It’s even smaller, lighter, and cheaper (storage per dollar wise) than the previous version. It even has 10+ hours of battery life off of one charge!

I happen to think this is absolute freshness. The in-line controls and info voice read-back are great improvements. The darker color one looks a little bit like the newer Sony Vaio designs..

Especially if you like white chocolate. I’m an extra dark chocolate fan though. Nevertheless, this is a great, geeky gift for someone like me. :D

Validas is cited as “a tool that helps you fight back against your wireless carrier”. In other words, you upload your most current bill, it analyzes it for places you could potentially save money. Now, it’s not magic, but is intelligent enough to realize where you could save money and any other outstanding charges that could be reduced by your carrier. After analyzing your bill, it then offers to e-mail your carrier with a dispute and request to change items in your subscription, claiming to “save customers a bundle”.

But, how much do people REALLY save? Validas claims that users could potentially save up to 22% a year on their wireless phone bill, or a total of over $4 million dollars for all of their users so far. I don’t know about you, but for me that’s kind of hard to believe. Don’t forget to pay the $5 dollars for the actual analysis of one bill. It seems like this is geared towards individual people, when it really should be marketed towards small businesses — maybe that’s why they have ‘analysis packages’ that you may purchase. But really, couldn’t you just look at your bill yourself and call the carrier up in person? Nowadays, customer reps strive to ’save you money’ even if you call up about something totally irrelevant like phone pricing and such. Just some food for thought..

Elon Musk. Not many have heard of him, but he’s a renaissance man in his own right. Musk is the guy behind the formation of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motor Co., and SolarCity.

It’s not the fact that he has millions of those things called dollars, or three exploding start-ups that may someday revolutionize our world. Doesn’t matter if he’s funded most of his own projects thus far. It’s simply the drive and passion he’s had since a little tyke, that yearning for facts that really amazes me. And he’s a great businessman. I mean, he has to be in order to exist in all the different markets he’s dove head first into.

Musk seems to think of an idea or goal, and does it — no bullshit. It’s even said that his new Tesla Model S will be the 21st century Model T, revolutionizing the way we travel, and most of all the style we travel in. I won’t destroy you will the history of Musk, but I will say that GQ wrote an excellent article pertaining to his roots and where he’s headed — you should check it out. All I have to say is, if there’s one person in the world I’d trust with a multi-million dollar project, it’s Elon Musk. Again, no bullshit.

It’s fast, scary fast.

And if you actually take the time to read through some of the new improvements that Apple included in their latest Safari 4 public beta, you will be dumbfounded. Take a look at the friggin’ list. It’s almost too many “features”, really..

I was definitely taken back by the development tools that it comes bundled with. They’re more comprehensive than FireFox’s Firebug plugin, plus they include local database manipulation on the fly (for sqlite databases, I’m assuming). I also found the JavaScript profiler (for optimization) extremely helpful already.

Of course only nerds like me care about that crap, so others will most likely care about it’s speed, standards compatibility, top sites UI, and cover-flow history navigation. Apple also added the FireFox Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab tab-browsing shortcuts — a feature I’ve been patiently waiting for. Apple definitely put some elbow grease into Safari 4, making the browser just one step sleeker and smarter.

Ah, best of all — you Microhard fanboys/girls will enjoy the native Windows UI with none of the coolness of Apple, which actually sucks for you but that’s ok…:D

It’s true. Acer, partnered up with AT&T and T-Mobile are to offer their new handsets for FREE in the US. At least that’s what the President of Acer’s Smartphone division said at MWC this week. That would suck if that was an early April fools joke on the President.

Although sleek and nice looking, the phones themselves didn’t cause any buzzworthy coverage. Half of the line isn’t even considered a smartphone by today’s definition, but then again the definition of a smartphone is always changing. The Tempo line, as they’re called, house either the proprietary Acer OS or Windows Mobile 6.1 platforms. Two of the models even come with fingerprint scanners. I happen to think that’s pretty damn sweet. More information about the new Acer lineup of phones announced at the MWC may be found at the BoyGeniusReport here.

Eight (8) months ago, Facebook and Twitter were not considered “mainstream”. By main stream I mean having a user base that contains Mothers, Fathers, Aunts, Uncles, and others of the sorts. Fast forward to today where they are both talked about equally, whether it’s on CNN or your favorite e-magazine/blog begging you to “Follow us on Twitter!” Clearly most of the buzz between the two services has much to do with Obama’s team and their influence in the digital communications sector, aka social networking. Their infiltration certainly stirred up a buzz about the two services which is clear today.

But, why if both services are given about the same (if not, more) publicity in the US is Twitter’s pageviews and reach metrics so much lower than Facebook’s? Ok, I understand that Facebook has 175 million+ users around the globe, but still, there hasn’t even been a significant jump in Twitter’s metrics. Don’t believe me? Check out Google Trends for both Facebook and Twitter, then look at the graph above.

…and then I went to update my Twitter status. Realizing that I generally use either my iPhone or Widgets to update, I quickly realized that Twitter doesn’t have “returning” web-based users. Instead, they’re just returning users. Hmmm, now that lots of online interaction may be accomplished through third party apps and not the browser window (thanks to APIs and so forth), perhaps there needs to be a new measurement for network or third party API apps usage for services like these…

I’ve been following all the developments and rumors emanating from the Palm Pre for quite some time now. For those of you unfamiliar with the Palm Pre, it’s Palm and Sprint’s last hope multi-touch smartphone. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a gorgeous phone and will be popular. For a full report, check out this first impression by CNET’s Bonnie Cha. The phone is said to drop sometime in the first half of this year.

I think that the Palm Pre will (eventually) have at least partial Flash 10 support on it. Palm announced in a recent interview that they will in fact include games on the Palm Pre, as a standard feature. Although the phone will run OpenGL ES2 (slightly better than the iPhone), I have a premonition that Flash may slowly make it’s way onto this device. Either by hacking it or by developer’s demands. Plus, this phone isn’t a wimp like the Storm :D.

Facebook (Zuckerberg, specifically) has officially apologized. After reformulating their Terms of Service which aimed to rape the rights of users content even after account termination, they’ve reverted back to the old ToS.

To give you a figure of how opposed it’s users are, both Facebook and the website Mashable.com ran a survey which users overwhelmingly (88%) disagreed with the changes. It’s not only the surveys that put the flame under Facebook, it was also the blog posts offering colorful opinions about the changes.

Recognizing this, Zuckerberg also stated in his blog post that Facebook now will utilize a Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities which aims to satisfy any questions and suggestions it’s users may have.

This is a pretty profound change since social media companies usually don’t give a crap about what users have to say regarding their rights. In my humble opinion, Facebook did a great job diffusing. Maybe other companies will follow their footsteps…hopefully.

I may have to lose the iPhone and get a super expensive Nokia, just so I could use Skype….riiiight.

But in all seriousness, this is pretty cool news. This may be the big jump into VoIP on cell phones that we’ve been waiting for….or maybe not.

During the third quarter of 2009, Nokia claims it will offer Skype on their N95 super-ultra-duper smartphone. So users will now be able to utilize high-speed 3G and Wifi networks for use with Skype service, which includes instant messaging. The best part? It integrates right into the N95’s address book, so you can also add Skype contact info for your homies and homegirls.