You have to compute the 6th number. Guessing is futile.
It is said that engineers take 3 minutes to solve this, architects 3 hours and doctors 6 hours. If you guess which the 6th number is, you'll be able to open the excel file. Once you discover it, open the attachment, enter the number as
If you want to use a dedicated 3G dongle for your laptop, hardware choices are always limited. Here are AT&Ts two new offerings, the LG Turbo and Option Velocity. And no, you're not the only one who thought "American Gladiators."
LG Turbo
Free with a two-year contract, the Velocity is a no-frills card, with HSPA 7.2 support, MicroSD slot for thumb drive capability and a swiveling head that should allow you to—well, if you've actually used one of these 3G sticks, you know that they can be unwieldy. So it helps.
Option Velocity
Despite its plastic design, the Turbo is AT&T's new premium 3G stick. It, too, supports MicroSD, but it also adds aGPS and will set you back $30 with two-year contract.
Both new dongles will be available starting March 7th.
DALLAS, March 1, 2010 – AT&T* today announced two new 3G LaptopConnect devices: the AT&T USBConnect Turbo from LG and AT&T USBConnect Velocity from Option. Both will be available in AT&T retail stores, business channels and online beginning March 7. The Turbo and Velocity enable customers to stay connected on their laptop while on the go with the nation's fastest 3G network.
The Velocity, is the first GPS-enabled LaptopConnect device from AT&T. The built-in aGPS functionality opens the door to location-based applications making it easier than ever for customers to get to their desired destination. Option offers a free software application, the Option GPS Control Panel, that leverages location-enabled sites like Yahoo! Maps and Bing for directions and local points of interest. Option GPS Control Panel will be available for download on the Option support web page beginning March 7. Additionally, through TeleNav Track LITE™ and Xora GPS Locator from AT&T, enterprise customers can add tracking and location awareness thus improving response time by easily locating the closest worker to a service call.
The Turbo is AT&T's first LaptopConnect device from LG and features a compact, lightweight design. Turbo's HSPA 7.2 capability offers a high speed Internet connection that allows users to meet their professional and personal computing needs away from their office or home computer. The ergonomic design and unique USB connector makes Turbo compatible with a wide variety of laptop configurations.
Both devices feature an integrated microSD card slot making them portable storage devices that allow users to carry the data and files they need at their fingertips. LaptopConnect devices allow customers to get more done on-the-go as well as keep up to date with their professional network from anywhere AT&T provides data coverage.
"Velocity and Turbo both offer a first for AT&T: our first GPS enabled LaptopConnect device and our first LaptopConnect device from LG," said Michael Woodward, vice president, Mobile Phone Portfolio, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. "In addition to being compatible with our latest HSPA technology, the two devices let AT&T customers get more done while on the go. From traveling professionals to students, AT&T offers a LaptopConnect solution for everyone."
Pricing and Availability
Beginning March 7, both the Turbo and Velocity will be available online and in AT&T stores nationwide. AT&T USBConnect Turbo will be available for free after mail-in rebate and a new two-year DataConnect contract of at least $35 a month (pay $99.99 and after mail-in rebate receive $100 AT&T Promotion Card. Two-year agreement and DataConnect plan required).AT&T USBConnect Velocity will be available for $29.99 after mail-in rebate and a new two-year DataConnect contract of at least $35 a month (pay $129.99 and after mail-in rebate receive $100 AT&T Promotion Card. Two-year agreement and DataConnect plan required).
please tell me, how to calculate boiler efficiency of bagasse fired boiler by indirect and direct method.
So, that's another one the birds have on us. In addition to flight and colorful plumage, they're also equipped with magnetometer beaks that can sense magnetic fields and use them as a map. Yes, even chickens.
Here's how it works. The upper beak of birds has nerve branches that contain iron, which may be used to measure the intensity and inclination of Earth's magnetic field:
More than about 500 dendrites in the periphery encode the magnetic field information, which is composed in the central nervous system to a magnetic map. It obviously does not matter, whether birds use this magnetic map for their long distance orientation or do not – the equipment can be found in migratory birds, like robin and garden warbler, and well as in domestic chicken. "This finding is astonishing, as the birds studied have a different life styles and must fulfil diverse orientational tasks: Homing pigeons, trained to return from different release sites to their homeloft, short-distance migrants like robins, long-distance migratory birds like garden warblers and also extreme residents like domestic chicken", explains Gerta Fleissner.
That's right: even Chicken Little has a built-in magnetometer. I get it, birds. You win. Me and my lame opposable thumbs are just gonna sulk off into the distance. But I'm not saying where, now that I know you'd be able to find me. [Eureka Alert via Boing Boing]
To understand Sony, understand its founders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. Even though both are now gone, their executive dynasty and its haphazard, emotional governance established the model for the Sony of today—even as it holds Sony back.
Sony's early years are thick with stories of near disaster tempered by last-ditch recovery. After the Second World War, Japan was rebuilding its infrastructure. Electricity, no longer needed for military factories, was in surplus, and Ibuka and Morita wasted no time in putting together an electric rice cooker and an electric blanket for sale to the Japanese market.
They were horrible.
Despite a clever design, the rice cooker—a wooden bucket with electrodes at the bottom which would turn off when water steamed away, breaking the circuit—mostly under- or overcooked the rice. The electric blanket scorched blankets and futons, and there was fear it would eventually set a house on fire.
Ibuka was a tinkerer of the first order, so skilled at inventing that he won the Gold Prize at the 1933 Paris World's Fair for his patented "dancing neon". Morita was the scion of a prosperous family who chose a career of science instead of running the Morita sake business, breaking a chain of first-born leadership that stretched back fourteen generations.
They met working for the military, but wasted no time in forming Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, Ltd., which would eventually become Sony—as soon as the war was over.
Ibuka, in his founding prospectus, made it clear that above all else, Sony would exist as a welcoming workplace for the eternally misunderstood engineer: "The first and primary motive for setting up this company was to create a stable work environment where engineers who had a deep and profound appreciation for technology could realize their societal mission and work to their heart's content."
Engineers have always been stars at Sony—more so, perhaps, than their creations.
For decades—perhaps even up until this day, depending on who you ask—the key decisions of the company were typically driven by Ibuka, Morita, or one of the relatively small cabal of executives that led the company. This is typical in a Japanese company, where even the board of directors is often comprised mostly of cronies and yes-men, unlike in Western corporations where (in theory) a board of outsiders represent the needs of the public shareholders.
From its very start, Sony has been a wonderworks of invention, with engineers given ample leeway to work on their own projects. Their early inventions were often built on the ideas of other companies, improvements rather than wholly new ideas.
German companies had invented tape recorders in the 1930s, but both the machines and the magnetic tape used for recording was expensive. Sony developed a paper tape that was affordable but with a shabbier sound quality, literally brushing on the shellac by hand onto paper tape with a brush made from badger hair.
When Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, Sony sent an employee to the United States for three months to learn how to manufacturer them. When test runs yielded only five functional transistors out of every one hundred made, Ibuka ordered the company to move ahead with production. He held in his mind a vision of a pocket-sized transistor radio, and although it took a couple of years for everything to click, the TR-55 Transistor Radio was a very profitable product for young Sony.
Consider Ibuka's biggest success: the development of the Trinitron picture tube, a couple hundred million of which Sony sold over the years. When the project began, Sony had licensed another tube technology, Chromatron, which had such poor production yields that it cost Sony nearly twice as much to produce than the price for which they were actually sold. Chromatron nearly bankrupted the company.
Ibuka himself led the engineering team that created the aperture grill that made Trinitron tubes colorful and clear. It took nearly two years for the first Trinitron tubes to roll off the assembly line. Years later, Ibuka considered it the high point of his career at Sony.
But if Ibuka had failed—and there were many failures before his team made the breakthrough—Sony probably wouldn't be around today. It was a legendary success—a legend that now allows Sony to rush headlong into engineering-led disasters.
Morita was less an impassioned engineer and more a dabbler, although make no mistake: Morita loved his gadgetry. It's just that he also loved business, good food, the arts. Like his successor, Norio Ohga, Morita was concerned as much with the media that would play on Sony products as he was with the gadgets themselves.
It was this thinking that lead Sony into the content space, having first made considerable profits by selling recording media like audio or video tape alongside its tape recorders, as well as the extremely profitable acquisition of Columbia Records.
Eventually, having made a fortune selling both CD players and manufacturing a large percentage of compact discs, Sony made a play for a Hollywood Studio. Although Sony had looked at most of the major studios, it happened that Columbia Pictures had the right combination of a potentially profitable film archive, a vast television library, and promising upcoming film projects.
The problem? Sony had no idea how to negotiate the deal properly, led on by typical Los Angeles entertainment tricksters, and soon had decided the only practical choice was to abandon its hopes of acquiring Columbia.
Until Morita said one evening over tea, "It's really too bad. I've always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio."
And that was that.
Sony ended up paying an outrageous premium to acquire Columbia, only to write down billions of debt just a few years later. The same sally-forth qualities that had served Sony's founders so well at the beginning of their careers were still in play thirty years later, only now they were in control of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees.
There are countless examples of Ibuka and Morita's successors following in their footsteps, taking up the mantle of the brash engineer, forging ahead despite warnings of overambition or even unprofitable results, all in pursuit of a now-mythical Better Way. It's hard to blame them. Sony's founders brought fantastic success through their ideas and their tenacity, creating a corporate juggernaut big enough and diversified to withstand failures that would be catastrophic to smaller organizations.
Gadgets are not simply single-purpose electronic tools these days. They are platforms for software, for interaction, for media consumption.
I can't help but wonder if Ibuka and Morita would look at the Sony of today and see any similarity to the company they founded, a place where engineers can work in peace to create the future, or if they would realize that sometimes the dreams of engineers are best when united towards a unifying vision—a vision that must adapt to the landscape of its time.
For this piece and others, I am indebted to the authoritative work of John Nathan and his book, "Sony: The Private Life", as well as Sony's own history page which, perhaps tellingly, only goes up to 1995.
Has anyone ever changed fields within their major? Like going from HVAC to like aerospace design? or going from working with motors/engines to like embedded systems programming?
I have been out of school for 2 years working in industrial electrical engineering.. automation/controls/power but
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sony's gearing up to take on Apple this year, with the long-awaited PSP phone and a netbook/eBook reader/PSP hybrid to fight the iPad.
There aren't extensive details available yet—including any info about pricing and specs—but we can expect to see the both the PSP phone and the PSPad sometime this year. The Sony Ericsson PSP phone, in particular, has been in the works since at least 2007, but has met with various delays since then.
As for the multifunction iPad competitor, it's not clear exactly what form that will take. Both devices, though, will leverage the media platform Sonys launching later this month. The Sony Online Service—a temporary name—is going to provide similar media content as iTunes, but will supplement its offerings with its extensive (and exclusive) catalog of PlayStation games. Mostly older games are expected to be available on the mobile devices.
The project is apparently being speared by Kunimasa Suzuki, who has an oversight role in both Sony's Vaio and PlayStation businesses. Getting previously disparate corporate divisions to work together has been a major part of CEO Howard Stringer's turnaround plan, making the PSPad an incredibly important sign of if that labor has born any fruit. Is this the Sony renaissance we've been longing for? Or will it be another in a long line of proprietary format failures? We'll find out soon, either way. [WSJ]
This world map of mobile browser usage is interesting. Some figures, like the iPhone/iPod's presence in almost every major market of the world, are not surprising. Others are funny.
Why is Nigeria owned by Opera, with 94% of the market share? Or why Blackberry is not appearing in Canada, its home country? Even the Sony PSP is beating them there, while they are the dominant platform in Australia. The world is upside down. [iCrossing]
I have a problem with water in our elevator shaft. The floor of the shaft is not level and water that can't get to the subpump pit pools and has caused a "rust like" build up and smells awful.
Periodically, we have someone clean it out, but that seems to stir up a foul smell that is offens
In this week’s Nature, researchers say they’ve analyzed a near-complete skeleton of one of the closest relatives to early dinosaurs, a silesaur called Asilisaurus. The fossil is more than 240 million years old, which is ten million years older than the earliest known fossils of true dinosaurs. The finding of this dino relative therefore suggests that dinosaurs emerged earlier than we previously believed, and it throws another surprise into the debate over their origins.
From the remains of 14 different individuals, the scientists managed to piece together what a whole skeleton looked like. However, the finished product didn’t look quite like they expected. After studying the bones for 3 years, the team concludes that Asilisaurus was about the size of a Labrador retriever. The animal walked on four legs, and the shape of its teeth suggests that it ate plants and maybe a little meat.[ScienceNOW]. That conflicted with the expectation of study coauthor Randy Irmis, who said the team would’ve thought small carnivores, and not mostly plant eaters walking on four legs, were the closest relatives to the dinosaurs.
Indeed, that question remains open. According to the Nature editor’s summary, Asilisaurus is an early member of the Ornithodira line, the “avian” group that broke off from the crocodile group during the time before dinosaur emergence. What does that mean for the dinosaur ancestry? The balance of opinion has alternated between more reptilian ancestors, which walked on all fours, and two-legged animals that had bird-shaped bodies but couldn’t fly. Recently, the idea of two-legged dino ancestors had been winning out, but the new find yanks the trend back toward quadrupeds [ScienceNOW].
Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum says: “The creatures share a lot of features with dinosaurs,” he said. “They show us an intermediate step between more primitive reptiles and the more specialised dinosaurs” [BBC News]. While dinos hung around for 165 million years or so, the silesaurs like Asilisaurus lived only 45 million years before extinction. However, since silesaurs and true dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor, the two groups should have existed during the same time frame [National Geographic]. Thus, the earliest emerging dinos might stretch back even to the time frame of this Asilisaurus, more than 240 million years ago.
Related Content:
80beats: Frozen in Stone: Ancient Snake Posed to Devour Dinosaur Eggs
80beats: Scientists Blow Up Super-Hard Rock To Get To Dinosaur Skulls
80beats: Early Dino Had Crazy Colored Feathers, Resembled “Spangled Hamburg Chicken”
80beats: New Analysis Reveals Color of Dinosaur Feathers for the First Time
80beats: Model Suggests 4-Winged Dino Glided Like a Flying Squirrel
Images: Sterling Nesbitt, Marlene Hill Donnelly / Field Museum
A company called Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory has created the "Hana Sukkiri Melody" ringtone, which claims to be able to clear out your sinuses whenever anybody calls you. Ah-whaaaa?
The company claims that "the ringtone will make a nose has resonant frequency with pollens adherent inside your nasal cavity, so eventually pollens fall down." Oh, is that how things work? If so, why don't people just play the tone over and over again into their nose to clear things up rather than relegate it to ringtone status, where they're presumably expected to let the phone ring a few times while they hold it up to their nose before answering.
Luckily, JRTL has some much more sensible-sounding ringtones in the pipeline, including "sleep-promoting ringtone," "ringtone makes your date," "crow scarer ringtone," "ringtone makes your skin beautiful," and more. And I don't know about you guys, but I've been waiting years for a ringtone to get these danged crows away from me. Finally! [Asiajin via Twitter]
How about some “pretties” to decorate your Thursday? NASA sure puts out a tank-load of them, and most of them end up as wallpaper on my laptop. Here’s a few I thought you might like (wish I had inspiring music to go along with them):
NASA - Artist's conception
This is an artist’s concept of the Juno spacecraft, planned to launch in August 2011. It’ll go into polar orbit around Jupiter until at least 2018, and will probably return data beyond that. Here’s the Juno website, if you’re interested in reading about it.
Of course, this is the Hubble 2009 Deep Survey image. It has an amazing enlargement with all the tiny galaxies showing up very clearly.
NASA/ESA Hubble Heritage Team - The M13 Globular Cluster
Here’s another Hubble image with an amazing enlargement. I love this crowded star field. The M13 Globular Cluster, seen in the constellation of Hercules, is even visible with the unaided eye on very dark nights. The bright red stars are cooler red giants, and the blue-white stars are the hottest in the field.
NASA/ESA ISS Expedition 22 Crew
The ISS Expedition 22 crew took this image of Endeavour as it approached. That’s the Earth’s atmosphere behind the shuttle; blue is the mesosphere,white is the stratosphere, and orange is the troposphere.
NASA/JPL/USGS 12/07/92 Galileo's Moon
This color-enhanced beauty was taken by the Galileo Spacecraft as it passed the moon 12/07/92.
And speaking of the moon, here’s an archival photograph of spectators waiting for the Apollo 11 launch:
NASA Historical image - Apollo 11
I could do this all day, but I guess I’ll leave off with that one. Which is your favorite of this group? Mine is that moon shot from Galileo. Amazing…
1 ltr diesel is how many kw
Once upon a time, there were these cables that got into your home and into these things that went ring-ring, with numbers and redial buttons and call waiting. The DSP Multimedia Handset is the same, with Android and a touchscreen.
It's also looks like the last twist to landline-based DECT handsets. In addition to Wi-Fi, this phone uses the Android operating system, meaning that you would be able to read your mail, surf the web, listen to music, talk with Google Voice, or use any of your favorite Android apps using its 3.5'' TFT LCD touchscreen. It even supports accelerometers, so you can play even play games. [DSP via Android Community]
Real time is the next step for Google: They're working on a standard for website publishers to hit Google with new content for indexing in seconds, a huge leap from the way Google currently crawls the web.
One way it might work is through a setup like PubSubHubbub, where a site tells a Hub there's new content, and the Hub tells subscribers when there's new content, versus having to ping the site repeatedly to check for new stuff. Google would just subscribe to feeds for sites, essentially. Beyond fundamentally adding a new dimension to Google's index, it'd help small sites, which are normally crawled far less frequently by Google than larger sites, since they could simply tell Google when they've got new stuff. The future is now, like now. [ReadWriteWeb]
Adidas miCoach is a fitness activity tracking system similar to Nike+, except it gives you more data—including heart rate information—and has a sexy voice to guide you through workouts. Yes, it costs more, but it also does more.
$140 may sound like quite a bit to spend on a fitness activity tracking system, but you are getting everything you need to get started with a running program:
I've used Nike+ in the past and I recall opening up a box to find nothing but a stride sensor and some instructions, but with miCoach there was a small pile of straps, gadgets, and cables to deal with. This might almost be sufficient to scare off new users, but the whole system fits together easily.
To start, you'll plug the pacer unit—the brains of the operation—into your computer using the included USB cord. This'll charge the device and give you a chance to get some workout plans onto it using the lil' syncing application you'll download from the miCoach website. That same application will pull your running data and update your miCoach account each time you decide to sync the device.
Setting up a miCoach account, charging the pacer unit, and getting everything synced barely takes any time. After that's all done you plug the included single-earphone into the pacer (or use your own headphones), clip the unit to your belt, attach the stride sensor to your shoelaces, wrap the heart rate monitor strap around your torso, wait for the pacer to recognize the other parts, put on some tunes, and run.
Ok, ok. It sounds like there's too much that needs to be done each time you go out for a run, but in reality it's a process that takes a few seconds. The heart rate monitor strap is quick and comfortable to put on, the stride sensor clips to your shoelaces securely, and the pacer recognizes both almost instantly.
Unlike Nike+ which integrates into specific music players, miCoach can work with any device-including my ol' Sony MD Walkman. You simply use the included male-to-male cable to connect your music player to the pacer unit and plug your headphones into that. That's it. You can hit the track now.
While running, you can use the miCoach in one of two modes: free or coaching. In the free mode, the device will simply monitor your activity and save it for later syncing. In the coaching mode it'll do that and chime in to guide you. This might sound like it'd be annoying, but there's actually a variety of almost-sexy sounding voices to choose from and they only butt in to provide the stats you need or to tell you that you're running too fast.
After you finish your run, you'll plug the Pacer into your computer using the included syncing cable. No worries about whether you've got a Mac or a PC, because there are apps for each. (Sorry *nix lovers.) For whatever reason I struggled to get my computer to recognize the Pacer the very first time I tried to sync it after a run, but didn't encounter a single issue at any point after that.
Cheesy as it sounds, Adidas got it right with their miCoach website. It's ridiculously simple to use and is designed in a way that those requiring guidance can get it, but those with a sense of familiarity can just skip to the steps they want.
If you want to use one of the workout plan, you can select and customize them through the site. I highly recommend giving those workout plans a shot, especially if you're a beginning runner—I've spent far too much time training people for a large gym chain and seeing them struggle to figure out what to do if attempting to start without set plan or schedule.
Speaking of schedules, you can view your workout calendar, track data uploaded from your Pacer, and those unfamiliar with running or in need of a refresher can get some tips and pointers.
The only thing missing from the miCoach site right now is a social aspect. I want to be able to share my workout plans and data with other users in hopes of shaming myself into keeping pace. Adidas says that such a feature is in the works though, so we'll see if I'll get my wish.
It's already tough enough to eliminate every excuse against going for a run at an ungodly hour and the last thing I need is for my activity monitor to give me one by requiring a charge just as I'm tying my sneakers. I was surprised to realize that over the weeks that I've used the miCoach system, I never needed to purposely charge the pacer unit. The specs claim that a full charge should last for about ten hours and I've certainly used the device for more than that. It seems that daily syncing maintains a good charge and that's one less hassle to deal with.
The stride sensor's battery isn't rechargeable, but—unlike the Nike+ sensor's—it is designed to be replaced. For whatever reason, opening up the battery cover proved to be a bit of a challenge, but that may have had more to do with a fear of breaking a nail than with a flaw in design.
As Goldfrapp sings, I'm in love-I'm in love-I'm in love with a strict machine. Since receiving a miCoach to review, I've tossed aside my Nike+ and used the new gadget. I've gotten more satisfaction out of my runs because of the additional data and also discovered that I wasn't pacing myself properly. It seems that the miCoach has improved my running experience and that in turn prompted me to actually get off the couch—or out of the office chair—more often. Two sneakers up.
Replaceable battery on the stride sensor (though I did struggle a bit to open the battery compartment).
It's compatible with any music player
Data. Data. And some more data. Plenty of stats are available, but none are forced down you throat.
Great battery life.
The Pacer unit can be plugged into a USB port for recharging.
Plenty of workout plans are available on the miCoach site for those who want to use them.
The system has a lot of parts and may seem overwhelming to new users. Perhaps the heart rate monitor and the Pacer unit could be combined into one piece in future versions.
No social aspect to the miCoach site (though Adidas says this will change).
[Adidas]
The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA’s successor to Hubble. Mind you, it’s not a replacement: JWST will see in the infrared, peering deeper into the Universe with its ginormous 6 meter unfoldable mirror than Hubble can.
But that infrared part is important. Objects that are warm give off IR light, and if you don’t cool your telescope, it’ll glow in the wavelengths you’re trying to see. It would be like having a flashlight shining down your ’scope!
So JWST has to be cooled, and since it’ll be in a spot in space where the Sun shines 24/7 (the so-called L2 point, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balances), it basically needs a sunshade. And also since the ’scope is pretty big, the shade itself has to be sizable.
What engineers came up with is a multi-layered blanket of material that will sit "underneath" the telescope, blocking the sunlight and passively cooling the whole thing. The shade will be pretty big, about the size of a tennis court! To make sure it works, they created 1/3 scale model of the actual shade. This diminutive has been built, and is now undergoing tests at Goddard Space Flight Center.
[Click to deployenate]
Cool! Um. Literally.
You can also keep up with the construction of JWST using a webcam mounted in the clean room. I remember that room well; though I never got in I used to watch them work on Hubble cameras there.
Also, to give you an idea of just how big JWST will be… In 2007, I was at an astronomy meeting where a frakkin’ full-scale JWST model made an appearance. Here’s a video I made about it:
I did my best with this video considering the day before I was dying from a norovirus. Man, I love Seattle, but that was a rough week.
Anyway, JWST is still planning a 2014 launch. If you like Hubble images, JWST will blow you away. Just the galaxy shots it will produce will be spectacular beyond compare. And the deep field images will go much farther than Hubble can, if you can imagine that! JWST is a revolution in astronomy waiting to happen, every bit as much as Hubble was. Let’s hope these tests go well, and we can get that bird flying.
From Engadget:
Advances in solar power aren't always the most immediately exciting sort of developments (a more efficient solar panel still looks like a solar panel), but this new solar power system developed at the University of Michigan certainly won't have any trouble turning a
After the Windows Phone 7 launch passed without so much as a mention of Project Pink, Microsoft's other new phone project started to fade into memory. Today, we can confirm: Pink's coming, and Verizon's the carrier. UPDATE: First live shots.
A tipster passed us a load of 3rd-party marketing materials, in which a promotional plan for Pink is laid out in detail. (Campaign specifics and most graphics have to be witheld to protect the innocent, but rest assured, they're legit.) The documents don't talk about specs or software details, or more importantly why the hell Microsoft thinks this weird little pebble is a good idea, but there's plenty we can learn:
• The early Pink renders leaked to us back in September? Those are exactly the same ones included in the proposal.
• Of the two phones in prior leaks, only one shows up here: The Turtle vertical slider. It's a messaging phone, basically—one part Pre, and two parts Sidekick. (Or maybe three.)
• Verizon is a launch partner for the device, and probably an exclusive carrier. The branding and marketing in the documents suggests a joint Microsoft/Verizon launch, but another carrier isn't completely out of the question.
• The phones aren't running Windows Phone 7, unless it's hidden behind a different interface. Virtually all rumors around the Pink platform implied as much, and again, this appears to be something fundamentally different.
• Social Networking! It's all over the proposal, and presumably, the phone.
• It's suggested that the platform has apps of some sort. For a phone like this to share apps with Windows Phone 7 is pretty much impossible—the minimum hardware requirement for a Windows Phone look out of reach for this little black lump—so this one's a big question mark. Is it another SDK? Or closed app development like we've seen on the Zune HD? Web apps?
Since the documents come from a party working with Microsoft, and not Microsoft itself, a few things are missing: there's no mention of a release name for the product (Pink is the codename we've been using, but the launch title could be different.); stil no sense at all as to how the interface works; and no announcement or launch date. The documents are just days old, and hint at a near-term launch, which would be inline with what we've been hearing about a second Microsoft phone launch at or around CTIA at the end of this month. And remember, this are marketing materials, designed to promote a launch, not just an announcement. In other words, Pink, or whatever the hell it is, will likely beat Windows Phone 7 to market. So that explains all those Tweets, I guess.
All these missing pieces add up to a massive gap, not just in the phone's feature sheet, but in our understanding of what it's supposed to be. If it's a replacement for the Sidekick, the obvious question is, is anyone asking for a replacement for the Sidekick? If it's just a Microsoft-branded feature phone, er, why? Doesn't the future of youth/budget phones all about scaled-back smartphones (see: Pixi, Backflip), and not glorified feature phones?
UPDATE: More insiders have come forward, and now we have a possible timeframe: Late April. Oh, and there are two phones, as implied by the original leak. The second, according to our tipster, is the Pure horizontal slider, pictured below:
So these two phones - the Sharp PB10ZU and the PB20ZU - there are names for them but I can't tell you what they are, cause Verizon may just put out different code names in order to find out where any leaks occur. And frankly the names are really really awful sounding so I hope what I've been told aren't the final names anyway...
Apparently the interface shares some aesthetic elements with Windows Phone 7, albeit with "some sort of UI skin/more of a social-networking edge to [it]." As for release, apparently Verizon is "looking at a late April launch date," though this isn't set in stone. [Thanks, Tipsters!]
Does anyone know where to buy a post (not a hanger) type John Deere tractor earring? And, no, I can't just take the hanger off the hanger type and add a post - they're huge and they'll tear my ear lobe off whenever I slip my respirator strap over.
