Hasta La Gadget!

Mmm, the sweet smell of mobile data burning up the pipes in the morning. Gets us every time. Evidently, the same aroma does something to the brains of Ericsson and TeliaSonera, who have taken their January agreement to the next level by introducing the planet’s first commercial Long-Term Evolution (LTE) site in Stockholm, Sweden. Mind you, we’ve seen lots of trial runs over the past year and change, but this one’s no test. Rather, this site will become part of a commercial network scheduled to go live in 2010, bringing wicked fast mobile transfers to Stockholmers everywhere. Now, let’s hope these American carriers get jealous, and fast.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

Ericsson and TeliaSonera reveals world’s first commercial LTE site in Stockholm originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 May 2009 08:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG’s been getting cozy with Microsoft lately on the Windows Mobile front, and it looks like one of the most significant fruits of that labor to date might find a home on AT&T — eventually. This brassy little number is the LG “Monaco,” which is apparently also known as the “Pico” to some folks; what it’ll eventually be called at retail is anyone’s guess, but the big news is the feature list: 3.6Mbps HSDPA, a 3.2-inch WVGA display, 5 megapixel AF cam, microSD expansion, an add-on pico projector of some sort, and Windows Mobile 7. Though the screen is 0.3 inches smaller diagonally than the alleged minimum specified by Microsoft’s “Chassis 1” guidelines, everything else here would work (and look) great as a next-gen device — and the accessory projector’s a pretty nifty selling point, too. At one point, AT&T had a crazy idea that they’d have this puppy on shelves by September of this year, but seeing we’ll be lucky to have 6.5 devices in our hands by then, this date has undoubtedly slipped since the slide was made. And yes, we’ll admit — we’re intrigued by the gold accents. Is that so wrong? Follow the break for a better view of the phone.

Continue reading LG Monaco: AT&T’s getting a WVGA WinMo7 QWERTY slider?

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

LG Monaco: AT&T’s getting a WVGA WinMo7 QWERTY slider? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 May 2009 08:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are a few items that everyone should have in their toolkit, things so useful that there really is no excuse not to own them. Gaffer tape, or its residue-laying, brittle-ageing US counterpart, duct-tape, is one. Velcro is another. Now this diumvirate of utility is joined by a third object, a widget so simple that you could make your own in seconds, yet so versatile you couldn’t count its uses in a lifetime (well, maybe not in a dragonfly’s lifetime, at least).

It is the ball-bungee, and you can see it above. It consists of a hollow plastic ball and a length of elastic cord. With it you can hold almost any two items together. I came across them by way of the Strobist blog, and they are particularly suited to photography as there are no scratchy parts on them. You can secure flashes to poles, or even small comapct cameras to, well, anything. I wanted to make a couple to hold my umbrella to my light-stand, which is one of the “traditional” uses.

Yes, I said make. I figured that the ball bungee would make a great how-to post for the Gadget Lab, being simple, cheap, quick and useful. Like always, I visited my local hardware emporium, only to find no plastic baubles and, shockingly, no elastic cord. There were, however, packs of ball-bungees in the garden section. The price? Just over €2 for a pack of four, or about US 70¢ apiece. At this price, it’s clearly useless to make your own. And as a generic product, there’s no manufacturers page to link to. You’ll just have to go visit your local hardware store.

Face it: in between waiting for Windows 7 to launch and tweaking the XP build on your newly purchased netbook, there’s this little thing called Windows Vista that needs to be maintained. Today, Microsoft did its part and released the standalone installers for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Service Pack 2 for Vista and Server 2008. Now it’s all up to you. Hit the read links to patch the Wow with a little SP2 Meh.

[Thanks, Justin W.]

Read — 32-bit
Read — 64-bit

Filed under: Desktops, Handhelds, Laptops

Windows Vista SP2 is live, ready to download originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 May 2009 07:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Write-On Glassware

(Credit: Fred Flare)

I don’t even start thinking about what I’m doing on a given day until I have a little caffeine in my system. The makers of Write-On Glassware have realized I’m not the only one and have come up with a coffee …

Originally posted at Appliances & Kitchen Gadgets