Hasta La Gadget!

We don’t know about you, but back in 1983 we were still playing in the mud with sticks and learning how to read. Frog Design, on the other hand, well, they were busy creating zany gadget prototypes. The company — which helped create such august products as the Apple IIc (which was unleashed in 1984) — also worked on a tablet pc for Apple around that same time, and its recently let slip some photos of what might have been. The tablet you see in the photos (there’s another after the break) was called Bashful, and it’s a pretty slim character considering its birth date, boasting a full physical keyboard and stylus to boot. Several prototypes of this little lover were made, including one with a disk drive and even one with a phone. So that means, by our count, Apple’s been mulling this whole tablet deal for… twenty-six years. Hit the source link for even more photos.

Continue reading Frog Design outs the Apple tablet that could have been… in 1983

Frog Design outs the Apple tablet that could have been… in 1983 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How long does it take for a smartphone to go from two hundred bucks on contract all the way down to a big, fat goose egg? If you’re Bell — and the phone is the Palm Pre — the answer is right around five months, apparently. Following its August release and a couple of mid-course pricing corrections, Bell’s now making Palm’s first webOS-based device available for free just as long as you’re willing to commit to three years at a minimum spend of CAD $50 (about $47) a month. The move likely comes on the announcement of the Pre Plus, perhaps as a preemptive strike against any of its competitors planning on carrying it — and if we were Sprint right now, we’d be paying very, very close attention to these guys.

Bell’s Palm Pre now free — in exchange for three years of your life originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Gazette: Manuel Desrochers didn’t set out to design an award-winning piece of utilitarian sculpture.

“I’m not even a designer,” is the first thing Desrochers, the 34-year-old Montreal creator of the Ovopur water-filtration unit, says about himself.

“But I’ve always been preoccupied by water and how underappreciated it is in our society. We open the tap and let it pour, or we buy it in plastic bottles and then throw them away.

“In our society, water is taken for granted or hidden away.”

It’s that sentiment that prompted him to come up with an eco-friendly water-filtration system for the home or office that is at once functional, environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing. His Ovopur, which retails for about $690, is an egg-shaped water-filtration system of handmade porcelain and mouthblown glass that filters tap water through a reusable glass filter and keeps it cool without electricity.

The water trickles down from an upper reservoir, through a glass filter containing four layers of filtering materials, and into an 11-litre egg-shaped porcelain reservoir whose thermal properties keep the water cool.

Cool water [The Gazette]

Filed under: Laptops

MSI X-Slim X620 keeps its ULV processor and ATI graphics, adds an optical drive originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This generation of Android phones is faster, more powerful and generally awesome-er than anything before. But for whatever reason, they don’t have one thing other smartphones take for granted: multitouch. Here’s how to fix that, and so much more.

Google’s Nexus one and Verizon’s Motorola Droid are, in a sense, miles ahead their competitors in terms of hardware specs, but moreso because they’ve got much newer versions of Android’s software, with 2.1 and 2.0, respectively. In the midst of a slew of new software features and despite base-level hardware and software support, Google, who has always been cagey about the multitouch issue, continues to leave it out of their core apps.

This is especially weird in the cases of the Droid and Nexus One, which don’t just support multitouch on a hardware level, but fully support it on an OS level, too. It’s really just the apps, like the browser, the photo gallery and the maps app, which exclude support for multitouch gestures such as pinch-zooming. Why can’t all Android users have use the same gestures that iPhone, Pre and HTC Hero owners can, if their phones can already accept multi-finger input? Only Google knows. But there’s something you can do about it. Actually, there are two things:

Rooting

Rooting is most intensive method, and can actually do a lot more than add multitouch to your phone. What this does, basically, is give you deep, system-level access to all your phone’s software and parameters, which lets you run unsanctioned tethering apps to writing apps to your SD card (by default, Android phones restrict you to the device’s limited, onboard memory), modify the device’s stock apps, and most importantly, swap your phone’s software out completely, with what’s called a new ROM. To get native multitouch apps on your phone, you can opt for an entire flash ROM, or just a more narrow set of hacks. But you will need to root your device.

So here’s how to get multitouch on your new Android phone, natively:

• Google Nexus One

• Verizon Motorola Droid

Now, if the above instructions seem like overkill for a relatively minor feature, don’t have any need for the other goodies that rooting promises, or aren’t satisfied with the current state of Nexus One and Droid homebrew, you have another, easier option:

Downloadable Apps

As I mentioned before, the Droid and Nexus One’s shared dirty secret is that they support multitouch out of the box, but don’t support include the gestures necessary to get any use out of it. This means that unless you’re willing to hack your phones, as seen above, you’re not going to be able to get multitouch in your native browser, or for that matter any of your native apps. The easy solution? Download Dolphin, a browser that include multitouch gestures (and a lot more cool stuff, like swipe gestures, RSS feed subscriptions and a built-in Twitter client.

For photos, try Multi-Touch for Gallery, which is a full photo gallery replacement, or PicSay, which is a combination gallery/photo editor. All you’ve got to do is search for these apps in the Android Market, install them, and designate them as your default web and photo browsers.

There are other mulitouch apps in the App Market, from games to utilities to simple tech demos. Drop your favorites in the comments, and I’ll add them to the post.

That’s pretty much it! If you have any tips to tricks for getting the most out your phone’s hardware, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy pinch-zooming, folks!