Hasta La Gadget!

We’d heard Toshiba was working on 512GB SSDs back in April, and the company’s delivering right before CES. The industry-first half-terabyte drive is the highlight of Tosh’s new line of 43nm MLC drives, which also includes 64GB, 128GB and 256GB units in both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors — just right to pudge out your laptops and netbooks. No word on price, but you’ve got plenty of time to save up, as these won’t hit mass production until at least April.

Filed under: Storage

Toshiba announces 512GB SSD, other smaller SSDs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mobile Spy, that terrible piece of technology that silently monitors smartphones without the user knowing, has come to the iPhone. Goodbye safe haven of SMS and calling privacy, it was nice knowing you.

The app, created by Retina-X Studios, runs in total stealth mode so that users don’t know its even on their phones. It silently records all SMS text messages, inbound and outbound call information (including call duration) and uploads them to a private account you specify.

It’s been out for a while now on Symbian and WinMo phones, but the iPhone had been left gloriously untouched until now. Not surprising, I suppose, given the device’s ever-increasing popularity. Retina-X says its for monitoring your children or employees. I say if you need to monitor them like this, you’ve got some terrible control and trust issues. [Aving]

Following up on the small and simple design pledge we heard last week from Philips, the company today released a couple of MP3 players small enough for stocking stuffing.

But is the audio quality good enough to take attention away from more popular tiny music players, like the iPod Shuffle? After a few hours playing with one of these bad boys, the GoGear Spark, my first thought is that it’s not a bad alternative due to the OK audio. It’s certainly cheaper and surprisingly tough. As for the other players, they each have their own thing going on.

The Spark (at right) comes with a nice 1.5-inch OLED display, options at 2GB-4GB (for $50-$60, which is less per gig than the shuffle), and uses Philips FullSound EQ tech for improved sounds.

I put it through a jazzy-rock-rap play list, and the beats had a surprising amount of depth. But the feature that I liked best was that the screen is used for navigation (as a giant button, not a regular touchscreen), and clicking through the songs is pretty satisfying. Without any external buttons, the screen takes up most of the tiny space.

The other one of interest is the GoGear LUXE player. It has the transparent color LCD-style that we saw a couple of years ago from a Sony music player that shall remain nameless. This one, though, is refined and sparkly (see above). It also comes with FullSound, which means that a music output is refined by "performing 10 million operations per second to analyze and re-compute the music signal." The key feature, though, is the ability to sync it with any phone to make a switch to incoming calls (it has a clip-on Bluetooth mic), without losing your place in a beat or without removing your headphones. I’ve yet to test this one.

The LUXE will be available at 2GB and 4GB, at $90 and $100, respectively, when it’s released in January.

Lest we forget, there’s one last player, the Raga. Basically, it is a sporty, straight mash-up of the 2004 iPod Minis, in an iPod shuffle body and isn’t notable by any means. So the one thing it should have going on is a lot of insecurity compared to the others. The company, however, will market some armbands and other accessories to go with it. 

Source + Photos: Philips

Great googly moogly, we wrote about this very application like fifty weeks ago. Fifty, people! Of course, with the drawn-out SlingCatcher drama, lengthy Sling product cycles aren’t a terribly big surprise, so we should just all thank our lucky stars we’re going to be getting our hands on SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry before the year’s out. The app officially enters its public beta cycle come December 30 for the Bold, the Curve 8320 / 8900, the Pearl 8120 / 8220, and the venerable 8820, piping your home teevee right to your handset and usurping any semblance of productivity your BlackBerry otherwise stands for. A 3G or WiFi connection is “strongly recommended” — which we take to mean “go ahead, give EDGE a whirl” — but BlackBerry OS 4.5 is a hard and fast requirement, so make sure you come equipped with the goods if you want to waste some quality time in front of the small screen when this goes live.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Portable Video

SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry goes beta at long last on December 30 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Land of Godzilla now has another monster terrorizing its streets—Boston Dynamic’s BigDog robot! Only… aren’t those feet? This isn’t BigDog Beta, is it? No wonder the Japanese look more puzzled than scared. [JapanProbe]