Seaman 2 Tops Japanese Sales Charts
Illustrating both that the PS2 is still a relevant gaming machine and that the Japanese gaming public adores weirdness, Seaman 2 debuted at the top of the Japanese sales charts this week, edging out DS Bungaku Zenshuu.
One other PS2 title, Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Meteor, cracked the top ten, but for the most part it was a DS party, with six of the top ten sellers being for Nintendo’s portable.
Will Seaman’s success be enough to convince Sega to bring the title Stateside? Probably not, more’s the pity.
We need more virtual pet Neanderthal man sims, don’t you think?
[Via: The Japanese Software Chart]
Apples Estimates 250K iPhones Sold to Unlockers
During the Q&A portion of Monday’s Q4 earnings call, Apple’s COO Timothy Cook made an interesting statement.
Cook said he estimates that 250,000 of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones Apple has sold were “bought with intention of unlocking.”
That’s almost 20 percent of all iPhones sold to date. Can Cook be serious?
The admonition came while Cook was answering questions about the price cuts that happened mid quarter and their effect of iPhone sales.
Here’s what he had to say:
We were very happy with the elasticity we saw. It enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around a million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people who had the intention to unlock. And while we don’t know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is that there was probably 250,000 thousand of the 1.4 million that we sold, where people had bought them with the intention of doing that. Many of those happened after the price cut.
Cook went on to say that AT&T [revenue sharing] payments were obviously dependent on the iPhone being locked to AT&T.
In other words Apple gets squat from AT&T unless the phone is activated through the wireless provider.
Previously Piper Jaffray analysts Gene Munster and Michael Olson suggested that the AT&T revenue sharing is likely based on the circumstances under which a person bought their iPhone.
At a minimum, the two estimate $3 a month per existing AT&T customer, for the duration of their two-year contract; this figure is said to go up by $8, however, if the person switched to AT&T for the iPhone.
ASUS Eee Out In Less Than Two Weeks
Want an ASUS Eee laptop?
The low-spec Linux laptop with the low-set price tag will be on sale in the U.S. on November 1, according to Eeeuser.
PC World reports they sold out within minutes in Taiwan.
Without any big marketing efforts, the same’s not likely to happen in the U.S., but given that $300 tag, who knows?
T-Mobile Finally Adds Razr2
After months of anticipation, T-Mobile has become the last major mobile carrier to offer Motorola’s sleek Razr2, selling it for $249.00 USD with service contract.
From the outside the V8 has the same sleek design as both the GSM V9 and CDMA V9m, but inside there are some important differences.
The V8 lacks 3G support (T-Mobile has yet to launch a wireless broadband network) and it doesn’t fully utilize the external display.
Sony Launching Internet-Based TV Service for PS3
Sony Computer Entertainment Korea and KT, Korea’s big telecom operator, will be joining forces to bring internet-based TV service to the PS3 in November.
KT’s Internet Protocol TV service, called Mega TV, allows viewers to download shows from the Internet and watch them whenever they like.
Microsoft announced it was working on its own IPTV service earlier this year, but has yet to follow through.
KT already provides IPTV services in Korea. Lee Young-hee, chief of the Media Center at KT, sees great potential in his company’s alliance with SCEK:
With this partnership, Mega TV will include high-definition games and Blue-Ray media in its periphery. We will seek more cooperation with SCEK to create synergy.
The PlayStation series is the world’s best-selling video game platform, however the PS3 has been struggling in the U.S. and Japanese markets while its rival Nintendo is faring well with the cheaper Wii game machine.
Source: Korea Times
Insect Drones ‘Spotted’ on U.S. Streets
Sightings of robotic-looking insects — combined with reports that the Pentagon is working on cyborg insects — is prompting people to speculate that the government has perhaps already deployed this super-cool technology.
The Washington Post reports in an article that truly made my day:
“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”
Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.
“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ ”
That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Of course, as the article notes, no agency admits to actually deploying insect bugs, but hey, why would they?