Charpie

Finally, the iPhone has a true competitor. Introducing the Pomegranate NS08 smartphone. Yes, that’s right. Goodbye iPhone.

The NS08 includes a vivid touch screen, built in camera, email, full internet browsing capabilities, MP3 player and GPS navigation. Yeah, yeah. Boring, right? Well, those are just the basic features. The Pomegranate phone also has a built in projector for displaying large images whether it’s for a business meeting or simply a replacement for your plasma or LCD television you just bought. As if that wasn’t cool enough, try out it’s built in coffee brewer, electric razor, and harmonica.

Ok, by now you’ve gotta be thinking what you’re reading is ridiculous. As badly as we’d all love a mobile phone with a built in harmonica, the Pomegranate NS08 is actually part of a $300,000 campaign for Nova Scotia. The Canadian province has set out to get people to take a look at what they have to offer through some very non-traditional means. In my opinion, it’s very well put together. Whether you’re sifting through the site watching all it’s videos and downloading wallpaper or you simply click a link that takes you right to the kicker, you’re sure to get a chuckle. It may be the kind of chuckle that you give Uncle Larry after a really lame joke, but a chuckle nonetheless.

Regardless, good for them. I’d never actually looked into Nova Scotia, but this at least got me to further check out some of their material. I’ve heard they may be getting some bad remarks for spending over a quarter million in taxpayers’ money, but if you ask me, that money spent will have a lot more legs than if spent on traditional media.

Microsoft has released a sneak peak at Windows 7. I’m assuming Windows users must like the look of a clusterfuck. Ah well, to each his own.

Got my hands on the new MacBooks the other day. Gotta say they feel like they’re built like a tank, which eased my mand a tidbit about the glass display. However, lack of a firewire port means no Target Disk Mode, and for this guy, that’s no good. Looks like I’ll be making more of an upgrade than I thought.

Top 10 things you didn’t know about the new MacBook.

This is probably getting a little old; my Microsoft ad campaign banter. But they just make it so easy. This latest ad is a perfect example. What’s with the line at the end?

“I’m a PC and a human being. Not a human DOING, not a human THINKING, a human being.”

Huh? You don’t DO or THINK? You just BE? It seems to contradict the entire ad showing many people with their accomplishments. Obviously they must have been both thinking and doing. 

Microsoft has aired their followup to ‘Shoe Circus.’ The four and a half minute ‘New Family’ segment is no doubt thoroughly entertaining and stays true Seinfeld’s ubiquitous ‘a show about nothing’ genre. So what is it, a campaign about nothing? I think most viewers would think so. I say, “who cares?” It’s entertaining and fun, something Microsoft is not very well known for unless you count Xbox which they were afraid to put their name on for years.

The story, however, is taking a bit of a turn. Apparently, Microsoft is dropping good ol’ Jerry. Sources across the interweb say the move was planned by Microsoft from the beginning, but it seems a bit fishy that it comes after a buttload of not so positive feedback toward the campaign’s first two spots.

So, I really tried to give Microsoft credit this time. I thought the spots were fun, even though they didn’t really bring any hard substance to the table. Turns out they may be as lame and out of touch as I initially wanted them to be.

It will be interesting to see where the $300 million plan heads now.

Yesterday I made the data storage switch and put my worries in the hands of a robot, Drobo. For those of you that don’t know, Drobo is similar to a RAID setup only it makes RAID look like it was designed by the Bush campaign. Oh slam! No really, Drobo is smart. Basically, it’s an enclosure that accepts any SATA I or SATA II drive. You just snap your drives in from the front and Drobo handles everything else. There’s literally zero configuration beyond that, unless you’d like to get into more advanced features with the included Drobo Dashboard software.

This is not the coolest part of the device, though. What is? The fact that your data is redundant and space is expandable. Let’s say you stock it with two 1TB drives. That effectively gives you 1TB of usable storage, because the other terabyte is used to backup data. It’s not a 50-50 deal, however. To figure out how much space will be used for backup purposes, you subtract the largest drive. So, if you have three 1TB drives that gives you 2TB of usable space and leaves 1TB for redundancy. If you have two 250GB drives and one 500GB drive, you get 500GB of storage. Get it?

Let’s say you need to add more space? Just pop in another drive in one of the empty bays, or replace one of the drives with a higher capacity one. You can do it on the fly, while it’s on, and even while your computer is reading data from Drobo! It will reconfigure everything for you, transparently. You can even configure Drobo to email you alerts should a it reach capacity or sense a drive failure.

How does it do all this? Probably magic. That’s my guess.