Check out these beauties!

While circulating around the local Best Buy, some curvy, shiny, and full featured beauties caught my eye.  They were clothes washers and dryers in race car red, stately blue, and polished silver .  The new washers are front loaders, green (use less water, detergent, and power), quiet, and include clothes steaming, like you can get when you take your clothes to the dry cleaner.  Ooh … I have some delicates in my laundry room, would you like to come home with me and do a little washin’?

These washers and their accompanying dryers are EXPENSIVE, too.  Starting at about $1800 for a pair and topping out at ~$4000 for the pair.  Ouch!  Yet, I’m flirting with a pair and so is my mother, who is looking hard to upgrade her rusty and wheezing washer and dryer pair with a gleeming pair of status symbols.

BTW:  I bought a basic front loading washer back in 2001 because there were state and federal tax rebates for water and power savings that brought the price in line with top loaders.  I must say that it’s night and day between a front loader and a top loader.  Most noticeable, initially, is how quiet the washer is.  The drum space is used more efficiently so you can put more clothes in and put in big stuff like comforters.  The savings in our water and power bill were very clear ~$30/month back in 2001.  Most importantly, you never have that problem inwhich you’ve loaded a bunch of dirty clothes and the dirt gets thrown back on the clothes in concentrated spots.  Yuck!  Oh, and there’s the high speed spin which helps cut the dryer time to ~30-mins.  LOVE IT!!!

Here’s an interesting discussion about Amazon’s Kindle device.  The folks participating in this discussion make some interesting points about how they are less impressed by the Kindle device itself and think that Amazon missed the target by not offering Kindle as a device agnostic service.  However, this feeling is tempered by DRM and the thought that creating the device provides the DRM layer that protects content generators.  It’s an interesting discussion to read.  Enjoy!

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewfeature&id=1851

On November 19, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced the launch of an e-book device called Kindle. It weighs 10.3 ounces, costs $399 and can be used without a computer, offering instead a free, high-speed wireless data network from Sprint. Users can download books in less than 60 seconds, as well as newspapers, magazines and blogs (for a fee). The device uses an eye-friendly screen and lets readers increase the type size as needed. Will it be a hit, even though most other e-book efforts have been unsuccessful? We asked marketing professor Peter Fader, Don Huesman, senior director of information technology, and management professor Dan Raff to give us their reviews.

Registration is free and so far I’ve only recieved the “Bacn” I have asked for ;p.

These

or this

A CNET reviewer does a head to head comparison of budget laptops from Dell and Sony and concludes that he’d rather get the HP Pavillion dv6000 ;p.  I couldn’t agree more from a design appeal perspective.

Here’s the link to follow this reviewer’s journey of HP discovery.

Enjoy!

From Fuji, the FinePixZ has young people in mind.  Here’s short description from CNET:

Fujifilm is aiming its new Z10fd Finepix at teenagers and twentysomethings. Among other features, the camera lets users post pictures to blogs, Web sites, auctions or e-mail by copying and automatically resizing images right in the camera. The device also has a slide show feature that lets users view and share photos with friends, with music provided to help set the mood.

The Z10fd Finepix is one of several Fujifilm cameras with an infrared lens on the side. Consumers can hold these cameras up to eight inches apart, with lenses facing, and press a button to beam a full-resolution photo from one device into another.

Being able to send pictures to other cameras is a very neat idea and makes image sharing very easy.  It allows folks to share the same picture without having to take the picture multiple times with different camera.  I like the way the design of this camera has the way that young people use images on the web in mind.  I makes it very easy for teens and college students upload photos without having to go through the trouble of rescaling images for websites.

I image the music feature in the camera uses some generic music that won’t cause copyright issues.  It would be neat, though, if pictures files could have accompanying music files — sigh … the limitations greed impose upon us …