“I have pretty eclectic tastes”

Said the Democratic Presidential presumptive nominee Barak Obama, referring to his iPod music collection during an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine.
Barak indicated a wide range of artists on his iPod, from Miles Davis and John Coltrane to Jay-Z and Ludacris.

Growing up during 1970’s , Obama’s favorite Rolling stones track was  “Gimme Shelter” and favs include heavy weights like Elton John, Earth Wind and Fire, and Stevie Wonder.

Obama also had a wide selection of tracks from Bob Dylan, including the entire Blood on the Tracks album.

“Actually, one of my favorites during the political season is ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ “ Obama said. “It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric.” In the song, Dylan sings about trying be himself, “but everybody wants you to be just like them.” Many musicians appearing on Obama’s iPod have lent him their support during his campaign, including Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. “I’ve got to say, having both Dylan and Bruce Springsteen say kind words about you is pretty remarkable,” Obama said. “Those guys are icons.”
(..you dont say!)

During the Rolling Stones interview, Obama expressed his concern with new age rap music lyrics:

“I am troubled sometimes by the misogyny and materialism of a lot of rap lyrics,” he said, “but I think the genius of the art form has shifted the culture and helped to desegregate music.”
He went on to call hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and rappers Jay-Z and Ludacris “great talents and great businessmen,” adding that “it would be nice if I could have my daughters listen to their music without me worrying that they were getting bad images of themselves.

Support his politics or not , you gotta give it up to the guy’s taste in music.

It turns out a clinic in Lleida, Spain is treating teenagers as young as 12- and 13-years old for “cellphone addiction” .  I kid you not.

Teens ranging from 12 to early twenties have been going through a rehabilitation program to get them to ease up on the minutes and resist the evil evil phone.

Child and Youth Mental Health Centre’s Dr Maite Utgès suggests that teens after spending upwards of 6 hours a day using their cell phone, started to fall back on their schoolwork and even led them to lie to relatives for more phone-card-money. The good Dr. suggested it may take up to a year to fully break these children of their drug - the cellphone ! Say it ain’t so Dr !!

All kidding aside, the addiction is real.

I can so see big Pharma jumping all over this one:

Do you like to talk ? Do you feel the urgent need to call a friend ? Have you ever talked to a friend for more than 30 minutes on your cell phone ?
If your answer is yes to any of the above question you might be suffering from Cellphonitis , a rare but treatable condition.

For the first time ever Mute-x is clinically proven to silence your phone’s addiction ! Taken just twice a day Mute-x is proven to hush you up and drop your cell phone addicition.

Only your Dr. can prescribe Mute-x to you. While rare, reported side effects include death.

BlackJack, Diamond and Sirocco are all examples of cell phone companies nick naming their products for branding purposes. The main idea being to create a catchy and memorable short name that is easy to pass around, kind of like your nick name in a social context.

Most of the time branding is well thought out and tends to be effective and serving it’s purpose.
HOWEVER … There are a few times when manufactures get it all wrong and when they do … boy is it worth a tribute…

So in true Celluar Mashup satire we pay tribute to branding gone wrong:

T-Mobile SideKick:

Why would you doom a perfectly good phone to “side-kick” status ?

If it’s not wearing green tights (Robin) or is a make shift microwave meal the thing deserves to be a Full-kick. Come on people…

LG KF750 Secret :

Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.. don’t tell anybody , LG’s got a secret and its called, well…Secret. Nothing says spread the word like Secret or maybe this is a little bit of reverse psychology genius from LG ? We’ll never know, It’s all a big Secret.

HTC TyTN :

Seriously… I mean it’s enough your company is called “HTC” and now you name your phone TyTN ?  Does that stand for some kind of DNA test ? or is it some kind of acronym for the Ninja Turtles ? Either-or it’s bad.

HTC TyTN II :

Oh it get’s better… not only did HTC not learn anything from their previous horrendous branding attempt, they went for the sequel  !
Can you picture a really deep voice  “Coming Soon to a Theater near you … (sound effects).. TyTN II !”

HTC MTeoR

We might as well just dedicate this entire article to HTC . MTeoR ? 10 bucks says the next one will be called Haley and will be released after 75 years .

Got some more ? Let us know we’ll add them to the wall of shame.

Apparently Japan has a thing for Kevin Costner… I mean it’s not official but how else would we explain this story ?

Japanese mobile phone maker Fujitsu decided it’s latest creation, the Fujitsu F706i, should be a waterproof phone.
Now that’s great and all, especially for über sober moments you decide to take your phone for a swim.  BUT get this… the F706i has been especially designed to receive digital TV signals while submerged upto 3 meters below. (Dr Evil - Riiiiiighhttttt….)

So besides growing webbed feet and gills in a new sinking water world, i really can’t see my self entertaining the OC while underwater .
Unless Fujitsu know something about global warming we don’t ….

A few years ago cloning was synonyms with Dolly, the beloved cloned sheep. If only Dolly knew back then that her 15 minutes of fame would be robbed by, well… the next cloned object to be, the iPhone.

Originally we thought we’d do a nice informative segment on all the Dolly sheep clones, but quickly found out we where unable to tell the difference in looks and features among the sheep as it became apparent that Scottish scientists do a much better job at replicating stuff than Chinese factories.

Instead, with dawning of iPhone 2.0 we decided to pay tribute to all the original iPhone-Dolly’s out there, and count down the Top Asian iPhone 1.0 clones:

7. C-002 HiPhone - The Dolly to my iPhone

HiPhone is such a iPhone knock off, You’d swear this baby was made by a bunch of Scottish scientist !

6. HiPhone S688 - The Dolly to Dolly

5. Cect P168- iPhone goes Surround  !

Take the iPhone, replicate everything about it and add well … Surround sound ! (huh?)
How’s that for catching ya off guard ?

4. Desay N8 - Shake Shake Shake

That’s not an iPhone owner suffering turrets syndrome , it’s the Desay N8 with full on shake control!
Nothing says hey baby can i have your number like a few twitches.

3. Maxspeed MAK003 - I’m watching you !

Maxspeed decided to clone the iPhone, take that home button and put to better use by turning it into a freaky glowing red eyeball thingy…

2. Cent Dual - Take that Locked iPhone !

While the original Apple iPhone is locked down to it’s providing carrier, Korean Cent Dual replicates the iPhone, offers it unlocked and, you ready … packs in a DUAL sim card holder ! Pure genius..

1. Meizu M8 - The Mongoose to my Snake

Still pretty much a prototype and not yet available, this baby went from being a typical run in the mill iPhone clone featuring the usual Multi touch, auto screen orientation and other standard iPhone features, to having it’s user interface fully redesigned and packing on features the original iPhone was missing, including:

• Video Camera Function
• Native Games
• External Keyboard
• USB Host
• TV Out ports
• Line In for Audio Input
• Fully featured blue tooth Connectivity
• Embedded GPS Chip

Could it be that the hunter becomes the hunted ?

Follow this beast on this active Meizu M8 forum thread

With the exception of a few iPhone accelerometer controlled games (My favorite being this one ) the vast majority of cell phone games are make shift projects that serve merely as in between Dentist appointment entertainment.  The biggest contributor to this mediocreness is the lack of suitable control schemes on a phone to play the game with .

Until now that is …

We’ve all dabbled with Nintendo’s Wii and loved it’s intuitive controller, it’s just brilliant !
Technical Warning : Since the Wii’s controller talks to the console via a sans-fil standard bluetooth connection this implies, theoretically at least, that any device that can do bluetooth can communicate with the Wii’s controller

(Light Bulb Appears)

Yes you evil genius, that’s exactly what has been done! A bunch of bright lads managed to write a nifty little program allowing use of your beloved Wii-mote as a controller of your favorite cell phone game !

Granted i won’t be packing my Wii-mote while visiting the dentist (wait a tick.. isn’t such a bad idea?)  non the less,  cell phones are already starting to pack 3D acceleration hardware and openGL API as part of  their SDK and letting Murphy’s law do it’s thing , slap on some decent TV output ports and we might have mobile entertainment units of the future ! Muahahaha ..

In the meantime some tiny SSX3 on a Sony Ericsson P1i  will do :

Love it !

The beginning of it all was the sub par digital light capture sensor protected with a “made in China” plastic shield absurdly labeled lens, packaged all together and marketed as Phone-with a-Camera.
With time, the marriage between phone and camera was nothing like most of that of it’s human counterparts; It blossomed, grew more intricate and interdependent , finally giving birth to their love child the term Camera-Phone

We now find 5 Mega Pixel camera phones,  with lenses from heavy weights like Carl Zeiss boasting optical zoom and advance compact flash systems.
Even the controlling software is now capable of on the fly image stabilization, Impressive color balance calculations and ever more focusing on refining video capture capabilities.
In fact some upcoming cell phone prototypes are really gunning after Video capture, boasting realistic frame rates , good pixel density and in some cases, EDTV output .

On the other front, we have the current renaissance in the mobile internet market.
Make no mistake we are in the Henry Ford days of mobile internet connectivity . People more than ever are demanding their data  like their food: On the go and all experienced on-the-go food makers know, the faster you serve it, the more they’ll gobble up !

It’s only a matter of time before destiny throws camera and phone’s love child, camera-phone , into the path of WAP’s latest descendants, 3 and 4G, spawning an incredible array of cutting edge offspring’s with great derivatives .

Imagine sharing breath taking views seen from Italy’s Capri in real time HDTV quality with your loved ones back home.
Picture herds of enthusiasts streaming video from a across the globe to single web server for the masses to view creating a decentralized, truly democratic and sponsor free news network:  Wikipedia on steroids.

Mentioning only two obvious possibilities we connect the dots and come to see with little effort the fruits created by the fast mobile Internet revolution and quality mobile video’s evolution will not only be cutting edge and very useful in their application but most importantly very humanistic in our social sense , enabling all of us to come even closer than ever in an ever more globalizing world.

Get ready for the new Generation of Mobile Broadcast Units.

Anyone that has their life on the go has at one point felt frustrated  searching for an unsecured WiFi connection while traveling . If like me, and have experienced this more often than not, at one point you must have dabbled with the thought of using your mobile phone as a “modem” through which can can connect  your laptop to the internet for ultimate internet mobility. The bad news is you’re not an original genius. The good news it is possible and infact widely used,  a process known as Tethering .
When done correctly this works like clock work, however the key point is getting it done correctly, which invovles technicalities that most just find cumbersome.

Solution for the masses : Turn your WiFi enabled phone into a wireless router !

This has to be one of the niftyiest things i’ve seen done with a mobile phone in a long time .
Basically if you have a WiFi enabled phone,  running this application you can turn your phone into a WiFi router that your laptop can connect to just like the regular wireless router you have at Home or Office, except in this case you laptop connects to your mobile phone , which then connects to the internet using your 3G/Edge connection.

Absolute Sheer Brilliance !

We all know how disgustingly cluttered Mac user interfaces tend to be , after all isn’t that the reason why so many people are leaving Mac and taking the leap of faith into the wonderful world of clean Windows designed interfaces ?

(Serious pun intended)

If you’re one of the few that took the above with an ounce of seriousness, fear not, you are not an estranged lonely creature (well not lonely at least), there are others like you that are in fact so believing in the cause they’ve decided to take the iPhone and make it look like Vista !
Not only does it look like Vista , it quacks like Vista: with Start Menu action and occasional blue screens of death (not really)

For the other 99% of people that may ask Why would you do such a thing ?

The answer: Attention

(Discovered as an easter egg in GTA IV )