Tech Eye:Magic Beans for sale you say?
First the young ones would pack up all the old bottles and animals they could muster to sell for weapons, and the big 'uns would find whatever trinkets they had stolen from passersby to flog for flagons of ale. But never will we forget the day when we sold the family jewels to a wily prospector from Valdivostok for a fresh can of what he assured us were genuine magic beans. Although Granny TechEye swore they kept her regular for a good six months, the rest of the family were not amused, and we swore to stay away from magic beans, unless they were very, very cheap and very, very magic.
Until today, that is, because if we had stumbled home drunk on our own superior sense of business acumen having purchased this magic Bean, then maybe Father wouldn't have sent us to work in the mines as swiftly. Behold Sony's Bean. If you plant it in the ground, water it carefully and give it plant food in spring and autumn while keeping the slugs at bay (we recommend a gun, it's more fun than salt), it will do sod all for you. But, if you fill it up with your favorite tunes you'll have a nifty MP3 player that can fit in the palm of your grubby mitt. It comes in 512MB and 1GB version, with a 512MB model with an FM tuner in the pipeline. Like TechEye's drug-addled cousin who's perennially living in the 1960s, it's flash-memory based, and transfer is via a nifty pop-up USB, so no cables, and the battery gives you an impressive 50 hours playback. If you're in a hurry, just three minutes charging will give you three hours of play it says here (oh, if only doing things that take three hours in three minutes was a virtue in TechEye's office). Oh, and it comes in three colors. And the headphones match. You sap.
So what price are magic Beans these days you ask? Around zł.480 for the 512MB and zł.600 for the 1GB. Or a whole can of fishheads if the seller's from Vladivostok, in our experience.
Until today, that is, because if we had stumbled home drunk on our own superior sense of business acumen having purchased this magic Bean, then maybe Father wouldn't have sent us to work in the mines as swiftly. Behold Sony's Bean. If you plant it in the ground, water it carefully and give it plant food in spring and autumn while keeping the slugs at bay (we recommend a gun, it's more fun than salt), it will do sod all for you. But, if you fill it up with your favorite tunes you'll have a nifty MP3 player that can fit in the palm of your grubby mitt. It comes in 512MB and 1GB version, with a 512MB model with an FM tuner in the pipeline. Like TechEye's drug-addled cousin who's perennially living in the 1960s, it's flash-memory based, and transfer is via a nifty pop-up USB, so no cables, and the battery gives you an impressive 50 hours playback. If you're in a hurry, just three minutes charging will give you three hours of play it says here (oh, if only doing things that take three hours in three minutes was a virtue in TechEye's office). Oh, and it comes in three colors. And the headphones match. You sap.
So what price are magic Beans these days you ask? Around zł.480 for the 512MB and zł.600 for the 1GB. Or a whole can of fishheads if the seller's from Vladivostok, in our experience.
