Best Buy offering DROID pre-orders as of today, automates the mail-in rebate

In the best sort of tradition, Best Buy Mobile has gone for a repeat of its Palm Pre offering and is offering the $299 Motorola DROID at $199 thanks to the automation of a mail-in rebate you’d have to actually “mail in” if you were to purchase the handset straight from the carrier. Best Buy also seems to be the first place to offer pre-orders of the phone, so if you’re worried about a sell out or just generally averse to affixing stamps to things, Best Buy appears to have you covered.

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Best Buy offering DROID pre-orders as of today, automates the mail-in rebate originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Magellan SE4 navigation unit turns up at Best Buy

Well, Magellan doesn’t seem to be doing much talking about this one itself just yet, but Best Buy has a fresh listing for a new SE4 nav unit from the company, and it seems to be available right now. Better still, Best Buy also looks to have knocked a full $60 off the MSRP right of the bat, bringing it down to just $119.99. That’ll get you a 4.3-inch touchscreen, NAVTEQ maps of the 48 contiguous states, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, six million POIs, and text-to-speech and turn-by-turn voice prompts, but seemingly few other notable features to speak of — not even so much as a memory card slot or MP3 playback, if Best Buy’s listed specs are right.

[Via GPS Review]

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Magellan SE4 navigation unit turns up at Best Buy originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba’s BDX2000 Blu-ray deck hits Best Buy for $199, sour grapes also on sale

Man, poor Toshiba. The company’s already sucked up its pride and started putting Blu-ray drives in its laptops, but here’s its first stab at a proper standalone player, the BDX2000, on Best Buy shelves a bit early for $199 — or $50 less than its announced price. Sure, that makes sense given the falling prices of Blu-ray decks as the holidays approach, but even at that price it’s not super competitive with the slew of other decks out there that can do Netflix streaming. We’ll see if Tosh’s next efforts are a little more interesting than this, or if this is just more heartbreak than its worth.

[Thanks, Alex]

Continue reading Toshiba’s BDX2000 Blu-ray deck hits Best Buy for $199, sour grapes also on sale

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Toshiba’s BDX2000 Blu-ray deck hits Best Buy for $199, sour grapes also on sale originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Walmart to rival Best Buy’s Geek Squad with own in-home install crew

We’ve never truly been at ease with that Geek Squad crowd. Something about “the people” they hang with and “the places” they hang at just worries us, so we’re pretty thrilled to see another mega-corp stepping in to take the place of the now-deceased Circuit City FireDog crew. Starting sometime before the holiday season, Wally World will be partnering with N.E.W. Customer Service Companies in order to offer in-home installation to customers buying anything from a wireless router to a HTIB. The service plans will be sold on prepaid cards ranging from $99 to $399 in value, and each install includes a “preliminary consultation and a tutorial after installation is completed.” Granted, it may be a bit tough to get the dude looking to spend $5 on a new plasma to spring for such a service, but hey, it’s not like competition is a bad thing.

[Via Hot Hardware]

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Walmart to rival Best Buy’s Geek Squad with own in-home install crew originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents

With a name like “Little Buddy Child Tracker,” you know this thing has to be awful, right? Insignia, Best Buy’s house brand, has just listed an incredibly invasive and humiliating new GPS tracker on its site, and rather than promoting it as just that, the marketing brains have decided it best to aim this at paranoid mums and dads who’ve done such a poor job raising their offspring that they can’t even trust ’em to trek out on their own. All sensationalism aside, there’s little Insignia can say or do to remedy the product labeling job, but if you’re okay with shoving this extra-small stick into your youngster’s lunch box, you can keep tabs on his / her exact location and have alerts sent to you via SMS if they leave a designated area. Just make sure they don’t ever know that you were responsible for planting this thing on their person, else you can forget about junior footing those nursing home bills when the time comes.

[Via Navigadget]

Continue reading Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents

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Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IREX 8.1-inch DR 800SG e-reader now listed at Best Buy for $449

You know what happens when you realize your $399 price point can’t compete with the International Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook at $259? You jack it up by $50 and hope people view it as an ultra-premium product, that’s what. IREX’s DR 800SG e-book reader, which admittedly comes with a salacious set of specs and features, has just landed on Best Buy’s site as promised. The problem? It’s $449, and not the $399 that we’ve been hearing for a little while now. ‘Course, Best Buy has been known to inaccurately post MSRPs before the product actually hits the shelves (it’s backordered for “one to two weeks” at the moment), so we suppose anything could happen. So, anyone snapping this up? Wait, who let the crickets out?

[Thanks, Tom]

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IREX 8.1-inch DR 800SG e-reader now listed at Best Buy for $449 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rocketfish wireless whole home audio system cuts the cord on all your speakers

Anyone stumbling into a Best Buy looking for some sort of wireless speaker solution has probably been ushered over to the Rocketfish section, but up until now, only a few devices have been available. Now, the Best Buy staple is introducing an all-encompassing system that aims to cut the (speaker) cable to all of your speakers. The wireless whole home audio system, which is obviously only available at the yellow-tagged retailer, is comprised of a Wireless Amplified Audio Receiver, a Wireless Sender / Receiver, a Wireless Outdoor Speaker and a Wireless HD Audio Starter Kit, which includes both a sender and receiver. The whole rig is designed to work with standard connections for speaker line and line level inputs, so most any speaker assortment should play nice. All told, the devices combined can send up to five sources to nine receivers throughout the home, but not surprisingly, there’s no mention made of the presumably lofty price tag.

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Rocketfish wireless whole home audio system cuts the cord on all your speakers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia Booklet 3G running Windows 7 Starter unwrapped at Best Buy

If your pulse is racing like Windows 7 on an Atom processor then this Nokia Booklet 3G is surely the cause. The premium netbook running Microsoft’s not so premium 32-bit, Aero-less Starter Edition OS (see the sticker?) is the first demo unit to arrive at Best Buy. Buyers better enjoy looking at that Windows flag ’cause with Starter, it’s the only wallpaper you’re ever going to get.

[Thanks, Caffoni]

Nokia Booklet 3G running Windows 7 Starter unwrapped at Best Buy originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Geek Squad visa application approved, Best Buy opening stores in UK

We know you’re worried about what could happen; we saw that Liam Neeson movie too, the one where the daughter goes abroad and gets kidnapped and only after killing 351 people does he get her back. Taking trips to Europe can be risky, but our Best Buy is old enough and responsible and can take care of itself, so we’re okay with it taking a trip to the UK next year… even though we don’t know exactly where it’ll be landing. It’s been talking about going for so long it’d be a shame to say no now. Yes, it’ll be packing its blue shirts and yellow name tags so everyone will know what it is, and once it gets there sometime next year we’re sure it’ll call and tell us which franchise location will be first. So until then just try not to worry — and maybe sign it up for some self defense classes or something.

[Thanks, Adam]

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Geek Squad visa application approved, Best Buy opening stores in UK originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Netflix, Best Buy deal brings Watch Instantly streaming to even cheaper Blu-ray players

Though they’ve been floating around retail channels for a few weeks, Best Buy and Netflix have finally made official a partnership bringing streaming to the latest Insignia Blu-ray players. The NS-BRDVD3 runs $179, while the NS-WBRDVD edition tosses in WiFi for $20 more, while they won’t stream out of the box, a firmware update just made available should add all that Watch Instantly goodness. These two keep the (we’ll be nice and call it plain) styling of earlier models, and likely live up to the family reputation of “basic Blu-ray playback at a bargain” reported on the second generation of players. Of course, the BD-P1600 offers more features and a nicer reputation at about the same price, but Reward Zone members may want to think twice, with AVS Forum posters mentioning the NS-BRDVD3 can be had for just $99.99 through the 24th. Decisions, decisions.

Read – Best Buy and Netflix Announce Partnership to Instantly Stream Movies Over the Internet Via Latest Models of Insignia Blu-ray Disc Players
Read – Save $50 On Select INSIGNIA(R) Connected Blu-ray Disc[TM] Players with Netflix [Via AVS Forum]

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Netflix, Best Buy deal brings Watch Instantly streaming to even cheaper Blu-ray players originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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