Hasta La Gadget!

BlackBerry’s BlackBerry 10 launch event that occurred a few weeks back didn’t have that many head-scratching moments, in fact, we think the only time a moment like that occurred was when Alicia Keys was announced to be the company’s official creative director. It looks like that comfy new position may be open in the very near future as Keys was caught using a device that wasn’t a BlackBerry 10 device yesterday.

Yesterday morning, Keys sent out a tweet saying “Started from the bottom now were here!” which aside from its grammatical errors, is a nice enough message. The problem is she sent out that tweet from the Twitter for iPhone application even though she’s reportedly has said she will be BlackBerry 10 exclusive from now on. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: No Entry-Level BlackBerry 10 Smartphone in 2013, HBO Go Available On Apple TV Through Airplay Feature,

Desperate to get on the Android bandwagon but refuse to accept any of the tastelessly-cheap handsets on the market today? Vertu has the device for you: the new Vertu TI, finally ditching Symbian but bizarrely swapping it for an old version of Android. The ridiculously priced – from $9,600, but as much as $19,900 – TI puts Ice Cream Sandwich on a 3.7-inch handset wrapped in sapphire crystal, titanium, and leather.

Those aren’t cheap materials, but we get the feeling that – as has always been the case – Vertu is more concerned with outward appearance than it is functionality. Your near-$10k gets you an 8-megapixel camera with a twin-LED flash, a 1.3-megapixel front camera, and a 1.7GHz dualcore Snapdragon S4 processor, in addition to 64GB of internal storage.

There’s also the dedicated Vertu button, which shunts you straight into the company’s “concierge service” for helping you find luxury hotels, luxury entertainment, luxury food, and – as you’ve probably guessed by now – luxury in general. Now, the Vertu service has also thrown in Vertu Certainty, to back up the TI in the cloud, and Vertu Life, which appears to be a news stream service with content tailored for the monied.

NFC and ridiculous levels of durability – you can drop a 110g ball bearing on the display, and it won’t smash, for instance – are great, but they don’t really make for a cost-effective device. Vertu will charge you $9,600 for the “entry level” TI in titanium with black leather, or $11,500 for the “titanium pure black” versions. The black alligator model will be $12,800, while the line-up tops out at $19,900 for the “Black PVD Titanium Red Gold Mixed Metals” version.

Vertu TI: Bizarre luxury smartphone with old Android and crazy $20k price is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Languages have evolved over the years, and some have ended up dying off completely. However, these extinct languages are still around today thanks to documentation, and researchers are now trying to reconstruct these ancient languages using a modified version Rosetta Stone, a computer program that teaches users how to speak a different language.

The team of researchers reconstructed a set of protolanguages from a database of more than 142,000 words from 637 Austronesian languages, which are spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and parts of continental Asia. Essentially, the computer program does the work that would normally take “hundreds of lifetimes” for people to do manually, according to Dan Klein, who is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Protolanguages are reconstructed by simply grouping words with common meanings from related languages of today. Then, researchers must analyze common features, and then apply any sound-change rules and other criteria to derive the common parent word. Researchers believe that these languages were spoken about 7,000 years ago.

Essentially, the program replicates what linguists do manually with 85% accuracy. Plus, it takes just hours instead of years. The program uses an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, and it sorts through sets of words in different languages that share a common sound, history, and origin. While researchers are able analyze these older languages, it’s still up in the air whether or not they can go further back in time to reconstruct even the very first protolanguage from which all other languages derived from.

[via BBC News]

Image via Flickr

Researchers use computer program to reconstruct ancient languages is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Strapping your feet to a board and then sliding down a snow-covered hill requires skills that most humans aren’t born with. So to make it just a little easier for novices to learn how to snowboard, Australia’s Streetboardz has created a board with a built-in handbrake that lets riders easily stop before things get out of control. More »

There’s nothing like a romantic comedy to keep you hopeful that love — usually through ridiculously dramatic circumstances — will find you one day.

Though we cycle through many of these films each year, a few have managed to capture our naive hearts while racking up big numbers at the box office. Yes, the narratives are unrealistic and the plots are predictable, but the success of these films shows we are still suckers for a good love story.

Which movies scored the biggest in theaters? Take a look through the slideshow below for the 10 highest grossing romantic comedies of all time.

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