Hasta La Gadget!

There was a lot of discussion when Steve Jobs wrote his famous letter about DRM a few years ago. I think the letter and the timing were brilliant back in the day and it put the issue of DRM squarely where it belongs, with the content companies and not companies such as Apple or Microsoft. I agree with the overall assertion that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Real will sell more songs without DRM. But there’s more to the story, and asking consumers about DRM is a loaded question. The analogy best given to me by one of my non-digerati friends is asking, “would you rather get 3 slices of pizza for $5, or all you can eat at a buffet for $5?” The vast majority will likely opt for the latter, even though that same vast majority will still only eat three slices.

Continue reading Entelligence: Have we demonized DRM?

Entelligence: Have we demonized DRM? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While penning our Zune HD review, we were initially quite baffled by our inability to do much of anything with it after installing Microsoft’s newest firmware update. Our concern had been properly kiboshed by assurances from the company that we’d gotten a fluke unit… and by the properly working replacement we received to finish the review with. Now, however, it seems as if we weren’t alone in our glass cage of emotion, with gaggles of irate Zune HD users emerging from the woodwork in order to express their disappointment online. Hop on past the break for a video of the issues we were having, and if you’re seeing something eerily similar on your own device, drop a vote / comment below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Poll: Has your Zune HD screen been unresponsive?

Filed under: Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Poll: Has your Zune HD screen been unresponsive? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s scarier than running through a dragon-turtle’s insides? We have no idea.

(Credit: Nintendo)

After a long hiatus, there are suddenly a handful of memorable, worthwhile titles for the Nintendo DS: Chinatown Wars, Rhythm Heaven, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, and most recently Scribblenauts. It took Nintendo, however, to save the best for last.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story might sound, at first read, like a kid’s title. It’s not; in fact, it’s the third in a series of unique role-playing games featuring Mario, Luigi, and the rest of Nintendo’s immortal cast of Mushroom Kingdom characters. The last in the series, Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time, came out for the DS back in 2005. In case you’ve never played before, you have to understand that it’s barely a role-playing game at all: yes, Mario and Luigi level up, collect items, and go on an adventure, but battles unfold as real-time quick-reflex minigames, and much of the story unfolds with a completely absurd sense of humor. This series of games might be Nintendo’s best-kept secret in its first-party lineup. We played it, and yes, we loved it. Here’s why….

Have you been waiting for the digital equivalent of the traditional Polaroid instant-camera experience? As the Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera is a hybrid printer/camera product, we enlisted PCMag’s printer and camera experts, M. David Stone and PJ Jacobowitz, to review it. One thing I can tell you: They both had a lot of fun testing it.

This 5-megapixel camera uses the same ZINK (zero ink) technology to output its photos as the Polaroid PoGo Instant Photo Printer and the Dell Wasabi PZ310 . With ZINK, clear dye crystals are embedded in the photo paper; heat from the printhead activates the color in the crystals. A downside is that you’re limited to 2- by 3-inch photos; one thing you can do with the PoGo that you couldn’t with an analog Polaroid camera is to save and store digital versions of your photos. You will need an SD card, as the camera comes without one, and its internal memory is only enough to hold a handful of images.

The PoGo’s image quality is modest, about that of a high-quality camera phone. Prints are tiny, and ZINK isn’t yet up to the standards of ink-based photo printing. But it provides what people want and expect from a Polaroid camera–enjoyable picture-taking and the ability to print your results out on the spot (and perhaps to draw a small crowd while you’re doing so, as happened with one of our reviewers).

Alienware’s Aurora ALX, which was just unveiled this week alongside ATI’s blisteringly fast Radeon HD 5870 GPU, gets going at $2,299. If that doesn’t bother you, the late-October estimated ship date might. Somehow, the benchmarking fiends over at HotHardware were able to grab hold of one of these rigs, and the results are fairly stunning (if not expected). Granted, their test configuration was a fully loaded $4,074 model, complete with a 3.33GHz Core i7 Extreme Edition 975 CPU, twin ATI Radeon HD 5870’s in a CrossFire configuration and 6GB of DDR3 memory. Oh, and blue lights. Lots of blue lights. Put simply, the one-two CPU / GPU punch produced results that led to domination that made pretty much anything else out there look weak. Don’t believe us? Hit that link for the bar-charted proof.

Filed under: Desktops

$4,000 Alienware Aurora ALX benchmarked: domination this world has never seen originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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