Gizmodo: cheapness

How Sony's Cheapness Is Biting The PS3 In The Ass

Jason Chen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:40:00 EDT

Sony's mantra of not writing checks for exclusives—or much of anything—seems to be biting them in the ass a couple times this week. There are at least four cases where the PlayStation 3 has suffered because of Sony's lack of willingness to open up the purse strings. We knew two of these before—backward compatibility and the DualShock 3—but we only found out about the other two during the roundtable session with Sony's Jack Tretton yesterday.

The first is exclusives. Final Fantasy 13 coming to the Xbox 360 was a pretty huge blow to the PlayStation brand seeing as they no longer having exclusivity to the main Final Fantasy line. This is just the latest in the line of Sony losing titles that were previously exclusive (or planned to be exclusive) to PlayStation. Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry are two more recent ones, but Wired also lists Assassin's Creed (could have been PS3-only), Virtua Fighter 5, Beautiful Katamari, and Fatal Inertia. What does Sony have of big third-party exclusives? Metal Gear Solid 4.

This, as we learned from Sony's Jack Tretton, is because they're "not in the business of writing checks for exclusives." Jack goes on to explain quite logically that in this day and age, it's just much more profitable for game publishers to put their titles on as many consoles as possible, and companies would have to throw out some big chunks of money to convince them otherwise. The kind of money Microsoft has been doling out.

The second is Home. Tretton called the current state of Home a "no man's land," a phrase which he immediately wished he didn't use. However, it's as accurate of one as we could come up with. The problem right now is that Sony's at an impasse. They've finished the shell of Home and much of the core functionality is done. However, there's no content for it.

Microsoft's $1 Billion Xbox 360 Recall Problems Caused By Chip Cheapness

Jason Chen — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Microsoft's red ring Xbox 360 problems have cost the company about a billion dollars in warranty repairs, but the research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner said that the hardware problems were caused because Microsoft wanted to be cheap. Instead of using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vender to make a graphics chip for the 360, Microsoft decided to design it themselves and have Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing create it. This saved "tens of millions of dollars" in design costs. Yes, only tens of millions.

The good news is that when Microsoft said that their red ring problems are fixed on newer units, they were probably right. They went to "an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip." Probably ATI, is what EETimes thinks. Moral of the story is to not skimp on chip design so you can save tens of millions, because that may come back and bite you in the ass down the road. [EETimes]

Aiptek A-HD Camcorder Stoops to New Low as Cheapest HD Camcorder

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:30:00 EDT

We were shocked, shocked! when Aiptek rolled out a $299 720p GO-HD camcorder last May, but now the company's topped that pinnacle of cheapness with the Aiptek 720p A-HD camcorder, a stripped-down version of its piece-of-shit brandmate, rolling in at a rock-bottom $169.99.

The company's taken out the optical zoom and substituted a 4x digital zoom (which to us doesn't even count as a zoom at all), but kept that inexplicable 2.4-inch 4x3 LCD viewscreen, apparently too cheap to actually offer the widescreen 16x9 view of typical HD camcorders. But the thing actually shoots in 1280x720 16x9. Go figure. Look out for this one, coming soon to a cereal box near you. Maybe they'll offer it as a Cracker Jacks prize. The only thing we can see using this for would be a disposable crashcam. [Aiptek, via Digital Camcorder News]

Logisys Ergonomic Cool Fan Mouse: It Blows

Charlie White — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 12:54:50 EDT

Take coolness into your own hand with the Logisys Ergonomic Cool Fan Mouse, an 800dpi optical pointing device with glowing LEDs inside. There's a little switch on the side that lets you turn on and off its tiny fan, which ventilates your hand through the air holes across the top. Look out, though, it's too cheap to be any good, $7.49. – Charlie White

Product page [Logisys, via Chip Chick]

Holide HX-2142: World's Smallest DV? Perhaps World's Crappiest, Too

Charlie White — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:46:07 EDT

This is probably just a piece of junk, but at least it's small—the Holide HX-2142 digital video recorder and camera is called "the smallest DV in the world." No dimensions are given, but judging from the size of its USB plug, this is truly tiny and thin camcorder that's down to spycam size.

There's just 2MB of onboard memory, but it has an SD/MMC flash memory slot, so conceivably you could record quite a bit of 12fps video at 640x480. The specs say a 64MB SD card can hold 20 minutes of its video. But hey, it's the world's smallest DV! No word on what "DV" stands for in this instance.

Don't expect broadcast quality, but this might be able to give you video as good as most cellphones are capable of delivering. Yuck. No pricing or availability were forthcoming, but if it costs more than $30, this must be some kind of joke. – Charlie White

Product Page [Holide Industry, via Red Ferret]