You'll soon be able to buy a $60,000 personal jet that's being designed by a renowned Lockheed Skunkworks engineer.
Thirty five years after its initial release, the KORG MS-20 synthesizer is back. This time around, it has MIDI and USB.
A Prehistoric Blackberry
By James Grahame
What a difference a decade makes. This is the RIM 950, a futuristic pager/email/pda released in April, 2000 by a little Canadian company called Research In Motion. It was the perfect companion for Type-A execs and on-call gynecologists. The monochrome display measured 132 x 65 pixels and the backlight allowed them to annoy the theater-going proletariat with a quick flick of the rotary scroll wheel.
4 MB of flash memory and 512 K or SRAM were enough to store hundreds of emails or 20,000 vital appointments in the wireless calendar. You could even surf the Internet.
I could ramble on, but there are a couple of important things to note. The first is that this gadget ran an astounding 21 days on a single easily replaceable AA battery. Fast forward to the present and I carry a second battery for my modern Blackberry, just in case the power-sucking backlight leaves me stranded after a few days.
Second, it weighs only 11g more than a modern Blackberry Bold 9700. After a decade, you'd expect its progeny to be wafer thin. However, feature creep and massive displays have conspired to keep the weight up. We're turning our phones into gaudy Cadillacs rather than stripped-down racers.
It'll be interesting to see what the next decade brings. Will companies keep adding features and power to their handsets, or will we see renewed interest in simplicity? More to the point: Will RIM still exist in 2021?
RIM 950 Specifications [blackberry.com]
