Before you shell out hundreds of dollars on holiday hits like Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed II, and Uncharted 2, you could easily be enjoying some of this generation’s classics for a fraction of the price.
Continue reading Archerfish Quattro video monitoring and recording system now available at Amazon
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Archerfish Quattro video monitoring and recording system now available at Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As part of our original Droid review we did not test whether the handset supported hands-free voice dialing. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10402823-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p
According to a report, AppleCare warranties can be voided if Apple deems the damage was caused by secondhand smoke. Appeals to Steve Jobs have, apparently, not succeeded. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10402711-71.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Technically Incorrect/a/p
Mangrove WinMo tablet rough-handled, teased for being ‘tubby’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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One photographer/blogger saw the need for a more fashionable alternative, and worked on a line of bags for female photographers who want both style and function.
The Engadget Show is happening again, humans! This Sunday, November 22nd, we’ll be bringing that live magic back to the stage as we sit down with Drew Bamford (you can read a bit about him here), director of HTC’s Innovation Center (the place where things like the Sense UI are born). We’ll also be joined by Joystiq’s Editor-in-chief Chris Grant for a special roundtable discussion focused on gaming. As a bonus, we’ve got giveaways for everyone in the audience, plus one of the lucky attendees will walk away with that Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundle we just got our hands on!
The show takes place at the Tishman Auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design. As you may already know, we film live in front of an audience once a month — but if you can’t make it, don’t worry. We’re bringing the video back home to Engadget (and as a free download here, in the iTunes Store, or the Zune Marketplace) for your viewing pleasure.
The beautiful venue (which you can see in a photo after the break) is located at 66 W. 12th Street between 5th and 6th Aves. Seating is limited and tickets will be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis — which means if you want to join us in the audience for the show, you’ll have to arrive early and be prepared for a little wait.
Here are the facts you need to know about the show:
Here is what you need to know if you want to be part of the audience:
If you’re a member of the media who wishes to attend, please contact us at: engadgetshowmedia [at] engadget.com, and we’ll try to accommodate you. All other non-media questions can be sent to: engadgetshow [at] engadget.com.
The Engadget Show tapes this Sunday with HTC’s Drew Bamford and Chris Grant of Joystiq! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Our Friday lists are all about gadgety fun and leisure, but sometimes technology can be frustrating—and there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to handle it. This is definitely the wrong way.
If you have a problem with you TV, like a certain 70-year old Missouri man did with his converter box during the DTV transition, DO NOT get loaded, shoot it and engage in a standoff with the police. [Link]
If you work in a tech-related retail store, DO NOT do what 29 year old Aaron Seiber did and stab yourself so you don’t have to go. Making up a phony story about a skinhead attack to the police doesn’t help matters either. [Link]
If you have trouble getting up the stairs, escalators are a real lifesaver. However, DO NOT use one like the man in this video.
If your phone dies, DO NOT take it to get fixed and threaten to shoot it in the store with the 9mm concealed in your jacket. There are no cellphones in prison—unless you have a really good hiding place (and there is only one really good hiding place). [Link]
If you have a tall hedge, and no gadget designed to trim it, DO NOT raise your ride-on mower up with a crane to do the job like this lunatic from New Zealand. [Link]
So you have bought a new phone and you are not sure what to do with your old one. Unless is is complete garbage, DO NOT smash it. Get some money for it or donate it to charity. If you want an iPhone to smash, there are cheaper ways to do it. [Link]
If your kid acts up in a Verizon store, DO NOT drag him around on the floor with a leash. Someone with a cameraphone is bound to make a video of the whole incident and share it with the police.
If your internet connection goes down while playing an online game, DO NOT vent your frustrations by grabbing a knife and stabbing the first 15-year old girl that walks down the street near your home. You could wind up in a mental hospital with pending manslaughter charges. [Link]
Although not as feature-heavy as some models in its class, Samsung’s LNB360 series takes the picture quality cake among entry-level LCDs.
Sometimes you have to take a step down to step up. That’s what Google should’ve done with its open source PC operating system Chrome OS, which the corporation demonstrated Thursday.
Instead, Google is positioning Chrome OS against Microsoft with a lightweight OS shipping with netbooks next year. Chrome OS will function as a modified browser, enabling netbooks to handle everyday computing with web-based applications. That’s right: No native software, just the web.
The philosophy behind Chrome OS is extreme: Go the web way, all the way. It’s a “paradigm shift to make the web synonymous with the computer,” as Mashable’s Ben Parr puts it. But it’s an idealistic vision that could take several years to actualize, given the currently limited state of wireless connectivity and web-based applications. Google is aware of that, and the company is merely massaging us with this radical idea of a web-only computing experience by suggesting we try it on netbooks first.
Looking ahead, the company said it plans to share Chrome OS with more-powerful devices, including notebooks and desktops. But we doubt consumers will show much interest in a Chrome OS netbook the way Google is currently packaging it.
With Chrome OS, the search giant is pushing an OS that enables us to do less — even less than already low-powered netbooks can do. Web apps can’t let us process Microsoft Word documents, sync our iTunes libraries, or edit photos with Photoshop, for example. Thanks to their crampy keyboards and small screens, netbooks aren’t ideal for productivity apps such as Photoshop or Microsoft Word — but you’d be surprised at the different uses for netbooks that made them last year’s hit product category. Watch what happens when Google offers an OS that doesn’t at least provide the option of using the aforementioned apps.
Of course, as Google’s pitch goes, there are web alternatives to everything. Cloud storage for backups, internet-streaming music and video services, and the Google Docs web suite for all your spreadsheet or word-processing needs. The list goes on.
The idea is such: Give up the computing experience you’ve grown accustomed to for over a decade. Come live in Google’s browser.
Why would anyone wish to do that today, tomorrow or even next year when the OS ships?
Michael Gartenberg, a tech analyst at Interpret, sums up the state of computer use today better than anyone else: “What we’ve seen is most users are looking for a combination of the two: rich applications on my desktop, and the apps where I want to be connected.”
“This idea that I’m somehow going to do away with rich app architectures and do everything through the browser is an old argument, and it’s never taken root,” he added.
The benefits of Chrome OS don’t seem to outweigh everything Google’s modified browser will do away with. The pluses: Tight security, thanks to Google’s careful monitoring for malware in Chrome OS apps; saving the money you’d spend on an external hard-disk drive thanks to cloud storage; ultimately, being able to “stop worrying about your computer,” as Google said in a promotional video shown at its Thursday event.
Stop worrying about our computers? We’re worried about you, Google. T-Mobile Sidekick customers should especially be disenchanted with the cloud. Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger hosted the data of all of T-Mobile’s Sidekick users in the cloud, and recently the server crashed, losing everything.
Nobody’s perfect, so it’s conceivable that the same thing could happen with Chrome OS. After all, Google’s Gmail service crashed in February and again in September this year. While no data was lost, it did cause hours of angst for people who had grown dependent on the mail service.
And then there’s money. Aside from losing access to the native apps we’ve paid for on our PC, it’s certainly imaginable that using Chrome OS could get expensive in general. If we wished to put an always-connected, web-app-only computer to good use, we’d need to purchase a data plan from a carrier. This could come in the form of an EVDO card or a smartphone tethering plan — in other words, a monthly bill. Google said Chrome OS will have caching features, so you won’t need internet access to do everything, but caching won’t provide the same offline experience as a full native application.
(Of course, our wireless problems could be solved if we could find an open Wi-Fi connection just anywhere we go. But unless you live in Mountain View, California, where Google provides free Wi-Fi, ubiquitous, free hotspots are not part of your reality.)
With all that said, there’s a ton of potential here for Chrome OS to be vastly appealing, and I’m keeping an open mind. To succeed with Chrome OS, Google should take a step down. To start, Google should modify Chrome OS into a “mini OS” of sorts that can live alongside another OS, such as Windows, on a netbook.
For comparison, Phoenix Technologies offers a mini OS called HyperSpace, which some netbooks are already shipping with. HyperSpace runs parallel to Windows as an instant-on environment, allowing netbooks to perform internet-centric functions without actually booting into Windows. Functions include multimedia players, browsers, internet telephony, e-mail and IM.
Sounds a lot like what Chrome OS is going to be, doesn’t it? That’s because it’s almost the same idea, only Phoenix Technologies is a lesser-known company (which developed the BIOS that boots many Windows computers today, by the way) and is taking a humbler approach — offering HyperSpace as an optional, complementary (but not complimentary) OS rather than a full-blown substitute for Windows. It’s an approach that could lead to greater results if embraced by an incredibly powerful brand like Google.
By offering Chrome OS as a free, downloadable mini OS that runs parallel to a full one, Google can still continue to expand its presence onto hardware — without having to sell the OS with netbooks. Consumers could still try out the benefits of Chrome OS and cloud computing when it’s convenient for them. Then, if users wished to boot into their primary OS to back up their data or do document processing with Microsoft Word, for example, they could — a hybrid, more feature-rich experience.
Unfortunately, not everything we want is on the web just yet. That’s not going to radically change in one year, and not even Google can change that.
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Photo: Melanie Phung/Flickr
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