tivoli audio

If you see someone ordinary carrying Motorola’s upcoming ROKR E8 handset later this month, then call the police, because they’ve probably mugged a Grinchsoundtrack5372 Motorola’s planning to award ROKR E8 handsets to Oscar nominees, before letting the huddled masses know when the phone goes on sale.Motorola’s ROKR E8 Oscar boxesThe ROKR E8, which was showcased at CES in Las Vegas last month, has been beautifully boxed-up Ministryofsoundcrj Oscar award hopefuls, such as Sweeny Todd star Johnny Depp and Juno beauty Ellen Page. So she obviously wasn’t satisfied with a hamburger phone…By Oscar nominantion onlyMotorola’s ROKR E8 is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge handset, with a 2in display and 2GB of internal memory. There’s also a memory card slot, allowing Oscar nominees to capture the event’s glitz through the phone’s two-megapixel camera.If they aren’t satisfied with the after-party music, then they can just plug themselves into their ROKR E8 and listen to music in several formats, such as MP3 and AAC. The boxes, which are colour-coded as black for the blokes and red for the ladies, also contain Motorola’s S9-HD Bluetooth headset.The Oscars take place on 24 February, but the ROKR E8 isn’t expected to hit European stores until some point during the first quarter of this year.

Computex 2006 MSI isn’t one of the world’s best known purveyors of portable digital music Bobmarleymp3gbi but we were quite taken by its slimline P610 device, the company’s alternative to Apple’s iPod Nano. MSI also showed off its 1in hard disk-equipped P640 player.The P610 is one of the few Nano-like offerings we’ve seen that actually looks good. It’s almost mobile phone like, with the black plastic frame around its 1.8in colour display mounted above a simple stainless steel touch-sensitive control that’s reminiscent of the Motorola RAZR V3’s keypad.The MSI device is a 8.5mm thick - the other dimensions are 9 x 4cm; the weight’s 45g - but it packs Downloadaudiobooks3506 14 hours’ music playback time. MSI is equipping the P610 with 128MB to 4GB of Flash storage, ready to be filled with MP3, WMA and WMA DRM tracks via a USB connection. It’ll also do Motion JPEG video playback and standard JPEG slideshows. There’s the inevitable voice recording facility, but listeners will probably enjoy the SRS WOW 3D Surround audio enhancement more. It has an FM tuner too.Use the P610 and you’ll “feel posh”, MSI tells us. We’re not so sure that’s the case with the P640, which offers the same functionality as the P610 but in a large case to accomodate either an 8GB or 10GB 1in HDD.The P640 measures 9.5 x 4.6 x 1.3cm and a plastic touch-sensitive control panel. It weighs 80g and provides only ten hours’ of continuous listening time. RFull Computex coverage at Reg Hardware

For a change, I get to talk about a local event!

Last year saw the debut of Toronto Tech Week, which is a great initiative to create some community here, something I have long found lacking, at least in my line of work.

This year’s event is coming up, running from September 22 - 26. The program has something Listofcountrymusicsingersrfqqe everyone, including a focus on startups, career options for tech, and competing priorities facing IT. There is also quite a bit of technology-oriented content, with three strong tracks - Web 2.0, software as a service, and new media/social media.

Colleague Dave Forde of Profectio has been the driving force behind this event, and in Year 2 it’s scaled nicely, most due to the hard work and vision of Dave and his team. He was nice enough to invite me to participate, and I’ll be moderating the Mobile Marketing 2.0 session on Thursday at 1 pm. We’ll be exploring the role of mobility in marketing campaigns, and we have speakers lined up from Yahoo!, Silverback Wireless and Canoe.ca.

Should be a good session, and if you’re attending the event, I’d love to see you there.

Technorati tags: J Arnold & Associates, Jon Arnold, Toronto Tech Week, Dave Forde