Hasta La Gadget!

Maybe, just maybe, you’ve noticed that Engadget relocated this past week to the City of Sin for CES 2011. Oh yes, we set up camp in a double-wide trailer, liveblogged our hearts out, combed the show floor, and worked our rear ends off to bring you more gadget news than you ever thought possible. It’s true, we’ve written over 720 posts (40 or so about tablets alone!), shot more than 180 videos, and brought you over 350 photo galleries in the last seven days. That’s a ton of technology news and products, but naturally, only certain ones have been able to rise above the rest and stick out in our scary collective hive-mind. With that said, we’ve complied our annual best of list for you, so hit the break and feast your eyes on what are bound to be some of the best products of the new year.

Continue reading Best of CES 2011

Best of CES 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Enough with the iPhone 4 already. Apple’s fifth-generation iPhone will be here sooner than you’d think (most likely in June 2011). Here’s a look at some of the feature and design upgrades we’d most like to see, including the odds of their implementation.

Originally posted at Fully Equipped

If you’re saying sayonara to your current carrier in search of iPhone pastures at Verizon, here’s the right way to make the switch.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

It wasn’t just Ludacris and T-Pain at CES who were plugging their endorsed audio products, rapper 50 Cent was there promoting his new brand of headphones as well. But the TV appearances and interviews were not enough for 50 Cent, who then took to the Twitter waves to make a bigger splash for distributing company H&H Imports Inc. As exemplified in the photo above, 50 Cent plugged H&H Imports Inc., a publicly listed penny stock (HNHI), all weekend on Twitter.

According to BusinessInsider, the company’s stock ended up closing up at 240 percent because of this, increasing the company’s value by $50 million in one day. But was that illegal? The Federal Trade Commission has a law that insists that celebrities must include the word “ad” or “spon” in their Tweets to indicate they’re advertising something on behalf of a sponsor. 

It seems that 50 Cent removed the tweets, perhaps because he got a slap on the wrist since he didn’t disclose his affiliation with the company. 

We’ve always liked the idea of having a Bluetooth watch streaming feeds from our phones, because deep down inside, we all want to act like special agents in public. Sadly, there aren’t many of these wearables to choose from in the present market. In fact, with the inPulse smartwatch for BlackBerry seemingly stuck in limbo, what we have left is the Europe-only Sony Ericsson LiveView for Android, and maybe something nice from Fossil as well if its concept design gets picked up. To seize this opportunity, Velocity Micro is now working on its own connected Android watch — currently known as the Cruz Watch — that’s destined for the sub-$200 market in mid-Q2 2011.

Here’s what we learned about this cool-looking prototype during our exclusive hands-on at CES: in many ways, it’s conceptually identical to the LiveView — it’s a watch, it’s a Facebook feeds reader, it’s a multimedia remote control (for Android’s music app and Android-powered TVs), and it can show you incoming caller IDs. While the Cruz Watch may be a bit of a lightweight when it comes to apps, its hardware certainly bests SE’s offering in several ways: for starters, it has a full touchscreen that takes swipe and tap gesture inputs (instead of using navigation touch controls on the bezel), and it sports a 1.8-inch LCD instead of a 1.3-inch OLED display. There are also a few software features that we dig, especially with the interchangeable clock face: two analog, two digital; and the incoming call notifier pulls the caller’s profile photo from your contact list, which is something that the LiveView can’t do. We’re told that since this watch is powered by Android 2.0 (and possibly something different on retail units), Velocity Micro might be able to implement app installation in the near future, so we shall see. Video walkthrough after the break.

Continue reading Velocity Micro Cruz Watch hands-on preview

Velocity Micro Cruz Watch hands-on preview originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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