Hello, Mom? I’m in the pool. What time’s dinner?
The oddly named Verizon G’zOne – Is it Australian? Aimed at Generation Z extreme sports enthusiasts? – is a rugged phone that is completely submersible in water. That’s right. Now you can call Mom, Dad or your relatives from the shower.
Actually the G’zOne can handle being underwater for only about 30 minutes, but it makes up for that by looking like an armored sea vessel. The openings for its 2-megapixel camera and built-in flash (which also serves as a flashlight) are shaped like a ship’s portholes, and there is a round front screen for reading the time and caller ID. The phone also has stopwatch and countdown timer functions.
The G’zOne’s battery lasts for about 3 hours of talk time and 170 hours on standby. The phone also includes a chip that is compatible with Verizon’s VZ Navigator mapping software.
The entire package weighs 5 ounces and includes a loop for attaching to a lanyard or other outdoor gear.
The G’zOne is available now on the Verizon website and costs $299 with a two-year subscription. Thanks to phones like this, it looks as if we’ll soon see multitaskers taking cellphones into the lap lane at the pool.
– John Biggs, The New York Times
Condensed baseball. Runs without the drips and errors
For those who believe baseball is several hours of tedium punctuated by a few minutes of action, a new software package allows you to save time by cutting out the boring stretches.
MagicSports 3 from CyberLink analyzes the action of a baseball game that has been recorded on a Windows-based PC with a TV tuner card, removing the commercials, the lineup changes and the foul balls. The interesting bits are arranged at the bottom of the screen as a series of thumbnails, labeled according to their excitement level. A strikeout gets one star, while a home run earns three. You can burn clips onto a DVD highlights reel.
To find the good stuff, the software scans the video for pitches, home runs, score changes and a rise or fall in audience and commentator volume. The company claims that its technology analyzes games in about 10 minutes on a modern PC.
The program ($50 from www.cyberlink.com) includes a module that analyzes soccer. Given that soccer is nonstop movement, it takes longer – about 20 minutes – to scan a game, looking for goals, red cards and fights between players to build a selection of greatest hits.
– Eric A. Taub, The New York Times
