Hasta La Gadget!

Well, that “trial” didn’t last long at all, now did it? Just days after teeing up a $50 unlimited voice plan in the great city of San Francisco, T-Mobile USA has reportedly taken said plan nationwide. Users are already buzzing about the widespread availability, though it should be noted that the same “loyalty requirements” from the San Fran pilot are still in effect for the rest of the nation. In other words, you have to have been a T-Mob subscriber for at least 22 months and have been in good standing the whole time. Oh, and being cute probably helps.

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile brings $50 unlimited voice plan to rest of America originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lots of Apple rumors today following the weekend whispers of a March 24 desktop hardware event, and they fall neatly along the plausibility spectrum:

• First up, we’d say a bump of the Mac Pro to Intel’s upcoming Nehalem-EP Xeon processors is looking quite likely — famed OS X hacker netkas was poking around in a test build of OS X 10.5.7 and found support files for i7 chips lurking about, as well as drivers for ATI’s Radeon 4000-series GPUs. If you’re making a chart, this one’s right up there with an NVIDIA-powered iMac refresh — it’s a pretty obvious move.
• Second, new entries for the Airport Extreme and Time Capsule have popped up in the FCC, and while the listed dimensions are exactly the same as the current editions, there are no model numbers and something internal has to have changed enough to raise ol’ Sammy’s brows. That could be as simple as a new radio hardware supplier or bigger drives, but if we were placing bets, we’d say both units are getting updated for simultaneous 5GHz and 2.4GHz operation — Apple’s really high on 5GHz for laptops and Apple TV, but the iPhone and iPod touch are 2.4GHz-only. Let’s call this one even odds, shall we?
• Lastly, a new picture of that improbable five USB port Mac mini has surfaced, this time purporting to show the outside of the box. Considering the Photoshop wars the last image of this thing set off, we’d say this is the least likely candidate for a Philly Schills reveal, but then again, Apple’s been pretty leaky lately.

That’s everything we know — anyone else have something to share with the group?

Read – Ars Technica on the Mac Pro
Read – New Airport Extreme FCC listing
Read – New Time Capsule FCC listing
Read – One More Thing Mac mini image [Via TUAW]

Filed under: Desktops, Wireless

Apple rumor Monday: Nehalem Mac Pro, new Airport Extreme and Time Capsule in FCC, Mac mini box originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of the new Amazon Kindle. I mean, the thing has been out for almost a week already. When is the company going to introduce a new version of the device? Before the 2009 holiday season, actually, if the latest rumor is to be believed.

According to Fast Company, an unidentified source within the company suggests that Amazon is working on a new device with a slew of improvements, including a larger screen with touch functionality, set to debut “by the end of the year.” That’s about all that we’re getting out of them at this point, however. After all, the company just released the Kindle 2. There’s no point in cannibalizing sales this early in the game.

News that the second iteration of the Amazon Kindle would have text-to-speech functionality prompted talk about the death of the audio book, but those fears appear to have been premature.

Amazon will now have rights holders opt in to the Kindle 2’s “Read to Me” feature, the company announced on Friday, so it will likely take some time before Amazon gets approval from those rights holders on its entire collection.

The offering converts books into speech. Customers can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and can select a female or male voice. Read-to-Me also works for newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other personal documents.

“If you are in the kitchen and you want to put the feel like being read to, the Kindle will read to you,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Kindle 2 launch, where he demoed the technology by having the Kindle 2 read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address aloud through its stereo speakers.

Rights holders were apparently not too thrilled with the feature. Amazon maintains that it has not violated any law with “Read to Me” but wants to respect the rights of copyright holders.

“Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given,” the company said in a statement. “We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

It’s as clear as it gets in the Apple rumor business that if you’re in the market for one of the company’s iMacs, it’s probably worth waiting a few weeks.

March came in like a lion, and could go out with an iMac.

(Credit: CNET)

Several rumors flew across the Internet over the weekend and Monday, hurled by World of Apple and others, that Apple is finally gearing up for the long-awaited refresh of its all-in-one iMac desktop sometime later this month. Such an overhaul is long overdue in the minds of many Apple watchers, who have been hearing about a potential iMac refresh since last November.

Surprisingly, few details are available about what changes Apple is planning to make to the iMac, which could suggest that the changes will be under the hood rather than design-related. The Nvidia integrated graphics chipsets used in last October’s MacBook refresh are a decent bet, perhaps combined with the 9600M discrete graphics card as Apple did with the MacBook Pro.

Maynard Um of UBS put out a research note Monday saying that one sure bet for the new systems are Intel’s Nehalem processors. The server version of those chips is scheduled to be out relatively soon, which means Apple will probably also have a new high-end Mac Pro soon, as OSX86 contributor Netkas (via Ars Technica) has uncovered.

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Originally posted at News – Apple