Hasta La Gadget!

The roll-up tool-bag is probably only hours younger than the invention of tools themselves: Soon after whacking away at a monolith with a femur, or cutting his thumb on a sharpened flint, the handy caveman would have needed a place to stow his kit. One dead, skinned woolly mammoth later – thunk! shik-shak! – and the tool-roll was born, complete with a furry surface on which our inventive neanderthal friend could wipe his greasy hands.

My poor knowledge of history aside, the tool roll is a great invention. And Timbukt2’s Tool Shed tool-roll (say that five times quickly) is now on my shopping list. The $35 tarp bag has pockets for your bike tools with an elastic strip at the top to keep long wrenches in place, and a netting pocket for small spares, chain-ring bolts and so on. The roll lies flat in use and once you’re done, you cinch it up and toss it in your bag.

Importantly, it’s also greaseproof. The Tool Shed comes in at a half-kilo (1.1-pounds): not the lightest roll, but it looks like it might last long enough to be your only roll.

I have a couple Timbukt2 bags already, and I love them. Just one thing, Timbukt2 designers: the strap on my mini-messenger bag is way too stiff. It’s nice that it’ll outlast me, but does it have to cut into my neck every time I wear it, too?

Tool Shed [Timbukt2 via Uncrate]

See Also:

• Timbuk2 Hidden Messenger Bag
• Timbuk2 Command TSA-Compliant Laptop Bag
• Wired Magazine: Brand-New Bag

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360 Panorama is a new kind of pano-shooting app for the iPhone. Instead of taking many pictures and then stitching them together afterwards, like every other pano app, you just sweep the iPhone across the scene in front of you and 360 Panorama will build a super-wide image in real time, similar to what you can do with some of Sony’s latests digicams.

The app is still taking lots of individual shots: it’s just putting them together as you swoosh your iPhone over the world and working out where the camera is pointing by using the accelerometers. Image-sections pop up onto grid as you go, showing you the app’s progress, and a full 360-degree panorama should take about 20 seconds to complete. You’re going to need a new iPhone to run it, though. Because this is a processor intensive app, it will only work on the iPhones 3G and 4.

The app is $3, and available now.

360 Panorama [iTunes]

See Also:

• Pano Turns iPhone Into a Panorama Shooter
• Firmware Update Adds 3D Panoramas to Sony NEX Cameras
• Realtime Panorama Mapping On Mobile Phones

Jailbreaking has gone into the cloud. Visit the Jailbreakme.com website on your iOS device, slide the big button on the front page (which cheekily mimics Apple’s slide-to-unlock button) and you’re done. It’s that easy. It works for iPhones (including the iPhone 4) and also iPads running iOS 3.2.1.

Jailbreaking – the unlocking of an iPhone or iPad to allow access to the file system and install any app you like – used to be done via your computer with a downloaded program. You’d plug in the iDevice and work from there. It was easy, but this is easier still. No doubt the US federal regulators’ recent ruling that jailbreaking is legal has emboldened the hackers: Apple can’t have the site taken down now, after all.

The cat and mouse game that is jailbreaking is not over, though: Just because unlocking your iPhone is now legal doesn’t mean Apple has to support it. The hack works through a PDF exploit in Mobile Safari. Comex, a member of the iPhone Dev Team (the jailbreaking people), uses Safari’s PDF decoder to run the code. Because Safari automatically opens PDFs, the jailbreak code is run. Expect Apple to close this hole in an update, if only for security purposes.

So how does it work? That depends. Our own Brian X Chen unlocked his iPhone 4 with no problems. He reverted almost immediately because Cydia, the unofficial App Store, has almost nothing in it that is optimized for the retina display. OThers have reported that FaceTime and MMS are broken. Currently, my 3G iPad is stuck in an endless loop and cannot get past the boot screen showing a single, lonely silver Apple. Needless to say, you should back up before trying this, and be aware that you are visiting a website that is doing some rather scary things to your iDevice.

The return of jailbreakme.com! [Dev Team Blog]

See Also:

• U.S. Declares iPhone Jailbreaking Legal, Over Apple's Objections …
• iPad Jailbreak Ready for Download
• Video: Hackers Jailbreak iPhone OS 4 in Less Than a Day
• 6 Reasons to Jailbreak Your iPhone

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Check out this 14mm-thin contender: built by Pegatron and still at the prototype stage, the MasterPad looks to be the embodiment of Steve Ballmer’s incoming armada of desirable Windows 7 tablets. It sports an 11.6-inch IPS screen, which accommodates a 1,366 x 768 widescreen resolution, a 1.3 megapixel webcam plus mic, two USB ports, a memory card reader, an accelerometer, mini-HDMI port, 3G connectivity, and 32GB or 64GB SSD options. All that hi-tech goodness is wrapped up in a magnesium and aluminum alloy body, weighing 990 grams. There are some less cutting edge specs, like the disappointing 2-cell battery that will only get you 5 hours of use and the 1.66GHz Atom N450 CPU — but we’re being promised 1080p video playback and Flash compatibility are ready to roll, and our machine translation hints at an additional HD video-processing chip. The early hands-on experience seems to have left the Israeli journos impressed, and their homeland can expect the MasterPad to arrive “in the coming months,” with an Android version also in the works. See it on video after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading MasterPad prototype marries Windows 7 to 11.6-inch IPS screen (video)

MasterPad prototype marries Windows 7 to 11.6-inch IPS screen (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 06:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Contactless payments made using your phone are hardly a new idea in themselves, but when three of the big four US carriers decide to unite behind it, the time might have come to start paying closer attention. Bloomberg reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are about to test the NFC payment waters with pilot schemes in Atlanta and three other cities, potentially aided by partnerships with Discover Financial Services and British bankers Barclays Plc. This would require all-new readers for merchants and embedded NFC chips in phones, but we reckon plenty of people might be happy to pay a small premium to streamline their lives that little bit more and leave the plastic behind. Either way, Visa’s nascent attempts at conquering the mobile just got themselves a big old cabal-sized competitor.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile team up to transform your smartphone into a credit card originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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