After I see an interesting gadget announced, I usually send an email to the PR/marketing dpt of the manufacturing company asking for a sample unit to write a review for.

Well, it usually goes well, but I have noticed that when I email “white box” manufacturers in China, they come back to me giving me the prices of the product per unit, and per 1000s.

No matter how I try to explain to them that I just need a single sample in order to write about, they don’t get it. They seem to see the world very binary: you are either a reseller/wholesaler, or you are not.

Thankfully bigger companies “get it”. The problem is only with the small white box chinese companies. They are small because they have no clue about PR, and they don’t get any PR so they stay small.

Another thing I noticed is that the people who email me back have changed their names to western-sounding names (in order to make western wholesalers feel more at home). So, you have Yo Chin Hong replying to you as “Judy”… Riiiight…

Terrible news. Just days after Nikon announced that they had to stop doing film cameras, now Konica Minolta is out of the camera business altogether. It seems that digital cameras and phone cameras has brought a stop to the camera market at large. Sad days for those who like tradition.

What is the world coming to? Look at this phone’s user interface. Laughable.

I would definately expect this from a Linux package, but never from Microsoft. And yet, it happened.

So, I downloaded a 900 MB package tonight which includes the developer’s SDK for Windows Mobile 5. It supposedly also includes a 90 days of VisualStudio 2005. Well, it doesn’t! There is no link to install it in the installation window, and it doesn’t exist on my hard drive after having uncompressed the .msi file. It’s not there! And without it, you can’t install the rest of the SDK which is there.

I wonder, no one actually tested the bloody file?