Hasta La Gadget!

Want to draw attention to an otherwise ordinary piece of consumer electronics? Do something emotive like, say, smash a giant Apple ice sculpture in front of the world’s Chinese press. Besides putting the boys in Cupertino on notice, Hanvon‘s officially launching the company’s TouchPad B10 — a 10.1-inch multitouch capacitive slate that we went hands-on with back in March. A €500ish device that runs Windows 7 on a retired 1.3GHz Celeron M ULV743 processor and Intel GMA 4500 graphics capable of delivering about 3.5 hours of battery life. Other specs include 2GB of memory, a regular ol’ 2.5-inch 250GB or 320GB hard disk, HDMI-out, and WiFi. Watch the theatrics after the break while we wait for Hanvon’s 1 million units sold announcement.

Continue reading Hanvon CEO smashes Apple effigy at TouchPad launch (video)

Hanvon CEO smashes Apple effigy at TouchPad launch (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 06:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For $15, you can turn your notebook computer into what looks like a box of Lego. Those keys are in fact stickers which sit atop your MacBook keycaps and turn the keyboard into a sea of dimpled plastic bricks.

The stickers, made from easily-removed vinyl, come from Etsy-seller openandclose. They’re kind of neat, but the toy-nerd in me can’t help spot the non-Lego elements in these “Lego-style” bricks. First, the colors are way off. Whoever heard of pink Lego?

Second, the circular nubbins are too small on the function keys and too big on the letters. Only on the spacebar do you see anything approaching Lego-like proportions. Going by the shadows, though, it looks like openandclose at least made the stickers in real 3D, and didn’t just shade the tops to look as if they are raised.

Available now, for you to buy and use for five minutes before ripping them off in a fit of annoyance.

Lego Style MacBook Keyboard Decor Decal Sticker [Etsy via Oh Gizmo!]

At last, it seems that AT&T will allow you to share your iPhone’s internet data connection with other devices. The screen captures you see above come from the newly released iPhone OS 4 beta 4, and show the option to enable internet tethering. This would allow you to share your connection to either your computer (over USB) or an iPad or other mobile device (via Bluetooth).

Huge, right? Especially as AT&T promised us the option to tether would be available by the end of last year. But not so fast. We’ve been here before, over a year ago in fact. When iPhone OS 3 was in its beta stages, developers found that they could switch on tethering and use it. When the final version was released to the public, it was gone.

All iPhones have the software for tethering built in. It is then up to the individual carriers if they will support it. AT&T doesn’t, yet, but pretty much anywhere else in the world you can share your data as you like. While the screen-grabs above are almost certainly legitimate, having a feature flash up in a beta release is not the same as having it actually launch to the public. I’m skeptical.

Apple Releases iPhone OS 4 Beta 4 and SDK to Developers [MacRumors]

See Also:

• Pictures: iPhone 3.0 USB Tethering Already Activated

Get ready to rumble, the latest Gartner and IDC smartphone numbers are out to give us a pretty good idea of how things shape up globally. Remember, IDC measures vendor shipments while Gartner measures actual handset sales to end users. So what does the data tell us? Well, to start with, in terms of smartphone devices, Gartner claims a 48.7% increase in smartphone sales of 54.3 million units in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009 — IDC pegs growth at 56.7% on 54.7 million units for the same period. Both estimates easily outpace the 17% or 21.7% growth in worldwide units of mobile phones moved according to Gartner and IDC, respectively.

IDC’s list of top 5 smartphone device makers (pictured after the break) has Nokia at the number one spot repeating its 39.3% share as it did in Q1 of 2009 while RIM is down slightly from 20.9% in 2009 to a 19.4% market share in 2010. Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) more than doubled its device shipments in the last year as HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) all managed to increase their shares on higher volumes.

Regarding smartphone OS market share, Android’s global numbers echo its success in the US jumping from a 1.6% market share to 9.6% in just one year. Gartner claims that sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year to displace Windows Mobile in the top 5 for the first time. Apple’s iPhone OS also saw growth from 10.5% in 1Q09 to 15.4% in 1Q10 as both RIM (down from 20.1% to 19.4%) and Symbian (down from 48.8% to 44.3%) dropped. See the OS numbers broken down into a no-nonsense table after the break.

Continue reading IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google

IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 04:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re one of the truly lilliputian proportion of PC gamers who actually bought two of either the GTX 470 or GTX 480 from NVIDIA in the hope of running a tri-monitor 3D gorgefest, we’ve got bad news for ya. If you’re anyone else, enjoy the schadenfreude of knowing that those first guys will have to keep waiting for 3D Vision Surround support until the end of June. As NVIDIA tells it, the driver bringing the tri-dimensional, multi-monitor gaming nirvana was targeted for an April release, but has now slipped a couple of months. It’s disappointing to see one of the major selling points of the GTX 400 series coming so much later than the cards’ release, but at least ATI’s around to console you if you’re feeling jilted. The company has set up an Eyefinity Experience Tool that does a good job illustrating the benefits of gaming on a trifecta of monitors over a single display. Hit the source links for more.

NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround delayed, ATI gloats with an Eyefinity demo site originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 03:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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