Gadgets Blog News

Dear mobile developers, I know you are really excited about the iPhone SDK.  It is a lot of fun and the idea of bringing home 70% of your labor is appealing.  But don’t forget about Android.  Please.  Android is going to be huge, huge I tell you.  We’ll be doing so many fun things with Android phones you won’t believe it.  Advanced functions like cut&paste or MMS.  It is going to be huge.  Please think about us, cause we think about you, like every day.  Sometimes we’ll pick up flowers and ask it if you love us.  Sometimes the answer is no. (Read the full post about ‘Google: Android will run circles around iPhone’…)

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One more Motorola Z heading for AT&T’s bonnet. The Motorola Z9 was leaked almost a year ago in 2007 and has taken its own sweet time to arrive at the FCC’s door. The Z8’s successor is also 3G capable and runs on Motorola’s Linux-based Synergy OS. While we weren’t too impressed by Z8’s weird sliding action, we did appreciate its multimedia versatility nonetheless. Motorola has now ditched the curved slider design, sticking to the more conventional straight slider approach in the case of Z9. Other known features include a 2-megapixel camera with flash, hot-swappable microSD expansion, a QVGA display, and Bluetooth with Stereo A2DP profile along with AT&T’s 3G-dependent Video Share feature. (Read the full post about ‘Motorola Z9 hits the FCC’…)

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This year’s big winner at the SXSW was Sched.org. Tauted as this year’s Twitter, Sched.org is a simple scheduling app that was developed in a mere 14 hours by Florida developers Taylor McKnight, a 24-year old web designer, and Mehta, 27, an IT consultant. Last year, Twitter proved to be a success and still continues to be a winner, with its micro-blogging feature. Users are allowed to post and receive simple updates wherever they are via their laptops or phone. And this year, Sched.org proved just the same by posting a more organized schedule of the conference. Sched.org is a calendaring service that solves schedule management. (Read the full post about ‘Sched.org: Geeks’ biggest SXSW winner’…)

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And around $100, it may be the most expensive too! But come on, it’s R2D2, man! The only thing that would make this cooler is if it doubled as a trash compactor with swiss army knife attachments. From Urban Outfitters: “Remember when Luke and Leia and the gang were stuck in that trash-compactor aboard the Death Star? And the walls were closing in and there was some kind of gross muck monster down there and everything? Well, remember how R2D2 hacked into the computer system and stopped the contractor from crushing everyone, saving the day like a little robot hero? Pretty awesome, right? But you know what the moral of that story was? (Read the full post about ‘Coolest Trashcan ever …’…)

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YouTube can be fun, and very occasionally brilliant, but a lot of its content is, let’s face it, Amateur Hour. Not so Hulu.com, which just opened to the public. It features real TV shows and even movies. For free - so long as you’re willing to watch ads too, of course. (Hulu estimates its ads at about 2 minutes per half-hour’s entertainment, less than commercial television.) I was one of Hulu’s beta testers, but I didn’t get the big head because there were 5 million of us. I only checked in a couple of times, partly because the selection was limited and partly because I’m spoiled by my fairly big TV screen - not to mention haunted by many hours of programming languishing unwatched on my DVR. (Read the full post about ‘Hulu.com: free movies and TV online’…)

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Canon is releasing the PowerShot SD890 IS, PowerShot SD790 IS, and the PowerShot SD770 IS, due in stores early April, end of March and mid-April, respectively. The three cameras share Canon’s DIGIC III imaging processor, which they claim is responsible for the cameras’ high performance levels, in addition to each utilizing Canon’s face detection technology, intelligent anti-blur technology and in-camera image enhancement, which allows for automatic red eye correction. What is different about the three cameras is body style, LCD size, and zoom level. The SD 890 has a 5x optical zoom with a 2.5-inch LCD screen. The 5x zoom is equivalent to a 185mm lens. (Read the full post about ‘Canon releasing three new 10-megapixel digital cameras’…)

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There’s no excuse anymore to stick with those crummy default speakers that came with your desktop, not when Creative has the “Inspire T10″ speakers for a mere fifty bucks. I know, you’re thinking “How good can they be for $50?” Pretty damned good, actually. Thanks to the dedicated tweeters, the listener can pick up high frequency instruments such as strings and cymbals, and like their more expensive models, the T10 features the unique BasXPort technology which delivers dynamic bass effects (like a great drum solo). (Read the full post about ‘Creative Inspire T10 - stylish yet affordable speakers’…)

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Possibly the coolest web concept ever (present company excepted, of course) is Common Craft, a kindhearted company making free videos to explain all manner of tech-type stuff “in Plain English.”

When Geekbrief goddess Cali Lewis interviewed Lee LeFever, one of Common Craft’s founders, she said his Twitter in Plain English video had instantly converted two non-techie family members to social networking/micro-blogging site Twitter. (And this after months of nagging - Common Craft clearly has near-magical qualities).

By far the site’s most popular video - with over 336,000 views so far - is RSS in Plain English.

(Read the full post about ‘Want technology explained in plain English? Common Craft is for you’…)

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Posted Mar 13th 2008 8:31PM by Donald MelansonFiled under: Storage Apparently catering to the few folks out there that feel they have too few USB flash drives, Ultra Products recently let loose this so-called SpaceStation 6, which comes with no less than six tiny thumb drives that can be neatly concealed and used as the mood strikes. Of course, there’s no hub action going on here — which would be convenient — and the slots likely won’t play nice with your current stash of flash drives. (Read the full post about ‘Ultra SpaceStation 6 offers up 12GB flash drive six pack’…)

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Posted Mar 14th 2008 1:59AM by Thomas RickerFiled under: LaptopsCheck it high-enders. DigiTimes has been milking their Taiwanese motherboard sources for information about Intel’s laptop-class, Core 2 Extreme QX9300 processor. They’ve come away with a Q3 ship date and price of $1,038 when purchasing the quad-core proc in bulk. Digitimes’ own sources had originally pegged the QX9300 for a May release. But such is the life of the muckraker.Tags: laptops, pvp, equipment, players (Read the full post about ‘Intel’s quad-core QX9300 laptop CPU in Q3?’…)

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