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nokia

Nokia's N96 Has European Debut, $800 Price Ticket

Nokia's much rumored, much anticipated N96 slider has just had its debut—in Europe. It's on sale for €550, or around $798 (yes, this is obviously the unsubsidized price—before tax, too). And though there's no firm info on the US launch timing or prices, this is a good indicator it's on its way. [Nokia]

nokia

Nokia's N96 Now Official, Quad-Band and HSDPA

After much leaking of information, Nokia's N96 slider cellphone is now official. It's a quad-band, US 3G-enabled (WCDMA) phone with a 2.8-inch screen, 16GB of built-in memory, a 5-megapixel Carl-Zeiss Tessar lens, A-GPS and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi. The media-player functions of the phone get their own dedicated slide-out keypad, as we knew. It's due out in the last quarter of the year, and pricing is estimated by Nokia at around $810. Full specs are below. More »

nokia

Nokia N79 and N85 Roll Out Officially, With US 3G Aboard

After yesterday's dribble of info, Nokia's upcoming N79 and N85 are official now, and do indeed carry WCDMA support for US 3G goodness. The N79 has a 2.4-inch screen, 5-megapixel camera and comes with a 4GB microSD card in the box for storage, while the N85 has a 2.6-inch OLED screen, 5-megapixel cam and 8GB of microSD card storage shipped with it. Both also come preloaded with "10 made-for-mobile N-Gage" games and have FM transmitters aboard, for streaming your music over a nearby radio. Full specs below. Update: the N79 is due to cost around $515 and the N85 will be around $660, both expecting to ship in October. More »

pew pew

Star Wars Laser Weapon Battles Arrive in 2016—at the Earliest

Boeing is firing off laser weapon press releases and news at almost the speed of light these days. In June we brought you word that the company had successfully test fired its thin-disk laser, the most powerful solid-state laser ever made at 25 kilowatts (100 kilowatt theoretical maximum). This week, Boeing took the chance to brag about its $36 million contract extension for the U.S. Army's High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator (HEL TD). If you're unfamiliar with the HEL TD, here's the short version: more laser weapons. More »

Fish Armor

Futuristic Dinosaur Eel Fish Armor Would Protect Soldiers With Scales, Sans Smelly Odors

A team of MIT engineers is hoping to develop tomorrow's body armor today with a fish whose family tree stretches back 96 million years. Called the Polypterus senegalus, or "dinosaur eel" to layman schlubs like me, this primitive fish still thrives in the muddy rivers of Africa, and has retained a full-body suit of armored scales that was common on species of fish millions of years ago. For years scientists have known that the eel's interlocking, millimeters-thick scales were capable of stopping penetrating attacks, but couldn't figure out why. Now, thanks to nanotechnology and a grant from the U.S. Army (go Joe!), they've figured it out. More »

touch diamond

HTC Touch Diamond Shows Up on FCC With US 3G Specs

Like the sun rising or your prostate swelling to grapefruit sizes, the HTC Touch Diamond showing up on the FCC site was an inevitability. It's not like we didn't know it was coming, but seeing for ourselves that it exists and has the proper US-based 3G HSDPA capabilities is always good. Now all that's left is to wait for someone to release it for realsies. If you've already got an imported Touch Diamond, you can add 850MHz support to it via a software update. [FCC via Engadget]

nintendo

Nintendo Says Wii Still in Short Supply This Christmas, We Call Them Out

If you read what Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said about Wii shortages this holiday season and didn't get angry, well, you're not paying enough attention. Forbes paraphrases him as saying "demand for the device in the U.S. is unusually high in contrast to either Europe or Asia," which is why you might not be able to get one this Christmas. Oh really? More »

travel

US Airways Removing All In-Flight Movies, Didn't Want Your Stupid Business Anyways

Apparently, flying is just too pleasurable an experience, which is why US Airways is getting rid of all in-flight movies and is canceling plans to test out a new entertainment system in its planes. Wah wahhhh! More »

Army Gadgets

US Army Selects Top Inventions That Can Take, Or Save, Your Life

IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, are a sad fact of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you'll see the influence of these deadly weapons in this list of the US Army's top inventions for 2007. Every year the Army selects the top refinements, outright new inventions, or streamlined weaponry, and pumps out a list. This year's list features several new types of Humvee armor, GPS-guided artillery rounds, and a wheeled contraption for vehicles called SPARK (above), which sniffs out IEDs before they have a chance to do any damage. More »

badvertising

US Cellular Ad Tries Really Hard to Make Yapping On Your Phone in Public a Beautiful Thing

According to this US Cellular ad, when you talk on your phone in public, flowers fly out of every one of your puckered orifices, you stop disappointing everyone in all of your personal relationships, and every stranger around you suddenly sees you as King Brilliant of Mount Saint Awesome. According to my personal observations, when you use your cellphone in public you turn into a self-centered jackass that everybody wants to punch in the face. Which is more accurate? You be the judge. [Gawker]

army

Army Reimagines Recruitment Center as an Apple Store-Inspired, Interactive Battle Simulator

With recruitment levels sagging, the U.S. Army is going the hyper-interactive route with an experimental new store that's right out of the Apple playbook. That is, if Apple Genius Bar employees greeted customers with Apache attack helicopter simulators, full-scale Army vehicle mock-ups, and wrap-around 270-degree video screens, instead of those paperless receipt scanner things. More »

wii fit

Weak, Flabby Dollar Creating Wii Fit Shortage, Could Probably Use Some Time On Wii Fit

Did you see Lam sweating it out in his Wii Fit review? Did that cause you rush out to the store, hands trembling with anticipation, in an attempt to procure one for yourself? Of course it did, but you probably came home empty-handed because the thing was basically sold out weeks before it even launched. And now we know why: the US Dollar sucks, and it's causing the notoriously conservative Nintendo to shift stock to places like Europe and Japan.
More »

net neutrality

Dems Launch Net Neutrality Bill, GOP Says "Hands Off the Poor ISPs!"

Yesterday on Capitol Hill, two Democratic representatives introduced a House bill that would require broadband ISPs to "interconnect with the facilities of other network providers on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory basis." It also requires them to treat all content, applications and services as the same, with "equal opportunity to reach consumers," says an IDG story in the New York Times. Any ISPs who start messing around with packets could be subject to antitrust enforcement. Republicans weren't so happy with the bill. More »

fuel cells

DOT Says Fuel Cells Can Fly; FAA Still Afraid They Might Fry

The US DOT has approved transportation of methanol fuel cell cartridges in your baggage and carry-on luggage, according to one fuel-cell maker. If you're lucky enough to own a fuel-cell system, you'll definitely be able to fly with it come October, when the ruling goes into effect. But this ruling only allows you to carry the cells, not use them on the plane. I looked into it, and the FAA, a division of the DOT, is still apparently evaluating the fire hazards associated with in-flight operation. More »

deals

Wiis Today at Toys R Us!

If you still haven't gotten a Wii for yourself, Toys "R" Us has truckloads of them in stores today for Mario Kart fever. Problem is, they're probably 1985 Datsun trucks, so you'll need to head down to your local branch quickly. To overseas readers, yes, we've still got a Wii shortage going on. Nintendo's apparently shipped most of them to the EU or keeping them in Japan because of how little the dollar is worth now. [Kotaku]

drones

Morphing Micro-Drone Is Half Bat, Half Cockroach, Creeps Us Out

I don't know what's more creepy about this 11-inch remote controlled drone developed by the USAF for reconnaissance missions. Maybe it's the flexible wings, which close and open like a bat when landing. Perhaps it's the crawling on the floor, modeled after cockroaches, to reach hidden places to spy. Or most probably is the fact that they are planning to develop a large drone that will carry 50 of these little beasts, ready to burst out of its belly at any time. Whatever it is, I want one. [Flight]

computers

Gateway "Spots" Contest Ends, One Tattooed Jackass Reigns Supreme

Gateway's Show Us Your Spots contest is at an end, and the winner is picked: some kid named Matt, who permanently brands himself a Gateway fanatic, all to win the system and spite his jerk friend Billy who calls him a Noob all the time. (Guess it worked.) Check out the runners-up, and our impressions of their noble but misguided attempts: More »

war robots

Wiimote, iPhone are New Tools of War

David Bruemmer and Douglas Few, engineers at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Lab in Idaho Falls, have put together an unlikely use for the Wiimote—they've hacked the remote so it can control a bomb-disposing, landmine-detecting, machine gun-carrying robot. More »