Hasta La Gadget!

DigiTimes has long been a source for all manner of crazy Apple rumors–this, however, is not one. According to the site’s unnamed “sources,” the company will be upgrading the MacBook Pro and iMac at some point during the first half of next year. Sorry, I just got a little sleepy typing that.

Nothing really exciting here. The MacBook Pros will feature “slight change in chassis design” and will be upgraded to OS X Lion. The iMacs, meanwhile, will have a new panel size and different prize point. Ho-hum.

How about a Verizon iPhone/mini-iPad hybrid? Anyone?

It would have pretty tough for Yahoo to have had worse timing on this one–just a week out from Christmas. It’s a subject that Carol Bartz doesn’t really broach in her internal memo. Rather she chooses to focus on what the changes at the company mean for the coming year.

Bartz’s internal layoff memo surfaced this week, explaining away the recent four percent staff cut the company underwent. “You’ve heard me say before that I didn’t come to cut Yahoo! to greatness. That’s still true,” Bartz explains in the memo, going on to explain that the cuts were “about more than cost savings.”

Its not a particularly empathetic letter, but these things never are. Bartz tells her staff that “we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others.” The company is cutting “underperforming and non-core product,” to focus on stronger properties “like e-mail, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content, and more.” All in all, it’s sounding a bit reminiscent of the whole peanut butter thing from a few years back.

Bartz then shifts for “one last thing before I go,” a focus on the “growth” and “turnaround” the company is experiencing.

All in all, it’s a pretty bummer end for what’s been a pretty quite year from the once-dominant search company.

Vuze, the company behind the Bittorrent client formerly known as Azureus, is launching a new media discovery service called Fanhattan. Is this the uber-content site you’ve been waiting for?

Say hello to the world’s first dual-core smartphone. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Sounds like the future. Of course, like most things especially futuristic (at least so far as the mobile world is concerned), there’s no word on when the thing is coming to our shores.

LG’s Optimus 2X is destined for Korea first–launching on that country’s shores in January. Other Asian countries and Europe will be getting their hands on the phone soon after. As for the US–not a peep on that front.

You want specs? How about these specs? The Optimus 2X is packing a 1Ghz NVIDIA Tegra 2 (we mentioned the thing is dual-core, right?), 8GB of memory (expandable to 32GB via microSD, a 4-inch WVGA screen, front and rear facing camera, 1080p video playback, and HDMI mirroring.

Neat.

This one’s strictly for the record, the one that documents failed aesthetic experiments. Microsoft’s Albert Penello has been cornered for an interview by the British Official Xbox Magazine — mostly to discuss the console’s five-year anniversary — and their discourse touched on the ill-fated frontal accessory for the original 360. Penello admitted that although “faceplates were what everybody wanted to do” five years ago, they pretty much fell flat in terms of retail success, which led Microsoft to kill them off pretty quickly. We can’t say we ever developed strong feelings either way about these plastic prettifiers, let’s just be happy that Microsoft’s latest console peripheral probably won’t be subject to similar mea culpa admissions five years from now.

Microsoft admits ‘failure’ with Xbox 360 faceplates, says nobody bought them originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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