Doug Aamoth…

I can count the number of times I’ve used my car’s CD player on one hand (it’s five or less) so it comes as great comfort to me to see the above device available for $150. If my stereo ever kicks the bucket, I’d be quite happy switching to an all-memory card format.

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Gianfranco Lanci is Acer’s softspoken, yet eloquent leader. Well, softspoken except for the whole Vista thing but he just said what we were all thinking.  He’s a man who gives the impression, albeit subtly, that if he were playing a game of Hearts against the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo, he’d be the guy quietly shooting the moon, calculated risks and all.

I had the great pleasure to be invited to lunch with Lanci and six other American tech journalists in Madrid today at Acer’s Global Press Conference 2007 event. I asked him about his company’s plans for US-bound LCD TVs, UMPCs, and if the world would ever be treated to a fancy mobile device I referred to as "The aPhone."

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Doug Aamoth here in beautiful Madrid, getting ready for tomorrow’s Acer Global Press Conference. What kinds of fascinating new products and services will be announced? It’s anyone’s guess at this point. I’d expect them to spend a fair amount of time talking about the recent Gateway acquisition and I’ll be having lunch with Acer’s wonderfully outspoken president Gianfranco Lanci, so I’ll see what information I can dig up. That’s all tomorrow though — here’s what’s happened so far…

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I keed, I keed. I’ll be buying this one along with everybody else who wondered how long it’d take before the Wii-mote got turned into a light saber. Well it looks like the answer is "Spring 2008".

Aside from flailing your melee arm about all namby pamby, the nunchuck will allow players to "torment foes with their Force powers." You’ll play the part of Darth Vader’s apprentice and the game will be set in the gray area between episodes III and IV.

It’s being developed by Krome Studios and will contain a Wii-only duel mode so that you and your friends can beat the hell out of each other with frickin’ lasers attached to your hands.

Wiimote Lightsaber: LucasArts Unleashes The Force On The Wii [Kotaku]

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Google announcement, IBM has announced that it’ll be offering "Lotus Symphony" on its website as a free download. The software will contain programs similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, albeit with fewer advanced features.

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BusinessWeek.com is running an article that breaks down how much all the parts inside the iPod nano end up costing and says that, "despite the addition of a video screen, the new nanos boast the widest margins yet for the line."

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Curious about quad-core but not quite sure if you’re ready to make the leap from dual-core? Well you, my friend, are in luck. AMD’s got a big, fat defective quad-core new three-core chip coming out in Q1 2008.

This could really go either way. The concept of a three-core chip may end up confusing non-technical consumers as well as insulting the more technical among us with marketing spin that would allude to the idea that consumers want something that bridges the gap between two and four cores.

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Ad-supported music and movie download site, SpiralFrog.com, has officially launched (as in, it’s out of Beta) today.

Here’s a little more info about how the site is kept free.

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You may not know this, but eMusic.com is the second largest music downloading service. It’s got 10% of the market (to iTunes’ 71%) and "sells more than twice as many songs as competitors like Napster, Rhapsody, and Walmart.com" according to the New York Times.

Songs are, at most, 33 cents apiece and all are DRM-free. The catalog is made up of mostly independent labels but you’d be surprised at the amount of music the service has that’d make a good addition to your collection. Many moons ago, I used the service and was able to download every NOFX album with the greatest of ease. Now eMusic hopes to extend its model to include audiobooks as well.

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I’ve been playing around with the previously-reported Grooveshark music service for a little over a week now and I can safely say that, even though it’s still in the very early stages, I like it and I think it’s got a chance to become pretty popular.

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