Hasta La Gadget!

Friendly tipster and man about town Ben spotted this Obama-branded MP4 player (“with built-in speaker!”) in Washington D.C. recently.

Paul: “Yes we can buy cheap Chinese iPod knockoffs!”
Chris: “Introducing the iPod hussein.”
Tim: “Sadly the John McCain gramophone was deemed too risky for today’s economic conditions.”
Laura: “There’s not a Zune America and an iPod America. There’s a United States of generic Obama MP4 player America.”
Nilay: “They would give it an African name, DIGITAL MP4 PLAYER, believing that in a tolerant America a terrible interface and weird format support are no barrier to success.”
Joe: The Audacity of KIRF
Richard: “Whew, for a second people thought he was using a Zune again”
Josh: “On Obama’s Digital MP4 Player, it’s not shuffle. It’s change.”
Ross: “Next on the O’Reilly Factor: is president-elect Barack Obama funneling funds through a Shenzhen, China-based shell company?”
Sean: “Who is that black bald guy anyway?”*

*Sean is Canadian, we can’t take responsibility for him or his silly little country.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Caption Contest: unofficial Obama MP4 player is officially awesome originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft is planning a major announcement at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month; many expect the company to announce the next version of Windows Mobile. Here in the states, Todd Peters, the vice president of marketing for the Windows Mobile division, hinted at CES last week as to what to expect.

According to the New York Times’ Bits blog, Peters said that Microsoft is responding to fierce competition in the phone market by revamping its mobile operating system, and—significantly—by putting it on fewer devices.

Currently, there are well over 100 devices on the market running Windows Mobile. As we’ve noted in many reviews on PCMag.com, Windows Mobile devices tend to lack the tight hardware integration required for a smooth user experience, often requiring more button pushes and deep sea menu diving than competing devices like the BlackBerry Curve, the iPhone, and the T-Mobile G1. Plus, I’ve found in recent reviews that WM-powered devices tend to have sluggish responses and often exhibit bugs (depending on the phone in question), particularly when playing media or taking photos.

The last time we heard from ioSafe they were taking 2.5-inch HDDs, wrapping them in armor, then stuffing them into 3.5-inch enclosures — adding fire and water protection in a standard form factor. Now they’ve given up on the internal route and have gone for something a little larger and more durable, fitting Western Digital or Seagate disks into hardened external USB 2.0 cases capable of being submersed in ten feet of water for three days or surviving a raging inferno for 30 minutes. $199 gets you a 500GB model, but, since you’d probably have a hard time upgrading the drive in there without a jackhammer, we’d recommend going straight for the $349 1.5TB model — early adopters get a tidy $50 off!

Update: Jason commented to let us know they also use Seagate drives.

Filed under: Storage

ioSafe announces Solo, the external, submersible, fire-proof HDD enclosure originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are advertisers stepping over the privacy line with cell phones? Two advocacy groups, the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether mobile marketers are violating users’ privacy, according to our news report.

The two groups assert that emerging mobile marketing shops are beginning to employ the same “unfair and deceptive” behavioral targeting strategies as older Web marketers. “Mobile devices, which know our location and other intimate details of our lives, are being turned into portable behavioral tracking and targeting tools that consumers unwittingly take with them wherever they go,” the groups said in the official complaint.

The report said that the groups are asking the FTC to examine how mobile ad companies deploy techniques like behavioral targeting (serving ads to people based on their online activity) and geo-targeting (serving ads based on people’s physical location). The groups are asking for the FTC to require companies to notify users about how their data is used and to ask for consent. The complaint singles out three companies in particular—Bango, MarchEx, and AdMob—but mentions a list of others.

We swung by D-Link’s booth at CES to check out its upcoming SideStage USB-powered monitor, hoping to see the thing in action and get some more details ahead of its release. What we found was quite familiar looking, to say the least. D-Link was disappointingly just demoing a Nanovision, but was quick to point out this would not be the product destined for a full US release sometime this summer. That new display will still be produced by Nanovision, but will be modified to better suit our market, graced with a different logo, and cheaper, too. No firm price yet, but the company is targeting sub-$100, which sounds good to us.

Filed under: CES, Displays

More details on D-Link’s upcoming 7-inch SideStage USB monitor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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