendo Wii games are “KINETICS games” because they utilize KINETICS, the motion of ‘your’ body!

Playstation Eye games are also Kinetics Games. Playstation PS3 Eye enabled games can also be called KINETICS games. Playstation MOVE system has some exciting KINETICS games.

KINETICS GAMES are games you control with the motion of your body instead of using joysticks or keyboards/keypads. There are quite a few KINETICS Games out there, most are for Wii and Playstation Eye/Eyetoy/MOVE but now new Microsoft KINECTS enabled games are coming out.

So “KINECTS Games” are a type of Kinetics games for the Microsoft XBOX 360.

What’s your favorite Kinetics Game on the Xbox 360, the Playstation, or the Nintendo Wii?
(there’s many out there from Pilates sport exercise games to fighting games to stretching and yoga games and do you think you can dance games…)

The arrival of the Kinect has spurred the explosion of related websites coinciding with its November 4th release. The Kinect is the final product of what we had come to know as the Natal Project from Microsoft.
Here are some Kinect websites to demonstrate this point:

Tennis Games
TENNIS KINECT
Fight Games
Fight Kinect
Kinect Fight
Kinect Fight Game
Kinect Fight Games
Exercise Games
kinect exercise game
kinect exercise games
Game Reviews
Kinect Game Review
Kinect Games Reviewed
Kinect Games Reviews
Kinect Enabled Games
Kinectic Game
Kinectic Games
Kinects Game
Kinects Games
Best Games
The Best Kinect Game
The Best Kinect Games
Sport Game
Kinect Sport Game
Kinetic Games
Kinetics Game
Kinetics Games