Hasta La Gadget!

So, we’ve got some good news and bad news. The good news is that Nokia‘s already offering up its Booklet 3G netbook for pre-order over in Italy, which is becoming an all-too-familiar scene for Nokia wares. The bad news is that the posted price is, um, absurd. During a keynote at Nokia World 09, listeners were told that the Windows 7-powered machine would ring up at “just” €570, yet Nokia’s own Italian e-store has it listed for €699. That’s just over a grand in Greenbacks, though we get the feeling it’ll be selling for substantially less once the feel-good emotions fade and cold, hard economics take their toll.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, the announced €570 price was likely pre-tax and pre-carrier subsidy as is typical for Nokia’s European announcements. The €699 price is thus VAT inclusive.

[Via I4U News]

Filed under: Laptops

Nokia puts Booklet 3G netbook up for pre-order… in Italy originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

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It’s always interesting to see how many companies are up for the challenge of making a name for themselves in the online music industry. There are plenty of them with different business models and varying services, but the common ground among them are that they use the Internet to provide a way for people to listen to music. A fairly new service that we discovered thanks to Mashable is called Grooveshark Lite, made by Grooveshark.com (their peer-to-peer model) which some of you may be familiar with.

Today we’ll be taking at what Grooveshark Lite is all about.

What is Grooveshark?

Grooveshark Lite looks promising after testing it out. One thing that stood out was the interface – it simply looks good. But a site just can’t look good, it has to offer value to users as well. Grooveshark does this by offering a nice selection of music for users to stream from the Grooveshark library. You can search for your favorite artists, create playlists, get recommendations, and save songs you enjoy to a favorites list. It also has a social aspect as well by giving users the option to share songs with friends.

Mashable helps describe the service by saying, “If Pandora had a love child with Last.fm, it’s name would be Grooveshark Lite.” If you are familiar with Pandora, and you are familiar with Last.fm, you will have a decent idea as to what Grooveshark Lite offers.

Autoplay

The Autoplay feature is what makes this service remind us somewhat of Pandora. Once you add a song or two to your queue, you can click the Autoplay feature and it will start playing songs they think you’ll like based upon the songs that you added.

Like Pandora where you rate a song with a thumbs-up or a thumbs down, Grooveshark allows you to rate songs as well. Their system involves clicking a smiley face or a frown face if you like or don’t like one of the songs they automatically start playing for you.

Below is the guide they give you which shows what the various buttons are for if you are using the Autoplay feature.

Notice that you can also favorite songs which then get added to a Favorites list. If you don’t like one of the songs it automatically plays for you, you can skip the song. You can also delete songs from the queue as well.

Grooveshark Lite Features

Download the songs that you like:

If you come across a song that you like, they provide the link to download the song. If you decide to use this feature, you’ll be taken to their main site, Grooveshark.com. The log-in that you use for Grooveshark Lite is the same login you use for the main site. From what I saw, it looked like most downloads are around 99 cents, but you can also earn credit towards music downloads by sharing the music you have available on your computer. More details on that can be found here.

Search for your favorite artists:

When you perform a search by artist, for example, it will return all kinds of results like:

• Songs that match your search criteria
• Other artists
• Albums
• Playlists that others have created

I performed a search for “Daughtry” and by clicking on “songs,” I was able to see a whole list of songs he has recorded and then play them. Clicking on “albums” showed me the various albums he has worked on.

The Playlists feature is also nice because it will display playlists that users have created which match your search, and then you can view which songs they included. This can also be a great way to discover new music. One of the playlists I came across for the “Daughtry” search had some songs by the group but other songs by artists I wasn’t familiar with.

Oh, and we can’t forget to mention that you can create your own playlists too, which is a must-have these days.

Similar Songs

Once you perform a search for a song and then click on it, you’ll see a whole list of Similar Songs. This is one feature that reminds us of Last.fm because they too have a “Similar Tracks” feature. Below is a comparison of the Similar Songs/Tracks Grooveshark Lite and Last.fm offered for the same song:

Wrapping it up

Grooveshark Lite definitely offers a lot to their users, our only concern is whether they too will struggle with dealing with the music industry like some services currently are.

Check it out and let us know what you think…

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Netbooks, by definition, have been around for years now, and while the vast majority have left the 7- to 9-inch realm, hardly any have bothered to show up with a respectable 720p panel. Furthermore, hardly any have deviated from the strictly held hardware line, which generally consists of an Intel Atom N270 / N280 processor, GMA950 graphics, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, Windows XP and far too few USB sockets. Oh sure, we’ve seen an Ion-based machine trickle in every now and then, and AMD definitely has our interest piqued with Congo, but we’re honestly exhausted by the torrent of netbooks that just seem to look exactly like one another internally. This week’s question is dead simple: if you had the power to flip the netbook arena upside-down, how would you go about it?

Filed under: Laptops

How would you change the netbook as we know it? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Turns out not everyone was amused by Sony’s tongue-in-cheek PlayStation 3 Slim ad about internet rumors — just ask the Nigerian government. The line in question, “you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, otherwise I’d be a Nigerian millionaire by now,” apparently caused a bit of a stir, and the local authorities demanded the company pull the commercial. It’s now been replaced in the company’s Viddler account with a slightly altered version that claims online FUD is “how World War One got started.” Someone should tell Sony Director of Rumor Confirmation Kevin Butler that there’s a certain assassinated Austrian Archduke who would beg to differ. Revised video after the break, and just for kicks, we found the old video on YouTube for comparison.

[Via Joystiq]

Continue reading Brilliant PS3 Slim ad loses Nigerian scam reference, internet rumors now known to have started WWI

Filed under: Gaming

Brilliant PS3 Slim ad loses Nigerian scam reference, internet rumors now known to have started WWI originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sprint CEO Dan Hesse recently sat down for an interview with the master of one-on-ones and black backdrops, Charlie Rose, and while much of the talk was spent traveling down memory lane and revisiting Hesse’s two-decade rise through the ranks at AT&T before fleeing in 2000, there were some great quotes that came out of it:

• “We’re getting ready to launch a couple of new Android devices.” We know one’s the Hero, and the other — if we were the betting types — is the Samsung InstinctQ.
• Rose: “The merger with Nextel was a bad idea?” Hesse: “In 20 / 20 hindsight, it was, yes… the premium that Sprint paid for Nextel was too much.” Sprint’s gone back and forth on the idea of spinning off Nextel over the past couple years, so it’s not a surprising thing for him to think — but to hear Sprint’s CEO actually say out loud that he thinks a very active part of its network shouldn’t have become part of the company is a little bombastic.
• “Our prepaid brand is Boost.” Nothing wild and crazy about that statement, though it does reaffirm that Virgin Mobile is destined for assimilation. The whole thing’s kinda funny considering that Boost dabbled in CDMA before reversing course, and once again, Sprint will be dealing with large installed bases of both iDEN and CDMA prepaid customers.
• On touchscreen smartphones: “Those are the most expensive phones for us to sell, and those are the ones where we need to make sure that the customer stays with us [and] doesn’t churn, because we’re out a lot of money… those are expensive devices.” Theoretically, an aggressively-priced subsidized smartphone could still end up leaving a carrier in the red if you broke your contract early on and paid the ETF, but we doubt that’s a huge problem — especially for a CDMA carrier like Sprint. He goes on to say “I’m already looking at 4G versions of smartphones,” so that’s really encouraging to hear, particularly if you’re into WiMAX.
• “Customers will pay premium for simplicity. Simplicity is everything… Digital One Rate which we launched back at AT&T, that was all about simplicity… people paid more. It wasn’t a price cut.” Translation: “Unlimited makes you feel like you’re getting a deal, but rest assured, we’re banking.”
• In response to Rose asking how Sprint uses the Palm Pre to take on Apple and RIM: “It was really kind of Palm’s decision to take on Apple. And Palm has had [a] long standing relationship with Sprint.” It’s interesting to hear Hesse seemingly back away from a fight with Apple and chalk up the situation to happenstance — RIM not as much, considering that Sprint carries a number of BlackBerrys in its lineup and will certainly continue to do so. Talking more about pitting the Pre against the iPhone, he goes on to say that Palm’s handset is “doing well. But you’ve got to almost put the iPhone, to be fair, in a separate category. The Apple brand and that device has done so well. It’s like comparing someone to Michael Jordan.” If that’s not a tactful acknowledgment that the iPhone is a bona fide wireless superstar, we don’t know what is. Hesse’s giving the iPhone the respect it’s rightfully earned — as any strategically-minded executive would.
• “The biggest impediment to mobile growth is you got processors are getting a lot faster, screens are getting sharper, they use more and more power, and battery technology is not moving very fast… That’s the one breakthrough that the industry needs. It needs battery breakthroughs.” It’s good to hear that Hesse understands as well as everyone else that the wireless industry needs to be focused on making power draw a non-issue, but he sounds less convinced of the solution: “I don’t know. Solar we hope, and renewable energy sources.” When Sprint gets some cash socked away, it might consider throwing some R&D money at the problem — it’ll be first to market with something resembling a “national” 4G network, after all, and the situation’s only going to get worse.

Who knew you’d find out so much about the inner workings of the States’ third-largest carrier from watching PBS? [Via Gizmodo]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Sprint’s Dan Hesse talks Android, Pre, iPhone, 4G on Charlie Rose originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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