Hasta La Gadget!

I own a pair of Sennheiser headphones – I wouldn’t game without my trusty PC 350s, but today the company upped the ante by unveiling the full line of new Sennheiser PC Gaming Headphones. Among them are the PC 360, the successor to my PC 350s, a pair of new compact models that feature 7.1-channel Dolby surround sound called the PC 163D and the PC 333D, the latter of which features a right ear-cup with a “DJ hinge,” which DJs and gamers alike will appreciate as it lets you twist the right ear-cup up and away from your ear to mute the headphones quickly.

Also in the new lineup is the PC 330 headphones, which also feature the DJ hinge, but come in a little cheaper and lack the 7.1-channel surround sound. All of the new models feature Sennheiser’s high quality noise isolating microphones and strike a balance between serious audio quality and clear voice quality. The PC 360s cost $299.95 list, the PC 163D and 333D are $209.95 and $239.95 respectively, and the PC 330 is $169.95 retail. All of the new models are available now.

[via SlashGear]

To think, it’s been just over a year since Barnes and Noble’s Nook was officially unveiled, a 6-inch e-reader with a secondary, Android-powered colored display for navigation. And here we are now, in attendance at a “very special event” from the bookseller’s Union Square store in New York — for what, we can only guess. Stay tuned, things could get very colorful.

Continue reading Live from Barnes & Noble’s ‘Very Special Event’

Live from Barnes & Noble’s ‘Very Special Event’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The veracity of The Register‘s information regarding the Symbian Foundation’s future remains to be seen — but for what it’s worth, Nokia’s outspoken vice president of markets, Niklas Savander, seems to have some pretty strong language about the platform’s future in a recent interview with CNET Asia. Here’s the money quote in response to a question about whether Espoo will pull the Foundation’s operations back in-house after having spun them off as an open-source operation in 2008:

“I don’t see any reason for that. What would be the benefit of doing that? We have made it open source, so it’s, of course, up to the different users whether they want to use it. The whole notion behind the open-source community is that people can choose to leave or not to leave. We have quite a few Japanese vendors that are pushing Symbian products. The Symbian Foundation will exist as an open source movement and we will use it. Other people are welcome to use it if they want to. If they don’t, that’s not going to change things. That’s how open source works.”

So Nokia’s public-facing philosophy seems to be that they don’t care who — if anyone — uses Symbian, they’re going to continue to let the Foundation do its thing. Meanwhile, another part of the interview highlights the fact that they’re still planning to continue to drive Symbian downmarket. Obviously, Nokia’s internal roadmap could differ significantly from Savander’s message, but so far, we don’t have any hint from these guys that changes are afoot. That said, the Foundation’s funding situation could force Nokia to take action if it wants the platform to continue to develop and evolve, but we suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Another interesting tidbit in the interview highlights the fact that one of new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s edicts has been to significantly reduce the amount of time between a product’s announcement and its release, which might be the driving force behind his decision to push the introduction of Nokia’s first MeeGo products into 2011. As much as we hate waiting, we’d say that’s a stellar direction for the company to take — nothing builds animosity toward a product more than letting it waste away in a purgatory of unattainability (assuming your name isn’t Eldar Murtazin) for six-plus months.

Nokia’s Savander: ‘the Symbian Foundation will exist as an open source movement and we will use it’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the latest green report, Greenpeace indicated gaps between PC vendors in phasing out the use of toxic substances.

A high-profile market research company radically revised its findings about how many iPad users download iPad apps.

Last week Nielsen published figures stating that 31 percent of iPad owners had never downloaded an app.

Now the company has revised its figures. The true number, Nielsen now says, is 9 percent.

In other words, the vast majority of iPad owners — more than 9 out of 10 — have downloaded an app. Games are the most popular category, followed by books and music, as shown in Nielsen’s revised graphic, shown here.

We reported on Nielsen’s claim and are now posting this update. We’re also updating our original post on the topic.

The original number was eye-catching and, if true, would have had significant implications for the viability of Apple’s app model, not only on the iPad and iPhone but on the soon-to-be-launched Mac App Store for OS X customers. The notion that one-third of tablet users were perfectly satisfied with the device’s web browser, e-mail client and other utilities was surprising, if not totally unbelievable.

We were taken in by the survey, but treated it with a dose of healthy skepticism:

If these figures are actually meaningful (ie. if the self-selecting sample-group actually contains more than a few dozen iPad owners) then perhaps the app store isn’t the competitive advantage that Apple believes it to be.

Turns out that the App Store may be a competitive advantage, after all.

In reporting the news, we’re only as good as our sources. Nielsen is usually a credible provider of market research, and we made a mistake in reporting their numbers without examining them more closely.

For its part, Nielsen hasn’t explained how it managed to overstate the number of non-app-downloading customers by a factor of three. At least they’ve corrected their original post.

via The Register

See Also:

• The State of Mobile App Stores Summarized in Charts
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Feds Get Their Own App Store
• Google Says Mobile App Stores Have No Future