Hasta La Gadget!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could listen to internet radio in your car? With Livio’s new Carmen, you can, provided you’re happy with a rather weird, convoluted, time-consuming and almost Rube Goldberg-esque experience.

The best way to give you an idea of the whole complicated mess is to describe the process. First, plug the Carmen into your computer, fire up the companion software and then choose the from the internet radio stations available (“more than 42,000 stations”). The Carmen will then record these for you, DVR-style, in real-time. To make that clear, you won’t be downloading an hour-long show in seconds like you would with a podcast: you’ll be waiting an hour for it.

Once the 2GB stick is loaded up, you take it to the car and plug it into the cigarette-lighter socket. Then you turn on the car’s radio. The Carmen works by sending the MP3s via FM (although you can opt for an aux cable). It even comes with a small remote control so you can search on the floor for that instead of squeezing the Carmen’s tiny buttons.

To recap: You spend hours recording radio shows only to re-broadcast them to your car stereo. And for this you spend $60. Alternatively you could just use the radio in your car, or hook up the cellphone or MP3 player you already have to your car stereo. That would cost you nothing.

For all my complaints, I admit I have a soft spot for the Carmen: the idea of recording songs and shows off the radio to listen to in the car takes me back to my childhood. Thank goodness somebody is applying today’s tech to 1970s problems.

Available for pre-order now.

Carmen Car Audio Player [Livio. Thanks, Joe!]

We’ve seen the inside of the hardware for Samsung’s Galaxy S, and now a Russian coder who goes by the name LeshaK is ready to take you down to the core of the software — despite himself not actually having one of the phones. He’s posted a kernel that you can apply for easy unpacking or, if that’s not your thing, provided the commands you can use to do it yourself, which look to be as simple as changing the permissions on ‘su’ and then re-flashing the phone with the new, lighter restrictions. We’re not able to test this ourselves, but a few users are reporting infinitely looping reboots when trying to apply this, so we’d advise reading the entire thread on the other end of that source link before you go ahead and ruin your whole Wednesday.

[Thanks, Amit]

Hacker finds root for Samsung’s Galaxy S originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The spotlight on Sprint’s MiFi has definitely faded since the launch of the Overdrive and EVO 4G — both of which can kick it into high 4G gear when in range — but Sprint subsidiary Virgin Mobile is bringing Novatel’s groundbreaking mobile hotspot back into the forefront by taking it to the prepaid world. What that means is that you’ll be paying $149 for the MiFi itself — contract free, naturally — plus any of a number of prepaid data rates ranging from $10 for 100MB all the way up to $60 for 5GB. It’s said to be launching next Monday online and in Best Buy and Radio Shack locations — so if you’re an occasional data user, this might be about the best option on the block.

Virgin Mobile launching prepaid MiFi next week originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The EVO 4G has a lot of weight in the smartphone arena thanks to WiMAX and that 4.3-inch screen, but though its Broadcom BCM4329 silicon also technically supports 802.11n WiFi over 2.4GHz, the protocol was disabled for some reason. Thankfully it’s just a matter of ten characters to enable greater throughput, as the fine folks at xda-developers recently discovered. Better yet, you don’t even have to edit those characters yourself — if your EVO’s nice and rooted and the word “brick” doesn’t inspire fear, you’ll find instructions and flash-ready ZIP files at our source link.

EVO 4G gets 802.11n WiFi by changing two lines of code originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Teardown king iFixit posted this exploded view of the iPhone 4.

Hardware and software tests of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 have started to show up, and there are a few surprises. Those brand-new iPad owners looking jealously at the fancy new iPhone can relax, though: The iPad is still the fastest piece of Apple mobile hardware out there.

MacRumors has run the numbers using benchmark Geekbench and Checkup apps for iOS, and although the tests were complicated by the fact that not all the test software runs on all the platforms, the iPad came out tops, closely followed by the iPhone 4, with the iPhone 3G coming in last.

This is a little mysterious, as iFixit, the King of the Teardown, has already ripped open the iPhone4 to reveal that it does indeed use the same 1-GHz A4 processor as the iPad, and also has double the RAM (512 MB vs. 256 MB). We strongly suspect that the chip is being underclocked inside the iPhone to both keep things cooler in the tight confines of its case and to conserve battery life.

The iFixit teardown reveals some other surprises. The battery is not soldered in place, making it easy to replace. Very easy, in fact, as the two screws on the bottom edge release the back glass-plate panel, giving instant access to the battery. Not so good is the new bonded display. It may be tougher, and make the pixels look closer to the surface, but the glass, LCD and digitizer are all one unit, meaning cracked screens will be a lot more expensive to replace.

But what of older hardware? Well, if you have the older 3G, you might not want to upgrade the OS. Flickr user Adrian Nier has posted a side-by-side video of two iPhone 3Gs, one running the new iOS4 and the other still on iOS 3.1.3. In the video, he tests the startup time and the camera, loads a web page (the now-traditional NYT, of course), and accesses the settings. Surprisingly, the phone running 3.1.3 is significantly, obviously faster. See for yourself:

This is not so surprising. The iPhone 3G is capable of running iOS4, but doesn’t get many of its goodies, including multitasking. It is also a three-year-old hardware design, and if you bought one back then, you should be eligible for an upgrade to the new iPhone anyway. For the record, my latest-gen iPod Touch (32 GB) runs as fast as it did before. There seems to be no slowdown on an already very fast device.

To delve even deeper into the innards of Apple’s latest, head over to Chipworks, which carries on where iFixit leaves off. If you want to see pictures of the new 5-MP camera’s sensor taken with an electron microscope, that’s the place to go.

iPhone 4 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

Apple iPhone 4 Smart Phone — Teardown to the Silicon [Chipworks]

iPhone 4 is Faster than 3GS and Slower than iPad in Early Benchmarks [MacRumors]

iOS 4 Performance on iPhone 3G Camera and Settings [Adrian Nier/Flickr]

Image: iFixit

See Also:

• Gallery: iPhone 3GS Teardowns Reveal Underclocked CPU, More
• Teardowns
• iPad Dissection Reveals Its Secret Powers
• For iFixit, iPad Is D-Day + Super Bowl + Oscars