Hasta La Gadget!

We’ll come right out and say it, we like Julius Genachowski. Whether you agree with the dude’s policies or not, you can’t deny he’s pursuing them with gusto. Having already noted the insufficient carrying capacity of current mobile broadband airways to deal with incoming 4G connections, the FCC chairman is now reported to be moving ahead with plans to provide greater spectrum allocation for those purposes. Currently in the draft stage, the latest Commission proposals include a plan to reclaim airwaves from digital broadcasters (and pay them appropriately for it), which are to then be sold off to the highest bidder from among the wireless service providers. Executing the most extreme version of this plan could generate around $62 billion in auction revenues, though it would require transitioning digital TV viewers over to cable or subscription services and is therefore unlikely. Jules and his crew are still “looking at everything” and ruling out nothing, but we can probably expect to see a moderate shift of TV spectrum rights over to wireless carriers in the final plans when they’re revealed in February.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Wearables

FCC keen on commandeering TV spectrum for wireless broadband originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Viper Rush is not the name for hallucinations experienced after a snake-bite. Instead, it is a bag that could truly be called a mobile office.

The shoulder bag, from Booq, offers a plain but good-looking, semi-rigid foam face to the world: an exterior that should cope with bumps and splashes well enough. Open it up and it is something like the TARDIS, incorporating enough nooks and crannies for all the electronic gubbins that is essential to daily life.

However, when you open it up still further, it becomes a desk. The laptop section turns into a lap-top workspace, with “bumpers” to raise the computer’s hot bottom into the air and a pair of restraining straps to keep the lid from opening all the way.

It might be a little bulky for those used to just tossing their notebook, unprotected, into a rucksack, but for serious business travelers, or for anyone who wants to grab a few minutes of work/Twitter when they’re out on the road, this looks to be a very nice bag. Better, it costs a very reasonable $130, in both medium (15-inch computer) and large (17-inch) sizes.

Product page [Booq. Thanks, Brad!]

Take a peek at the new TwitterPeek, an always-on, always connected Twitter machine. It comes from the folks that make the Peek and Peek Pronto, two bare-bones email-only handsets that can be bought and used without monthly contracts.

The TwitterPeek stays with the simple approach, and does nothing but send, receive and search Twitter posts. It doesn’t do SMS, and it doesn’t even do email. At first we thought this was a joke, but the Amazon listing looks real enough and a quick visit to the Peek discussion forums shows this request from the company: “As usual we have a couple things cooking in the Peek oven. We’re looking for Peeksters that use Twitter a lot.”

The package will cost $200, and that includes a lifetime of Tweeting — you’ll never pay for your connectivity. We expect that we’ll start to see more and more devices with “free” internet connections over cell networks, where the seller does a deal with the telcos to provide low-bandwidth hook-ups. It has worked for the Kindle, so maybe we’ll get the long promised internet-connected Toaster after all. One which burns a Tweet into your breakfast slice.

The picture, by the way, is from Peter Hu’s (of Time and CrunchGear) Twitter feed. We’re running this instead of the regular product shot because a) it is ironically appropriate and b) there’s a huge WIRED logo on the front of the box.

Product page [Amazon via Peter Hu’s Twitter]

See Also:

• Peek Now Available in Cheap Packs of Five
• Peek Leak: Pronto Email Device is Twice as Fast
• Official: Peek Pushes Pronto with Unlimited Texting
• Peek Could Kill Subscription Fees For Its Email Device
• Review: Peek Device Delivers Peak Email Performance And Not Much …

"Good" is always what you want to see when it comes to the state of your system, isn’t it?

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

You get a new computer and it runs great. However, after a while, things start to get more and more sluggish. This is true for all operating systems, including those running the all new and shiny Windows 7.

That is because, other than user errors (such as misuse, viruses, spyware, accidental file deletion, harmful changes to the Registry and system settings, and so on), the OS doesn’t take good care of itself. It collects and store junks from the Internet. It doesn’t completely remove remnants of unwanted applications. Its Registry keeps getting more and more bloated with residual settings, and so on and so forth. All of these result in system clutter that over time slows down the machine.

This is when a cleanup software, like System Mechanic from Iolo, comes in handy.

I tried version 9.0.3 of the software recently, as it’s the first I found that works with Windows 7 64-bit (the software itself is 32-bit, however) and it seemed to work well, though not perfectly.

…

Back in our day, the kiddies all ran around with Helios, VK Mobile looked like it could be the next Pantech, and “Kickflip” was a phone, not a skateboarding move. Okay, fine — we knew like one or two people that used Helio, VK Mobile never even made a dent in the US market, and skateboarding had a lock on kickflips long before the wireless industry did — and actually, that perfect storm of bad news may have ultimately led the once-promising MVNO to the sad situation we have here today under Virgin Mobile’s stewardship. Virgin has now all but erased the memory of Helio from its website, leaving just the Ocean and Mysto to soldier on — and the phones now go by their ODM’s names (Pantech and Samsung, respectively) rather than Helio proper. The strangest part is that the Ocean seems to have outlasted its replacement, the Ocean 2, which is now gone — unless you hit up Virgin Mobile’s Korean language site, a sub-brand in itself that it inherited from Helio and has a track record of giving members of the community better, faster access to hot devices. Any way you slice it, though, it never made sense for Virgin to run two brands — Helio’s fate was sealed the moment the sale was finalized, but considering the company’s spot-on mantra of “bring awesome Asian phone tech to North America,” we’ll always have a soft spot in our hearts for these guys.

[Via MobileCrunch]

Filed under: Cellphones

Virgin Mobile looks ready to euthanize Helio brand, Ocean 2 vanishes originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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