Hasta La Gadget!

Thanks to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, we’ve seen plenty of innovation as of as of late, when it comes to gaming devices. But the Wiimote, PlayStation Move, Kinect, and even the 3DS all pale in comparison to the sheer breakthrough innovation that Sony is offering the world with its latest invention–the Toylet.

The new technology is urinal-based, challenging players/pee-ers to compete in four different urine-based mini-games while doing their business. The games included pee quantifier “Manneken Pis;” image eliminator “Graffiti Eraser;” “The North Wind and Her,” in which the player attempts to lift a woman’s dress with his urine; and “Milk From Nose,” which pits two milk-squirting sumo wrestlers against one another.

The games have been installed in four Japanese metro stations, where they’ll be up in a test run until the 31st. The games also include a USB port, so player can download their high scores to a flash drive. But please, wash your hands when you’re finished.

Screenshots after jump.

While the rest of the country was fixated on politically motivated shooting, bad weather, and the Consumer Electronics Show, its seems that a chunk of the Internet was reeling from the terrible news that Facebook would be shutting down, mid-March. Sure the site just received $500 million dollars, has been valued at billions upon billions, and was the subject of a recent critically acclaimed major motion–but hey, the great one always quit at the top of their game, right?

News that the wildly successful social network was closing up shop was originally reported by The Weekly World News–that home of Batboy notorious for making the The National Enquirer look like The New York Times. But while the WNN has never been taken particularly seriously, this report really has the Internet to thank, having quickly ballooned and taken on a life of its own, as things on the Internet are wont to do.

“After March 15th the whole website shuts down,” a fake Facebook exec fakely told the realish Weekly World News. “So if you ever want to see your pictures again, I recommend you take them off the internet. You won’t be able to get them back once Facebook goes out of business.”

PCMag has taken the whole thing as a sort of cautionary tale against such eventualities.

Still not believing that Verizon Wireless will introduce a CDMA’d iPhone for its network tomorrow? We can’t say we’re completely sold either, but it’s getting harder and harder to fight off the emotions pointing to “yes.” The Wall Street Journal has followed up on its earlier reports by suggesting that not only will VZW soon carry Apple’s iPhone 4, but that it will make no changes to its data plans once that happens. Of course, it’s not like anyone actually expected Big Red to do such a thing, but it’s definitely one more reason for heavy users to consider Verizon Wireless over AT&T. Grandfathered customers notwithstanding, AT&T users who buy a new iPhone 4 are hit with a few tiered data plan options, with the largest ($25 / month) being capped at 2GB. With Verizon, $29.99 per month nets you “unlimited” data, though you could run into issues if you routinely suck down more than 5GB — a rather typical ‘gotcha’ in the American cellular space. The real question, however, is this: will the Verizon iPhone be compatible with Verizon’s $14.99 / month (150MB) plan, and moreover, will it ever be upgradable to handle the LTE network we heard oh-so-much about just days ago? Bookmark our liveblog and tune in tomorrow to find out!

Verizon reportedly ready to offer unlimited data plans on iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news for people who love bad good news. According to IDG News, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show saw around 140,000 people descend upon it, which pretty much destroys the estimate of 126,000 attendees. We’re told that around 126,000 humans showed up last year to see Palm introduce webOS 1.4 (and for everyone else to introduce an e-reader), while just 113,000 booked a ticket to Las Vegas for CES 2009. The last time this quantity of Earthlings arrived in the desert to get their geek on was CES 2008, or in other terms, the last year that life as we knew it was halfway normal. There’s no question that we felt as if the floor was teeming with people, and the show in general just felt more alive than usual.

Furthermore, we’re being hit with even more amazing news from the show floor: the official show dates for 2012. Rather than pushing CES up against a pair of holidays in Christmas and New Year’s Day, the Consumer Electronics Association has finally seen fit to bump things forward a week. CES 2012 will officially be held January 10th through 13th, and we’re guessing that most of the press events will start on the 8th or 9th. Sadly, we weren’t able to go three for three with outstanding news today — the show is still slated to be held in Las Vegas, so we’re apologizing in advance to the internationals who will once again wonder how a place overran with neon, grotesque paper cards at every street corner and a public transportation system that only stops once every five minutes could be so highly touted.

CES 2011 sees big boost in attendance, CES 2012 scheduled way more sensibly originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola’s scored all manner of accolades last week with the introduction of the Xoom tablet. Even during a show in which some 80 different iPad competitors were launched, the company garnered all manner of buzz and took home a handful of Best of Show awards over the course of the week.

According to a new report from Taipei-based tech rumor source DigiTimes, the company is expected to ship between 700,000 and 800,000 of its Honeycomb-based Android tablet in the first quarter of the year. The site hasn’t named any sources, but suppliers Catcher, Apple contributor Foxconn, Taiwan Chi Cheng, and Silitech are all said to be involved in the manufacturing process.

Motorola’s tablet will hit store shelves in the first quarter of this year. It features a 10.1 inch screen, front and rear facing cameras, and packs an Nvidia Tegra 2: 1 GHz dual-core processor inside.