Jan 23

Switched On: When Gadgets Talk in Their Sleep

Posted in: 3ds, column, networking, nintendo, nintendo 3ds, Nintendo3ds, switched on, SwitchedOn, Today's Chili, Wireless

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The Nintendo 3DS stands to democratize stereoscopy in a way society hasn’t experienced since the View-Master craze, by offering 3D hardware more affordable than the current crop of televisions and PCs, and without requiring special glasses to see images pop out of the handheld’s screen. But when it comes to innovation, the 3DS could represent a two-way street, for even as its 3D screen is focused on enhancing the handheld gaming experience, its “Pass” network technologies — SpotPass and particularly StreetPass — could have broader implications for the way we discover the world around us.

Continue reading Switched On: When Gadgets Talk in Their Sleep

Switched On: When Gadgets Talk in Their Sleep originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jan 23

Sony’s Music Unlimited service infiltrates France, Germany, Italy and Spain, offers streaming tunes

Posted in: cloud, Music, playstation 3, Playstation3, ps3, sony, streaming, Today's Chili

See this message? You no longer have to if you live in France, Germany, Italy or Spain, as Sony’s rolled out its Music Unlimited subscription streaming service in each aforementioned nation just yesterday. Basically, it’s the same deal that launched in the UK last month, but at a slightly cheaper price given the exchange rate: €3.99 a month buys you a virtual radio station that streams millions of songs to your Sony TVs, Blu-ray players or PS3 — with portable devices and phones on the way — while €9.99 upgrades to a premium plan that lets you select tunes on demand and generate playlists. Next stop: North America. PR after the break.

Continue reading Sony’s Music Unlimited service infiltrates France, Germany, Italy and Spain, offers streaming tunes

Sony’s Music Unlimited service infiltrates France, Germany, Italy and Spain, offers streaming tunes originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jan 23

Best Buy Using Sleazy Tactic to Sell The Wii

Posted in: gaming, nintendo, Today's Chili, wii

This article was written on November 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

wii at best buy If you walked into a Best Buy store to browse one day and you happened to see an employee carrying a Wii above their head and proclaiming “The Last Wii!”, you might be intrigued to buy it, right? We all know that the Wii has been a rather hot commodity over the last year, and they continue to be short on supply with the current demand. Even if you had no intention of buying a system when you walked in (or you already own one), seeing it and hearing that it’s the very-last-one would be enough for anybody’s ears to perk up. You could sell it on eBay, give it to your kids, or keep it for yourself, the possibilities — endless! A Best Buy in New Jersey knows this, and so they’ve been selling “The Very Last Wii” over, and over, and over again. I’d call this a sleazy sales tactic, but one that obviously works. The story goes like this:

Saturday morning (11/10) I witnessed some amazing sleaziness over at the Princeton,NJ Best Buy. I was standing near the back of the store when one of their salespeople came strolling from a back door holding a Nintendo Wii over his head, and started walking the aisles announcing that it was their last unit. I followed, wondering both how quickly would it get snatched up and how quickly could I decide if I wanted to buy it. It took a few minutes for a couple to come rushing up to claim it, exclaiming how happy their kids were going to be. I went back to looking around the store. About 30 minutes later, I heard this announcement on the store’s PA: “Attention Best Buy customers! Julie is now walking through the store with our last Nintendo Wii! If you’re looking for a Nintendo Wii, please look for Julie!” And there was another salesperson doing the same thing as the first – walking the aisles of the store holding the Wii above her head.

I was now in the store solely to witness more of this sales technique. The second Wii took just over 15 minutes to sell – I overheard two manager-types (one in a suit, the other a yellow shirt) discussing it, the suit asking “Did Julie sell that Wii, yet? How long?” And then “Wait 40 minutes and send out the next one.” Too long for me to wait around, so I left (after stopping in at the store’s new Apple niche to set the a Macbook’s home page to the Best Buy tagged stories on Consumerist).

I suppose there’s nothing illegal or unexpected about this, but as some one tentatively in the market for a hard-to-find Wii I’m annoyed enough to swear off Best Buy this holiday season.

After reading that, I have a hard time believing that a Best Buy would feel that such a tactic were necessary! I mean, these things have been flying off the shelves on their own, without problems. Obviously we weren’t there to confirm whether or not this story is true, but it sounds like something a Best Buy would be capable of doing. If they were doing this with a Playstation 3, I’d be able to understand it a little more, but a Wii? Give me a break!

Source: The Consumerist

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Jan 23

Grace Digital punts WiFi radio into a wireless bookshelf speaker system, can’t escape Reciva’s ghost

Posted in: audio, Music, radio, speaker, speakers, Today's Chili, wifi, Wireless

Just when we thought Grace Digital Audio had turned over a new, touch-friendly leaf, the company’s back with another WiFi internet radio that uses the frustrating Reciva interface. We can’t say we’re pleased, but the firm’s new $250 Wireless Stereo Micro System does have one new feature that might be worth checking out — it comes with a pair of handsome bookshelf speakers that connect over the ether as well. This time, you can not only connect to your home wireless network (or auxiliary media player) and pull down loads of tunes from the typical array of services — including Pandora, Live365 and Sirius XM — but listen in stereo too, while hopefully hiding that ugly four-line LCD and its irksome nests of menus from ever disturbing your view.

Continue reading Grace Digital punts WiFi radio into a wireless bookshelf speaker system, can’t escape Reciva’s ghost

Grace Digital punts WiFi radio into a wireless bookshelf speaker system, can’t escape Reciva’s ghost originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jan 23

Toshiba NB550D with AMD Ontario denied entry to the US

Posted in: AMD, laptop, Laptops, netbook, Today's Chili, Toshiba
So, this sort of sucks. Remember the AMD Fusion Toshiba NB550D with its Harman Kardon speakers? Well, according to Toshiba it won’t be landing in the US anytime soon. According to Liliputing, Tosh has no plans to release the Ontario-powered 10-inch laptop on this side of the pond. Yep, it seems that Toshiba US would prefer to keep Intel’s Atom powering its 10-inch NB520 and NB505 netbooks and save AMD’s higher end Zacate E-Series for larger systems like its 15.6-inch Satellite C655D. Of course, there’s always the Acer Aspire One 522 for those seeking AMD’s Bobcat core and ATI Radeon 6250 graphics in a 10-inch chassis, but there’s just something about those HK speaker grills that have us wishin’ Toshiba would change its mind about this one.

Toshiba NB550D with AMD Ontario denied entry to the US originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 17:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jan 23

Instantbird – Where Mozilla Meets Pidgin

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Mozilla, Newly Released, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Pidgin is an extremely popular open source instant messenger, but have you ever thought to yourself what it would be like if Mozilla created something similar? It would be possible to make the instant messenger do almost anything you want with the use of extensions … you could even add more networks! Well, there hasn’t been any signs that Mozilla is working on such an application, but Florian Quèze and Quentin Castier took it upon themselves to turn the dream into a reality.

Let me introduce you to Instantbird, an XUL application that uses the libpurple library to connect to other networks. That’s the framework used by Mozilla, and the same library that both Pidgin and Meebo run off of.

–Current State–

The Instantbird 0.1 download is about 13MB in size, and there is no installation required to test it out. With that being said you may want to do a quick read through of this article before you spend the time setting it up.

Right now Instantbird is about as simple as it gets, but it does let you connect to several different networks: AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, QQ, XMPP, Yahoo!, and more. There is a tabbed interface for your chats and a decent account manager, but there are absolutely no options for you to configure. This screenshot that I took just about demonstrates the entire extent program:

Instantbird 

–What’s to Come–

The exciting part, however, is still yet to come. Here’s a brief look at the plans for future versions of Instantbird:

  • Instantbird 0.2 – status handling (away, busy, etc…), contact management, extensibility, notifier, and more.
  • Instantbird 0.3 – richtext for outgoing messages, buddy icons, file transfers, preferences, sounds, and more.
  • Instantbird 1.0 – should be close to what Pidgin offers
  • Instantbird 1.0+ – video and voice support

–Oh the Possibilities–

I’m really excited about the future of this project because of how it plans to use extensions. In fact the theme and extension manager has already been implemented into Instantbird:

Instantbird Addons

The add-ons site hasn’t launched yet, but when it does we might see some truly awesome features roll out. Think about being able to send files to friends no matter what network they are on! The thought of having addons in an instant messenger is extremely appealing to me, and if developed well enough could cause its popularity to rise very fast. Pidgin’s plugin system just doesn’t cut it in my mind.

I wish the best to the developers, and I can’t wait to see what future versions have to offer!

Instantbird Homepage [via David Ascher]

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Jan 23

1.2GHz Tegra 2 3D chips suggested by leaked slide, coming ‘spring 2011’

Posted in: arm, dual-core, leak, mwc, mwc 2011, Mwc2011, NVIDIA, rumor, speculation, tegra, tegra 2, Tegra2, Today's Chili

Darn, we’ve barely started getting acquainted with Tegra 2, yet NVIDIA seems to already be preparing the stage for a sort of Tegra 2.5 — a 1.2GHz dual-core chip that’ll be marketed as a 3D-capable mobile processor. This T25 silicon is apparently set for mass production in the first quarter of this year, with availability coming up in the spring. Given the noises we keep hearing about 3D going mobile, this is one rumor that makes a lot of sense — and even if you’re a staunch supporter of the 2D creed, you can’t deny that a sped-up Tegra 2 CPU sounds pretty delicious. We’ve managed to also track down some technical chatter about adding support to Chromium OS for a 1.2GHz T25 from NVIDIA, seemingly corroborating the leaked image above. Oh boy, it’s gonna be a hot summer for mobile computing this year!

1.2GHz Tegra 2 3D chips suggested by leaked slide, coming ‘spring 2011’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 15:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jan 23

Nikkei: PSP2 will have 3G cellular data, OLED touchscreen

Posted in: gaming, OLED, playstation, psp, sony, Today's Chili, touchscreen

We’re only four days away from a supposed January 27th unveiling, but apparently there are still more juicy PSP2 rumors left to dole out — Japan’s often-reliable Nikkei newspaper reports that the handheld machine will sport a crisp OLED touchscreen and 3G data from NTT DoCoMo when it arrives later this year, with the latter enabling multiplayer action and even full video and game downloads over the Japanese cellular network. What’s more, the paper confirms that the screen will be physically larger and powered by some potent new silicon. So, how will Sony differentiate this PSP2 from the PlayStation Phone and tempt you to buy both? The game system won’t make calls.

Note: In case you’re not familiar, the image above is a relatively ancient reader mockup, and likely not representative of the final product. It is pretty sexy, though.

Nikkei: PSP2 will have 3G cellular data, OLED touchscreen originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 14:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jan 23

This Week’s Best YouTube Videos: Cubicle Doorbells, Verizon iPhones, Wikipedia’s Birthday, and More

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, videos, YouTube

iPhone - Clock Countdown

Wikipedia celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and in case you don’t remember the service’s humble beginnings, one of the best videos at YouTube this week was a little retrospective of how the service has grown and where it started. Also, Verizon Wireless and Apple dropped their first ad for their upcoming iPhone launch on Verizon Wireless exclusively on the Web, and of course the video was an instant sensation. 
That wasn’t all though – ThinkGeek’s new Cubicle doorbell yielded some of the funniest bits of office humor I’ve ever seen, a remix of Dire Straits collides with Star Trek: The Next Generation, and we get a prime example of why you should watch where you’re walking instead of texting. Hit the jump to see the videos. 
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Jan 23

Leaked Image Of Microsoft’s Origami — Real Or Fake?

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on March 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Leaked Image Of Microsoft's Origami -- Real Or Fake?

Lately there has been a lot of news sites scrambling to get information on the secretive device by Microsoft called Origami. The excitement that people have over this device is absolutely amazing, and people are making it sound as revolutionary as the iPod. However, even Robert Scoble has said “There’s no way this thing is going to be able to meet the expectations of the hype being placed on it.”

The photo above is a supposed image of Microsoft’s Origami that was leaked but the reliability of the source is currently not known. It does look impressive and appears to be running some sort of a mock-up of Windows Vista. I guess we will have to keep wishing what the device will do since we don’t know exactly yet.

News Source: Origami Portal

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