Gadgets Blog News

Posted Feb 7th 2008 2:20PM by Chris ZieglerFiled under: cellphones, Handhelds Palm’s GSM Centro has been about the worst-kept secret in the entire smartphone industry for the past few weeks, and indeed, it’s now official — for Europe, anyway. The unlocked handset features a quadband GSM / EDGE radio with nary a trace of UMTS in sight (this is still Garnet, after all), 64MB of user-available storage, a 1.3 megapixel camera, and a QVGA display — in other words, the same Centro we all know and love (or tolerate, or despise, depending on your point of view) with just a little bit less CDMA and 3G data to its name. It’ll hit the British market on the 14th of the month and the remainder of Europe by the end of February for € (Read the full post about ‘Palm Centro, now in spicy European GSM flavor’…)

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Occasionally an iPod or iphone may freeze or fail to respond to your commands. This can happen for a number of reasons and does not necessarily indicate a serious problem. Sometimes they just need a restart much like the way your computer needs a reset once in a while.

Tutorial: How to reset a Frozen iPod or iPhone

Restarting an iPod/iPhone is a simple procedure that will not erase any of your music, data files, or customized preferences.

methodshop

Tags: hdtv, gear, video games, Ogg Vorbis

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Posted Feb 7th 2008 12:18PM by Joshua TopolskyFiled under: cellphones According to Reuters, chipmaker ARM has plans to show off an Android-based “Google Phone” prototype at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The news agency is citing a “source” for this information, and both Google and ARM declined to comment, as if reading from some sort of industry script, though we’re seeing and hearing a lot of buzz from MWC on new tech, so this would come as no surprise. Come on guys, we don’t mind if the OS is still a little buggy… show us some hardware.Tags: dap, AAC, mobile phone, lcd (Read the full post about ‘ARM demoing Android prototype at Mobile World Congress?’…)

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As I was in Dubai last week when the Internet went down due to the severed cable I was interested to read that work has started on repairing it in the Mediterranean Sea. Add to that the fact that looking at the map it feels like I should be able to see them working from my study window and it all seems very personal. Flag Telecom are stating that it will take about a week to get fixed, and will involve a total of 50 people including navigation experts and cable engineers. Worryingly the cause of the problem that severely disrupted the Middle East and India last week is still not known. In case you didn’t catch it, the level of disruption was amazing: There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption. (Read the full post about ‘Severed deep sea Internet cables getting quick repairs’…)

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While we can all appreciate someone (Toshiba) trying to break the norm, there are some things that just don’t make any sense.  The phone in question is the Toshiba G450 due to arrive in the UK next month for a whopping $300.  Even a four year old could tell you dialing on this thing is going to be dicey. Two round number pads to get all 10 numbers seems a bit far fetched.  The tiny screen, though it is sweet OLED, is only 96×39.  Those small features add up to only 57 grams. The phone, to its credit, can be used as an USB modem, storage device (160MB), mp3 player and if you can figure out the number pad system: a phone.  Genius! (Read the full post about ‘New “stoplight” phone design will, in fact, drive you batty’…)

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Posted Feb 7th 2008 9:18AM by Joshua TopolskyFiled under: cellphonesIt’s difficult to tell if this is just a little fear-mongering, or cause for real concern, but it looks like there’s another iPhone / touch exploit out there lurking on the unseen horizons of those device’s browsers. According to reports, a memory exploit — similar to the previously-patched TIFF exploit — has been discovered which affects units with firmware 1.0.2 all the way up to 1.1.3, thus carrying over to new 16GB iPhones and 32GB touches. Apparently, all you have to do is browse over to a site containing the malicious code, and it triggers a memory-exhausting script which causes the phone or iPod to crash. (Read the full post about ‘New iPhone and iPod touch Safari exploit discovered’…)

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Designer Florian Kräutli has come up with new idea for curtains, they have built in magnets so that you can position and structure them in various ways and they actually look pretty cool. A curtain which you can shape to any form”, magnets embedded in the curtain fabric allow the user to shape the curtain innumerable ways, both open and closed. More info about the magnetic curtains idea over at Florian Kräutli found via Moco Loco via Core 77. Tags: players, buyers guides, gprs, speaker (Read the full post about ‘Conceptual Magnetic Curtains’…)

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Posted Feb 7th 2008 8:25AM by Nilay PatelFiled under: Home Entertainment Hey, look at that — the Squeezebox Duet just popped up for pre-order. Slim Devices’s answer to Sonos was pretty impressive when we played with it at CES, and it looks like pricing is exactly what we heard: $400 for the wireless controller and a single Squeezebox Receiver, which can stream music off your home machine or tune into Rhapsody or Pandora. (Read the full post about ‘Squeezebox Duet now available for pre-order’…)

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The whole situation still makes me a little nervous about just how nice the shopping experience will be, but there is a slight bit of good news for CompUSA fans. Those 16 retail store locations that we mentioned the other day, they are going to be retaining the CompUSA name. Systemax, the parent company of Tiger Direct is also planning on re-branding the existing 11 Tiger Direct retail locations with the CompUSA name and use Tiger Direct only for their online sales. The deal is said to cost $30 million and is an all cash deal. Read [Trading Markets] Via [SlashGear] Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed → Tags: buyers guides, consumer technology, MP3, technology (Read the full post about ‘CompUSA update: Tiger Direct retail locations to assume CompUSA name’…)

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Posted Feb 7th 2008 9:43AM by Paul MillerFiled under: LaptopsWhile Everex continues to bungle the launch of the CloudBook, Paul C. Kim is already spilling details on the next iteration, providing an already troubled launch with problems of Osborne proportions. Due to be released later this year, the upcoming CloudBooks should feature an SSD option, “female colors,” and possibly even a 22-inch option. Also under consideration is mobile broadband. (Read the full post about ‘Everex claims future CloudBooks to include SSD, 22-inch screens, Osborne effect?’…)

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