Hasta La Gadget!

As much as we were hoping to get some definitive statements from AT&T and Verizon’s Q1 2011 financials about the Verizon iPhone’s impact on the smartphone market, none were really forthcoming. It’s left to analyst outfits like the NPD, therefore, to try and parse the data for us and read between the official lines. The latest numbers from the NPD Group’s Mobile Phone Tracker indicate that Apple’s share of US smartphones sales jumped from 19 percent in Q4 2010 to 28 percent in the first quarter of this year, which helped stymie Android’s prodigious expansion. The Google OS went from being on 53 percent of all smartphones sold to a flat 50 percent in the quarter. Also intriguing about the period is that, for the first time, smartphones accounted for more than half of all mobile phones sold in the US, at 54 percent. The top five best-selling cellphones also happened to be smartphones, with Apple and HTC providing two each; the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, Droid X, EVO 4G, and the Droid Incredible took home the NPD commendations.

[Thanks, Matt]

Disclaimer: NPD’s Ross Rubin is a contributor to Engadget.

NPD credits Verizon iPhone with stemming the Android tide in Q1 smartphone sales originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This $150 stainless-steel bottle cage is vanishingly rare. And that’s probably a good thing

This scrappy-looking bottle cage comes from Mr. Iribe, an apparently mythical Keirin track-frame builder in Japan. When he is not busy making bikes for the Samurai, “he makes a few bottle cages as well”, says the blurb on Compass Bicycles’ (Seattle) website. These hand-made cages are so good, it seems, that they are worth $150 apiece.

So what do you get for your money? The Iribe Bottle Cage is made from stainless-steel tubing, with the sections silver-brazed together. Compass says that stainless steel is poorly suited to fillet-brazing, so Mr. Iribe first wraps the joints with strips of steel first. This, combined with the un-plated finish and what looks like a spring from a ballpen, results in an accessory that looks like it was hacked together by a somebody during an emergency.

Compass’s writer would disagree, saying that the cage “reminds me of a Samurai sword: a piece of art that provides exceptional function.”

The cage is light, though, at just 36 grams, or 1.27 ounces. I just weighed the first cheap aluminum and plastic bottle cage I pulled from my bike-spares bin and it weighs in at 60 grams. Of course, once you add in a liter of water, which weighs 1000 grams (on top of the weight of the bottle itself), then that 24 gram difference looks vanishingly small.

And my bottle cage cost like $5, not $150.

Iribe Bottle Cage [Compass Bicycles via BSNYC]

See Also:

• Bottleclip Keeps Stylish Cyclists Hydrated
• VelEau, The Most Complicated Bike Drinking System You Could …
• Danger: Handlebar Mounted Cup-Holders

The PSN hacking that left millions of customers’ personal data exposed isn’t the first time Sony has royally screwed up. CNET looks back on some of the company’s most memorable mistakes of the past few years.

Originally posted at Circuit Breaker

Woah there, Mr. Speedy. We’ve barely caught up with the 10Gbps Thunderbolt interconnect, debuted in the new Macbook Pro, and now Intel’s hyperactive researchers are already chattering away about something five times faster. They’re promising a new interconnect, ready in four years, that will combine silicon and optical components (a technology called silicon photonics) to pump 50Gbps over distances of up to 100m. That’s the sort of speed Intel predicts will be necessary to handle, say, ultra-HD 4k video being streamed between smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes and TVs. Intel insists that poor old Mr. Thunderbolt won’t be forced into early retirement, but if we were him we’d be speaking to an employment lawyer right about now.

Intel touts 50Gbps interconnect by 2015, will make it work with tablets and smartphones too originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Apr 2011 06:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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