Hasta La Gadget!

Looks like the kids in Taiwan will be able to take everyone’s favorite Ion-based nettop for a spin sometime soon. Except, instead of being known as the Acer AspireRevo, its been rebranded as a Gateway QX2800. Actually, that isn’t the only difference — the CPU on this new guy has been upgraded to an Atom 330 dual core, and storage is now 500GB. But besides that, its the same kid: NVIDIA Ion 9400M graphics chipset, 4-in-1 card reader, WiFi 802.11b/g/n, HDMI output, and six USB 2.0 ports. According to PCADV, the dual core processor could give this machine a 40% performance increase over the AspireRevo. To ship with Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1 at some vague point in the not too distant future.

[Via iTech News Net]

AspireRevo rebranded as the Atom 330-based Gateway QX2800 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whether you’re watching a movie on an airplane or interacting with your iPhone while it’s charging on your desk, some kind of stand is essential. That’s why I read David’s Mobile Xtand review with great interest.

Pretty cool product–but $40? That’s way too rich for …

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Let’s step back from the iPhone leak suicide for a minute and just think about the basics of what happened. A phone was lost. A guy was tortured. A guy killed himself or something. Over a fucking phone.

It may have been a very special phone, and it may have been a phone that would have cost a company and its shareholders maybe upwards of billions of theoretical dollars if it had leaked out into a competitor’s hands, but really, it’s a phone. Is it worth a life? No. I think this secrecy thing has gone far enough. Especially since nothing stays unleaked ever anymore!

What caused the death? An overzealous security official who used “interrogation methods” to find the phone. A fucking phone. Going to extremes like putting the worker into solitary confinement, searching his house (illegally? legally?) and possibly beating him isn’t the way to go about things. I know, the employer probably put a lot of pressure on the security chief to find that phone—maybe even threatening the chief himself with termination if the missing device wasn’t found—but he’s a grown man. He can make his own decisions about right and wrong. Torturing a guy over a phone is not right. It’s just a job. Is it worth a life? No.

But of course the blame doesn’t lie only with the security guard. The company Foxconn and its parent company Hon Hai aren’t pillars of the Chinese community when it comes to placing the welfare of its employees above how much yuan they squeeze out of them. Foxconn admitted to breaking Chinese labor laws. CHINESE labor laws. If they don’t care about their workers under normal, everyday circumstances, how much do you think they’ll value a man’s welfare if they think a little roughing up will save a multi-million dollar contract and secure future dealings with Apple? It’s just money. Is it worth a life? No.

And was this method of interrogation even such a smart idea in the first place? If you’re just so compelled to torture someone (which you shouldn’t be) don’t do it over shit that would be leaked three months down the road anyhow. Think about the last two years: do you remember any Apple product that hasn’t had spy shots leaked beforehand that turned out to be real? It’s now become inevitable. The CIA doesn’t torture someone to stop the sun from coming up. That’s fucking retarded.

As for Apple, are they blameless in this? No, of course not. They know exactly what kind of people they’re dealing with. Remember that Chinese labor law story linked above? Apple sent a team to investigate Foxconn before the manufacturer admitted to wrongdoings, yet found nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, you could come to the conclusion that having an insanely locked-down company do your manufacturing is the situation Apple prefers, so they can use fear and intimidation tactics to maintain their culture of secrecy. But really, it’s just a product. Is it worth a life? No.

This may have started about a missing phone, but in the end, it all boils down to being about money. Someone was indirectly killed, through a sequence of sad and unfortunate events, over money. You know who kills for money? Criminals. So please, Apple, stop doing business with criminals. And get your own priorities straight. A phone is not worth dying, or killing, over. [iPhone leak suicide coverage @ Giz]

So we’ve been playing with the Devotec Industries Solar Sound Bluetooth speaker system for a couple days now, and we’ve got to say we’re pretty impressed — we just wish it could run directly (and indefinitely) off the solar panel, instead of requiring an internal battery that takes 12-24 hours to charge from the sun or four hours to charge off USB. That said, you will get eight hours of decent audio when the battery is full, and it’s actually relatively loud — you’ll be more than fine indoors and in quieter spots, although cranking things up all the way results in some audible distortion. Of course, it’s A2DP, so setup is a breeze with most Bluetooth devices, including 3.0 iPhones, and you can hook most everything else up with the included 3.5mm headphone cable. (Just keep in mind that Apple doesn’t properly support AVRCP, so the forward and back control buttons don’t work correctly over Bluetooth.) Not bad for $79 — and you won’t have to burn through endless AAs to take your tunes on those summer picnics and beach trips.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Devotec Solar Sound Bluetooth speaker hands-on and nano-review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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