The Sony Rolly, in all its egg-shaped glory.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)
Is your Sony Rolly languishing on the shelf? Feel like you exhausted the novelty of this $400 dancing MP3 player after only a few hours of Christmas morning exuberance? Did you think the Rolly’s potential for tormenting …
Japanese owners of Sony’s little rolling music… thing have been able to remote control their Rollys via Bluetooth since late last year, and now folks elsewhere in the world are getting a shot with the release of Rolly Remote for US owners. The software and firmware update let you connect to Rolly wirelessly from a PC (it doesn’t look like we get mobile phone connectivity yet), enabling control over the thing’s playlist and movements. You can jack into seven of the little wheelie monsters at a time, meaning all you would-be choreographers out there finally have a way to express those emotions welling up inside without having to hire a bunch of dancers. (Vivaldi’s Greatest Hits collection not included.)
[Via Sony Insider]
Filed under: Portable Audio, Robots
Remote control your rolly with Rolly Remote, now in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In case you didn’t know it, CNET’s been running a special package the last couple of week’s called “Tech Madness” that not only highlights CNET’s March Madness toolkit but a little game called “What’s the No. 1 gadget in the land?”
While we don’t …
Garmin’s GPS-toting watches have never been great lookers, but the company seems to have really made a point to ignore aesthetics for the Forerunner 310XT (above), a new nav-enabled watch tauting an impressive (for one of these) 20 hours of battery life. Also new is the Forerunner 405CX (after the break), an update to the company’s popular (and rather less offensive looking) Forerunner 405, adding “increased accuracy” in calculation of calories burned and comfort improvements to boot. Both work with the company’s ANT+ wireless monitors, but only the 310XT is waterproof (up to 50 meters), so you triathaloners know which bit of circuitry to covet in the coming months. No official price was announced for either, but we’d expect the 405XT to cost near the same as its predecessor, which launched at $299, and we’re seeing the 310XT on some early retailers for $399.
Update: lcbarron commented to let us know these are now up at the Garmin store. $369 for the 405XT, $349 for the 310XT. Pick your poison!
Read — 310XT Press Release
Read — 405CX Press Release
Filed under: GPS, Wearables, Wireless
Garmin intros Forerunner 405CX and 310XT with GPS, a face only a triathlete mother could love originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Now this is a pleasant surprise. We expected to get our hands on a DSi, just not today. Like the baby in a carriage of fictions-past, the little bundle of gadget joy arrived on our doorstep this morning. Regardless, Nintendo has outdone themselves on presentation this time around, seating the console in a large box that emits a sample of cheers and shines bright lights on you when you pop the lid. Seriously. Other than that, the DSi is about what we expected — slimmer, sleeker, lighter… generally a lot more DS-y. We ran into a few issues off the bat, like the fact that it can connect to our network, but not to Nintendo servers (this is an issue addressed in the manual — it makes no sense to us), and we found the menus to be slightly unwieldy to navigate through, but mostly we’re as excited as school children on X-mas morning. Take a look at the vast gallery below to see what’s what, and stay tuned for a more in-depth look at the DSi.
Gallery: Nintendo DSi unboxing and hands-on!
Filed under: Gaming
Nintendo DSi unboxing and hands-on! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
While most complain about slow CPU speeds on netbooks, the thing they universally lack is a decent sound system. If nothing else Samsung’s N120 could be an improvement there, featuring enough bezel to house a pair of speakers, and there’s room for what must be the world’s smallest subwoofer in there somewhere. Of course, all that bezel was really to make room for a bigger keyboard, but we already knew that, and we now know the thing is showing up at retailers across the web for pre-order at prices falling in the $450 – $475 range and colors at either end of the light spectrum: black or white. With that keyboard, those speakers, and 10.5 hours of battery life, this sounds like a solid entrant to the netbook races, especially for anyone more interested in sound than color.
Filed under: Laptops
Samsung’s 2.1-channel rocking N120 netbook now available for pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This article was written on July 24, 2006 by CyberNet.
A user over at Google Blogoscoped noticed that they had been one of the chosen people to test out a new Google Homepage prototype. There isn’t anything too extravagant or eye-popping but it looks like the Froogle and Groups links were removed from the navigation bar and a link to Videos was added. The “more” link now pops up with a box with some more Google services instead of just taking you to the Google services page. However, I would believe that the “even more” button would still take you to that page.
The user that found this said that after they saw the page and took some screenshots they removed their cookies to make it go back to the old style. If their cookies weren’t removed then it would be possible to replicate the screen but now we don’t have any verification as to how real this is. I guess we can throw this one in with our other screenshots for new Google test pages (if you didn’t notice each of those words link to a different page that Google has tested).
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We’ve seen bulky UMPCs with hidden QWERTY keyboards and svelte ones you could almost slip in a pocket, but regardless of size they’ve always been comfortable with their lot in life: not being treated as full computers. Not so for Owl’s iMpc A10, a plucky portable that wants you to believe it’s a real machine, starting with its name, which intentionally implies “I’m a PC.” So too is John Hodgman, though, and funny as he is we wouldn’t say he’s a very good portable computing device. The A10 should be, with a 1.2GHz VIA C7 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. It also sports a 5.6-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen, a webcam, 802.11b/g wireless, and a claimed 5 hours of battery life — decent specs but nothing to really differentiate it from the crowd. A price of 2,999 yuan, or about $440, seems reasonable enough, but no availability outside of China means no respect from us.
Filed under: Handhelds, Tablet PCs
Owl’s iMpc A10 UMPC just wants some respect originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Palm Pre is being touted by almost everyone as the first serious rival to the iPhone. That’s no surprise — almost every other manufacturer has squeezed out a touch-screen, big-icon handset since the iPhone debuted almost two years ago, but they have all been me-too clones, and about as successful in topping the iPhone as the myriad MP3 players that failed to beat the iPod. The Pre looks like the first phone to actually bring something new.
What has this shown us? It makes it clear that simply adding extra features doesn’t work. Adding a 5MP camera is no more likely to topple the iPhone than adding an FM radio worked to beat the iPod. The reasons for the success of the iPhone are subtler and harder to see.
Here’s what the Pre needs to do to make a dent.
Be Fun to Use
Arguably, almost every cellphone before the iPhone was horrible to use, a monstrosity of hard-to-access features and bad UI decisions. Because every phone was as bad, the manufacturers got away with it. The Pre enters a post-iPhone world. The iPhone’s UI is not only easy and intuitive but a joy to use. Little tweaks, animations and subtle guides combine to make the iPhone fun to just play with.
The Pre’s wiggly strip, its un-intrusive pop-up notifications and its “card" metaphor are all good candidates for this. And when you see the “window-blind" expandable menus for the first time, I dare you not to crack a smile.
Applications
The iPhone is lacking in many features — just look at the reception that the addition of cut-and-paste got at the OS 3.0 announcement. But the beauty of the iPhone model is the App Store, which means developers can add almost any missing feature they like. Every smartphone can run third party applications, but Apple was the first company to make it so easy that it’s hard not to buy apps.
Palm needs to make sure the Pre has a store at least as good as the iTunes Store, and — unlike Apple — it doesn’t have the luxury of spending a year making it. The Pre needs to launch with a perfect, well stocked store to stand a chance. Pandora and Amazon have already signed up, so its off to a good start.
An Kick-Ass Ad Campaign
One of the secrets of Apple’s success is brand awareness. Nobody goes to the store to buy an “MP3 player"; they go to buy an iPod. And so the iPhone, too, isn’t seen to be the same as a phone. The iPhone exists in a category of its own.
To have a chance of really competing, rather than being a respectable also-ran, the Pre needs to become a household name, and to garner similar buzz to that surrounding Apple’s phone. This is starting with the tech blogs — we are almost universally excited by the Pre, but it needs to go mainstream. Other than the BlackBerry and the iPhone, name another handset that get regular coverage in regular news and newspapers.
One More Thing
While Palm shouldn’t try too hard to push the Pre as an iPhone competitor, it needs to have something to differentiate it from the Stupendabrick. And it has it — a keyboard. The iPhone is, like the iPod Touch, a mobile computer, a handheld pocket-box tht can do anything thanks to its very simple hardware design. The Pre is a phone, albeit a good one, and it has the keyboard to prove it.
For many, the lack of a hardware keyboard on the iPhone is a “deal-breaker". For them, the Pre might be just the thing, although with 30 million already sold, the iPhone/iPod Touch on-screen keys can’t be that bad.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired
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Filed under: Cellphones
Motorola Evoke QA4 hands-on with video originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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