Has ATT been secretly working on an Android phone with HTC? More importantly, is it seriously considering announcing the phone the same day Steve Jobs and Apple take the stage at Moscone West? pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20006068-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p
Want an electric vehicle with more than a piddly couple-hundred mile range? Apparently you have to build it yourself and follow in the footsteps of the Japan Electric Vehicle Club, which broke the Guinness World Record last weekend by driving 623.76 miles (just over 1,000km) on a single charge in its customized Daihatsu Mira. The trip took 27.5 hours traveling around what appears to be the famous Tsukuba circuit in Shimotsuma, Japan. The car was powered by 8,320 Sanyo li-ion cells, each weighing about 44 grams, for a grand total of 807lbs — more than half the weight of a stock Mira. While we’re sure Daihatsu helped with this build, it’s worth noting that this is not an official project of the company, meaning the 100 mile Nissan Leaf is about as close as you’re going to get to this feat for the near future.
[Photo credit: Japan Electric Vehicle Club]
Continue reading Electric Daihatsu Mira goes 623 miles on a charge, but not to a showroom near you
Electric Daihatsu Mira goes 623 miles on a charge, but not to a showroom near you originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 08:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sometimes a dumb gimmick can actually be a great idea, too. Let’s test that theory. When I say to you “USB flash-drive cufflinks,” what do your think of? Novelty nonsense? That guy in your office who insists on wearing the Donald Duck tie? If you’re like me, you are cringing right now, imagining some dime-store monstrosity.
But a look at the photo shows a pair of pretty classy cufflinks, two squared-off metal boxes which would look very handsome on the sleeves of your Italian hand-tailored shirt. The extra utility is only revealed when you pop off the lids and the tiny 2GB drives within are revealed, giving 4GB total.
There’s something a little bit James Bond about these, and the usefulness of always having some storage to hand (literally) is clear. But then, given the fact that none of my cufflinks are pairs anymore but a collection of lonely singles, it might not be quite so secure. If you set them up as a mirrored RAID-array, though, you could lose an arm and still keep all your data, making you a kind of a cross between James Bond and Bruce Schneier.
Available now for a shocking $195 per pair.
2GB USB Flash Drive Cufflinks [Cufflinks.com (awesome domain name, by the way) via Uncrate]
Sound ID describes its new 510 Bluetooth headset thus: “The world’s first Bluetooth headset with its own iPhone App.” That about sums up an incredibly neat and inexplicably new idea.
Earpiece sits stuck to the side of your face making you look as dorky as any other BT-headset, and you can answer calls and change volume using the button and touch-strip on the device. But there is also a companion iPhone application which adds more features.
The A2DP headset talks to the EarPrint app and lets you monitor battery level, call people back and activate a Find-Me mode to help you track down which sofa cushion it is lost under. You can also fine tune the sound while in a call simply by dragging your finger in two dimensions on-screen to tweak the signal processing applied to the three microphones.
This is, clearly, how all Bluetooth devices should work. The app is free and available now (Sound ID smartly got the App Store approval process out of the way first) and the headset will be ready to buy in early June, for $130.
Sound ID 510 [Sound ID via Oh Gizmo!]
EarPrint [Sound ID]
Content is king. That’s a given in a world now dominated by me-too devices. That’s why Acer is launching clear.fi, software meant to ease the process of sharing and playing your media — be it pictures, recorded TV, eBooks and music — over a variety of devices including Acer notebooks, desktops and smartphones connected to your home network. Content can be stored centrally and then easily distributed to any compatible device via the clear.fi console. Acer’s Revo family sits at the heart of the clear.fi network, a suite of devices that includes the Revo multimedia center, RevoView media player, and RevoCenter home storage appliance.
The Revo all-in-one media center (pictured) comes packing a funky RevoPad wireless controller with touch-sensitive backlit QWERTY keyboard that turns into a multi-gesture touchpad with a click. Sorry, no specs yet on that. The RevoView is a set-top media player that plugs into the TV and home theater sound system. It can play content from USB, hard disk, flash cards, optical disk, or UPnP compatible devices. It also features a hard drive that can be swapped with Aspire M Series desktop PCs and the Acer RevoCenter — a compact NAS supporting UPnP streaming and up to four hot-swappable SATA disks. Check the press release and pics of the RevoPad and RevoView after the break.
Continue reading Acer launches clear.fi on Revo family of multimedia devices
Acer launches clear.fi on Revo family of multimedia devices originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 07:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In another reversal of plans, Acer has just announced its first e-reader device. The LumiRead will participate in the clear.fi initiative for keeping you constantly in the Acer loop, while also offering WiFi and 3G connectivity options. It looks very much like the tablet we saw teased earlier this morning, coming with a similar integrated keyboard and a smaller 6-inch E Ink display. Announcing a distribution agreement with Barnes and Noble and its one million-book library, China’s Founder, and Germany’s Libri.de, which carries four millions titles, Acer will try to ensure it has a strong selection upon release. It’s also throwing in an ISBN scanner, which will be turning paperbacks into instruments of their own destruction by allowing you to scan a book in for later purchase online. Supported formats are described only as “various,” and there’s 2GB of storage onboard (expandable via MicroSD) to keep things stashed. Expect this new e-reader to show up in Q3 of 2010. Full PR after the break.
Continue reading Acer’s 6-inch LumiRead to offer Barnes and Noble ebooks, ISBN scanner
Acer’s 6-inch LumiRead to offer Barnes and Noble ebooks, ISBN scanner originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 07:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If for some reason none of the current Android slates have tickled your fancy, not the Nexus One nor the Droid Incredible nor even the Evo, maybe Acer’s Stream is for you. It sports Nexus One-like specs, with a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and 512MB of RAM. Its five megapixel camera can record 720p video and it can also play back content at the same resolution with support for Xvid, WMV HD, and others. There’s an HDMI port on-board in case you want to bring that content to the big(ger) screen, and it’ll even act as a DLNA and UPnP streamer on WiFi, with dedicated play/pause, fast-foward, and rewind buttons. This could be the most media-friendly Android smartphone we’ve yet seen, and that it’s already made its way into the hands of a previewer (as shown in the favoloso video after the break) and has passed FCC scrutineering is a very, very good sign that this could be serving up your home media collection soon.
[Thanks, Valero]
Acer’s Android-powered Stream gets official, gets handled, lives up to its name with DLNA support (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 07:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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if you feel like going through the process of typing in your PIN every time you unlock your iPhone is worth it thanks to the unconquerable security it implies, you might want to read this report from Bernd Marienfeldt about the chosen one’s security model. Yes, a PIN will keep casual users from picking up your phone and making a call with it, or firing off an e-mail to your co-workers saying that you’re quitting and becoming an exotic dancer, but it won’t keep someone from accessing all your data. Bernd and fellow security guru Jim Herbeck have discovered that plugging even a fully up-to-date, non-jailbroken iPhone 3GS into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx allows nearly full read access to the phone’s storage — even when it’s locked. The belief is that they’re just a buffer overflow away from full write access as well, which would surely open the door to making calls. Bernd believes the iPhone’s lack of data encryption for content is a real problem, and also cites the inability to digitally sign e-mails as reasons why the iPhone is still not ready for prime time in the enterprise.
[Thanks, Amit]
iPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open, even when using a PIN originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 06:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Expect this to be the first of many similar announcements as Nokia works out carrier agreements for its new flagship phone. Vodafone’s always informative Coming Soon page has today been updated with the N8, touting its “incredible” camera, social features, and personalization options. Nothing resoundingly new or informative then, but at least you’ll know where to look come late August.
[Thanks, Moominking]
Nokia N8 gets first official carrier in Vodafone UK originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 06:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Barnes & Noble has released its e-reader software for the iPad, adding yet another way to buy and read e-books. It’s as slick as we’ve come to expect, but suffers from several minor flaws and one fatal problem: Unlike iBooks, where you can buy easily and seamlessly from with the application, the B&N reader boots you out to a website, just like Amazon’s Kindle App.
The app is available only in the US App Store, but as it is free you can create a US iTunes account and grab it anyway. That way you can try out sample books and also download free e-books (credit required, although not for samples), of which there are surprisingly many (mostly romance and Star Wars novels). Once you have completed the transaction in your browser, you step back to the app and hit refresh. The books are quickly downloaded to the iPad.
I briefly tried out the reading interface, and it is adequate. There is a good range of fonts, you can highlight and make notes on text, although you can’t search your notes, and you can define words in the built-in dictionary as well as Google and Wikipedia (you’ll be asked if you want to launch the search in Safari first). The page turns are slick, and thankfully they leave out the page-turn animations that are so distracting in iBooks.
The problem is when you flip to landscape format to read. Instead of splitting the text across two pages to take advantage of the big screen, the app just goes wide. There appears to be no way to fix this, so upright reading is recommended. BN eReader for iPad (it’s full, ugly name) is a competent reader, and it’s free. If you already own a Nook, I’d recommend it. Otherwise, there doesn’t seem much point.
BN eReader for iPad [Barnes and Noble. Thanks, Brittany!]
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