Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Hot on the heels of those early photos of Nextel’s line up of Motorola phones for 2004 we featured the other day, some photos have turned up of some of the other Motorola products in development, including a new gamepad for cellphones (pictured at right), and what looks like some sort of an adapter or…
Our first weekly column for Wired News is up today. This week’s edition is about high-definition DVD, with a “Reader Question of the Week” answered at the end. Check it out! Read
Time has a pretty good overview of Dell’s new consumer electronics strategy, looking at why they’re doing this now and why it’s so important to them (you know the drill, digital convergence, the wired home, etc.). No big bombshells, apart from it becoming rather clear that Dell is poised to launch a price war that…
With all the new massively large hard drive MP3 players coming out these days, it’s hard to get all worked up about a player with just 256MB of Flash memory, but Creative has a couple of new players on the way that aren’t bad options if you just want something small and light. The Rhomba…
With a major new update for Windows XP Media Center Edition coming out, Tabula PC wants to know why Microsoft isn’t planning a much overdue update for the Tablet PC Edition of Windows XP as well. It’s a fair point. After all, both variants of Windows XP are about the same age (just about a…
Virgin (the same people behind the Virgin record stores, cola, airline, cellphones, etc) are jumping into the consumer electronics game with a whole line of budget gear aimed mainly at teenagers. Among the first Virgin Pulse gadgets are a couple of MP3 players (a 64MB and a 128MB model, with that little memory, they better…
Microsoft is getting ready to announce another cellphone running their Smartphone operating system on October 8th. They’re not saying who it is yet, except that it’ll be from somebody big. We’re guessing that the phone is going to be Samsung’s i600, which has been in the works for just about forever. Read [Thanks, Alberto]
This is Barnes & Noble’s worst nightmare: a company called NeoMedia has new application for Nokia cameraphones called PaperClick that let’s you walk into any bookstore, take a picture of any book’s ISBN, and automatically get its pricing information from Amazon. It’s bad news for any bookstore, but something like this is especially troublesome for…
Ok, so this is one “James Bond” gadget you can actually buy (it even has the “007” logo engraved on it): a digital camera hidden in what is designed to look like a cigarette lighter. Photos taken with the JB1 are pretty low-resolution, but it almost doesn’t matter. With something like this you’re really just…
There aren’t any pictures or anything, but there are some rumors of a new “iPAQ 6000” Pocket PC from HP. This one looks like it’ll be more of a Pocket PC Phone, and have quadband GSM/GPRS, built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, an SD card slot, and an integrated digital camera. Could this finally be the cellphone with…
In the spirit of that dashboard mounted Tablet PC we wrote about a few weeks ago, one reader writes in with his glowing car-mounted Apple iBook, which he’s tricked out with GPS, WiFi for wardriving, radar detection, a rear view USB camera with infrared (so he can see what’s behind him, even in the dark),…
In all the hubbub over the Tungsten T3, Zire 21, and Tungsten E, we almost forgot about the other new Palms that were announced yesterday, Sony’s TJ35 and TJ25 Clies. Both have 200MHz processors, 320×320 pixel color screens, and run Palm OS 5.2.1; the TJ35 has 32MB of RAM, while the TJ25 has just 16MB.…
A new USB keyboard from Zvetco with a twist: a built-in biometric fingerprint in the top right corner for adding extra security to your PC. Read [Thanks, Marc]
The Inquirer played with the Concord Eye-Q Go, that two megapixel Bluetooth digital camera we first mentioned a few months ago, testing it to see how well it worked when it came to beaming pictures to a variety of cellphones. Actually handled itself pretty well, apparently. Read
Because of problems on T-Mobile’s network, it hasn’t been possible to access HTML websites on the BlackBerry 7230 for about a week now. To make matters worse, rather than come clean about the problem, some users were being told that T-Mobile simply no longer supported HTML browsing anymore. T-Mobile says they’re working on the problem,…
DesignTechnica review of Plextor’s new dvd burner, the PlexWriter PX-780A, which at speed of 8x, is the fastest drive which can burn to both the DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW formats. They’re saying that if you’re in the market for a dual-format drive, this is the one that you want. Read
A new DVD recorder plus digital video recorder from Toshiba, at least for Japan. The RD-XS41 will be able to record up to 208 hours of video on its 160GB hard drive, and burn DVDs in the DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM formats. Read
Whenever we have to explain the difference between Bluetooth and WiFi, we usually just say something like, “Bluetooth is like wireless USB, WiFi is like wireless Ethernet.” At which point they usually ask us what USB and Ethernet are. Potentially mucking up our succint little explanation, National Semiconductor is working on a low-power version of…
About six months ago Kyocera was showing off a phone called the Kurv, which came with a digital camera, an MP3 player, a built-in FM radio, and most importantly, these swappable “Smart Skin” faceplates that included graphics, ringtones, and games in them. The idea was that you could easily custom the inside as well as…
Christopher Coulter scores again with some specs on the TC1100, HP’s new slate-style Tablet PC, which improves on HP’s earlier effort, the TC1000, but not quite as much as one would hope. Anyway, the TC1100 will come in two versions, one with a 1.0GHz Centrino processor and 512MB of RAM, the other an 800MHz Celeron…