Hasta La Gadget!

CNET brings you the news live from Apple’s Town Hall meeting, where the topic at hand is the iPhone 4. Join us Friday at 10 a.m. PDT. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20010731-37.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Apple/a/p

There’s been a lot of chatter going around the interwebs in the past 24 hours about the Droid X’s exceptionally well-locked bootloader — a situation that is going to make running custom ROMs considerably more difficult (bordering on impossible) compared to your average HTC. Specifically, the culprit is said to be a technology known as eFuse — developed by IBM several years ago — which allows circuits to be physically altered at the silicon level on demand. Thing is, the term “eFuse” has taken on an unrelated meaning this week, with My Droid World claiming that some chip inside the Droid X is commanded to “blow the fuse” if it’s unable to verify the stock bootloader, which permanently bricks the phone. It amounts to a really, really hard slap on the wrist for anyone trying to hack, say, Sense or stock Froyo onto it.

Considering IBM’s historically non-nefarious usage of the term “eFuse,” we suspected something was amiss here, so we reached out to Motorola for an explanation. Read on to see what we got back.

Continue reading Motorola responds to Droid X bootloader controversy, says eFuse isn’t there to break the phone

Motorola responds to Droid X bootloader controversy, says eFuse isn’t there to break the phone originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Regular readers will not be surprised at my excited delight when I saw this Super Mario Kart board-game. Laid out in the shape of a race-track from the old classic SNES game, what could be more fun than shooting green turtle-shells at the stupid cheating Princess, only this time in the real world?

Everything, it turns out. While the premise is a great one, it fails in execution. The idea is that two players each have a separate, parallel track around the board, and around this track you must shimmy and coax your “kart” (a plastic ball). First to the finish-line wins.

The video of the game in action (non-embeddable, linked below) shows it to be way duller than that description makes it sound. First, there are far too many non-kart like tracks. It comes down, pretty much, to bashing buttons to make the ball hop to the next section. Second, it would have been way more fun, nostalgia-wise, to recreate an actual track from the game. Instead, we get a mish-mash of sections from the Rainbow Road, Ghost Valley and Donut Plains. The only really authentic element is the soundtrack, which has FX from the original, right down to the squealing tire sound when you get hit with no stars.

The game is on show at the Tokyo Toy Show 2010, so it’s unlikely that it will ever see the shores of the West. Good thing too. I’ll stick to my happy little emulated world.

Mario Kart and Super Mario Bross [sic] board game [Akihabara News via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Video: Super Mario Kart on Non-Jailbroken iPad
• Video: New Blur Commercial Takes Direct Aim at Mario Kart …
• Mario Kart Power-Ups Come to Indycar Racing
• Review: Mario Kart Wii Skids Way Off the Road
• Nike+ Mashup: Mario Kart Ghost Racers on Real Streets

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Google pointer activity monitoring could influence search engine results, probably won’t originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pinel & Pinel — it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? The design boutique has just kicked things back into high gear with an all-new creation inspired by the era of wooden TVs, Bono’s mullet and the original Engadget BBS. The 80’s Trunk, a swank new arcade cabinet, is easily one of the most astounding creations we’ve ever seen, and there’s no question that your basement is yearning for one as we speak. Unlike conventional cabinets, this one’s equipped with an emulation system that houses 60 unforgettable titles (Pac-Man, Space Invaders and 1924, just to name a few), and there’s also a plethora of color options to choose from. You’re also looking at a 1080p LCD, enough amplification to wake the neighbors with bleeps and bloops and an iPod / iPhone docking station if you prefer your own background noise. Mum’s the word on a price, but it’ll probably come down to choosing between this and your first born’s college education. You know what to do.

Pinel & Pinel’s 80’s arcade cabinet fits squarely into the future originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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