Hasta La Gadget!

Stacks is an add-on for jailbroken, or hacked, iPhones which brings a distinctly Mac-like tweak to the iPhone UI. As the video shows, Stacks lets you replace the icons in the home row (the non-moving row of icons at the bottom of the screen) with, well, stacks. Touch one with your finger and it expands to show a bendy column of extra icons. Think of it as piling up app shortcuts and then fanning them out like a pack of cards to pick one. Stacks has been around for a little while, but the video shows the soon-to-be-released v3 which adds renaming and drag’n’drop editing.

As Erica Sadun over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog notes, it’s a shame that you need a Jailbroken iPhone to run this neat and rather handy tweak. On the other hand, though, the OS 3.0 search feature all but renders this obsolete. .

Product page [Steven Troughton Smith via TUAW]

Agfa, the troubled Belgian film and photo company, isn’t quite dead yet, and somebody, somewhere, has slapped the company’s logo onto a new waterproof camera and is offering it under the tagline “sporting submersion”.

You may remember Agfa-Gavaert as a heavyweight imaging company. The medical and industrial side doesn’t concern us here, but Agfa made some stunning films and decent enough cameras. Then, digital photography came along, the company choked and now all that is left of the photographic side is the name, Agfaphoto, used under license from the still ailing parent company.

The new DC-600uw appears to be a pretty good and simple sports cam. It can survive dunks of up to 10 meters (33 feet) and the waterproof sealing keeps out dust, too. The pixel count is kept deliberately small at 6MP to combat high ISO noise (the camera will shoot at up to ISO1600) and it will shoot VGA-quality video with sound.

Other than that, there isn’t much. Zoom is digital only (5x) and focus is fixed, not auto. This is all for a reason: the DC-600uw costs just $200, which, if the pictures are actually any good, is a fine price for an underwater camera. In fact, it might just be the perfect holiday snap machine.

Product page [Agfa]

You’re not still running Windows 7 Beta are you? Tsk tsk, better get your RC build before your system starts spontaneously shutting down every 2 hours. As Microsoft has warned repeatedly, Windows 7 Beta builds will begin bi-hourly shutdowns starting on July 1st in a bid to move you over to the latest release candidate. RC user will suffer the same treatment starting March 1st, 2010 on the way to a June 1st expiration — well after the October 22nd launch date of Windows 7 to retail. This concludes this Engadget public service announcement, your regularly scheduled snarkiness will return in a moment.

[Thanks, Kyle]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablet PCs

Windows 7 Beta automatic shutdowns begin today, RC users safe until March 1st originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s one thing to bury something like developer mode — a mode that the average Pre user will never need — behind a cute-but-exhausting throwback Konami code, but it’s quite another to hide useful stuff that way. A PreCentral tipster discovered that entering “RocknRollHax” on the keyboard (and yes, capitalization is important here) while in the email app enables the previously missing capability to use it in landscape mode; presumably Palm hid it from end users because they thought it was too buggy or weird for mainstream use, but it certainly works alright for us. Worst part is that the code needs to be re-entered each and every time the email app starts, so you’d better really want it — but at least you don’t have to root to get it.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Frustratingly long secret code enables totally useful landscape email on Pre originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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