Hasta La Gadget!

Visualized: Motorola Xoom rolls into Best Buy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Announced late last year, Sprint’s version of the HTC 7 Pro has been stuck in a holding pattern (along with Verizon’s Trophy) while waiting for Microsoft to wrap up its first big software update for Windows Phone 7, which includes copy and paste functionality along with — you guessed it — CDMA support. Steve Ballmer’s keynote address at MWC last week nailed down said update for launch in the first part of March, which means that there shouldn’t be much else holding up Sprint and Verizon from getting their first WP7 devices out of the door. A follow-up tweet to an earlier teaser posted on Sprint’s official Twitter account says that a device being announced on February 24th “will have a hub for gaming, music, pictures, and video,” which sounds an awful lot like Windows Phone 7’s hubs to us — and we’re not aware of anything but the 7 Pro in Sprint’s Microsoft-flavored pipeline, so it’s starting to feel like a lock. Who’s buying?

Sprint tweet makes February 24th launch sound like Windows Phone 7 — is the HTC 7 Pro ready? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As crisp and vibrant as AMOLED and Super AMOLED smartphone displays are, they roll off the assembly lines with a pretty big design compromise: most of the components in the marketplace right now make use of a little visual trickery called PenTile whereby green subpixels occur with greater frequency than red and blue. Meanwhile, traditional displays (CRT, LCD, plasma, you name it) typically use one red, one green, and one blue subpixel per pixel, and the end result is that AMOLEDs tend to be a little grainier by comparison at a given resolution. OLED-Info points out that Sammy’s new Super AMOLED Plus displays appear to have solved the PenTile problem, instead using something called Real-Stripe — effectively meaning honest-to-goodness RGB pixels, which explains the company’s claim back at CES of a 50 percent boost in subpixel count. Interestingly, Real-Stripe requires more space per pixel, which could be why the Galaxy S II and Infuse 4G are 4.3 and 4.5 inches, respectively, a pretty healthy hike from the 4-inch mark they’d settled on with last year’s original Galaxy S models. ‘Course, none of this puts us close to the 7 or 10 inches we’d need to make a tablet work — but we know they’re cranking on that already.

Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus displays dispense of maligned PenTile pixel configuration originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ditching school used to be a lot easier. A California based school district wants to stop all hooky playing. Anaheim Union High School District will being giving students who have missed four unexcused days in a school year a GPS tracking device.

The GPS device will be a size of a cellphone and force kids to “check in” a couple of times of a day. That way the school district will know where the students are at any given time. The real kicker here is that both the student and parents have to agree to use the device. No word about what will happen if neither party agrees to use it.

I have heard about these ideas before, but this one is less invasive idea than other proposals. My only issue here is that the kid could leave it at one location, and thus make the device pointless. Either way, the school district could lose on this. What are your thoughts about schools using GPS devices to track students?

Via Hot Hardware

Microsoft to release Kinect for Windows SDK this spring originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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