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iPhone 3G

iPhone 3G Reviews: Hardware, Software and Apps

Here's our Gizmodo iPhone 3G Review, iPhone Firmware 2.0 Review and our still updating iPhone App Review Marathon (89 apps total).

Samsung

Samsung's i8510 Boasts Almost Everything, Plus An 8 Megapixel Camera

Samsung has a new slider on the market in Europe and we're hoping it finds its way over here. The i8510 is a S60-powered GSM phone with very fast 3G speeds and Wi-Fi, as well as GPS. What makes this high-end phone lust-worthy, though, is the 8 Megapixel multifunction camera with Xenon flash that can record video at up to 120 frames per second. It also has image stabilization and face recognition as well as other features. Couple that with Bluetooth 2 and 16GB of internal flash storage and you've got a serious, slim phone for T-Mobile users. And it looks really nice, too. [Symbian Guru]

iPhone Apps

Aurora Feint iPhone App Delisted For Lousy Security Practices

Remember that Aurora Feint Puzzle/RPG game that we told you we liked? Turns out we don't like it anymore. In fact, we're actually pretty damn scared of this app, seeing as Apple de-listed them from the App Store due to privacy and security issues. To the developer's credit, they were forthright with what they did and didn't do. More »

interactive tv

GPS Gaming Technology Lets You Race Against F1 Pros In Realtime

iOpener's GPS technology is made so you can take real-time data from an F1 race and use it to race against those same drivers in a video game. By placing combination of Differential GPS and an Inertial Management Unit on a car, it can track its location accurate to 30cm and get the data to gamers in under 5 seconds. iOpener doesn't plan to develop games themselves, but want to make the technology open to developers, and believe the idea could span across other genres, such as biking or snowboarding. [BBC News via Gizmag]

Cellphones

Mobile Safari vs. Opera Mobile vs. Skyfire: Who's the Fastest?

Three of the best mobile browsers that act like grown up ones are Mobile Safari, Skyfire and Opera Mobile 9.5. Even though the latter two (both for Windows Mobile) are still betas, Laptop Mag decided to toss them all into a race anyway, seeing which could deliver piping hot content the fastest. They ran Opera and Skyfire on an AT&T HTC Tilt, so everyone was surfing on the same 3G network with beefy hardware. Spoiler: Skyfire delivered pages in one third of the time it took Safari or Opera. It's because Skyfire cheats. More »

Bad robot

Bad Robot Limited Edition Figurine

Anyone who's watched to the end of an episode of Lost knows the Bad Robot mascot. You know the little bastard who taunts you with his eyes, saying, "I know exactly how the rest of Lost unfolds, but you're just going to have to wait for it piece by piece, you poor slobs." To commemorate your slow, painful wait, JJ Abrams had these limited edition figurines made in a batch of 500. They're giving away 3 of them at Comic-con this week, where they'll be showing off a pilot of their new show, Fringe. What's cool is that they prototyped these figures in house on the same 3D printer they designed the Cloverfield monster and the new Star Trek movie's phasers on. More »

Electric Cars

Aptera Electric Trikemobile Finds a Friend (and $2.75m) in Google

Pre-orders for the awesome Aptera electric car opened up last year, but the company has been relatively quiet about their progress as of late. Google's philanthropic arm has just thrown a cool $2.75 million their way, and now they're being a little more forthright: the Aptera Typ-1 is due this year, same specs, at about $30,000. Both full electric and plug-in hybrid flavors will be available. Given electric car startups' propensity for disappointing failure, it's comforting to see this especially promising one get a vote of confidence from Papa Goog. [CNET]

Water slides

Awesome Adults Build Giant Indoor Water Slide For Kids

A part of the American Dream is to be able to retire comfortably in your favorite area, say on a lake, with a large home. But not everyone dreams the same, some people love giant water slides, and this family went a little nuts and installed one inside their house for the kids. Not for the adults, mind you, the kids. It's thirty inches in diameter and totals thirty feet long, all indoors. It's built to wrap around the used parts of the house so you'd never notice. This is pretty damn cool and makes me resent my parents even more for never doing anything remotely this cool, ever. [The Craig Caboodle]

iPhone Apps

iPhone Apps We Love: Pageonce Is Our Cheap Personal Assistant

Lifehacker covered the web version of PageOnce already, but think of it is as a web portal that displays all your various utility, credit card and shopping accounts in one page for easy glance-ability. This is the exact same thing, except on your iPhone. We love it. More »

On the ball

It Took Comcast 20 Calls and 3 Visits Over 5 Weeks to Determine That No Cable Was Run to This Guy's House

I know—Comcast bashing is getting way too easy these days. But its hard to resist when you find out that it took 20 calls and 3 personal visits over five weeks for the company to figure out why Kenneth Bayes, a subscriber in Haymarket VA, could not get service. Then it hit them—they never ran cable to the guy's house. It is just the kind of customer service debacle that Comcast has been blaming on their rapid growth. According to Rick Germano, senior vice president of customer operations, "We are a victim of our own success, to a degree." More »

Fake Steve Starts Real Dan Lyons Blog The Fake Steve Jobs blog may be gone (for now) but Dan Lyons has started a blog with a somewhat similar style, expanded topic matter, interesting treatment angles on tech and a Newsweek-themed header. [RealDanLyons]

PSP

More PSP 3000 Spy Shots

A tipster mailed in these additional PSP spy shots to go along with the ones we saw yesterday. Assuming this is real, it shows a black PSP with the new PlayStation button, the mic hole, and a thinner outer ring. There's also the headphone jack with the TV out port which features more arrows than before. Color us amazed. If anything, this says that everyone, from Sony themselves to people who have nothing better to do than to make fakes and seed them to news sites online, aren't really expecting much out of the next iteration of the PSP. More »

BlackBerry Media Sync

BlackBerry Media Sync Released, iTunes and RIM Now 2Getha 4Eva

With a large enough expansion cards BlackBerries have always been decent media players, but transferring tunes is sort of a pain in the ass. Released today, Media Sync solves this problem, interfacing with your iTunes music collection to automatically transfer selected music and playlists to your BlackBerry. It is currently only available for Windows and doesn't support video or DRMed tracks, but hey, it's a start. [BlackBerry via CrackBerry]

nothing to see here

DelFly Micro Dragonfly Is Smallest Creepy Autonomous Spybot Yet

We told you the tiny DelFly II robotic dragonfly spy cam was just the beginning, and we were right. The same Dutch roboticist is now unveiling the DelFly Micro—with a wingspan of just 10cm and a weight of 3.07 grams, it's the first to be smaller than an actual real-life dragonfly. Granted, the dragonfly being used for comparison is Borneo's Tetracanthagyna plagiata, which has a frankly horrifying 20cm wingspan—the largest in the world, no less. But still, now you're even less likely to realize those annoying bugs whizzing around during your protest march are actually just autonomous insectoid ornithopters keeping an eye on you—nothing to worry about. See it take to the air, complete with live eye-in-the-sky video feed, below. More »

Humping Dog

The Neutered USB Humping Dog On Sale Now

The Crunching Dog—a sadly neutered version of the humping dog—is finally on sale. All it takes is $9.99 for you to get a cheap plastic dog to show you that you're worthless because you'll never do as many situps or do them as fast as this crappy toy from Japan. Seriously though, how can something with a dong THAT huge even physically do situps? This is the excuse we're using to justify our own obesity, in case you were wondering. [ThinkGeek]

Voice of the voiceless

iPhone App Devs Still Gagged by Non-Disclosure Agreement, Mad as F'n Hell About It

As we covered in our case for still needing the iPhone app black market, developers are gagged by a non-disclosure agreement that keeps them from talking about actually programming the iPhone with anybody, even though sharing info would help app development. Surprise, developers don't like that. So now we have Fucking NDA, which aggregates their rants and musings, turning them into a single stream of angst about, well, that fucking NDA. Here's a gem collected from Twitterific's Craig Hockenberry: More »

Rumor

Dell E (aka Mini-Inspiron) Specs Uncovered, Actually Called Inspiron Mini?

Zumo thinks they got a peak at the specs for Dell's first cheap mini-laptop on a recent trip to Dell's Texas facilities. They say that it'll be called the Inspiron Mini, contrary to previous reports it'll it's the Dell E. What's supposedly inside sounds reasonable, and what you'd expect out of a suitable Eee killer, especially if it's really only $299. More »

Engines

Plastic Motor Powered Directly By Light, No Solar Middleman Necessary

Professor Tomiki Ikeda, along with his research team at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a plastic motor that runs on direct light. Unlike solar power, there is no need for storing energy before conversion. The motor can achieve this feat thanks to a plastic compound containing azobenzene which contracts when exposed to ultraviolet light and returns to its original shape when exposed to visible light. By making this material into a belt and wrapping it around two wheels of different sizes, movement can be generated when the larger wheel is exposed to ultraviolet light and the smaller one to visible light. More »