Today two really interesting gadgets arrived at FON offices: a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and an ASUS Eee PC. They’re both WiFi enabled ultra-portable devices.

Asus managed to pack a complete PC in a super small form factor, a device weighting just 900 grams. It’s on sale in Taiwan for about 250 euros in its full featured version, with a 7″ screen, 4 GB flash drive, 512 MB ram, SD card slot, a great webcam, three USB ports and running a customized Linux OS booting up in less then 20 seconds. Soon it’s going to come in a Windows version and some people were also able to install Mac Os X on it.

The system runs Firefox, Skype, OpenOffice and some great multimedia apps like Amarok and other media players for videos and photos. It’s a device built for Internet surfing and Firefox runs great on it, as do all the most popular web applications. The screen is very small but still usable and you can attach an external monitor and mouse to use it more comfortably.

People are going crazy for this device all around the world and it’s already at the top of the wish list on Amazon and CNET. In two weeks since its launch in the US, Asus has already run out of stock, same thing in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Germany. They plan to sell 3 to 5 millions in 2008. The most interesting thing about this little PC is its incredible price which combined with its small weight and ease of use makes it a great device for kids and students and a perfect gift for Christmas (everybody here at FON seem to want one). FON is in talks with ASUS to make accessing FONspots with an Eee PC really quick and easy.

The Nokia N810 is the successor to the geek’s favorite N800 Internet Tablet. It’s a thin and light mobile device with a huge touchscreen and a sliding keyboard. It’s built to fit nicely in your pocket and has almost all you’d ask to such a device: WiFi, webcam, integrated GPS, 2GB internal storage and a SD slot. It’s a great device, no doubts about it, although its sale price makes it a lot less interesting and groundbreaking when compared to the Eee PC. It runs the new Internet Tablet OS 2008 Linux distribution, based on Maemo, and runs a great Mozilla browser with Flash and Ajax, a mapping application, a media player and will ship with Skype and other Internet telephony applications preinstalled.

It’s an open source platform and there’s a community already at work developing great applications for it. Anyway I think there’s still some work to do for Nokia: installing applications on these devices is something a geek could do quite easily, but not the same can be said for common people. Applications take some time to launch and don’t run smoothly as on the iPhone: it’s a computer-like experience which we are familiar with, but I don’t think this is how a mobile device should work. Nokia also keeps leaving these devices without 3G connectivity, nonetheless they are competing with Apple and RIM for the same limited space in my pockets. My iPhone and BlackBerry keep me always connected, Nokia instead asks me to bring two 500 euros devices with me to get Internet everywhere I go (the N810 and N95).

Google recently published a development kit for Android, the open source mobile platform they created. Google is hoping third parties will use the kit to develop exciting new applications and is offering $10 million in total awards for the “best mobile apps” built on the platform.

It’s a great idea which will probably make hundreds of compatible applications available when the first Android mobile devices will start shipping. It’s also good news for open source developers, but unfortunately not all of them! The Android Developer Challenge is not open to residents of Italy because of “local restrictions”.

Fabrizio Giudici, an Italian experienced Java developer writes on his blog about the restrictions which prevent Google from including Italy in the Challenge:

– the entity which is organizing the contest must guarantee in advance a security deposit covering the whole value of prizes.
– prizes must be assigned in presence of a notary public and a representative from an acknowledged consumer association;
– prizes that are not delivered (for any reason, including recipient not picking them) must be donated to some non-profit organizations, explicitly listed in the contest rules;
– there are some papers to fill in and the contest must be registered to two different Ministries and to the State Monopoly Administration.

Although most of these restrictions are in place to protect consumers, its actual effect is preventing Italian open source developers to seize such a great opportunity as Google’s contest. I think Italian politicians should get rid of these self-imposed obstacles if they want to encourage innovation in their country.  In general Italy continues to be the European country with the weird, out of date laws, the other one that is absurd is the one that anyone who uses WiFi must certify his identity.  ¿What happened to la libertá?

Spotify is serial entrepreneur Daniel Ek new online music start-up.  Before I tested it I thought that the world just did not need another online music platform but now that I am using I changed my mind.  With a really simple process you download and install their application, just like you download Skype, you login and can listen to all the music you like.  Analogies?  Spotify is like iTunes but with on-demand. It’s like Joost, but for music!  It´s like Pandora without the need to vote and with your ability to listen to music anytime you want.  It´s like Last FM without the community.

At Spotify you listen to what you want when you want but don’t own the music and you don’t pay for music. Knowing what you are listening to and the kind of music you like more, Spotify will eventually serve ads just like a normal radio, but with the added benefit of context and mood targeting.

The application looks just great, really simple, quick, easy. From the main screen you can listen to the Radio, selecting the years and musical genres you’d like to hear. A simple search box lets you find all your favourite artists. At any time you can drag a song to one of your playlists, like you would do on iTunes. You can also click on the name of an artist and read his biography, reviews, listen to his top hits or albums (the database looks huge).

You click on an album and you can listen to it, just like it was on your hard drive. You can also listen to the Artist Radio which will feature music from artists similar to the one you were looking at. It’s probably the best way to discover new music, and it’s addictive!  Spotify learns about your listening preferences and recommends you new music in Radio and Artist Radio. It doesn’t have all the social features of services like Last.fm, another really interesting music streaming service, but will soon work with existing social platforms. It’s currently in private beta.  Write to me and I maybe able to get you invites.

I’ve recently discovered the Newsmap application from Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton. It’s an awarded experiment in Information Visualization which displays a so called treemap of the stories aggregated by Google News. A treemap is a visual representation of data using rectangles sized and colored to graphically display the relative importance of each information.

Newsmap does an incredible job at displaying stories, letting you easily tell the category, popularity and time of publication for all the news displayed, using nothing more then color and size.

Weskamp was born in Argentina, studied Architecture in Japan and worked in Tokyo as a designer and interface developer. He is now working for Adobe in San Francisco. His latest works include a visualization of the social relationships inside Flickr and a curious installation in a Tokyo shop using a webcam to reveal the colors people are wearing.

In this video I comment on eMobile, a company building mobile broadband services supported by the latest HSDPA and IP network technologies.

You can also watch this video in Youtube

In this video shot at my home I show the new Apple TV and explain why the product falls so short of expectations. Apple TV is not TV. It is just a way of connecting your PC to your TV to listen to music (but sounds systems on TV are generally very poor) to see movies (but you have to transform all movies to formats compatible with iTunes which is a lot of work). The hard drive is pathetic, only 30 something GB. Frankly if you are going to get an Apple TV better get a cheap PC and leave it always connected to your TV. You will be able to do many more things.

In this video I speak about how gadgets are made and sold in China and the attitudes of the Chinese vis a vis global brands.