Monday, February 28, 2011

Keydex: The Ugliest iPad ?Keyboard? Ever?

The only part of the Sanwa Keydex iPad stand that won’t melt your eyes due to its sheer ugliness is the keyboard — and that’s because it doesn’t come with one. Instead, you have to supply your own iPad Keyboard Dock. And that’s where the pointlessness of this accessory starts to become clear. To fully [...]

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Gadget Lab Podcast: Motorola Xoom, iPad 2, Intel?s Thunderbolt












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This week’s Gadget Lab podcast zooms in on the Motorola Xoom tablet, the upcoming iPad 2 and Intel’s new Thunderbolt connectivity standard.
The Motorola Xoom is a neat piece of hardware. It’s got a 10.1-inch screen (slightly bigger than the 9.7-inch iPad), front- and [...]

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AppBoy Releases A Check-in SDK For iOS Apps

With the number of iOS apps now well over 300,000, app discovery is becoming an increasing frustration for users. It's also become a major challenge for developers as the increasing number of apps is making it more and more difficult for them to attain exposure for their apps. Now, straight from the "What Took So Long for Something Like This to be Released" department, mobile developer community site AppBoy has released an iOS app check-in SDK.

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Windows Phone's new UI and Xbox games are most exciting aspects of Microsoft deal, says Nokia poll

In search for feedback on its momentous decision to dump Symbian in favor of Windows Phone, Nokia has put up the above poll on its Conversations website canvassing opinions about what users anticipate most out of the new deal. There's no consensus choice, with the equivocation of reactions being underlined by the fact that the "Other" option was the modal response, however of the given categories, a UI refresh and Xbox-related gaming boons turned out to be most important. No surprises there, Symbian's touchscreen UI shortcomings are well known about while the Xbox tie-up has been one of Microsoft's big selling points for Windows Phone 7 since its start. We'd just ask Nokia to be quick about delivering on these things -- spending too long in anticipation mode won't be good for our health.

Windows Phone's new UI and Xbox games are most exciting aspects of Microsoft deal, says Nokia poll originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Beleaguered Huawei encourages US government to investigate it, quotes two presidents in the process

When you're the second-largest supplier of communications infrastructure in the world and your president is an ex-member of the Chinese military, suspicions of espionage -- warranted or not -- are pretty much a foregone conclusion. Indeed, Huawei has suffered a couple of high-profile business setbacks in the past year over vague concerns that the company could be some sort of Trojan horse for Chinese intelligence, and they're fed up: after being pressured into shelving a planned acquisition of server virtualization firm 3Leaf Systems' intellectual property by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, they've published a lengthy open letter that implores the government to fully vet the company to put to rest any concerns or fears it has.

The gist of the letter is that Huawei is owned by its employees, not the Chinese government, its loans are commercial, its products are continually audited by third-party companies for security, and the tax breaks it gets from the government are consistent with what private corporations in other countries receive. Huawei also manages to quote both Obama and Lincoln in the letter -- just to make sure it has both Democrats and Republicans covered, we suppose -- and concludes by saying it believes that "any thorough government investigation will prove that Huawei is a normal commercial institution and nothing more." Sounds like a challenge to us.

Beleaguered Huawei encourages US government to investigate it, quotes two presidents in the process originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 07:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What ?The Social Network? Won (Three Awards, But Not Best Picture) #Oscars

Despite losing Best Picture to The King's Speech, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's epic Facebook creation myth The Social Network did pick up three Oscars tonight, more than any film about nerds has ever garnered, unless you count A Beautiful Mind. The Social Network won Best Film Editing (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter), Best Original Score (Trent Reznor) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) at tonight's 83rd Academy Awards Ceremony. The film, which picked up four awards including Best Picture at the Golden Globes and was nominated for eight Oscars, was definitely the Twitter and tech crowd favorite but apparently not the Academy's.

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Nintendo 3DS launches in Japan, populace tears through initial 400,000 unit shipment

You won't be able to snap one up at your local GameStop for a full month, but the Nintendo 3DS had a solid launch in Japan today, reportedly liquidating nearly its entire initial shipment of 400,000 spiffy stereoscopic gaming handhelds by the end of the day. Some of those sales were to customers waiting in a few lines up to 2,000 persons long, but those lines were exceptions to the norm -- several publications note that very few stores actually had any lines to speak of, as most Japanese electronics retailers sold out when the 3DS went on pre-order over a month ago. Get a refresher on what to expect from the system here (and here) or read all about the surprisingly orderly Japanese launch at our source links.

Update: Our friends at Engadget Japanese were on hand for the 3DS launch, and picked up a pair of systems themselves -- get a closer look at one of the first retail 3DS units in the gallery below!

Nintendo 3DS launches in Japan, populace tears through initial 400,000 unit shipment originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 21:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink NeoGAF, PC World  |  sourceNikkei Shimbun, Andriasang  | Email this | Comments

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3D-Print Yourself With Kinect

“Fabricate Yourself” is like a 3-D photo-booth. Using a Microsoft Kinect, anyone can hit a button and have a 3-D model of themselves printed right then. The project, headed by Karl Willis, removes the arcane intricacies of CAD software and replaces them with something anybody can pick up and play with.
Presented at the Tangible, Embedded [...]

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Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread comes to Nexus One with WebM, disables Facebook contact sync

Google has pushed another minor update to its tandem of Android flagship phones, the Nexus One and Nexus S. Apart from officially rolling out Android 2.3 Gingerbread to the Nexus One nearly two months after it was released, the update also brings with it support for Google's WebM video container. Changes in Android 2.3.3 also include fixes for a random reboot issue on the Nexus S and additional NFC functionality -- most notably, the ability to modify rewritable NFC tags which can currently only be read.

The update has also put the kibosh on Facebook for Android's built-in contact sync. Previously, Google had allowed Facebook to leave users' contact data in the cloud and access them on demand. With the Android 2.3.3 update, Google seems to be sticking to its guns that contact data needs to be synced to the phone using Google's approved methods. That way, even if you uninstall the Facebook app, you'd still have access to your friends' contact info like email addresses and phone numbers.

Right now, this change only affects owners of the Nexus S and other "lead devices," as was explained to Engadget. Google's official statement on the change is after the break.

Continue reading Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread comes to Nexus One with WebM, disables Facebook contact sync

Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread comes to Nexus One with WebM, disables Facebook contact sync originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC Incredible S, Desire HD, Desire Z and original Desire will all be eating Gingerbread by the end of June

When it launched the Incredible S at MWC a couple of weeks ago, HTC promised the new 4-inch device would be quick to get a Gingerbread update and now it's giving us a definitive schedule for it by saying that Android 2.3 will be distributed to its new flagship phone by the end of Q2 2011. We're not sure four months of sitting by the window waiting for the OTA update to float in necessarily matches up to our definition of "quick," but there are much better news for owners of HTC's older devices. The Desire HD and Desire Z -- both released in September 2010 -- will also be leaping away from Froyo and up to Gingerbread and will be joined by the original Desire, which was announced way back at last year's MWC. That handset was essentially HTC's own-brand Nexus One, so we already knew it was capable of running Gingerbread, but it's still rare to see a device go through two significant Android updates (the Desire began life with Android 2.1). All these old Desires are placed on the same update schedule as the Incredible S, whereas the newly announced Desire S and Wildfire S will ship with Gingerbread preloaded.

[Thanks, Johannes]

HTC Incredible S, Desire HD, Desire Z and original Desire will all be eating Gingerbread by the end of June originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Store Your Data in Retro Style

An Etsy store called 8BitMemory converts old NES games into external hard drives.� They use Toshiba 2.5″ drives for the conversion.� You can get a 500GB for $129.99, 750GB for $149.99, or a 1TB drive for $179.99.� These drives are fully USB-powered.� A Star Wars game is shown here, but many others are available.� You [...]

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OCZ's consumer-grade Vertex 3 SSD gets benched, SandForce SF-2281 helps it spank competition

We thought OCZ's Vertex 3 Pro was some flaming hot stuff, but solid state storage reviewers have mind-boggling news -- the plain ol' Vertex 3 will bring the same completely ludicrous 550MB / sec read speeds (plus even faster 525MB / sec writes) at a down-to-earth price. Previews found the Vertex 3's new SandForce SF-2281 controller and Micron 25nm flash memory chips edged out even its own enterprise-grade cousin in nearly every test -- with a few anomalies here and there -- and were reportedly too fast to achieve full performance with any SATA 6Gbps controller save the one in Intel's new Cougar Point chipset. Best of all, they claim that OCZ's targeting a price of just $250 for the 120GB version, or $500 for the 240GB drive benched here. That's still a chunk of change, but considering current-gen 120GB SSDs still cost over $200 street, it sounds like OCZ and SandForce are setting a bar that will drive down prices across the board. We can't wait.

Read - AnandTech
Read - Hot Hardware
Read - Legit Reviews
Read - PC Perspective
Read - Storage Review

OCZ's consumer-grade Vertex 3 SSD gets benched, SandForce SF-2281 helps it spank competition originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 15:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Switched On: Back from the Mac

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
Last week's Switched On discussed Nokia's quest to help Microsoft create a third mobile ecosystem alongside those of Apple and Google. That word - ecosystem - has clearly passed into the pantheon of buzzwords, leveraging many synergies from purpose-built paradigms. And yet, building and maintaining ecosystems is something few companies really understand. True technology ecosystems are more than just successful platforms or throwing many products together simply because they are owned by the same company. They are characterized by strategically implemented nurturing.

One concept that Apple seems to have adapted from natural ecosystems is the concept of the water cycle you probably learned about in grade school. Apple turns up the heat on the life-sustaining water of innovation that passes between the well-grounded Mac market and the soaring growth of the iOS market. Apple alluded to this cycle in its Back to the Mac event. After inheriting many technologies from Mac OS X, iOS began offering Mac OS X launch screens, full-screen apps, app resuming, and document autosaving. This week's announcements, though, show that the cycle may soon be heading again in the other direction as Apple showed off two Mac technologies that may well wind up strengthening the iOS ecosystem.

Continue reading Switched On: Back from the Mac

Switched On: Back from the Mac originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man in Gap is an addictive, simple Time Waster

maningap
Man in Gap is not about a guy trying to find his way around a Gap store; the gap is quite literal here, as you can see in the screenshot.

Basically, each level is composed of a ceiling and a floor, which snap together quite suddenly. As can be expected, when that happens and you're caught in-between, you're squished to a very thin line of pixels. Not so good.

What makes it even worse is that the ceiling and the floor mostly interlock: They're like two pieces in a zipper, and where the ceiling has a "peak" the floor usually has a "valley" that meshes with it. You can see what I mean if you look at the jagged line in the screenshot - that's the contour of the floor and ceiling.

Lucky for you, there are one or two places in each level where the ceiling doesn't quite meet the floor. Your job is to quickly find those places (with your eyes only) and get to them before the level snaps shut. It takes about two-three seconds every time, so it's very fast. And every level has a different terrain, so you never get used to it.

Zero plot, minimal controls, and tons of fun. Really addictive, at least for me. I love the soundtrack, too - it's a nice guitar track with some hardcore distortion.

Man in Gap is an addictive, simple Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Download every Sports Illustrated 2011 Swimsuit photo with a simple Perl script

After the runaway success of last year's Sports Illustrated Perl downloader, Download Squad reader and cameltoe connoisseur, Sparticus, has produced the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Downloader 2011. It's a simple Perl script that you can run on Windows, Mac and Linux -- and before you know it, your computer will be positively overflowing with bikini-clad babes.

Like last year, the script doesn't only download the final, glossy-magazine-destined photos. There's tons of behind-the-scenes stuff, and lots of shots that simply didn't make the final cut. Last year there were around 1200 photos to download -- we're still running this year's downloader, but it looks like there could be even more!

Linux users, you'll be able to simply download the script, chmod +x, and run. Windows users will need a copy of wget and a Perl distro, such as ActivePerl. Mac users can use the Xcode Developer Tools.

Alternatively, be a cool kid and run Ubuntu in VirtualBox!

Download every Sports Illustrated 2011 Swimsuit photo with a simple Perl script originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just How Likable Is Each Angry Bird Anyway? [Image Cache]

We don't really want to think about how many hours we've spent flinging little cartoon birds at little cartoon pigs—it's too sad to consider all that wasted time. Instead we're going to focus on which of those little cartoon birds we like best and why. More »


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Twitter overhauls its Translation Center, adds Turkish, Indonesian and Russian

First launched in 2009, Twitter has just overhauled its 'gameified' Translation Center. It now has a very shiny UI, and voting on suggested translations or adding your own is easier than ever.

Translating phrases earns you experience points, and ultimately yields level-ups. You don't actually get anything by leveling up -- you just end up at the top of a feel-good leader board. If you're an active translator, though, you do get a badge on your profile page -- and as we all know, except for having wheelbarrows of cash, badges are the single most important metric of social status.

To get started, head on over to the Twitter Translation Center and connect it to your Twitter account. You can choose from a bunch of languages, and your translation services aren't limited to just the Twitter.com website: you can translate the mobile website and iPhone and Android apps, too.

Twitter overhauls its Translation Center, adds Turkish, Indonesian and Russian originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Readability pulled from App Store, calls out Apple for its greed

readability
Apple's new in-app extortion subscription fee model hasn't made the company many fans since it was announced last week. Apple has further vilified itself by pulling Readability -- a longtime geek favorite -- from the App Store for violating the new in-app subscription rules.

Readability is an odd target, especially considering Apple liked the script enough to build it into its Web browser as Safari Reader. Nevertheless, rules are rules, and Apple helpfully pointed Readability to section 11.2 of the App Store Guidelines, which requires developers to utilize Apple's payment system. The Readability team is pretty miffed, going so far as to say, "we believe that your new policy smacks of greed."

Continue reading Readability pulled from App Store, calls out Apple for its greed

Readability pulled from App Store, calls out Apple for its greed originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hubble's Personal Telescope Is Beautifully Vintage [Hubble]

This is one of Edwin Hubble's personal telescopes, the one Hubble used before he finished his Ph.D. It was given to a teacher when he left for graduate school and has been handed down from generation to generation. The telescope is beautifully vintage and to just think about the great man's eye looking through it, and how he saw the rest of the galaxy, makes it one of a kind. [BoingBoing] More »


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