Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re a Nintendo DS person, you’ve probably already hoovered up all available information about the forthcoming DSi. Well, as is typical in life, reading about something and experiencing it are often very different. Dan Evans and I were reminded of this today, when Nintendo hosted a “sneak preview” of the DSi in its New York office. When we got our hands on the new handheld console, we decided it was just possibly more fun than either of us had anticipated.

For me, the most entertaining new thing is what you can do with Nintendo Camera feature, using the 11 different “lenses” built into the DSi. Stretching out images, adding “graffiti” and “stamps” (see more pics after the jump) and creating kaleidoscope-like effects (like the one above) is my idea of a good time. The DSi will also let you do many weird and cool things with your music and with 10-second sound bites you record yourself. Then there’s the SD slot and the ability to download games… This is a whole different experience!

We saw some other, um, stuff we can’t tell you about yet. Suffice to say, the new DSi is very engaging. I am now very sure that I want one.

In a federal court in San Francisco yesterday, Hitachi finally admitted its role in a global LCD display price fix scheme, pleading guilty to a one-count felony charge.

The Japanese company has agreed to pay a fine of
Justice Department. According to court reports, Hitachi has admitted its involvement in fixing the prices of LCDs sold to Dell that were later used in monitors and laptops from 2001 to 2004.

The price fix basically involved secret meetings between top executives of companies and them agreeing to set a certain price to sell the LCDs to Dell, and thereby eliminating the natural forces of the open market.

A few months ago, Sharp, LG and Chunghwa of Taiwan also plead guilty to the same conspiracy of price-fixing LCDs in a massive anti-trust settlement. The price-fixing for those companies happened between 2001 and 2006 and also involved the selling of LCD panels to Motorola (for its Razr phones), and Apple (for the iPod). 

South Korea-based LG Display was levied the largest fine, at $400 million dollars. Sharp’s fine was $120 million (mostly for its role in deceiving Dell) and Taiwan’s Chunghwa took a hit of $65 million. With the Hitachi fine, the U.S. Government has now taken in over $600 million dollars.

If you think that’s a lot, well, it is, but it’s nothing compared to the overall worldwide take of LCD panels. According to the Associated Press, there’s a $70 billion worldwide market for them, and all of those companies have likely gained in LCD profits the fine amount many times over the years.

Maybe these pleas will force these companies to avoid using these methods with future display technologies, but I doubt that’s gonna happen.

While ordering Apple’s new iPod Shuffle online, a strange thing happened as I was checking out: Apple recommended some headphones to me that seemed incompatible with the Shuffle. The way I understand it, the latest third-generation iPod Shuffle has migrated all of its playback controls to a remote on …

Originally posted at MP3 Insider

According to Outdustry, iTunes gift cards have been pirated, and China’s biggest C2C online shopping site, Taobao, is the platform used to sell the cards.

(Credit: Taobao)

Chinese hackers have figured out a way to generate iTunes gift card keycode numbers and help themselves to songs from Apple’s music store. The hackers have been selling pirated $200 iTunes gift cards on Taobao for as little as 17.9 RMB, or just $2.60–a savings of almost 99 percent!

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(Credit: Power Shelf)

One night, a tired Lynn Fetzer-Westmeister realized that her phone charger had fallen behind her nightstand. In a dance that’s probably familiar to most of us, she pulled the furniture out from the wall, reached for her charger cord, plugged it back in, and pushed her …