Hasta La Gadget!

The Crosley Revolution portable turntable brings new life to an old design made famous in the ’80s by Audio-Technica.

The Lego brick is one of the most iconic products in the toy industry–not iconic enough, however, for the company to score the trademark rights to the design. Not in the European Union, at least. A Luxembourg-based judge upheld a 2008 ruling, which struck down Lego’s trademark claims.

Lego argued that, without the trademark, the door is wide open for copycat products. “It is naturally a matter of concern to us that use of the brick by others can dilute the trademark,” Lego intellectual property executive Peter Kjaer said of the ruling. “But the worst aspect is that consumers will be misled.”

Lawyers on the other side of the argument, meanwhile, argued that the shape could not be trademark as it “precluded people from using the same technical function,” meaning that owning the trademark to the snapping pegs would prohibit other from creating a product that had the same feature.

“The court effectively took the view that all the essential characteristics of the Lego brick did perform a technical function–to enable bricks to be connected and stacked–even if other minor features did not, and this precluded registration,” the lawyer, Shireen Peermohamed, explained.

The court agreed, stating that such a trademark over the “technical solution” would essentially constitute a monopoly.

We’ve already seen a few attempts at some premium 3D glasses, and it looks like you can now also count Oakley as being aboard the bandwagon. The company has just announced that it’s developed what it describes as the first 3D eyewear with “optically correct” lenses, and that it will be rolling out its first 3D glasses sometime before this holiday season. Those glasses will be of the passive polarized variety, and use Oakley’s so-called HDO-3D technology, which promises “unparalleled visual clarity,” along with a wider peripheral viewing angle and a truer alignment of 3D images. No word on pricing just yet, but Oakley will apparently be rolling out a range of different designs that will be sold though premium optical distribution channels in the US — a worldwide launch will follow in 2011. Full press release is after the break.

[Thanks, Colin]

Continue reading Oakley announces plans for line of 3D eyewear

Oakley announces plans for line of 3D eyewear originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Care for a little more insight into Nokia’s smartphone development habits? In an email to our pal John Gruber, a former Nokia software engineer has laid out his perspective on why the Finnish phone maker seems to be struggling in that lucrative high-end smartphone market:

“Here’s the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field.”

He goes on to say that Nokia’s haughtiness extended to the point of turning an assessment of the iPhone’s relative strengths into a list of reasons why it wouldn’t succeed, which — considering that the doc was compiled at around the 3GS’ launch — seems like a distinctly foolish thing to do. The really interesting bit here, though, is where that leaves Nokia today. As far as its Design chief Marko Ahtisaari is concerned, the future’s MeeGo all the way, but that new platform was nowhere to be seen at Nokia World this year, and Gruber raises the question of whether Nokia shouldn’t perhaps switch to the already ubiquitous Android or soon-to-be-everywhere Windows Phone 7. Neither makes a ton of sense on the surface, as Nokia’s proud tradition doesn’t exactly mesh with dancing to Microsoft’s stringent spec tune or becoming yet another Android phone manufacturer. But in the current fast-moving market, a good smartphone software platform today might just be better than a great one tomorrow — more to the point, we probably wouldn’t be pondering this if Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was still in charge, but now that a software guy has finally taken the helm, maybe the winds of change might blow once more in Espoo?

Nokia software engineer says ‘hardware rules,’ software follows originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re someone who regularly reads Reddit, this unofficial iPad reader for the popular social site might be the best there is. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20016595-12.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Download Blog/a/p