Hasta La Gadget!

Not long after HP’s CEO Meg Whitman made comments about re-entering the smartphone market, here is a screenshot from the GLBenchmark database that suggests that there is an Android HP smartphone codenamed Bender that has submitted some data there.

Of course, you would think that HP engineers would be savvy enough to not submit data from a test product, but we’ve seen this happen with other brands before (it could be an orchestrated leak too), so it’s plausible. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: HP TouchPad triple boots into webOS, Android and Arch Linux, CyanogenMod 7 rolled out for TouchPad in Alpha stage,

Every time I think about the retiring of the Space Shuttle fleet, it bums me out. I’ve been following the Shuttle since grade school when the Challenger disaster was all we could think about. It’s sad to think that for the foreseeable future, United States astronauts will have to catch a ride with foreign governments to be able to make it into space.

With the Space Shuttle fleet now retired, the massive Kennedy Space Center runway where the Shuttles used to land will no longer see astronauts returning home after touching down on its surface. To commemorate the final three active Space Shuttles, black granite plaques have been placed alongside the runway showing where the three Shuttles made their final landings.

There are plaques for the Endeavour, Discovery, and Atlantis – conspicuously absent are plaques for the ill-fated shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

The plaques are placed where the nose gear stopped on each of the shuttle’s final missions and offer details on how many missions each shuttle flew, how many days they spent in space, and how many miles they flew.

[via Florida Today]

Warning for the cripplingly self-conscious: a study from the University of Missouri has shown that crappy comments on your profile picture can negatively affect how attractive people find you not only in a physical sense, but in a social and professional one as well. At least in people who try to gauge attractiveness from nothing put a profile picture. More »

What a week. What a month! So far this September, Amazon, Nokia, Motorola and Apple have announced new products, and HTC is up next, with a press event scheduled for Wednesday. We’ll let you speak for yourselves — maybe you want more liveblogs — but we here at Engadget keen to take a break from the hands-on posts and breaking news posts and talk shop about the products we already own. This week, Jason tests a rugged tablet sleeve, Don rates his Dell monitor and Darren makes the case for disposable AAs (and yes, he has a favorite brand).

Continue reading IRL: Ballistic Tough Jacket, Dell UltraSharp U2412M and an argument for disposable AA batteries

IRL: Ballistic Tough Jacket, Dell UltraSharp U2412M and an argument for disposable AA batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Would you whack your phone voluntarily to shut it up? I know I wouldn’t. Just think of all the bumps and scratches whacking might cause to the phone’s exterior. This is just one more reason why I probably won’t be buying any Microsoft phones soon – especially those that incorporate this strange feature.

Okay, so Microsoft hasn’t actually gotten around to making phones that ask you to whack them, but they might. They’ve been on a patent filing spree lately and the one that asks you to give your phone a good old whack or two is just one of them.

The patent application explains that users will be able to turn their phone off or make it go silent by hitting it. It’s pretty much common knowledge that you aren’t supposed to drop your phone or hit it at will, but if Microsoft goes through with incorporating this feature into future phones, then you might soon see well-meaning people whacking their phones in public while they look like idiots to the rest of us.

[TNW via Gizmodo via Dvice]