Sunday, May 08, 2005
Hands on with Cingular’s version of the Audiovox SMT 5600 >
Reader Jesse King got his hands on the new Cingular version of the Audiovox SMT 5600, and was kind enough to send us a few pics of his new baby. Not surprisingly, it looks almost exactly like the old AT&T Wireless version of the SMT 5600, even down to the lack of carrier branding on the phone itself (even though the handset depicted on the SMT 5600’s box does sport a Cingular logo on its casing). Not that we mind a phone coming with less branding on it or anything…
Continue reading “Hands on with Cingular’s version of the Audiovox SMT 5600”
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CherryOS: It’s all over >
First they put it on ”on hold” last month, then they
announced they were going to relaunch it as an open source
project, now the genius guy behind
CherryOS, that OS X emulator which apparently
“borrowed” some code from an earlier emulator by the name of PearPC, has decided to pull the plug on the entire
ill-fated venture. Arben Kryeziu says that it simply “was not ready”, which we believe is a euphemism for
“I didn’t feel like getting sued by the people behind
PearPC”.
[Thanks, Bico]
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The Pipeline: Circuits calls it in, Forbes waves down the broadcast flag >
It’s the Pipeline, where you can surf the treacherous waves of the MSM. This week, The New York Times calls it in, Forbes waves down the Broadcast Flag, and eWeek why Japan is losing the tech battle.
This week, The New York Times takes a look at the future of
cellphones and finds — surprise, surprise - - that cellphones are packing in more features than just telephony. In a
wide-ranging article, Steve Lohr covers everything from the now-ubiquitous cameraphone to smartphones. Readers in the
U.S., however, are most likely to agree with his comments on the state of the American cellphone market (while those
outside of the U.S. are likely to experience a bit of schadenfreude: “The new technology and services are
coming in force, but so far the effort to push beyond voice has gone slowly in the United States compared with other
nations. Data services, from short text messages to sending photos, range from 3 to 8 percent of total revenues for
American carriers. In Europe, Japan and South Korea, data revenues range up to 35 percent. ... Many industry analysts
blame the wireless carriers for clinging to confusing, and often costly, metered payment plans on their networks,
including some by-the-megabyte pricing plans for pictures. ‘Consumers don’t know megabytes from dog bites,’ said Delly
Tamer, chief executive of LetsTalk.com, an online cellphone store. ‘Complexity is a huge bottleneck.’”
Continue reading “The Pipeline: Circuits calls it in, Forbes waves down the broadcast flag”
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HP iPAQ hw6500 vs. the Treo 650 >
If you’ve been agonizing over whether or not to wait another month or two for HP to roll out their new iPAQ hw6500, we’ve got little something for you might have been waiting for: a whole slew of comparison shots showing the new Pocket PC Phone side-by-side with palmOne’s Treo 650 (and a bunch of other phones). Not that we didn’t already know that the hw6500 is longer and wider than the 650, but it is good to finally see ‘em right next to each other.
Continue reading “HP iPAQ hw6500 vs. the Treo 650”
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Cringely thinks Apple’s going to stop making iPods >
Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely is floating the idea that sooner or later Apple is going to license the iPod to other
manufacturers and get out of the business of selling
iPods (you have to scroll down to the
bottom of his most recent column). The fact that Stevie J. pulled the plug on Mac clones notwithstanding, here’s his
line of reasoning: Right now they’re using the iTunes Music Store to drive sales of iPods, but Apple continues to face
downward price pressure on the iPod and eventually they’ll be forced to cut margins on the iPod (all of ‘em) to the
point where they’ll no longer be all that profitable (at least not at the kinds of margins that Apple is used to
enjoying). Cringely thinks that the long term profit margins on iTunes downloads are better and more scalable than for
hardware, so he thinks that they’ll start letting other companies make iPod clones that are compatible with the iTunes
Music Store and then stop making their own iPods to focus entirely on selling downloads. Crazy? Yeah, but you know how
Steve Jobs likes to pull unpredictable crap like this, so don’t put it past him. If the iPod stops being a moneymaker
don’t expect him to hold on to it out of some sentimental attachment.
[Via Digital Media Thoughts]
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Mustek’s PVR-H140 personal video player >
We won’t pretend that this is the most advanced personal video player we’ve ever seen (or the most styled out), but Mustek has a new PVP out called the PVR-H140 that sports a 3.6-inch color LCD screen, up to a 40GB hard drive, an SD/MMC memory card slot, a built-in speaker, AV in for recording TV shows, AV out for connecting up to a TV, and support for playback of ASF, MPEG1, AVI, and MPEG4 video files and WMA and MP3 audio files.
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Pantech to snap up Siemens’ cellphone biz? >
Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Nokia don’t seem all that interested, and Motorola,
Ningbo Bird,
LG, and
Acer have supposedly already passed, so is it going to be
up and coming South Korean cellphone maker Pantech that ends up scooping up Siemen’s mobile division, which
finally went on the block late last month? Pantech is
completely determined to be a baller in the global cellphone market and want to be in the top 5 by 2007 (much to the
annoyance of peninsular rivals Samsung and LG; people we’ve spoken to at each company don’t seem to have a lot of
respect for them), so we could totally see them buying Siemens’ mobile division, especially if they could snap it up
for a song. Nothing final yet, but a Pantech exec did confirm that Siemens recently presented them with a proposal to
buy the division.
[Via Slashphone]
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The week in Engadget >
In case you missed any of them, some highlights from the past seven days of Engadget:
Xbox 360
- Another Xbox controller pic?
- Gates confirms Xbox 360 for 2005
- Live Xbox 360 shot!
- Xbox 360 Windows Media Center Remote Control
- Close up shot of the Xbox 360’s controller
- The Pipeline: Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
- The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates, Part 1
- The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates, Part 2
- How-to: One-click audio news, synced with your iPod in Tiger
- First look at TiVo Desktop 2.1
- Switched On: Philips PSS110, The Little Boombox That Can’t
- The Clicker: Single Frequency Networks and OTA HDTV
- Music Thing: The Technos Acxel
- Time for a little Friday Fun!
- Movie Gadget Friday: Death Star I from Star Wars
News
- Verizon to get the Treo 650 on May 11th?
- The Motorola i605, Nextel’s first cellphone with Bluetooth
- Your Turn washing machine makes sure it’s your turn
- HP to get the iPod mini and the iPod shuffle
- Florida signs law to track sex offenders via GPS for life
- Run homebrew code on the PSP
- Bluetooth + Ultra Wideband?
- Nike and Bausch & Lomb’s MaxSight performance-enhancing lenses
- Kodak kicks out the C360, C330, and C310
- iPod shuffle snaps up 58% of the US market for flash-based MP3 players
- Gateway’s 6GB MP3 Photo Jukebox
- PSP UMD format cracked; game ISOs appear
- FCC chairman wants to mandate E911 for VoIP
- More Samsung i730 details
- palmOne’s LifeDrive Mobile Manager appears on Amazon
- Yet another SL65 fashion
faux pasphone from Siemens - Luxpro at it again with the EZ Tangent and Top Tangent
- Federal appeals court strikes down Broadcast Flag
- Morse code trumps SMS in head-to-head speed texting combat
- Georgia school reduces suspension for student’s call from Mom in Iraq
- Google down? Google hacked/not hacked!
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Saturday, May 07, 2005
Google down? Google hacked/not hacked! >
Not normally something we’d cover, but damn, is Google down? Is such a thing even possible? Anyone know what’s going on?
UPDATE: They’re back! Seriously, anyone have any idea what happened?
UPDATE 2: GigaOm has a screengrab of a site called SoGoSearch that Google.com was redirecting to for a little while there. Sounds like somebody got themselves hacked!
UPDATE 3: Ok, to be fair, no one knows for sure that Google got hacked, this story is still developing. But hacked or not, something pretty catastrophic must have happened for them to have a system-wide outage like that. Sounds like there may have been some sort of Denial of Service attack, whether that was combined with a redirect of some kind isn’t entirely clear. We’ll keep you posted.
UPDATE 4: Google is now saying it was a DNS issue. They haven’t said what the source of the issue was.
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Japanese stores use RFID to let customers bookmark their favorite shops >
Tokyo-based TechFirm is launching an RFID-based service that lets stores and customers exchange information. By
pairing a shopper’s RFID-enabled phone with RFID readers in the stores, customers can download and save information
about the store — a bookmark of sorts for favorite shops. The incentive for the stores is that the exchange is two-way,
and shops can collect lists of potential repeat customers in order to send them spam special offers
and bargains. Maybe stores in Japan will actually make sensible usage of their customers’ data, but we would be the
first to opt out if something like this ever hit the States.
[Via near near future]
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Microsoft unveiling Windows Mobile 2005 next week >
You can sort of file this one under “Open Secrets”, but RCR Wireless News (among other sources) is confirming that
Microsoft is going to formally take the wraps off
Windows Mobile 2005 (aka Magneto),
the next version of their operating system for mobile devices, at Mobile and Embedded DevCon 2005 in Las Vegas next
week. Doesn’t mean you’ll be able to get it in a phone right away, so don’t be upset when Verizon intros the Samsung
i730 next month (or whenever it drops) and it’s running Windows Mobile 2003 SE. Or at least, be upset, but don’t be
surprised.
[Thanks, Omar]
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Close up shot of the Xbox 360’s controller >
The leaked Xbox 360 pics keep on coming this afternoon. The latest is a close up shot of the new console’s controller that gives us a good look at that little silvery thing in the middle, which besides sporting the Xbox 360’s logo, is also supposed to be some new kind of button or something or other (if we knew exactly what it was we’d tell you).
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Xbox 360 Windows Media Center Remote Control >
Microsoft must have been dreaming if they thought they could hold a launch party for the Xbox 360 last night and somehow stop us from getting our hands on photos of every last piece of hardware that was there. We already scored a live shot of the console, along with its controller, now courtesy of another attendee we now know what the Xbox 360’s DVD player/Media Center remote control is going to look like.
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Telco-powered vibrator >
Okay, now here’s a decent product for women. And it’s probably the very best customer service you can ever hope to get from your phone company. Ironically, this vibrator (it glows in the dark!) is a good excuse not to get naked.
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Have a baby and score a free TiVo >
Yes, it’s a total publicity stunt—and yes, we’ve also fallen prey to their evil plan—but if you or your significant other just happens to give birth at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas this Mother’s Day weekend you’ll walk out of there with a real bundle of joy: a brand new TiVo with lifetime service! TiVo’s giving away free TiVos at Parkland Memorial, which has the busiest maternity ward in the country, as part of promotion to emphasize how TiVo gives “moms a way to have some personal time to themselves.” One snag with the giveaway: the Dallas Morning News reports that a lot of the recipients had no idea what a TiVo was until they were given a certificate for one yesterday.
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