Motorola bags Beckham for advertising campaign

The advert will market the Motorola Aura, which is tipped to cost at least £1,000

Motorola will embark on a global ad campaign featuring David Beckham for its new luxury phone, the Motorola Aura.

The advert will advertise the device, which is tipped to cost at least £1,000. The famous footballer is pictured in a Terminator style for the advert, as half machine and half man.

The high priced, low spec phone includes; a stainless steel exterior, a circular screen protected by Sapphire crystal, a 180 degree swivel system, a two-megapixel camera and 2G capabilities.
The advert was shot in a studio in Milan in March 2009 and will be aired at the end of this month.

Next3D 3D Movie Player Coming to Mac, PS3

Next3D announced Monday that its 3D Movie player technology will be released for Macs and for Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console. The software will be free and will work in conjunction with Next3D's content delivery service.

Next3D movies are encoded using technology that provides 1080P-resolution high-definition stereoscopic imagery, along with digital rights management, distribution and auditing mechanisms for content providers. The software made a splash at last month's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco; a public beta is expected to be made available soon for the Xbox 360 version.

Next3D's technology is based around a proposed specification for the H.264 video standard already in use; the proposed spec adds support for compression of multi-view-based content. When paired with a 3D-capable television (several models are already available from Mitsubishi and Samsung) along with LCD "shutter glasses" and an emitter that synchronizes the glasses to the television, it makes it possible to view content in 3D without any color shifting, as is common with old-fashioned red/blue anaglyph glasses.
source- macworld

Dell's Outlet Stores Go Down in US and UK

Some of Dell's online outlet stores, where it sells refurbished PCs, were unable to process orders Saturday due to an apparent technical error.

Attempts to access pricing and availability for laptops and desktops were met with blank pages or a "server error" message. The problem affected Dell's outlet stores for the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.

The stores sell equipment at discounted rates and are separate from Dell's primary online stores, which appeared to be working normally.

The problems at the U.S. outlet store began Friday evening, according to messages posted to the NotebookReview Web site, and the site was still down Saturday evening.
"I tried last night and early this morning to view the inventory on Dell's Small [Business] website but I kept receiving an error message," a user with the screen name Stevoreno wrote on the NotebookReview.com forums Web site Saturday morning.
Dell did not respond to requests for comment. A customer service agent on its support line said the U.S. store was having "technical issues" and that the company was working to fix it.

The downtime could hurt the clearance sale going on at Dell's U.S. outlet store, where 15 percent discounts are being offered on Inspiron PCs and Mini netbooks.
source- IDG

FCC Spills Details of the LG Secret CF750 for AT&T

Documents for the LG CF750 became public on the FCC web site today. The CF750 is identical to the "Secret" phone marketed globally, including hidden touch D-pad, 5 megapixel camera, and carbon fiber back plate. Pictures also confirm that the CF750, which is a slider, has dedicated music controls. The draft user manual mentions AT&T and describes a standard AT&T menu with options such as "AT&T GPS", "AT&T Music", "Yellow Pages", "MEdia Net" and "MEdia Mall". The draft user manual also mentions "Video Share", which is another AT&T service. FCC and Bluetooth SIG documents confirm that it will have global GSM and U.S. 3G (850/1900) plus stereo Bluetooth and a memory card slot. LG and AT&T have not officially announced this phone.

Tech Pros Plan to Leapfrog Vista for Windows 7

Cautious business IT administrators are more willing to stay with the devil they know, Windows XP, than risk the devil they don't, even if the latter is the highly-touted Windows 7, a research company said Monday.

According to Dimensional Research, which surveyed more than 1,100 IT professionals in March, 72% of those polled said that they are more concerned about the cost and overhead of migrating to Windows 7 than they are about continuing to supporting the eight-year-old Windows XP. Only 28% felt the opposite, that they're more worried about holding XP's hand than migrating to Windows 7.

The results not only illustrate IT's historical distrust of change, but also shows how strongly corporate administrators are wedded to the aged XP, said Diane Hagglund, a senior research analyst with Dimensional and the survey's author. "IT hates nothing more than change," she said, "and in the open-ended comments, there was a clear trend that people wanted to say good things about XP -- things like, 'It's been very good to us.'

"There's definitely a correlation between their satisfaction with XP and their hesitancy to move to Windows 7," she added.
Even though Windows XP officially slipped into a limited support phase last week -- seven-and-a-half years after it was released, two-and-a-half years later than for most other Microsoft products -- business users rely on it like no other operating system.
Dimensional's poll found that 97% of the IT professionals surveyed said that their companies and organizations are still running XP, by far the highest return for any OS. Vista, for example, was used in just 40% of the companies, while Linux was in 32%. Mac OS X was in 28% of firms.

For those willing to ditch XP, Windows 7, which hasn't even made it to release candidate status, is the clear winner over the proven -- some would say problematic -- Windows Vista.
According to Hagglund, 83% of the people polled said that they would skip Vista and move directly to Windows 7. Even more telling, of the IT professionals who said they would upgrade to Windows 7 by March 2010 -- the group most eager to get off XP -- more than half (53%) said that they would do so explicitly to avoid Vista.
Only 17% of those surveyed said that they'd be upgrading existing Windows systems to Windows 7 in the next year. That caught Hagglund off guard.
"I was really surprised that, even with really positive reviews for Windows 7's beta, adoption would still be really really slow and cautious," she said of the survey results. "They've spoken really loudly, and said even if the product is great, we're going to take it slow."
She put some of the blame on Vista's shoulder. "Negative public perception of Vista seems to have helped build this layer of distrust with Windows 7," Hagglund said.
But the prognosis for Windows 7 now is brighter than Vista's ever has been. Even before Windows 7's release, one out of six IT professionals claim that they'll migrate to the OS in by March 2010, 59% by March 2011.

"In June 2008, nearly 18 months after the release of Vista, and several months after SP1, 60% said they had no plans to deploy it," said Hagglund. "So Vista was even worse [in IT's eyes], and Windows 7 is not nearly as bad."
Dimensional's survey was conducted for KACE Networks Inc., a systems management appliance maker based in Mountain View, Calif
source- computerworld