Hasta La Gadget!

These “Secret Message Cufflinks” unscrew to reveal two tiny scrolls, with “inspirational words” inside. What you don’t see in the picture is what is written all over them: “Lame, lame, lame.”

Seriously. What kind of wuss would wear a pair of cufflinks with these words inside?

“Born to be wild. Live to outgrow it” by Lao Tzu and “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do is in harmony,” by Mahatma Gandhi.

There are, at least, a couple of extra scrolls (read: small pieces of paper) included for you to add your own, manlier slogans. But what you should really be doing with these cufflinks, into which you could slip almost any small item, is carrying contraband. The obvious candidate is illicit substances, but anything would do. I’m actually considering getting some of these and keeping salt and pepper in there, but anything (anything!) would be better than the default options.

Actually, one thing would be worse: inspirational photos. Imagine a tiny picture of a cat dangling from a tree with the caption “Hang in there.” Sob. $50.

Uncrate]

I just wasted €1.59 in the App Store, but at least my back is straight. I’d like to attribute my upright posture to the application in question, called “Upright”, but sadly it’s my awesome office chair that does that. Upright is quite, quite useless.

The app uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to measure when you move. Tap the screen once to calibrate and from then on, any deviation will cause an alarm and/or a vibrating alert. This part of the plan works just fine.

The problem comes with the iPhone itself. You need to either put it in a shirt pocket (where you cannot, of course, actually touch the screen to start to application) or hang it from a lanyard (yes, they actually exist
), which is clearly a bad idea.

The “Slouch Sensing” can be adjusted between high, medium and low, and you can also set a “grace period” so you can, say, reach down and grab a dropped paperclip without setting of the alarm. For instructions on adjusting these or any other settings, see here.

The worst part? I would have just looked at the screenshots and come to the exact same conclusions had the PR e-mail not contained a promo code for the application. I downloaded it, and then typed the code into iTunes. This was the exact point at which I discovered that promo codes, like drug-mules, cannot cross borders. The US-only code is as useless as a burst, heroin-filled condom here in Spain. Outtasight.

Product page [iTunes]

Apple has finally gotten around to squeezing Intel’s new Nehalem chip into its Xserve line. Our first tip-off came last week when the new server showed up on Apple’s Hong Kong store. Now it’s official.

Apple says that the two new models offer “twice the performance”, although the numbers themselves don’t look much different. The top end model runs at 2.93GHz against the old quad-core 2.8GHz version, so it’s clearly the change from the Harpertown to the Nehalem architecture that has done the trick. Well, that and the new, faster 1066 MHz DDR3 memory that the other Macs have had for a while.

The Xserves come with three drive bays, and there is now the option to put in a solid state drive, useful for running the OS in a server farm where you want to save all the electricity (and heat) that you can. The other advantage here is that it doesn’t actually take up one of the bays.

The base model, with 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Xeon 5500, 3GB RAM and a pathetic 160GB hard drive will run you $3000. If you opt for the top end octo with two quad-core 2.93 GHz chips and, like the Zen Buddhist in the pizza store, ask Apple to “make me one with everything”, you’re looking at over $12,000.

Press release [Apple]

Product page [Apple

Photo of Nehalem Bay: Michael Cornelius/Flickr

See Also:

• Apple Slip-Up Shows New Nehalem Xserves Imminent
• Intel’s Nehalem Boasts 8 Cores and Integrated GPU

Think Sling Media is partially making up for its ridiculous arbitrary lockout of iPhones on older Slingboxes by offering a $50 credit toward the purchase of a new model? Think again: turns out that the credit is applied against prices in Sling’s own online store, which are already jacked beyond reason. Actually, they aren’t, they’re just MSRP — but let’s be honest, no one pays MSRP for anything anymore, and you can actually get either the PRO-HD for less from Amazon than from Sling’s store after the frickin’ credit (and the SOLO isn’t faring much better after fast shipping, especially if you’ve got a Prime membership). It’s a pretty backhanded way to say “thanks” to your early adopters — and it’s just a shame that the iPhone version of the SlingPlayer will likely be a strong enough draw to let the company get away with murder.

Read – Slingbox SOLO on Amazon
Read – Slingbox PRO-HD on Amazon

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Home Entertainment

Sling’s $50 rebate on iPhone-compatible boxes rendered useless by stupid pricing originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reputable Dutch site Tweakers has Alain Segond von Banchet, RIM channel sales manager according to LinkedIn, stating that the BlackBerry Storm followup is scheduled to launch at the end of the year or at the beginning of next. In addition, he has the phone coming to KPN, not Vodafone who had the first generation Storm locked-up under an exclusive deal. Interestingly enough, Mr. Segond von Banchet says that the Storm 2 (not the final name) will “offer among other things a new manner to input text” — among other things meaning WiFi, presumably, as we heard before. Keep in mind that channel sales managers do not typically represent a company to the press. Nevertheless, what he’s saying does jibe with previous rumors and we have no doubt that RIM is working hard to avoid the universal disdain that greeted the Storm’s mushy, push-button touchscreen input.

Update: Tweakers responded telling us that Mr. Segond von Banchet was speaking on the record for RIM because there was no one from marketing at the TeleVisie 2009 Expo yesterday.

Filed under: Cellphones

RIM (employee): Storm 2 with “new approach to text entry” for end 2009, early 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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