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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

The G1’s taken some flak for being just a little less fashion-forward than the hottest handsets on the market, but as retail Android handsets go, it’s the most beautiful thing going — and we think that illustrious title’s safe for the time being. Meet the “Dream G2″ (groan) from China’s Sciphone, a brick of an Android-powered handset promised for a November 28 release featuring EDGE data, WiFi, 4-megapixel cam with autofocus, 50MB of internal memory, microSD expansion to 16GB, FM radio, a QVGA display, and “the most advanced software ever engineered.” Without a physical keyboard (as far as we can see, anyhow) and no software support in Android promised for a few months at minimum, it’s unclear how you’ll input text, but hey, the release is still a good ten days away — maybe these guys are good at thinking on their feet.

[Via ModMyGphone]

Android-powered Sciphone Dream G2 is neither dreamy nor the G1’s successor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the most hilarious things I’ve seen in China is the number of small cellphone companies churning out perhaps less-than-genuine iPhones. Though originally nothing more than crappy shells with barely a sliver of the original’s functions, now many of them boast specs that’ll actually cause you to give them a second look—including, if you’re lucky, touchscreen goodness! Today we look at the Sciphone V188.

At 116 x 62 x 16mm, the Sciphone is just a tad thicker than its Apple-made counterpart. Despite that, you get a slightly smaller screen (at 3.2-inches) and much less resolution (240 x 320 pixels). Still, there’s multitouch, which makes it a step above most fakes out there!

And the Sciphone includes a couple of things the iPhone doesn’t have: a removable battery (rated for about 120 to 180 minutes of talk time), dual sim cards so you can receive two numbers worth of calls at once and… three pages of menus. I guess when you can’t load apps from iTunes, the company has to provide them for you from the get-go.

Cost of the iFauxne: 700 yuan ($102.50) [Shanzhaiji]

If there’s one thing you can’t overstate, it’s how much the Chinese people loooooved the Olympics. So it was kind of expected that Chinese fireworks makers would capitalize on the magic of the Opening Ceremonies by selling similar DIY pyrotechnics. This Chinese New Year, watch for the Bird’s Nest series of fireworks going off all over the country, including smiley faces and footprints, blossoming peony flowers and “silver and red waterfalls.” Gizmodo-readers in Beijing can grab their share of explodey things at over 200 locations across the city come Nov. 15th. [The Beijinger]

Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky has written a fascinating article on Tim Cook, the quiet Apple’s Chief Operating Office unknown by most of the public, but a key member of the Dream Team that helped Steve Jobs to turn the company around during its dark ages. Why now? I can’t help to think that this is related to Steve Jobs’ potential farewell and Apple’s future transition of power. But while that’s probably my tinfoil hat in action, Lashinsky asks himself the same question I did: Can Cook become Apple’s CEO? Reading the events and third-party comments portrayed in his article, it feels like this may very well be the case.

Even while he recently declared that “[Steve] is irreplaceable” and that he saw “Steve there with gray hair in his 70s, long after I’m retired”, Cook has been showing more at Apple events recently. He is right that Steve Jobs is irreplaceable: Nobody can match his charisma and vision in the industry, as he has demonstrated again and again during this years. But Cook has other qualities that match those of Jobs. And coupled with abilities of the rest of the Dream Team (Ive, Schiller, Serlet, Johnson et al), he may well the best guy to get into the iCEO’s chair as Steve takes a more laid back role in the company.

• Like Jobs, Cook is extremely demanding and passionate about work and doing things right. In a meeting back in 1998, when he arrived to Apple, he had a meeting about a problem in manufacturing in China. He suggested that someone should be there “driving this”. Thirty minutes later into the meeting, he looked at one of his lieutenant and asked him emotionless: “Why are you still here?”

• He is an extremely hard worker and is devoted to Apple, coming earlier and going out later than anyone else. Reportedly, he “genuinely” loves the company.

• He has run much of the company for years and has been responsible for making everything run like clockwork. Because of this, and the things above, Cook is the highest paid person at Apple and is the only management team member—apart from Jobs—who’s actually a board director at another company: Nike.

• As a result of that, and having to work with development, design, manufacturing, and distribution, he knows the company inside and out.

• While he’s quiet and calm, he can push people to the limit much like Steve Jobs does. According to a former executive, he asks very difficult questions, ones that he knows people can’t answer, and keeps pushing until he gets where he wants.

• Like Jobs, he has also looked at death in the eye: He was diagnosed multiple sclerosis in 1996, two years before coming to Apple. Fortunately, it was an error, but it left him with a different perspective on the world.

• He’s also a minimalist, an eternal bachelor who doesn’t flash his great fortune—living in a rented house in Palo Alto even while he has sold $100 million of Apple stock over the last years, and dedicating himself to sports and nature in his free time.

One of the most telling things about Cook, however, is his devotion for Bobby Kennedy. According to Lashinsky:

“He had a way of touching and relating to people of all walks of life,” Cook confided recently, according to someone who knows him well. “He was one of the people who got close enough to the presidency who really loved people, who wanted to raise people up.” Cook also admires the way Kennedy “was comfortable standing in his brother’s shadow and doing what he thought was right.” Coming from a man whose most critical career phase has been almost completely overshadowed by a charismatic leader with an uncommon ability to relate to the hopes and dreams of the masses, it’s a telling comment.

Indeed, it is. Head to Fortune for the rest of Tim Cook’s portrait. [Fortune]

In what seems to be an attempt at greater productivity, Microsoft China executives are now being driven to work in busses that are equipped with computers that clock you in the moment you log in. However, I have to wonder—besides snooping eyes—what would make you actually do work, instead of goofing off and playing Minesweeper, or even browsing your most favorite blog ever (a.k.a. Gizmodo). [New Launches]

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley went to Guiyi, China to document the lives of Chinese e-waste workers there. He was able to get footage of what these pits, which process much of the toxic electronic scrap we in the West throw away, look like—despite being jumped by angry e-waste lot owners and nearly having his camera confiscated.

The Chinese who attacked them were trying to keep mum on the lucrative business of mining e-waste for valuable components, including gold. According to Jim Puckett, who works for a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in third world countries, “A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they’re afraid this [business] is all going to dry up.”

The workers who sift through these e-waste pits get paid about $8 a day. They use caustic chemicals and often burn plastic without any type of protection uniform. The air is full of toxins, potable water needs to be trucked in, and pregnancies in the city are six times more likely to be miscarriages. All to deal with the mess we ship over. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that even though we don’t see our trash anymore, it still exists. And even though America has laws against e-dumping, companies regularly flout them with little repercussion.

Pelley’s investigation will be broadcast on CBS this Sunday at 7pm. [CBS News via China Digital Times]

Filed under: Transportation

According to a report leaked by someone at Canadian electronics manufacturer Electrovaya, the company is teaming up with China’s Changan Auto Group to bring a new electric car to our northern neighbor — and it might be on the street as early as this year. Electrovaya is set to distribute the car (based on Changan’s popular Ben Ben five-door) possibly making this the first automobile from the People’s Republic to tap into the lucrative North American market. Of course, wheels like this won’t make you any more popular with the ladies (you’d probably want a Linc Volt for that), but we’re just happy that there are more green options out there.

[Via Autoblog]

Changan, Electrovaya teaming up to release electric cars onto Canadian streets? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Guardian has a great interview with the head of Tudou.com, China’s answer to Youtube. Tudou means potato in Chinese, meant to denote “couch potato.” CEO Gary Wang started the video-sharing site up four years ago after discovering the immense amount of government regulation involved if he wanted to go into television entertainment.

“There are things you cannot do in China because of certain regulations,” says Wang. “TV is simply off limits. If you take away TV you didn’t have a large market, so I began thinking how to bring entertainment to China, where there were already 10 to 20 million broadband users and I knew it would build up.”

Of course, the 10 to 20 million figure is from 2004. Now, China boasts almost the same amount of internet users as the population of the United States. Tudou, which as grown threefold since just last year, now serves 100 million videos a day and garners about 75 million unique users a month. Though only about 5 percent of the videos on the site generate advertising revenue, that’s already better than Youtube’s 3 percent figure.

The biggest problems Tudou faces is, not surprisingly, the Chinese government. Wang employs about 100 people that focus just on vetting videos that are uploaded to the site – lest they be copyrighted… or, more importantly, contain banned political content. After all, since his servers and staff are all in China, a company shut down notice is literally always one uncensored clip away. [Guardian UK]

Chinese internet users have become the top target for malware, according to a new security report by Microsoft. The company said that about 47 percent of software “exploits” it found, including ones that can record keystrokes and steal passwords, in the first half of 2008 were in Chinese, while only 23 percent were in English.

Considering China surpassed the U.S. in overall internet users this June, it’s probably not that surprising that the country would be targeted. Couple that with the influx of inexperienced users with freshly middle-class banking accounts, and you’ve got a major security problem. Microsoft recommended constantly updating to lower vulnerabilities, which probably won’t happen since the newest Windows updates contain that anti-piracy black screen security measure. [Yahoo News] (Flickr credit - Kai Hendry)

The U.S. is injecting a good $1.25 million into a new “virtual training ground” for American diplomats who plan on working in China called “The Second China Project.” It’s a pretend city in Linden Lab’s Second Life that purportedly will help almost-expatriots get used to the environment in the world’s most populous nation. While some of the training activities sound useful (for instance, what to give as a gift, how to seat guests), as someone who’s lived in this country for years, I can tell you there are things that diplomats should get ready for that the virtual world doesn’t even seem to touch on.

• Bargaining. And remember, this is for almost everything, lest you continue the very prevalent racial stereotype that laowai (directly translated: old outsiders) are here primarily to get fleeced. If you’re planning on interacting with Chinese people at all, get used to that and the feeling that you got fleeced anyway, no matter how hard a bargain you drove. I recommend trying your hand at the return counter of failing retailers to get an accurate simulation of what you’ll be doing in China.

• Censorship. You’re not going to be able to surf the web the way you want to surf the web. Though there now is a Firefox plugin that’ll help you deal with that. You too can now feel the power of the Great Firewall and wonder things like “Okay, what did the BBC say to anger the CCP this time around?”

•The Air Quality. You’ve probably heard that story about former President Ronald Reagan, where after he recovered from that assassination attempt and was released from the hospital, he remarked that he wanted to go back to L.A., where he could “see the air [he's] breathing?” If he was talking about Beijing, it would be more like “feel the air I’m breathing tearing up my nose like I just snorted a factory’s worth of particulate matter.” No, it’s not as catchy. Yeah, it’s about as true. In fact, it’s so true that I’m going to tell you not to get used to the air quality here—it’s not worth the cancer. When you get to your destination in China, get any number of these air purifiers ASAP. (Flickr Credit: Kevin Dooley)

• The Sea of People. Remember how the Bird’s Nest stadium seated something like 90,000 people during the Olympics Opening Ceremony and you maybe thought something like “Haha, that’s more than the populations of some countries!”? China’s full of statistics like that that you’ll encounter first hand.

For instance, did you know that the Shanghai subway transports more than the entire population of San Francisco every morning during rush hour? Crazy, right? That’s China! Luckily, Black Friday is coming up, and being in a Best Buy that morning will give you a feel for being one in a crowd of millions. (Flickr credit: Marc van der Chijs)

• Sad Cellular Options. While jailbroken iPhones are all the rage here in China, we probably won’t be seeing the iPhone 3G anytime soon, thanks to China Mobile’s desire for full control and the country’s lack of a real 3G network. In fact, compared to our East Asian neighbors, we have the most terrible choice of cellphones ever. China seems more willing to focus on churning out iPhone fakes and gimmicks (like this hilarious but useless spaceship cellphone) than developing its own useful, well-designed tech. Oh well, at least the PRC’s got an incredibly extensive network – I can use my mobile in subways and in the mountains without ever having to ask “Can you hear me now?”

• Dealing With Rabid Nationalists Raised On The Propaganda Machine. One of the most important things to learn (especially as a diplomat) will be how to smile, nod politely, and present actual facts without being insulting when you’re confronted with a Chinese person with a really, really distorted world view. Try to remember that they live in a world where information is one-sided and tightly controlled, the internet police is active on every student message board and the nationalism scapegoat is constantly used. To tell the truth, with all the telecom spying and appeals to voting like a “real American,” we’re perhaps not too far off from that world ourselves. [University of Florida via Dvice]