Hasta La Gadget!

CNET editor David Katzmaier cut his cable cord TV for a month, then reconnected. Read the full Diary to find out why.

Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today’s bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season.

You didn’t think we’d let the holiday season go by without an official Engadget Tablet Gift Guide did you? Hey, give us more credit — we know it’s not 2009 anymore! The past year has seen an explosion in the tablet category, and while the iPad may still be the market leader, there’s no shortage of Android and Windows 7 alternatives out there that let you surf the web, read books, and watch videos with just a flick of a finger. Sure, more are on the way, and all signs point to Apple updating the iPad in early 2011, but if you’ve got to have a touchscreen slab before the end of the year, we’re here to lend a helping hand. Hit the break for a rundown of the best choices by price category.

Continue reading Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Tablets

Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 12:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Home automation and jetpacks are surprisingly similar in that both of these space-age technologies have, for decades, been over promised and under delivered. Who here wouldn’t love to tap a single button when exiting the house to activate the alarm, shut off the lights in the kids’ rooms, lower the thermostat, and lock all the doors? That’s the convenience, the promise left unfilled as we say goodbye to 2010. We live on a planet that still requires humans to manually close the blinds at the end of the day and flip on a light switch some 90 years since the commercial introduction of the incandescent light bulb. How primitive. And it’s downright criminal in ecological and financial terms that we still can’t easily
monitor and control the power usage in our homes let alone the trickle of wattage vampired off the individual electrical sockets feeding our greedy horde of household electronics.

How is this possible given all the advances we’ve seen? Wireless and sensor technology has advanced far beyond what’s required to automate a home. Just look at smartphones, for example, that now ship standard with 3G (and even 4G) data, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS radios in addition to sensors for motion, temperature, moisture, proximity, and even direction. We don’t have the answer to home automation’s dilemma — to dig into that topic we’d require a few thousand more words, at least. All we know for sure is that the biggie consumer electronics companies are reluctant to sort it out. As such, dozens of small companies are left to deal with a mess created by an industry incapable of coalescing around a set of interoperable home automation standards.

One such company is Mi Casa Verde. A tiny startup that launched its linux-based Vera home automation server back in 2008 with a renewed promise to make home automation setup and control as easy for novices as it is robust for techies and enthusiasts. We’ve been using a recently launched second generation Vera 2 for a few weeks now. Sure, we haven’t quite reached one-button nirvana, but as home automation newbies we’re proud to say that we’ve automated a few helpful in-home lighting situations while skirting the clutches of the Dark Angel sequestered within our fuse box. Better yet, we can control it all from an iPhone — including the Christmas tree. Click through to see how we did it.

Continue reading Mi Casa Verde Vera review: Home automation, simplified

Mi Casa Verde Vera review: Home automation, simplified originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s a PlayStation app coming soon for the iPhone and Android handsets. The bad news is that it doesn’t actually do what you’re hoping it does–i.e. play games.

The app is more of a supplemental resource for PlayStation owners. You can use it to check things like trophies and friends’ statuses, discover information about new games, read the PlayStation Blog, and share info via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. PlayStation phone it’s not.

The app is coming “very soon” to European markets like the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. More markets will follow later.

RIM execs hint at when the company may release its tablet, saying that the device’s revenue impact will occur in its fiscal first quarter, which starts in late February.

Originally posted at The Digital Home