I had chance to play around with one of these at the recent Osmosoft Show&Tell bash and I came away very impressed. I can see lots of people in the Western world wanting to buy one (or wanting to “Give One, Get One”) because they have a lot of innovative features (power saving, screen visibility, touch pads etc)and they’re much more portable than most current laptops (especially given the price).
The BBC recently caught up with a school in Nigeria that have been trialling the OLPC XO for the last 5 months. Read their progress report here.
Despite sounding like a mouthwash, Plaxo is a nifty tool that can be embedded in any site to allow a user to select contacts stored in their address book on Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Hotmail and others. Plaxo interfaces to all of these sites for you so that you don’t have to write code for several different APIs. Perfect for situations where you want to offer users the ability to send emails from within your application (e.g. “recommend to a friend”, “share this page” etc).
Plaxo do some clever javascript/iframe jiggery pokery to circumvent the browser’s cross-domain restriction. The only issues that I can with this approach is that your users have to submit their username/password via plaxo (although they do promise not to store these details and the calls back to plaxo are over https). I’ve knocked together a quick demo.
At the E3 gaming conference Sony just announce an updated PSP. It’s remarkably similar to the existing PSP, in appearance at least - the main changes being that it’s 33% lighter and 19% slimmer and it now sports a video out port for watching video/games on an external screen. Is this an attempt to revive the UMD as a format for storing films? Sony also claim better battery performance and quicker loading times from the new device.
It’s a real shame they haven’t changed the button layout to put the analog controller in a more ergonomic position - the current layout is juts uncomfortable. Also, why doesn’t it have a built in version of the new camera that recently launched? I expected more from a Revision 2 PSP.
On sale in the US from September with the basic package expected to cost US$199.99.
Source: Joystiq
