Hasta La Gadget!

Is Nintendo’s forthcoming portable gaming system hazardous to your health? The company has issued warnings about the 3DS ahead of its upcoming Nintendo World conference, suggesting that extended use of the console may be harmful for children under the age of six.

“Vision of children under the age of six has been said [to be in the] developmental stage,” the company said in a warning on its site, “delivers 3D images with different left and right eye images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children’s eyes.”

This isn’t the first time the company has issued such a warning for the glasses-free 3D console. When the device was announced back in June at E3, Nintendo America’s head, Reggie Fils-Aime, told Kotaku that the company was recommending a break after playing for an hour. Nintendo has since halved that number, suggesting that players take a break after 30 minutes,

Fortunately, the device lets the user dial down or turn off the 3D effect.

The iPhone is already the spiritual successor to the Polaroid, able to deliver great results, instantly. So instead of wishing that whichever company currently owns the Polaroid brand-name would just make a great new camera already, why not just make your iPhone look like the iconic Land Camera?

Buy this skin, designed by Canada-based Ryan Astle, and you can do just that. The reusable plastic stickers come in a pack of two – one big one for the back, so the subject of your photo can see how retro-serious you are about your snaps, and a little sticker for the bottom panel on the front, adding a fake button on either side of the home button.

Of course, the Polaroid name itself isn’t mentioned, because this might distract Polaroid’s current owner from churning out cynical cash-in crap for long enough for a visit to court. There’s really no doubting what the design is “inspired” by, though, and it can be yours for just $15. The skin will fit any iPhone model, not just the current one.

Photoroid Skin [Infectious / Ryan Astle via Giz]

See Also:

• Polaroid Lives! New Camera Uses Real Instant Film
• Rebel Film Developers Give New Hope to Polaroid Fans
• New, Vintage Polaroid Cameras Sell Out in Hours
• ShakeIt Brings Polaroid Pictures to the iPhone
• Beautiful Polaroid Camera Sculpted in Lego

Rovio may have introduced its wildly successful game Angry Birds to the Android platform, but make no mistake which operating system the company prefers to develop for. In a recent interview with the site Tech Marketing, Rovio executive Peter Vesterbacka let it be known that Apple’s iOS is still the top dog in his eyes.

“Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right,” he told the site. “And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time.”

Android also has a fragmentation problem, according to Vesterbacka. “Device fragmentation not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem,” he explained. “So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android.”

Not that he’s saying that Apple is, you know, better, or anything. It’s just that, in the mobile world, fragmentation is sort of a way of life,

That doesn’t mean that model is superior, it’s just important to understand that Apple is Apple and Google is Google. Different. And developers need to understand that. Different business models for different ecosystems. And wouldn’t forget about Nokia and MeeGo either, new leadership always tends to shake things up and create opportunity. And HP-Palm. And RIM. And even Microsoft. It’s a fragmented world.

Rovio’s Angry Birds was the number one paid app for the iPhone in 2010.

If you wish to raise your fist in the air and curse anyone for the massive global Skype outage, direct your anger towards 5.0.0.152. That’s the Skype for Windows version that crashed when a December 22nd cluster of support servers responsible for offline messaging became overloaded. While that’s the only version affected — the latest 5.0.0.156 and 4.0 versions were fine, as were the clients for every other platform you can think of — the number of users running point-152 globally represent 50 percent of all the users. More importantly for the other half of the world, about 25 to 30 percent of all supernodes were affected, too, whose role is establish connections, among others.

So… up to 30 percent of supernodes are down worldwide. The other 70 percent were taking on the increased load. The crashed Windows clients were by and large being restarted simultaneously by affected users. All this happened just before the usual daily peak hours and during the holiday season. It’s almost a comedy of errors, were it not impossible at the time to call someone and share in the laughter. For its part, Skype goes into detail over how it fixed the current situation and how it plans to be better equipped to handle any future duress. It’s a pretty interesting read, we suggest you set some time aside and check it out.

Skype outage post-mortem puts some blame on the elder Windows clients originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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All the pieces, they’re a-comin’ together. If you’ll recall, we spotted a smattering of HP Palm codenames in webOS 2.0 code early last month, and now, those very names are popping up elsewhere. Over at DirectCast, a couple of casting calls have emerged for HP Palm, with both of ’em seeking young, carefree hipsters with lovely hands. They’re willing to pay a solid grand if you fit the profile, presumably to hold one of these impending devices on camera for some sort of advertisement. A PreCentral reader actually signed up, and then received some even more interesting information — he was informed that the shoot will involve the HP Palm Broadway, Manta and Topaz. The Broadway was indeed one of the devices spotted in the aforementioned code, and while Manta wasn’t there, “Mantaray” was. Topaz, of course, looks to be Palm’s forthcoming tablet. This is all just expanded speculation for now, but if you were holding out hope for new HP Palm products, feel free to let your imagination run wild.

HP Palm Broadway, Manta and Topaz name-dropped in casting call originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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