Hasta La Gadget!

When we were younger, we lusted after the top-shelf electric train set. The pow-pow-Power Wheels jeep. The Virtual Boy. These days, that rich kid down the street will have a very different sort of toy. When ModMyi reported that Toys ‘R’ Us was training associates to sell the iPad 2 weeks ago, we thought it might be a leftover April Fools’, but sure enough, Geoffrey the Giraffe will begin pushing Apple’s tablet to children who don’t want to grow up as soon as tomorrow morning.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Sign of the times: iPad 2 heads to Toys R Us originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A hotel just not enough space for you when you’re on vacation? How does a village sound? Still too cramped? What about an entire country? If you’re the kind of person that just needs to spread out a little bit when you’re away from home, rental service Airbnb would like to offer you one of ten rental towns (or even the small country of Liechtenstein) as your personal getaway.

The company’s usual service involves renting out users empty apartments while they’re away to travellers needing a place to stay and similar person-to-person short-term rentals. Now, they’ve partnered with marketing company Xnet to expand their offerings to whole geographic areas. Airbnb’s website suggests that Xnet will take the villages and “transform them into highly customized settings for events, corporate retreats, conferences and more.” I’ve heard of themed hotels, themed parties and themed vacations, but a themed country is an entirely new one. If you ever wanted a small country in Europe to bend to your every will, and your name isn’t Nikita Khrushchev circa 1958, now’s your chance.

Of course, this is all a huge marketing stunt, but given that Liechtenstein is apparently a hot rental property, there’s no doubt some people will buy into it. It’s not exactly the most economical of travel plans to make either; Liechtenstein is $70,000 a night with a minimum two night stay. Thankfully, according to its listing, it accommodates between 450 and 900 people. Rental villages hover around $50,000 a night, if you don’t feel spendy enough to lay down the cash for an entire nation.

Rumor has it that HP is preparing to enter the cloud-based music storage fray. A reader at PreCentral sent in what purports to be a confidential PowerPoint presentation indicating the TouchPad will launch with an HP-branded music and movie store, as well as a smart syncing service that caches frequently accessed media for local playback. This may very well be the “Music Synergy” that SVP Steven McArthur mentioned to us. Amazon has already launched such an app and it’s all but official that Google is planning the same thing, so it only makes sense that the company would want to imbue webOS with similar powers. We can’t verify these claims ourselves and the slide above is clearly a wonky Photoshop job, but it’s would hardly be surprising after snatching up Melodeo and the streaming music service Nutsie. And, while webOS and Android are working to banish the quaint ritual of plugging your cellphone into a computer, we can only imagine what the Lala team is up to — maybe Jobs has them washing his turtlenecks.

HP may bless webOS with cloud-syncing music store originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Unlike lasers, HPM beams don’t need a lot of accuracy. With a fan [of HPM energy] you can target 10-30 small boats. If you can knock out 50-75% of the engines in a swarm, you can then concentrate on the remainder with lasers or kinetic [cannons].”

To develop better defenses against such attacks, the contractor received $150,000 from the Air Force to test-fire microwaves at military computers. No word on whether said defenses involve generous use of tin foil.

US government contractor developing ‘microwave gun,’ Hot Pockets tremble originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paper alloy takes shape for biodegradable consumer electronics (write your own origami joke) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 15:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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