Apple 4 GB iPod Mini Green M9434LL/A
Average Customer Review:
Electronics
list price: $349.99
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Features

• 1.67 inch (diagonal) backlit screen displays full song names and more
• More than 8 hour battery life on a 3 hour charge (1-hour fast charge to 80% capacity)
• Comes with earbud headphones, belt clip, AC adapter, FireWire cable, and USB 2.0 cable
• 4 GB model holds up to 1,000 songs; supports MP3, AAC, WAV, MP3 VBR, Audible (6), and AIFF formats
• Mac and Windows compatible; FireWire and USB 2.0 interface for fastest digital transfer available

Reviews (472)

The Best Thing EVER!
The iPod Mini is great! The sound quality is excellent, the colors are bright and fun, and you can store up to 1,000 songs easily and on the go!!!!!! I love it!

mini ipod rocks (almost)
Generally speaking, the mini ipod is great. I'm not an apple user, so I was hesitant to purchase it. Plus, the price is nothing to laugh at. It's very durable, and the user interface is pretty cool and easy. If your thinking of buying the 4 gig, I recommend springing for the extra cash to get the 6 gig. The ipod can hold a lot of songs, but mine is already full (4 gigs). You'll be wishing you had more space like I do.

Pros:
- Lightweight
- Durable
- Small/compact
- Easy to install (some people had problems, but my install was easy)

Cons:
- You HAVE to use itunes (which comes with it) for this to work. Not a big deal. But I was so used to Windows Media 10, I thought I wouldn't like it, but itunes makes things pretty easy. It will automatically catalog and convert songs if you want it to.
- There aren't many other worthy competitors out there right now, so if you want lots of storage with a simple sleek design, ipod is the way to go.
- The sound quality has something to desire. With all the hype and the price, I was expecting a brilliant sound system. I've tried different earphones, but the sound is a bit tinny (metallic, harsh on the high end). This can suck when you crank it up and your ears are shattered by the high-end. The ipod does offer some preset EQs, but they should've offered a band EQ for those of us who really want to fine-tune things.
- The navigation wheel takes some time and skill to get used to. It's definitely designed for the nibble-fingered, and not for big chunky hands. So, you'll get used to it and get the feel of how to make this baby sing.
- TERRIBLE stock earphones that come with it. Throw those out and buy some new ones right away.

Overall, I recommend, but be prepared to spend some money on the ipod itself, and another small investment in some quality earphones. I hope future models will include a detailed manual band EQ. That will then make this an ideal product.

People Love Minimalistic Gadgets
The next big (little?) thing to take the world by storm is the Ipod Mini. I'm not sure what it is about small electronic devices that puts a giant smile on everyone's face, but this one definitely gets the job done. As soon as I heard about it, I knew that it would eventually be mine. A few days later I found myself standing in the store with a new blue Mini in my hand, ready to be paid for.

The Mini is great for people who need to move around a lot at work and can't stand near an outlet all day, just clip it onto your pants and crank the volume. Chances are, you won't even notice that it's there due to the almost non-existent weight of the thing.

My one gripe about the Mini would have to be the earbuds. They tend to hurt my ears after only a short amount of time with them in. However, I'm thinking the fit of them might just take a while to get used to since I stop feeling the pain after a certain period of listening. Then again, maybe my ears had just gone numb by then.

After all is said and done, the Ipod Mini is an amazing product that will hold your attention for countless hours. It becomes addicting very quickly, especially when you take notice of all the skins and other accessories out there for it. I think even moreso than loving minimalistic gadgets, people really love add-ons. It's an obsession.. why else would The Sims exist? ... Read more

Asin: B0001A99ME
Sales Rank: 6224
Subjects:  1. Mac Macintosh Machintosh Apple    2. Portable Audio    3. MP3 MP 3 Player    4. Jukebox    5. MP3 Player (MP 3)    6. Apple    7. (Mac)    8. (Macintosh)    9. Gigabyte    10. 5GB    11. 5 GB   

Neuromancer (Remembering Tomorrow)
by William Gibson
Average Customer Review:
Mass Market Paperback (01 May, 1995)
list price: $6.99 -- our price: $6.29
(price subject to change: see help)
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Editorial Review

Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction:the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award andthe Philip K. Dick Award.With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld.Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price.... ... Read more

Reviews (366)

My first excursion into the world of Cyberpunk
This is the book that helped start the cyber punk genre (written in 1985 for crying-out-loud), written in a stream of thought style (don't worry it's no Finnegan's Wake) that can be hard to follow at times. If you're used to reading authors such as Philip K. Dick this should be no problem for you.

A hacker, Case, double crosses an employer who then destroys the neurons that enable his cyberspace travel. A new employer with a dubious background offers to fix the supposedly irreversible damage in exchange for an even more dubious job. The books break-neck pace lasts through the whole book; reading it is like drinking five double espressos and playing Rez on PlayStation 2 till three A.M.

I can recommend this to erudite readers who have yet to enter the Cyberpunk arena. I know I'll be reading more soon.

Importent book, but not always interesting
It took me a while to get to this book but finally I got around to read it, it's definitely a very ground breaking book in both his vision of the future and perception of the internet even though it was written way before the internet took such a massive part of our life. It's interesting to see how terms that were invented as science fiction are starting to have a functional use in our like such as "cyberspace".

What I also love about this book is that urban feeling, that type of sleazy dark high tec cities that always crawling with passion, crime and action. I just moved back to the city after 10 month in the suburbs and reading this book at this point in my life reminded me why I hated the suburbs so much, it made me feel very connected to the whole city experience and to living in this post modern world.

What's a bit of a pity for me is that Gibson's incredible perception about cities and technologies doesn't transfer to the way he wrote about people, and so the characters are really shallow and not very interesting, their emotional progress through the book's pretty non existing and they are basically very caricature images of cinematic super heroes, villains and outlaws. It could be that the reason I felt it to be so was that those character was quoted in so many other movies an books (Matrix, Bland runner, Ghost in the shell and so on) so that by the time I got to reading their origin they seemed flat and boring, but basically I couldn't find them believable or interesting in any way, I wasn't sad when some of them died or hurt, and that for me is a little turn off in a book.

All and all I enjoyed it a lot and the experience of living for a few weeks (and maybe more) in William Gibson's city was a very profound and interesting experience.

Entertaining, but completely shallow
Hot chicks with bio-mod razor nails? Shallow characters, shallow world. None of the humor, quirkiness, and philosophical insights as authors like Philip K. Dick, Lem, or Alfred Bester. Mostly style, very little substance. If Cyberpunk were a type of Rock & Roll it'd be 80's glam, lipstick & hair bands. Oodles of D&D Nerd 'Cool Factor'with hardly the philosophical intrigue of the highly derivative Matrix trilogy. While I'm sure this is blasphemy to the cyberpunk fans everywhere, the chip on my shoulder left by books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash is taking Geek Chic at face value, and realizing there's nothing behind the curtain--nothing beneath the sunken eyes of drug addicts and biotech junkies.

More deserving of a comic book than a novel! Then again, I can see why this would have had more impact in the 1980s when it was originally published. ... Read more

Isbn: 0441569595
Subjects:  1. Business intelligence    2. Computer hackers    3. Fiction    4. Fiction - Science Fiction    5. Information superhighway    6. Nervous system    7. Science Fiction    8. Science Fiction - General   

Amelie
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Average Customer Review:
DVD (December, 2002)
list price: $19.99 -- our price: $14.99
(price subject to change: see help)
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Editorial Review

Perhaps the most charming movie of all time, Amélie is certainly one of the top 10. The title character (the bashful and impish AudreyTautou) is a single waitress who decides to help other lonely people fix their lives. Her widowed father yearns to travel but won't, so to inspire the old man she sends his garden gnome on a tour of the world; with whispered gossip, she brings together two cranky regulars at her café; she reverses the doorknobs and reprograms the speed dial of a grocer who's mean to his assistant. Gradually she realizes her own life needs fixing, and a chance meeting leads to her most elaborate stratagem of all. This is a deeply wonderful movie, an illuminating mix of magic and pragmatism. Fans of the director's previous films (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) will not be disappointed; newcomers will be delighted. --Bret Fetzer ... Read more

Features

• Color
• Closed-captioned
• Widescreen

Reviews (850)

Roaming Gnome
This movie is about a girl named Amelie. Who in her own strange way tries to help her friends and some strangers find happiness. This movie you have to catch at the beginning or you will be totally confused. This movie is great it shows you that you can take fate into you own hands and not wait around for a miracle that may never come.

"Amelie": avoid it with someone you love
America's relationship with France, never the hardiest, was dealt a decisive blow with France's refusal to give the big "thumbs-up" to our incursion into Iraq. Some feel the enmity thus engendered in U.S. hearts to be more than justified. "Bushwa," I say (mainly because it's fun); if there were indeed a reason to be angry with our snail-eating friends across the sea it would be, rather, the illegal and unjust "Amelie".

It has been noted elsewhere that Audrey Tautou bears a striking physical resemblance to Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean, but personally I believe this comment to be "below the belt", and have no intention of dignifying its rancor by repeating it here. More germane: that the relentless symmetry of "Amelie"'s visual design (take note, budding film makers: nothin' screams "MY MOVIE IS A MASTERPIECE!" quite as loudly as having the same things on both halves of the screen) and Tautou's endlessly coy grins, grimaces and pie-eyed glances into the camera (kootchie-kootchie!) turned my face as GREEN as most of the shots in this film, for reasons I have no way of divining, happen to be.

As for the narration, mercilessly cloying in two languages: it is the rare film indeed that would not benefit from the excision of same. Film is a medium consisting of both pictures-

THAT MOVE!

- and sound. There are many possibilities inherent in this combination. It would be good for film makers to exhaust them all before resorting, ever so reluctantly, to the hiring of someone to stand off-screen and tell us about things we are not being shown (or worse) to explain to us things we ARE being shown, or (also bad) to explain what the characters on-screen are thinking or feeling about what is happening, or not happening, to them, or whatever.

C'est la vie (That Gallic charm is infectious).

It is for now a technical impossibility to give a film a zero-star rating; one star will have to do. Some films, however, are indeed wholly without merit.

Deserve Six Stars, not five...
Another Ran-Right-Out-And-Bought Production...I loved Loved LOVED this movie!There are a few adult scenes but they are so amusingly done (not smutty like American films would be) that they are almost safe to watch with your folks.While watching this movie, my husband turned to me and asked, Would you mind if I fell in love with her (Audrey)?" I said I didnt mind at all; I was nearly in love with her myself.This is a beautiful, fantastic movie. ... Read more

Asin: B0000640VO
Subjects:  1. Foreign Film - French   

Apple PowerBook Notebook 17" M9462LL/A (1.50-GHz PowerPC G4, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, SuperDrive)
Average Customer Review:
Personal Computers

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Features

• FireWire 400 port, FireWire 800 port, two USB 2.0 ports, PC Card slot (Type I/II)
• Built-in 10/100/1000 Base-T, 54-Mbps AirPort Extreme; built-in Bluetooth, 56K V.92 modem
• 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor running OS X version 10.3
• 512 MB DDR333 SDRAM, 80 GB Ultra ATA/100 hard drive, SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
• 17-inch TFT widescreen display, up to 4.5 hours of battery life

Reviews (12)

Some people simply write inadequate reviews...
I dont have a Powerbook 17 (yet), so I am not going to make any statemnts abouit it. Nevertheless I feel like saying the following:

after reading some of the reviews here, I noticed that people often make the mistake of comparing Powerbooks to PCs. This is wrong guys! Please compare Powerbook with Wintel Notebooks only. And then youll probably see that PB definitely is a strong performer. Otherwise you may also start to compare Centrino Notebooks with dual G5s..

thanks

overall good, but not perfect
The Powerbook 17" is reasonably fast. I suggest however to get it with at least 1GB since any Apple computers work defnitively better with a good amount of ram (half Giga is really the minimum). With 2GB (as I got) you will be quite satisfied since that will avoid the use of virtual memory (that can be painfully slow). Also, with 256MB of ram the video card performs quite well (despite I did not tested the computer with hard demanding video software). Comparred to my old PB, the ventilation is quite silent and efficient. Overall I am quite satisfied, still there are some negative points.

1. There in only one button mouse. Apple instists in this idea that is even more ununderstandable since many of its programs (like Safari) actually support a 3 buttons mouse.

2. The screen is ***far*** to be perfect. There is a strong pink backgroud that makes thet display unusable for photo editing. Mac OS is also provided with a very poor color calibration system. I impreved a bit the result by using a color scheme for a 3rd party monitor, but still the pink background is not completely erased.

3. I had some problems with the USB port and finally I had to erase my ipod. I am not sure if that is a problem of the powerbook or of the ipod. With the firewire (which i reserved for other devices) the ipod worked without problems. I suspect (despite I am not sure) that there is some bug in Mac OS since I had other problems with other devices under USB on both this and other Macs.

4. The use of an external monitor is still quite primitive.
a) You can not move the dock on the external monitor
(unless you do not want to use only the external one).
b) You can not have the menubar on both monitors at the same time.
c) The X11 client will open every window always on the main monitor.
d) The procedure to use the external monitor keeping close the powerbook
is quite boring.

These days the new version (1.6GB) appeared. Its specifications look very similar (still lacking a G5). I suspect that it owns the same screen of mine. This can be a serious problem under certain circumstances. So maybe you could be better serverd by a 12" (easier to be carry) and a good external monitor.

One of the best desktop replacement notebooks available
After reading the in-depth review at www.laptoplogic.com (http://www.laptoplogic.com/reviews/apple/25/1/1/) I went out and purchased the laptop from the Apple store with 1GB DDR RAM and 5400RPM hard drive. Everything about this system is stunning -- the screen, keyboard, design, and power. I use to own a Toshiba 15.4" and this thing is LIGHTER than the Toshiba. I'm a new user of OS X and I absolutely love it. It's probably easier than Windows. I recommend buying this thing if you want a large screen notebook that is actually portable, unlike most desktop replacements from PC makers. Amazon offers it with free shipping and no tax in most states. buy it now ... Read more

Asin: B00022HY7S
Sales Rank: 125
Subjects:  1. PowerBook    2. (Power Book)    3. Apple    4. (Mac)    5. (Macintosh)   

Garmin Forerunner 101 Wrist-Mounted GPS Personal Training Device
Average Customer Review:
Electronics (23 March, 2004)
list price: $114.95 -- our price: Too Low To Display
(price subject to change: see help)
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Editorial Review

The Forerunner 101 offers athletes an easy-to-read display and integrated GPS sensor that provides precise speed, distance, and pace data--all in one compact unit that straps to your wrist. It’s a lightweight, accurate training assistant with performance tracking, auto-lap, auto-pause and more. And because it is a high quality Garmin GPS device, you get many of the features GPS users have come to rely on, such as precise latitude, longitude, and altitude data. The Forerunner 101 is easy to use right out of the box and it delivers the benefits of GPS technology.

Although it lacks the rechargeable battery and PC connectivity features of the Forerunner 201, the 101 retains all of the other great features of the 201, at an even more affordable price. The Virtual Partner feature allows you to set your training goal by configuring your Virtual Partner’s pace and workout distance. You'll get a graphic perspective of your performance by viewing your pace in relation to your Virtual Partner’s pace, so you can always see at a glance if you're keeping up or falling behind.

Almost as important as the training device itself are the accessories to integrate it with your active lifestyle. If you're into cycling, the best way to keep an eye on your GPS while you ride is with a bike mount bracket that straps to the handlebars of your bike, motorcycle, or whatever you're traveling with for easy viewing.

	 
 	 	 
Auto Menu: Timer pauses when you stop running. Auto lap logs your performance over a pre-determined distance.	 	History: Review training history by day or week.
 	 	 
	 
 	 	 
Map: Navigate back to the start or to a stored location.	 	Virtual Partner: Set time, pace, and distance goals, and train with a "virtual partner".

Other Forerunner 101 features:

• Mark specific locations, and then look-up and navigate to these points using an electronic map.
• Amount of calories burned can be tracked and calculated over the course of a workout.
• Lap history--such as lap time, lap distance, and average pace--can be stored for 5000 laps.
• Performance data can be automatically archived and calculated to provide an accurate record.
• Automated stopwatch provides auto-lap and auto-pause features.
• Pace whistle sounds alert when you begin traveling slower or faster than your desired pace.
• Time and distance whistles can be set to sound when you reach a specified duration or distance in your workout.

What's in the box:
Forerunner 101 unit, wrist strap, manual, and quickstart guide ... Read more

Features

• Integrated mapping functions display your progress on your favorite routes
• Stores lap times, distances, and calories burned
• Waterproof
• Adjustable wristband
• Calculates precise speed, location, and altitude as you workout

Reviews (18)

Old Runner Tries Something High Tech
I investigated all of the reviews on this unit and purchased it with minimal expectations at amazon.com.
This unit exceeds my expectations for service. It does everything that it should do and was promised to do. It gives me the freedom to run routes without having to pre measure and the accuracy is astounding. I am a 60 year old runner that runs one half marathon race per month. I am so impressed with this unit. The main criticism I had heard about was that it would lose signals. Not the case. I run rural areas with trees and have encountered no loss of signal at all. The ease of operation is astounding. The navigation system has not been totally mastered but will be with time.
If you are a runner, buy this unit. The batteries hold up well and unless you want to download into a computer, save your money and buy this unit.
Thanks

Alabama Old Runner

Very happy with this purchase
I love the Forerunner, it really pushes me to work harder on my walks and runs when I have a measurable record of my time, pace, and distance.I find that the pace function is not terribly accurate and seems to lag behind my actual pace, but I believe the average pace listed at the end of the run is fairly accurate, and that is all that I am concerned with. The first day I ran with it, I wore it on my wrist, but it was not all that comfortable, so the next day I added the extender strap to it and wore it on my forearm, just below my elbow, and I liked it a lot better that way; I don't even notice it there. I could even see the screen better by just looking down at it and not having to lift my wrist up.I think the pace function was slightly more accurate when worn up higher on the arm because the unit wasn't swinging around as much. I wear a black terrycloth wristband (cheapo type) under the Forerunner's strap so that the strap doesn't get all sweaty, and it makes the unit more comfortable to wear as well.I like the fact that the batteries can be changed; I want to use this thing for much longer than the expected life of rechargeable type batteries.

Weak GPS reception makes this useless
The first two times I used this device it worked relatively fine -- GPS signal dropped a couple of times, but I expected this to happen every once in a while. Ever since then, I get signal, at best, about 25% of the time. Cloudy, not cloudy. Tall buildings or a clearing -- the signal is always weak (and the batteries are good). I'm giving this device two stars because the concept is fantastic. Too bad the device is useless without signal. The stopwatch works well, but I can get one of those for $10 at Target. Perhaps my unit is defective. Either way, I'm returning it. ... Read more

Asin: B0001ILXGQ
Subjects:  1. Outdoor Gear (Out Door)    2. GPS (Global Positioning System)    3. PDA    4. Laptop    5. map (mapping)    6. navigation