We’ve never had many complaints about Meizu’s Mini Player. Sure, it gloms onto a couple iPod design cues, but Meizu really did their own thing with the player, and they’ve gotten a lot of love for their efforts. CNET’s review of the device isn’t a total love fest, but they do have some nice things to say — along with some legitimate criticisms that might keep you from chucking your nano or 5g iPod just yet. For starters, the build seems just right, with the 0.4 inches of thickness giving it a sturdier feel than the nano, and the 2.5-inches of screen taking up as much of the device as you could reasonably expect. The clickable touch strip bulges a bit for a tactile feel to the buttons, but the actual touchpad is a bit too sensitive to reliably stop at your selection. Meizu also mixes up some of the player operation from the traditional iPod/Zen model. For instance, if you hit menu while at the main menu, you jump to the currently playing track, and continue cycling from there. Also, updating music is a drag-and-drop Windows Explorer affair, and to get music titles to be sorted by ID3 tags you have to manually select “Update Music Library” on the player itself. The lack of PlaysForSure or any sort of DRM could be a deal-breaker for some, but the music codec support otherwise is nice, and includes Ogg Vorbis files. For video there only seems to be AVI support, but Meizu includes documented software to ease the conversion process. There are also a few games included, along with apps like a calendar and calculator, so the Mini Player really stays away from the traditionally quirky and unsupported Chinese rip-off territory. No word yet on that 20 hour battery life, but we’re expecting good things from this little flash unit.

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from engadget

This screensaver on the NTT DoCoMo N702is cellphone looks and acts just like a glass of water. When you move it around, the motion sensor detects your angle and sloshes the water to the left or right, depending. The actual water level itself is indicative of the amount of battery you have left, so it’s probably more fun to keep your phone charged up. Maybe some developer can whip up a J2ME version of this app? – Jason Chen

An Interesting Way of Showing Battery Status [Slashphone]
from gizmodo

At just 15mm thick, the M600i is aimed at business users. Sporting a full QWERTY keypad, large 2.6-inch QVGA display, BlackBerry-style jog dial for sifting through messages, 80MB built-in memory, an extra 64MB Memory Stick Micro (M2), and all the business applications you could want (BlackBerry Connect, Ericsson Mobile Office, etc.). Here’s the verdict:

In the looks department and the all important aspect of data entry the M600i is superb. Its large screen and very clever and usable text entry system both deserve high praise. But I found the scroll wheel less wonderful to use, and the UIQ user interface is bit confusing at times

[Review via TrustedReviews]
from techeblog