ROKR.
It
looks disturbingly like a Motorola E398 with a paint job. (The Reuters press
release is also disturbing. “It has a color screen and can store 100 songs. It
has stereo speakers, stereo headphones and a camera.”) It sounds like the
toddler version of the Sony Ericsson W800 Walkman phone. Steve Jobs should come
out to Asia more often.
(Who knows –
ease of use might make up for its overwhelming Motorola-ness and underwhelming
Apple-ness.)
The iPod Nano (the
replacement for the iPod mini) looks like a bigger
winner.
Its
seriously anorexic profile (supposedly thinner than a #2 pencil) makes me worry
that I’ll snap it in half. (My Powerbook trembles every time I roll my chair
across the floor, as that was how it became a finalist in the Forsaken Machine
Demolition Derby.) But it looks painfully elegant and I think I just heard the
hip meter make appreciative screeches. What will make me buy this iWaif? The
built-in stopwatch. I kid you not. Apple’s keeping the pricing real; the 2GB
model is at $199, which will make it around P11,000 when it gets
here.