Hasta La Gadget!

Desk Pets is a company that makes all sorts of small remote-controlled toys. Some of the first products offered from the company were shaped like little bugs. The last product we talked about from Desk Pets was the TankBot that we reviewed late last year. The company is back with a new toy called the CarBot that is now available.

Desk Pets has announced that the CarBot can be purchased in retail stores, including Brookstone, Best Buy, and Toys “R” Us. The company calls the new toy the world’s first micro-robotic toy car, and the little car is available for $29.99. Like most of the Desk Pets toys we’ve seen, the CarBot is controlled by an app running on Android or iOS devices.

The car has some interesting special features, including a battle mode that allows multiple players to battle using infrared sensors. The car also has a maze mode allowing players to set up a maze that the toy can navigate on its own. CarBot also has a personality mode with sound and lights as well as a mute button to play in silence.

When the car is placed in Drift ‘n’ Race mode, the little toy can reach a speed of 2 feet per second. The car has an internal rechargeable battery and charges via a retractable USB charger built into the product. Forty minutes of charge time gives users 15 minutes of play time. There are four different colors of the car, including red, blue, orange, and green each operating on their own frequency allowing up to four to be played with at one time.

Desk Pets CarBot now available for $29.99 is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Indie game makers have been lobbing titles over Gabe Newell’s fence for a short while, but now his company is inviting everyone else to join in as well. Valve has widened Steam Greenlight’s crowdsourced approval process to include non-gaming software, with the community voting the most popular and useful apps onto Steam’s virtual shelves. We’re thinking of submitting a program ourselves, that calculates the time required for three quantities of a decaying substance to fall to half their value, just so we can see everyone’s faces when Half-Life Three appears on the list.

Filed under: Internet, Software

Steam Greenlight adds non-gaming category for your consideration originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Entrusting AOL with your email sounds like something best left for the 90s, but the company hopes that its cross-platform management client Alto will bring you back into the fold. Designed to bring existing Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, .Mac, and .me email accounts into some semblance of order, Alto organizes messages into cloud based “stacks” that can be themed by sender, recipients, keywords, or other factors, mimicking the way people traditionally sort through their physical mail.

“The way we use email has changed radically over the years, but the core email application experience hasn’t” AOL’s senior director of product for AOL Mail, Joshua Ramirez, said of Alto. “We’ve taken a deep look at how people use email now, and designed an application around that reality.”

As well as manually creating stacks, Alto will create them itself; initially, that’s based on a selection of pre-loaded categories, such as photos, attachments, social networking notifications, deals emails from providers like Groupon, and messages from retailers such as Amazon. However, they can be easily customized.

Photos, meanwhile, can be shared directly from emails to Facebook and Twitter, and Alto can pull in contact details from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as the latest social networking updates from your friends.

“When you sort through physical mail, you put it into stacks because it’s a natural way to decide what’s important, what’s junk, and what to save for later” Ramirez says. “We wanted to recreate that experience with Alto, but make it intelligent and automatic, to easily deal with the hundreds of emails we get every day.”

AOL Alto is available in invite-based beta from today; you can sign up here.

AOL Alto wrestles your email into order is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The folks at Verizon are revelling in their third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, having reported a 14.3 percent overall increase in earnings per share year-over-year. Wireless service revenues — not least from us smartphone users — contributed heavily to that income, growing 7.5 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011 off the back of a “record high” profit margin. The operator attributes these gains to its “4G LTE network advantage,” with its LTE service now available to 250 million customers and potential customers across the US, as well as to its “well-received Share Everything Plans and unmatched product portfolio.” It added 1.5 million postpaid connections, bringing its total wireless membership to just shy of 96 million souls.

Continue reading Verizon reports Q3 wireless service revenues up 7.5 percent, LTE now available to 250 million people

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Verizon

Verizon reports Q3 wireless service revenues up 7.5 percent, LTE now available to 250 million people originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A cleanly organized inbox may be a holy grail that’s seemingly out of reach, but AOL (which happens to be our parent company) has unveiled a web-based e-mail client dubbed Alto to help cut through clutter. Instead of singing up for a brand-new email address, users log into the service with an existing Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL or iCloud account and can use Alto to organize, send and receive messages. In addition to the traditional list view of received emails, Alto takes a cue from analog letters and automatically sorts mail into stacks depending on whether they contain attachments, photos, daily deals, notifications from social networks and bulletins from retailers. Users can customize and hide existing piles or even create new stacks based on key words, recipients, senders and other parameters.

Have more than one email account that needs its contents wrangled into order? No problem. Alto can handle up to five accounts per user. If you’re intrigued by the cloud-based client, you can take a gander at the gallery of screenshots below or head past the break for more details in the press release. Alto is currently accepting users on a first come, first serve basis in a limited preview, so hit the source link if you feel inclined to take it for a spin.

Continue reading AOL unveils Alto: a web-based email client with an emphasis on aesthetics and organization

Filed under: Internet

AOL unveils Alto: a web-based email client with an emphasis on aesthetics and organization originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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