Hasta La Gadget!

Like the Galaxy S III before it, Samsung has just announced that the new Galaxy Note II will indeed hit all five major U.S. carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless — by the middle of this November.

Fine, I admit it, the company’s still being pretty vague here. As usual, Samsung has left it up to the carriers to announce exactly when the new-fangled phablet will hit their respective store shelves, but rest easy — those announcements are bound to start trickling out any minute now.

There’s also no official word on pricing (on-contract or otherwise), but if the original is any indicator the Note II should launch with a price tag between $249 and $299.

Before we get too wrapped up in the details, let’s consider the hardware for just a moment — the Note II’s 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display and redesigned S-Pen may count among the device’s biggest draws, but its internals are worthy of some extra scrutiny here. While plenty of international handsets tend to get neutered once they make their way stateside, that thankfully doesn’t seem to be the case with the Note II. Samsung’s 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos chipset still runs the show here, while 2GB of RAM and an LTE radio help keep things moving at a snappy pace.

What’s more, the device is Samsung’s first to ship pre-loaded with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, though the Korean company’s liberal application of TouchWiz may make that fact a tough one to discern at first glance. Of course, Samsung’s additions don’t end there: the full slew of S-Pen applications is present too, as are plenty of modifications and updates seen in the recently-launched Galaxy Note 10.1 (think increased S-Pen sensitivity, greater hover distance, and more).

It’s also worth noting that Samsung’s timing really couldn’t be any better — LG opened the doors to its latest press conference/domestic phone unveiling just an hour ago, and now its rival has announced availability for its newest top-tier Android handset. To top it all off, LG also just recently launched its own hulking handset — the LG Intuition — which was largely panned by critics. The poor guys just can’t catch a break.

The chances of you having ever heard of the Dar al Gani 1058 moon rock, which is a lunar meteorite, is slim. However, this moon rock is notable because it’s the largest ever put up for auction. Auction house Heritage Auctions believes that the chunk of the moon could go for $380,000.

This particular lunar meteorite isn’t a piece of moon rock returned by the Apollo astronauts, so NASA has no claim over the rock and can’t stop the auction. Any moon rock returned by Apollo astronauts remains the property of NASA and the US government and can’t be sold to the public. This rock weighs four pounds is the fourth largest piece of moon rock available to the public.

It’s worth noting that rocks actually retrieved by probes or astronauts sent to the moon are worth more than lunar meteorites because of the inherent collector’s value of such pieces. Dar al Gani 1058 was a piece of the lunar highland breccias from the moon’s far side according to experts. There’s no way to tell exactly when the rock was ejected from the moon.

The moon rock was discovered in Libya in 1998. It has been put up for auction by an anonymous collector and the opening bid for the rock is set at $170,000. The auction house expects the rock will go to a museum and calls the specimen “worthy the most important natural history museums in the world.”

[via Huffington Post]

Dar Al Gani 1058 moon rock heads to auction is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Telepresence robots seem to be something that some people are starting to look at, and that’s one of the reasons why two Princeton students, Tianlong Wang and Xinyi Chen created the Helios robot. It turns your smartphone into a mobile telepresence rig for far less than other solutions.

Helios looks pretty interesting, as it’s an extremely low-cost solution. I’m all for telepresence, but spending thousands of dollars for a remote avatar doesn’t interest me at all. The Helios will retail for just $99(USD). The small, wheeled robot will allow you to have video chats with friends, family and co-workers around the globe, while you can steer the tiny ‘bot to follow them around or change camera position remotely. Thanks to a clever system that reads symbols off the bottom edge of the smartphone’s screen, it should work readily with a variety of phones. The prototypes work only with iPhones, but after launch, the plan is to release Android and Windows Phone apps as well.

Hello Labs is currently accepting pre-orders for the device, which is supposed to ship for this year’s holiday season. They also plan on launching Helios as a Kickstarter campaign.

[via Make:]

We’d say the wait is nearly over, but that wouldn’t be telling the whole truth. Inching ever closer to a hard launch date, Samsung’s Galaxy Note II is now poised to hit stateside on Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular “by mid-November.” If you’re seeking anything more specific than that, you’ll have to hold out for individual carrier announcements. What we do know for sure, however, is that the US variant of this 5.5-incher will be packing HSPA+42 / LTE radios and sporting a nigh unchanged build — much like the company’s other flagship, the GS III. To recap, this S-Pen equipped phablet, recently unveiled at IFA 2012, features a 1280 x 720 HD Super AMOLED display, quad-core 1.6GHz Exynos processor, 2GB RAM and ships with a skinned version of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Sure, this release is shaping up to be a slow tease, but that anticipation just makes the final bow of this second act even sweeter. Official PR after the break.

Continue reading Samsung Galaxy Note II to land ‘by mid-November’ on all major US carriers

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

Samsung Galaxy Note II to land ‘by mid-November’ on all major US carriers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I honestly hate my husbands Smartphone, whenever we’re in the car and he asks me to answer a text for him, I hate it even more. I can’t say that I have particularly chubby fingers, but I can never seem to get through a whole text without mis-typing several letters. I can think of a few phones, tablets, or even some apps that could truly benefit from a nice stylus… was there something wrong with using a stylus? Who decided fingers were better?

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[ The NEW Bamboo Stylus Pocket – Because Fingers are Fat copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]