Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to the Engadget holiday gift guide! Picking presents for friends and loved ones is never a simple task, and with thousands of options for each category, buying technology can be an especially frustrating experience. We’re here to help. Below you’ll find today’s bevy of curated picks, and you can head back to our hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season. And don’t forget to enter our giveaway — leave a comment for a chance to nab AT&T’s LG Optimus G.

If you have any gadget junkies in your life, there’s a good chance they’re craving a new smartphone. Whether you’re on a tight budget or have a fat wallet, simply look to our surefire list of the best and most unique mobile devices to place under the tree. But enough with the chatter… let’s start shopping!

Continue reading Engadget’s holiday gift guide 2012: smartphones

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, LG

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What is it about getting in the shower that suddenly makes us want to sing? It is obviously the same disease that infects us when we get in our car. I’m suddenly turned into Aretha Franklin or Adele or something. Very scary for those within earshot. But there is something therapeutic about being drenched in your favorite music or news while showering.

High five to Kohler. They did what we knew would eventually come. Meet Moxie, your new Bluetooth shower head. Well, technically it is a showerhead with a Bluetooth speaker in the center. With single button connectivity, syncing the speaker with your source is easy. Then simply dock it via magnetic connection in the showerhead. You’ll get 7 hours of use before you need to disconnect and re-charge and an LED will indicate when it is time to recharge. Since the speaker can be disconnected, take your tunes with you once you leave the shower too. The 60 nozzle showerhead easily delivers a full spray. As you would expect from Kohler, the unit is designed to resist corrosion and the silicon spray surface means easy cleaning. The speaker is always white, but take your choice of polished chrome or white showerhead. If this no brainer is for you visit Amazon and pick one up for $199. Your shower time will never be the same.

[ Redefine Singing in the Shower copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but no one ever focuses on how quickly it fell. Skitch can’t exactly be compared to an empire, but with some ten million users globally, there were a lot of voices shouting a lot of various things when the upstart jumped in bed with Evernote and upgraded itself to version 2.0. Not surprisingly, members of our own staff as well as vocal readers have been forced to look for alternative options after v2.0 yanked and / or maimed some of our favorite features from the original. Truth be told, there’s really no alternative that doesn’t also come with a severe compromise, but the Skitch team knows full well that said scenario could change if rivals are given enough time.

Today, the company’s chief designer Keith Lang is clearing the air on what happened, what’s happening, and where his program is going in the future. For starters, he mentions that his team was so heads-down on managing the product, that they failed to actually take into account “how deeply ingrained Skitch had become into many people’s daily workflows and how disruptive even small changes could be.” The good news, however, is that he’s vowing to “fix it.” He notes that version 1.0 was held together with many years of duct tape, and to ever truly move forward, a new program would have to be built from the ground-up. That new program, of course, was met with near-universal hatred from the prior user base, but it looks as if those in the passionate camp are fixing to be addressed.

In updates due to hit between now and sometime soon, Skitch will be regaining Menubar Extra support, FTP / sFTP capabilities, short URLs, direct hosting of Skitch images (!), multiple fonts and custom colors, as well as streamlined cropping and resizing. Aside from bringing v2.0 back up to where v1.0 left off, Keith is promising “really amazing stuff” in the future. We’ll be anxious to give the new builds a try — hopefully, they’ll bring back some good memories.

Filed under: Software, Mobile

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Source: Evernote Blog

If you think you’re spending a lot of time playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II, you better think again. Okan Kaya, a sales manager at 4Cabling in Australia, claims to have broken the world record for the longest gaming marathon ever, in which he played Black Ops II for 135 hours, 50 minutes straight. The previous record was 120 hours, seven minutes.

The news was announced on 4Cabling’s Facebook account, where they state that Kaya finished the marathon “with a mad career ranking of 29 of 5 million players.” Kaya, a 28-year-old Sydney native, was allowed one 10-minute break every hour by Guinness, and any unused breaks could be accumulated and used at a later time.

This allowed Kaya to fit in some sleep time over the course of the seven days. However, according to Kaya, his record isn’t official just yet. He’s in the process of gathering the evidence for submission to Guinness, but he says that he’s confident that his new world record will be approved without any problems.

Luckily, Kaya is still alive, considering how gaming marathons haven’t gone so well in the past. Back in July, a Taiwanese man died following a 40-hour Diablo III marathon at an internet cafe, and last year, a gamer in the US suffered a pulmonary embolism during a 20-hour gaming session. However, Kaya’s marathon was closely monitored and supervised by a group of volunteers who acted as witnesses and supporters.

[via Yahoo]

Australian man sets world record with 135-hour Black Ops II marathon is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Mac Mini has always been that runt you might buy if you couldn’t afford any other Apple computer. Which is to say: it was the Apple computer you bought when you should’ve picked up a budget Dell or something. No longer. The 2012 model is a fantastic, affordable, and small. More »