After a blowout last week, it was a quiet few days at the Federal Communications Commission. Outside of a few new Samsung and LG models, we have only the Sony Ericsson W205 Walkman phone and what should be the Casio Exilim phone to report. Because the FCC has to certify …
Ahhhh! E3’s next week, which means, of course, that I need to start packing soon for my trip to LA. It also means that we’re knee-deep in video game rumors. We waded through all of the information swirling around next week’s show (well, Natalie the intern did, actually) and picked out a few of the our hopes for next week’s show.
Sony: New PSP. This may well be the big news of the show. Speculation is bubbling up that Sony will release the PSP Go!, the successor to its perennial favorite portable gaming console will drop the UMD in favor of downloadable media and 16GB of built-in memory.Oh, and will God of War 3 get a release date?
More after the jump.
The Samsung SGH-T349 is the latest messaging phone from T-Mobile, and you’ll be forgiven if you thought this looked more like the RIM BlackBerry Pearl thanks to its partial QWERTY keyboard, also known as a 20-key keyboard. Each key has two letters, similar to the SureType keyboard on the …
Continue reading Volleyball-playing robot has Mac mini brain, heart of a champion
Filed under: Robots
Volleyball-playing robot has Mac mini brain, heart of a champion originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 May 2009 17:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ok, let’s just acknowledge something so we can all move on. This happened. Now, some apps.
It’s been a hell of a week for the iPhone and the App Store, and one we covered closely. Here are a few apps that slipped through the cracks.
Melodica: It’s a bit like Bloom, except more rigid, more practical, and less whimsical. With Bloom, you discover ambient soundscapes with inexact pokes and unguessable time signatures; with Melodica, everything’s pretty much on rails, including your tempo. Halfway between an audiovisual toy and a compositional tool, and it’s pretty fun. A dollar.
Eucalyptus : This eBook app was at the center of a little controversy a while back, when it was rejected for linking to RACY .txt file of the Kama Sutra in its library. The blogs leapt to its defense and everything got cleared up, but is it any good? Yes! Page flipping animations and other assorted eye candy are nice, and it’s a well-organized, sensible reader, with a large (but closed) library of public domain content. Shame it’s hideously expensive—you might want to watch this video before you take the dive. Ten bucks.
Sonic the Hedgehog: I was really looking forward to this one, but I’ve been let down by Sonic ports in the past, so I kept my expectations low. It’s OK. Visually, it’s a mixed bag: the classic Sonic aesthetic is intact, but looks muddy and pixelated on the iPhone’s screen, as if they just dumped some assets from another platform onto this one. Adapting Sonic to the iPhone’s limited control options was an obvious challenge for Sega, and one I had hoped they would rise to. With their onscreen d-pad and single button, they haven’t. $6 feels excessive for a game that’s best described as “playable.”
Tic Tac Toe Ten: Ok, this week’s getting a little rich for my blood. How about some free apps? Tic Tac Toe Ten multiplies an old classic by ten nine, changing it from a worn-out game for children into a surprisingly engaging one or two player puzzle. Tip: instituting time limits is key. There’s a pay version with more options, but the free one’s aaaaaaalllright.
Zensify: One of a growing number of social media aggregators, Zensify gloms together most common social networks, as well as services like Flickr, YouTube and Digg that have central social networking functions. It behaves and looks like a Twitter client (also, it is a Twitter client) and helps you keep track of what’s going on in your little corner of the internet. It’ll also create a cloud to see what topics are trending between your various services, which is cool, if not overly useful. Free.
• This Week’s App News on Giz:
• A Week in the Life of an Apple App Store Reviewer
• Car Controlling App Is Fake, But Fun Anyway
• Would You Replace Your Baby’s Rattle with an iPhone?
• Peek-O-Matic Strips Pinups, Hunks, Flabby Gizmodo Editors
• The First Fuzzy Shot of the Sirius iPhone App
Get Girls Half-Naked in Your iPhone
• The First iPhone Clock App I Actually Paid Money For
• June 1st New Yorker Cover Drawn Entirely on the iPhone
This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.
I visited Book Expo America in midtown Manhattan earlier today to check out the ways in which technology has seeped into the publishing world. From all the reports I’d heard leading up to the event, I expected something of a subdued gathering–a quiet mourning for the last days of paper publishing. It’s a testament perhaps, to the bubble that those us in the tech world live in that the show was anything but quiet: Registration lines snaked up and down the halls.
I’d heard talk of there being something in the neighborhood of 20 percent fewer exhibitors this year as well, but the large convention hall upstairs was packed to the walls with exhibitors, with industry attendees clogging up the aisles between booths.
Finding ebook readers was an entirely different matter. The vast majority of companies showing off these devices were segregated to a small piece of carpeting dubbed “New Media Zone.” Amazon was there with the Kindle, and Sony was showing a variety of its devices, but both companies were relegated to small tables in what couldn’t really pass for full booths.
Yeah, you heard it right: another volume of Guitar Hero — the game you either love to hate or love to love — is making its debut on September 1st. This one, Guitar Hero 5, promises a bunch of features that are party friendly, such as the ability to play through sets with no players actively playing, allowing anyone to join in at any time — because we all know how many ragers are built around GH, right? It’s probably no coincidence that the release date comes exactly one week before that other music game, The Beatles: Rock Band. So, which one are you buying?Filed under: Gaming
Guitar Hero 5 hits the streets September 1st, one week before the Fab Four originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 May 2009 16:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
(Credit: Dan Ackerman)With the new and supposedly improved Electronic Entertainment Expo just around the corner (here are some of last year’s highlights), we decided to run down some quick predictions for what the overarching themes of the show will be.
Scott Stein:
…
Tivoli calls this finish Zebra.
(Credit: Tivoli)
Tivoli Audio didn’t announce any new products at its annual showcase this year in New York, but it did reveal lots of new looks–13 new finishes, in fact–for its NetWorks Internet radio.
The new finishes are broken down into three groups: Texture …
[Via PMP Today]
Filed under: Cellphones
Keepin’ it real fake, part CCXV: HiPhone Nano meets Aura in a knock-off of modest proportions originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 May 2009 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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