When Steve Jobs convened the “Let’s Rock” event to unveil the new iPod Nano in September, he made a point of whetting our appetites for premium in-ear headphones with remote and mic that were said, at the time, to be shipping in October. It’s now December and the Apple website still says “Coming Soon.”

Apple engineers were ordered to revise the design, which required Apple’s overseas contractors to retool their manufacturing process, resulting in the extended delay, according to sources cited by MacBloz on Monday.

The premium headphones, slated to retail for $79, are intended to compete with high-end audiophile headsets costing two and three times that amount from the likes of Bose and Sony, and according to the MacBlogz sources, that standard has not yet been achieved. On the other hand, it should be premature to rule out a splashy marketing deployment of the eagerly anticipated headphones just in time for last minute holiday shopping.

Via MacBlogz.

EasyLoan is an application that allows you to quickly calculate monthly payments based on loan information that you enter into the application. When you open EasyLoan, you will be on the main screen. Here it will display; Amount of Loan, Annual Interest Rate, Number of Years, Monthly Payment, Amortization Schedule, First Payment and Calculate Monthly Payment. In order to calculate a monthly payment, you will need to fill out the first three blanks (Amount of Loan, Annual Interest Rate and Number of Years). Once you have entered the information for those three things, you can select Calculate Monthly Payment at the bottom of the screen. … [visit site to read more]Related Articles:

• 3DZapman 1.0
• Feeds 0.4.1
• LockDockBar 0.1
• AppleTap 1.1
• AppleTap 1.4

Ecorio, one of the ten G1 apps that was awarded $275,000 at the Android Developer Challenge recently – helps you keep track of your carbon footprints. The app constantly runs in the background while you are traveling, and keeps track of your trips through G1’s GPS navigation system.

After calculating down on how much you should cut back, it provides you solutions through its three features of Reduce, Inspire and Offset. These features provide some convenient alternatives to erase your carbon footprints – checkout the video above for more.

---
Related Articles at Startup Meme:

The mobile site opens to a simple search box where you can enter a product name or the number that appears under the UPC bar code found  on most products.  Snappr returns a list of products with price, a picture and user rating if available. The site is available in English and German and can be used anywhere in the world.

Does this sound familiar?  Snappr is a near clone of Barcle which I reviewed in Feburary.  To Snappr's credit, it's a more attractive site than Barcle and seems to work better too.  Searching is much faster and the bar code database seems more complete.  In a quick test with three products, a prepaid mobile phone, a book, and an analog to digital TV converter box, Snappr found the phone and the book, while Barcle found none of the items.  Plus, Snappr shows prices in the search results list, while Barcle requires you to drill down into each item's detail page to find the cost.

It's not all rosy with Snappr though. Products are returned in random order rather than sorted in some logical fashion like by price from lowest to highest. The prices shown are often wildly different than the actual price on the retailer's site. Like that SIM card for $1.19 shown in the screenshot.  The actual price on Amazon is 29.99! There doesn't seem to be a pattern, sometimes Snappr's price is higher than the real price, sometimes lower.

Like almost every mobile shopping site, actually making a purchase can be difficult. There is a "Buy.." link for each item which goes to the retailer offering the product.  But the link often goes to a full web page that is impossible to use on a mobile. Fortunately many of Snappr's items are sourced on Amazon.com which does deliver a mobile page whenever it detects a mobile browser. Registered Amazon users with a credit card on file can even make "1-click" purchases on the Amazon mobile site.

Snappr also has an iPhone app that can use the phone's camera to capture product bar codes so you don't have to key in those long strings of digits. That's a great idea which I hope they extend to other platforms. I don't have an iPhone to try it out with but according to a post on the Agregated Intelligence Blog, it works but is harder to use than Android's ShopSavvy due to limitations of the iPhone's SDK. Source: Mobility.mobi

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Shopping

Ratings: Content:  Usability: 

Mobile Link: snappr.mobi

If you’re like me, sending holiday cards is one of those “necessary evils” of the holidays. A new service, Ecardlets.com, hopes to make the process a little easier — at least for your friends with iPhones.

Ecardlets.com is a San Francisco, CA startup founded by ex-Microsoft and ex-Googlers, and has just launched its initial public beta of the first-ever ecard platform designed specifically for the iPhone. The unique three-dimensional greeting cards take advantage of the iPhone touch screen by allowing recipients to open and flip the cards with just a flick of the finger.

I tried out the service today by sending myself a few cards. The service couldn’t be any easier to use. Simply design your card and hit “send.” The service sends a text message to your AT&T iPhone recipient which includes a link to your card. Then simply swipe your finger to open the card and read the enclosed message.

There are plenty of stock cards ready to send (there’s even a “Congratulations on your new iPhone” card), but the service will become a lot more interesting as more people begin uploading their own card designs. The site offers a Photoshop (PSD) template that you can download to make your own ecardlet that others can then send. Right now you have to email your designs to ecardlets.com but the site is working on a system to enable user-generated ecardlets.

So spice up your greeting cards this holiday season and send your iPhone-toting friends something different.

Ecardlets.com is, at least for now, completely free to use…so send to your hearts content.

Retailers reported Xbox 360 console sales over the Black Friday weekend were on pace to beat previous years, outselling the PlayStation 3 by a three-to-one ratio and estimating a 25 percent increase from Xbox 360 Black Friday sales figures from 2007.

Not bad. But given Microsoft is making no mention of Nintendo's (NTDOY) Wii, we're guessing the Wii continued its dominance of the game console market.

In October, Nintendo sold more Wiis than sales of the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined, and eBay (EBAY) recently said the Wii was the site's most popular product on Black Friday.

See Also:
October Game Sales: Nintendo Wii Kicking PS3 Butt
Sony Cuts PS3 Prices By $150 -- If You Have Good Credit

Not all companies have suffered a decrease in the amount of traffic coming to their applications. Causes, which I previously featured, has seen their traffic soar 1000 percent in the past three months. One of the main reasons that is that the application is one of two members of the great applications program that Facebook announced at f8 earlier this year.

Their traffic has appeared to slow over the past few day though and while Causes is by far the largest individual application (2.5 million more monthly active users than second runner SuperWall), it is the company’s only application. RockYou and Slide still dominate the developer leaderboard going back and forth with each other for the top spot.

It it surprising to see the two companies which were the first widget developers on social networks retain the lead positions? I don’t think so. The companies clearly have the most resources allocated to developing on social networks with large funded social gaming following close behind. For now it looks like RockYou is on target to eclipse Slide in relative size on Facebook but it’s clear that the two companies remain neck and neck as the fierce competition continues.

Why this is genius: (1) it gets tons of people to follow NameCheap on Twitter (2) it will generate brand exposure as people answer questions with Tweets containing @namecheap (3) it will acquire customers, as you’ll need to sign up for a NameCheap account so you can sync your Twitter account and be credited for $9.69 (the price of registrations) each time you are one of the first three people to answer a question correctly.

The questions are holiday themed, and a new one will be posted every hour until Christmas. In all, that equates to $17,000 in free domains – or about one-quarter of the price of purchasing a half-page ad in BusinessWeek.

Clearly, you can imagine how the trivia-contest model could be extended to a lot of different types of promotions on Twitter, and I’d expect it to become fairly common if NameCheap’s campaign takes off.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

PopJax Raises a Non-Trivial $4.7M
Bunchball Plays with NBCSports
Twitter Mobile Interface
Quick Fix For Twitter Troubles
Website … One Word: youCharades
Don’t Send Bac’n: Use TwitterSearch
Mosio Uses Twitter For Mobile Q&A

And guess what? Google's dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

The Chrome extensions document, spotlighted Saturday by Google programmer Aaron Boodman, doesn't include a timeline, but it does shed light on why the project is a priority for Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome.

"Chromium can't be everything to all people," according to the document. "User-created extensions have been proposed to solve these problems: the addition of features that have specific or limited appeal; users coming from other browsers who are used to certain extensions that they can't live without; bundling partners who would like to add features to Chromium specific to their bundle."

When Google launched Chrome three months ago, it promised a Chrome extensions framework. Extensions are a popular feature of Chrome's most likely rival, Mozilla's Firefox, and one very popular extension is AdBlock Plus.

And AdBlock makes a specific appearance on the list of extension uses that Google said it would like to support eventually:

• Bookmarking/navigation tools: Delicious Toolbar, StumbleUpon, Web-based history, new tab page clipboard accelerators.

• Content enhancements: Skype extension (clickable phone numbers), RealPlayer extension (save video), Autolink (generic microformat data--addresses, phone numbers, etc.)

• Content filtering: AdBlock, Flashblock, privacy control, parental control

• Download helpers: video helpers, download accelerators, DownThemAll, FlashGot

• Features: ForecastFox, FoxyTunes, Web Of Trust, GooglePreview, BugMeNot

Demand for extensions is real.

In an unscientific CNET News poll about why people don't use Chrome, about 19 percent pointed to the lack of an extensions feature. And on Google's issue tracking site for Chromium, a Chrome extensions feature is the top-requested item.

"Of all the Firefox plug-ins, this is the one essential one," said Firefox user Ole Eichhorn. "Chrome is faster until you factor in all the cruft that gets downloaded as ads, then it isn't faster anymore. When Chrome supports AdBlock, it will be the winner, but until it does, Firefox is the only choice."

In its document, Google described some of its goals for Chrome extensions. The extensions should silently update, just like Chrome does. They should be isolated for security reasons and only get access to resources it's entitled to use. Installation should be easy, taking only two clicks.

They should permit rich user interface options--rich enough to implement some parts of Chrome as extensions, Google said. Among the interface options should be "toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or AdBlock-like functionality)," Google said. Some interfaces will require the user to grant specific permissions, such as "access to the history database" or "access to mail.google.com," Google said.

Google will play a major role in extensions, providing a central service that can be used to issue updates and to blacklist "malicious or harmful extensions" so the browser won't use them.

"It's likely in the future we may want to provide a consumer front-end which would allow users to more easily find the most popular, highest quality and trustworthy extensions," Google also said.