Hasta La Gadget!

OK, so Dell and Apple have been locked in a marketing war for years. Dell has long been considered the default PC for enterprise, while Apple has positioned itself as the most influential consumer computer brand in the world. But Apple has branched out from computing with the iPod and, …

We knew the name, but when it comes to phones, it’s not really the name we care about, now is it? (Is it?) Looks like we now have the first totally unofficial shot of Motorola’s upcoming ZN300 slider, said to feature a QVGA display and 3 megapixel cam around back. Unless this puppy runs Android through some comical error in communication between Moto’s executive and engineering teams, the glossy front, generous bezel, and rockin’ offset “M” logo aren’t enough to do it for us — but we’re sure they’ll manage to sell a few for a song on contract when it’s finally announced. Go, sk8r boi, go!

[Via PHONE Magazine]

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola ZN300 looks possibly okay, sort of originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Danger’s going to switch up its Hiptop platform strategy in the era of Microsoft ownership, you think that it might be to… oh, we don’t know, something even remotely Microsoft-related. Granted, shoehorning Windows Mobile 6.1 onto a Sidekick LX sounds like a match made in hell, but at the very least, they could start with a Windows CE base and attach a bunch of Danger-specific stuff with wood glue until the end result looked familiar to users. Alas, Hiptop3 is reporting its own sources in combination with some telling open job positions and notes from Danger employees to suggest that the upcoming Sidekick LX 2009 — possibly to be known as the Sidekick Blade — will actually feature an entirely new kernel based on NetBSD. Our only guess is that this fancy little project started well before the acquisition completed, and in the interest of getting a thoroughly modern, 3G- and GPS-equipped Sidekick into the market as quickly as possible, maybe Redmond begrudgingly greenlighted the remainder of the project. Good on you, Microsoft.

Filed under: Cellphones

Sidekick LX 2009 running Wind… er, NetBSD? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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*From the Free MP3 archive* On tracks like “Liar (It Takes One To Know One),” the punk/pop heroes continue to evolve their means of crossing alternative leanings with arena-ready hooks. Here, their slight–and welcome–subversions include moodier prod on guitars and genuinely achy vocals.

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free MP3 now!

Originally posted at Crossfade

If you’ve wanted to scan thousands of family picture prints at a time but never had the time to go through with it, a couple of services are available to do the job on your behalf. ScanDigital and ScanMyPhotos.com both take pictures that you send through snail mail and get back to you in digital versions that you can store in the cloud, safely.   

ScanDigital’s service scans your photos at 48 cents per print (at 300 dpi) or for 68 cents (at 600 dpi) to an online server where you can download or share them with others. Once they’re done, they’ll send you back DVDs of the digital pictures and all of the originals. According to the company, you receive task progress emails through the process.

But it’s not that easy to send those pictures to them in the first place, according to Yahoo’s Christopher Null. He tried the service this month and found that the instructions to send the pics were somewhat confusing and didn’t like that he couldn’t change his dpi scanning requests before the service was practically over. In theory, ScanDigital could set up a live online scanning ‘booth’ where a customer could check out how his pictures were looking while they were being scanned, and possibly request re-scanning a few for a few more bucks.

ScanMyPhotos.com also offers a similar service and scans hundreds of pictures per minute through an unnamed Kodak machine seen in this video. It’s probably similar to this one. Its rate of 5 cents per photo is likely the cheapest out of any similar service on the internet. But you just can’t send out a big box with a messy array of pics. You have to separate them all out into small packages with rubber bands and label them in sequence, and they all need the correct orientation. That’s annoying. Basically, you’re still doing a lot of the work and they’re just taking care of the basic scanning.

But are these services any better than buying a good scanner and just doing it yourself?

At the beginning of the year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to scan thousands of photo prints on behalf of my older relatives. I thought it was important to insure their memories (which are also my own) against disasters like earthquakes, theft, and flooding. But one hour after I started scanning prints of the first box out of 15, (with a high-quality flatbed), I just quit. I realized this was going to take forever. 

I’d scanned 16 pictures, which seemed like a lot to me (maybe that’s a pathetic number for scanning pros, but I was trying to be perfect with the framing). I figured that if there were 2,000 pictures in the boxes, it would take me over 156 hours to complete the task. Rats.

Since that’s way too much, I’m probably going to use ScanDigital to get them in order. Even if takes me a full afternoon to ship them, I figure I will save a week’s worth of hours, at least. 150 big ones. It’s not going to be cheap to pay for the service, but nothing is more expensive than wasted time.

Sources: CBS5 KPIX, Yahoo, NYTimes, ScanDigital

Photos: Canon, ScanDigital

2/3/08  – Note: ScanDigital contacted us with a discount offer for Gadget Lab readers — If you choose to try the service, you can add in the code  WIRED10 on an order and get 10% off the total price. — JF