If you own a Kindle, you also own a mobile Web browser. But chances are you never use it. That may be about to change. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10466240-93.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Digital Media/a/p
[Thanks, Michael]
Newegg selling ASUS Eee Box with Red Flag Linux pre-installed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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After all the hype, the TiVo Premiere was greeted by disappointment by many gadget fans. But is there more to the story?
Samsung’s all about records: firsts, biggests, smallests, thinnests, you get the idea. Indeed, it was just a few weeks ago that the company managed to slip the very first Bluetooth 3.0 certified handset through — but these guys never rest, and it looks like they’re already prepping to follow up that feat by throwing Android into the mix. The Bluetooth SIG is showing certification for an SHW-M120S model that apparently features a 3.3-inch WVGA AMOLED display, 5 megapixel autofocus primary cam plus VGA secondary, WiFi, GPS, HSDPA, and — yes, you guessed it — a Bluetooth Core Version of 3.0, meaning you’ll likely be able to fling files around to your house full of Bluetooth 3.0-capable devices with the greatest of ease. The presence of a T-DMB tuner means this sucker is targeted squarely at the South Korean market, but we’ve no doubt Sammy plans on taking 3.0 global so that it can… you know, have the world’s most Bluetooth 3.0 devices. PuntoCellulare seems to have a pretty good shot of it, and it looks pretty much how you’d expect any self-respecting Samsung smartphone to look in 2010 — in other words, there’s nothing that screams “I can wirelessly transfer data short distances at heretofore-unknown speeds” just by looking at it, and that’s totally fine by us. Rumor is we’ll see this launch “in the next few weeks.”
[Thanks, juanvaldez]
Update: Turns out PuntoCellulare just recycled a shot of the M100S, so we don’t yet know what the M120S will look like; the screen’s a bit smaller on this new model, for one thing, so we should be dealing with a more diminutive shell.
Samsung SHW-M120S to be first Android phone with Bluetooth 3.0? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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By now, you’ve probably seen many of the homemade videos from people who ordered an Intel Core i7-920 processor from Newegg.com and received a bogus processor and hunk of plastic shaped like a fan. Newegg has thrown
supplier IPEX Infotech of Freemont California under the bus for this fiasco; in a statement released to Information Week, the retailer said, “We have since come to discover the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier.”
PCMag.com did not order one. But luckily for us, my
neighbor, Microsoft TechNet columnist Greg Steen, just happened to be one of the lucky 200 or so buyers, and he let me borrow it for the day. As you can see, the box looks very real, and the weight of the package is perfect. Lots more images after the jump!
There’s more than just HDTVs on the way from Samsung this year, it’s also picked today to reveal the price and ship dates for its Samsung Apps-equipped Blu-ray HTIB systems (HT-C7530W pictured above and all due in March or April) and HDMI 1.4-equipped 3D passthrough compatible receivers. Even though the cool kids are already on to HDMI 1.4a, that should be good enough to pass through 3D video and handle audio all in one cable so if you’re planning a whole home theater revamp before Avatar comes home in 3D (whenever that is) you’ll probably want to grab one with the feature. Other than the 7.1 channel HW-C770BS for $549 shipping this month, there’s also a $499 HW-C900 model with multi-zone and video upscaling features for $499, though when it will arrive is still TBD.
Samsung puts price tags on its next receivers, soundbars and Blu-ray HTIB systems originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Here’s the story: I’m in love with the Wacom Intuos4 Wireless tablet. Free from cables, it’s the best graphics tablet experience I’ve ever had.
The Wacom Intuos4 was quite a leap from the Intuos3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen radial menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.
With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless tablet is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I’ve ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the tablet never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.
This performance is not only good for digital painting. It is perfect to retouch in Photoshop, allowing you to mask or clone with absolute precision, down to the last pixel, without having to vary the size of the brush. It makes everyday brush tasks so easy it makes me giddy when I’m using it.
But plenty of other tablet features also help dramatically in the daily workflow, allowing you to circumvent the keyboard almost completely.
Take the multifunction Touch Ring, a circular trackpad that allows you to perform four different, user-definable functions, like zoom: Circling my finger in one direction would zoom in. Doing so in the opposite direction will zoom out. The second function will cycle through layers, the third will change the brush size—although sadly this doesn’t work in Photoshop—and the fourth rotates the canvas to face the physical orientation of your tablet. To switch to the next function, you click in the middle button. An LED will change and your monitor will display an elegant transparent dialog that fades in and out briefly, but long enough to identify the new trackpad function.
The eight user-definable ExpressKeys are located in a perfect position: Four above and four below the Touch Ring. Each is labeled with a completely customizable OLED display, much like the Optimus Maximum keyboard, but presented in a starkly contrasting black and white. (The display looks so good that, at first glance, you’re sure the buttons are permanent, backlit cutouts.) Like the Touch Ring, you can define the functions for these buttons using the Wacom control panel. The labels will change according to your preference.
Another favorite feature of mine—which I’ve been jonesing for since I stopped using Alias PowerAnimator and Maya—are the radial menus. These are just software-based and can also be found on the Cintiq line, but they are great timesavers. Pop-up radial menus are easier to use than regular pop-up list menus (both for mouse and tablet operation). They are also user-defined, and give you eight functions at a time, which can also be sub-menus.
However, the best thing is that all these features can be application dependent, something that was possible with previous Wacom tablets, but not with this level of detail and finesse. In Photoshop, for example, my radial menus are tailored to fit my most used program features. The result is that I touch the keyboard very rarely, if at all.
All these cool features and exceptional performance, however, are shared with the existing, cheaper, cabled Intuos4. The question here is: How good is the performance of the Intuos4 Wireless over the Bluetooth connection? And what about the battery life?
Response is just as fast and just as good. The Wacom Intuos4 Wireless works just like the USB-based Intuos4.
As for the lithium ion battery, it charges quickly via USB. The tablet puts itself to sleep when it detects no signal and, as a result, you can use the tablet for a day, heavily, without recharging it at all. (Or just keep it around without worrying about losing power.) The advantage of USB recharging is that you can be using it while connected to the computer, with the cable itself as the connection (the Bluetooth goes off when the tablet is connected physically).
My only little gripe with the wireless component of the tablet is that, on occasion, it will take a few seconds to reconnect when you turn it on. This happened when the computer wakes up first, so I suspect is an issue with Bluetooth getting silly after the Mac wakes up. 99% of the times is instantaneous, however.
If you have a Wacom Intuos4 you can probably skip this upgrade. That is, unless you are itching to have the freedom of movement of the Bluetooth connection. That’s the joy of this tablet: You can move around freely with it. It adapts to your position, not the other way around. You don’t depend on your table. You can lay back on your chair, and lose yourself in hours of photo retouching or illustration.
Given the nature of its custom menus, any user can take advantage of the Intuos4 for every program. You can be using it constantly, instead of a mouse. If you just want to use it for graphic applications, however, another advantage is that you can put it away easily, without having to disconnect it or struggle with cables.
This tablet could only be bettered if they made it into a wireless display. Like the iPad, but connected to the computer so I can use Photoshop on my bed, the sofa or outside on the terrace (the Bluetooth signal gets there, I tried). Like the Cintiq 12 I tried, but with the same response, weight, and form factor.
If you have an Intuos 3 or any other display-less Wacom tablet, get the Intuos4 Wireless. Even though it doesn’t come with a mouse—like the regular Intuos4 Medium—it’s absolutely worth its $399 price tag (just $30 more than the USB-based Intuos4’s list price).
Amazing performance with 2048 levels of pressure and only 1 gram of minimum pressure
Touch Ring and ExpressKeys customizable controls avoids touching the keyboard
Slightly pricier than Intuos4 Medium, and it doesn’t come with the mouse
A couple of times it took the Intuos4 a few seconds to reconnect after being asleep, although this is probably related to the computer coming out of sleep as well
Samsung announces US availability, pricing for R1, R0 PMPs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Suspense! Drama! Surprises! Unrealistic expectations! It’s always a veritable roller coaster of emotions whenever Apple gets around to cutting a new SDK build — and without a doubt, iPhone SDK 3.2 beta 4 is no exception. We don’t yet have a good read on what’s new here, so if you’re a member of Apple’s $99 dev program and happen to get it downloaded and installed, let us know if you find anything awesome, like an iPhone 4 or iPad 2. Or, you know, anything else. Have fun!
iPhone SDK 3.2 beta 4 drops in originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Crapware’s bad enough, but having your life torn asunder simply by plugging in that shiny new (insert USB-connected device here) is an exciting new trend — viruses find their way into the darnedest places, don’t they? It seems an employee at anti-malware firm Panda Research who’d ordered a new Magic off Vodafone UK’s site was greeted with no fewer than three nefarious executables upon plugging the device into her PC: a bot client, a password stealer, and a Conficker variant, and running a network sniffer quickly confirmed that the virii were live and ready to do harm as soon as the autorun in the Magic’s mounted mass storage was executed on her Windows machine. If this were a widespread issue, we’d certainly have heard about it in other places, so odds are good (as Panda points out) that this was simply a case of HTC or Vodafone doing an awful job of wiping a refurbished set — but it gives you pause and kind of makes you wish you worked for an anti-malware firm, at least on days when you’re plugging in a new phone for the first time. The silver lining, we suppose, is that Vodafone has recently discontinued the Magic, though that creates another problem: the only Android device it currently stocks now is the lowly Tattoo, so the X10 and Nexus One can’t come soon enough.
Customer greeted with malware on Vodafone-issued HTC Magic (good thing it’s discontinued) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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