Sony Xperia Play hits the UK on March 31st, thumbsticks coming never

Sony Xperia Play hits the UK on March 31st, thumbsticks coming never

Readers in the British Empire get ready for Sony Ericsson‘s biggest UK marketing campaign ever. That’s in the lead-up to the release of the Xperia Play, a phone that we’ve been hearing about for so long that we’d need some pretty shocking commercials to get us all excited again. You may feel differently, though, so mark your calendars for March 31st. That’s the end of the month and falls in nicely with the “late March” word we’d heard for elsewhere in the world, though that is awfully late. As to where you can buy it, it’s said that “all the mobile operators and retailers” will have it, so you shouldn’t have to wander too far. And, with six games pre-installed, you should even be reasonably well equipped to kill the rest of that Thursday.

Sony Xperia Play hits the UK on March 31st, thumbsticks coming never originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola Xoom Not Selling

 

motorola-xoom-android.jpgMotorola Xoom is not the iPad, or even the Samsung Galaxy tablet–and the sales show it. Sales have fallen short of expectations, and now some people are expecting a production cut.

 Here’s what analyst Peter Misek had to say about the Xoom sales,

Xoom sales have been underwhelming. While marketing has just started we believe MMI will likely have to cut production if it already has not done so. We believe the device has been a bit buggy and did not meet the magic price point of $500. We believe management knows this and is hurrying development and production of lower cost tablets. Importantly we believe management will likely have to make the painful decision to accept little to no margin initially in order to match iPad 2’s wholesale pricing.

Motorola has not released figures yet, however, IDC didn’t even list the device in its break down of tablet market share. Motorola has plans to lower the $800.00 price soon, which might help a bit.

Via ZDNet

Jack White Bringing Mobile Record Store to SXSW

jack white record mobile.jpg

Here’s a mindboggling statistic for you: “97 percent of all high school aged kids have never been to a stand alone record store.” I mean, the stat is in a YouTube video, so it has to be true, right? Whatever the case may be, the once-mighty record store is, without question, a dying breed. Thankfully, it has Jack White on its side.

The former White Stripes frontman is giving the world (or at least the portion of it that resides in Austin, Texas) The Third Man Rolling Record Store. It’s something of a bookmobile for vinyl, only instead of the friendly librarian manning the thing, it’s that creepy pale guy from The Raconteurs. 
White and his decidedly swanky mode of transportation will be hitting the Texas street for South by Southwest from the 16th to the 20th.Teaser video after the jump.

Nintendo Wii Game We Dare Is Pulled From UK

 

WeDare.jpgNintendo has pulled a Ubisoft Wii game called We Dare from the UK market, due to risqué commercials within the title. 

The commercials hit the Internet a few days ago, showing spanking, and other acts deemed more mature than the game’s PEGI 12 rated audience. Once the videos circled to UK, the local Government demanded it be pulled due to the inconsistent rating given by PEGI.

The commercials have since been banned in the US, but are still on Ubisoft YouTube channel being listed as private. No word on if other European countries will allow We Dare to be released.

Via Ars Techica

Helpful Tip: Use the Internet to Save $$$ Eating Out

This article was written on March 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

free food offer If you’re one of those people who like to save a buck here or there, here’s a helpful tip that will save you some money when you’re eating out at a restaurant. Most restaurants these days have websites that you can visit to check business hours, or view the menu. Additionally, many of those restaurant sites have an email list or newsletter that you can sign up for. I know, I know, no one likes getting more junk in their inbox, but this “junk” just might be worth it.  When you sign up for an email list or newsletter, most restaurants will send you a thank-you “gift.”

From our experiences, the thank-you gift can be anything from a coupon for a free appetizer to a coupon for a few dollars off your purchase. And if you set-up an email account just for newsletters like this, you won’t have to worry about your regular account getting cluttered up with junk. Some of them will even send you an additional free gift once your birthday rolls around. Anything helps, right? With as expensive as eating out can get, signing up for an email newsletter from some of your favorite places can be worth it.

Here are a few examples of offers you’ll receive when signing up for an E-Club or newsletter:

After signing up, it usually takes a couple of days to get your coupon so if you can plan ahead, you’ll be better off. Have a tip on how to save money eating out? Let us know!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Motorola Xoom Preps for Flash Video

moto tablet finger.jpg

If you’re Motorola, today might not be the day to try to get the world to pay attention to your new tablet. After all, everyone is a bit fixated with that other device at the moment. The one that’s launching today. You know, the one with the 90 percent tablet market share.

Still, no doubt sick and tired of having the second generation iPad steal its spotlight in recent weeks, Motorola today announced that it will begin rolling out a system update tonight aimed at prepping the device for the March 18th release of Adobe Flash Player 10.2.
The company has long offered Flash as selling point in the company’s battle against the iPad, with Steve Jobs’s on-going snubbing of the otherwise ubiquitous software, for reasons of security, batter life, and overall user experience. The Xoom didn’t actually ship with the software, however, waiting for the 3.0.1 Android Honeycomb update. 

Symbian UI overhaul scheduled for the fall?

While Symbian might be good as dead to most Engadget readers, Nokia must continue supporting the millions of S^ wearing faithful until it can fully transition to a Windows Phone smartphone shop in 2012. So we were interested to hear Marc Driessen, Nokia Benelux product manager, spill some details about a few previously unannounced Symbian updates for 2011. As you’ll recall, S^4 as a product had been canned months ago, but the scheduled UI updates were still part of the Symbian roadmap. According to Driessen, Nokia is targeting a major UI overhaul in the fall, an update rumored to include a dedicated pull-down status bar up top; new iconography; new flexible widgets; a simplified navigation bar below; and better menus throughout that don’t require a scuba suit to navigate. While Nokia HQ won’t confirm the dates or details to us (we asked), the fall timeline does match with what we’ve heard elsewhere. Dutch site All About Phones is also reporting that a smaller update for N8 and E7 users might come as early as this summer. Of course, those owners are still waiting for the first real S^3 update that was promised for early 2011, so hopefully Nokia can squeeze in the split screen text input, portrait QWERTY, and improved browser before March is done.

Symbian UI overhaul scheduled for the fall? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flash 10.2 beta hits Android Market on March 18th, supports Honeycomb, Gingerbread and Froyo (update)

Contrary to reports floating about the web, the Motorola Xoom isn’t getting Adobe Flash Player 10.2 today — rather, the tablet is getting updated to support Flash, which will actually arrive in one week. Adobe now says that Flash Player 10.2 will be ready to download from the Android Market on March 18th, supporting only Honeycomb tablets (in other words, just the Xoom) to start, and will eventually be available for Android 2.2 smartphones — again, contrary to what we’d been told, but we can’t really complain on that count supporting Android 2.2 (Froyo), Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and a beta version for Android 3.0.1 (Honeycomb) at release. Froyo devices won’t get the full battery-friendly Stage Video rendering pipeline and deep browser integration like their Honeycomb tablet brethren, but dual-core phones will reportedly see a performance improvement nonetheless, and there’s a new tweak that’ll let Flash web apps pull up a virtual keyboard if needed for full functionality. PR after the break.

Update: Adobe contacted us to clarify that Flash 10.2 is, in fact, headed to all three of the most recent versions of Android on March 18th — the Honeycomb tablet version will simply sport a beta label, and the smartphone builds will lack full functionality as described above.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Flash 10.2 beta hits Android Market on March 18th, supports Honeycomb, Gingerbread and Froyo (update)

Flash 10.2 beta hits Android Market on March 18th, supports Honeycomb, Gingerbread and Froyo (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Xbox 360 ruled in February, NPD says

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 easily bested the competition, according to market researcher NPD. Xbox was followed by Wii and PlayStation 3. Black Ops was the top-selling game last month.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

Instapaper 3 Adds Sharing, Curated Articles and Plain Old Speed

Instapaper 3 makes a good app better

Instapaper, one of the best apps on any mobile device, has just been updated to v3.0 in time for you to enjoy on your new iPad 2. There are some big new features, but if you want to go right along and continue reading articles you saved earlier, then you can carry on as if nothing had changed.

And if you never used Instapaper, here’s a refresher: You click a bookmarklet whenever you see a web article you’d like to read later. Fire up Instapaper — later — and you’ll find all the articles saved and beautifully formatted for easy reading.

The biggest new feature is social integration (no, don’t groan — developer Marco Arment has got this just right). The button to “star” favorite articles has been replaced by a “Like” button, and your friends can browse and read these articles.

Friends come from the usual places — Facebook, Twitter, your contacts list, Tumblr (Arment was a founder and the developer of Tumblr), and also Pinboard and Evernote. Once you have added friends you can click to browse a list of their liked articles. It actually works really well, and is a lot better than the previous system, where you had to subscribe to another Instapaper user’s email address. In fact, so hidden was this feature that you likely didn’t even know it existed.

Next up are editor’s picks. This section gathers various long-form journalism aggregators: Give Me Something to Read, Longreads, The Browser and Longform.org. Tap one of these and you are taken to the relevant website (using the new, redesigned built-in browser) from where you can pick what you want to read, whether now or later.

There are lots of other less noticeable updates, too. Better image quality for stored pictures, full search of downloaded articles (great for research) and what Marco calls a “smart rotation lock,” which pops up a button to switch on rotation-lock if it thinks you have tipped your iDevice too far by accident. This is fantastic for people who prefer to use the iPad’s toggl-switch for muting, not rotation lock, and is one of those tiny, smart touches with which Marco peppers his software.

It’s a solid upgrade, and free. And if you don’t use Instapaper already, shame on you — it only costs $5.

Instapaper 3.0 is here! [Instapaper Blog]

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