Hasta La Gadget!

While affirming its stance on the legality of Kindle 2‘s text-to-speech feature — and in fact stating it’ll actually get more customers interested in buying audiobooks — Amazon‘s announced that it’ll now let the books’ rights holders decide on a title-by-title basis whether or not they’ll let TTS be enabled. No word on when the update’ll be fed to the devices, but we bet somewhere right now, Paul Aiken‘s cracking a tiny smile. Full release after the break.

Continue reading Amazon sorta capitulates, will let publishers decide text-to-speech availability

Filed under: Handhelds

Amazon sorta capitulates, will let publishers decide text-to-speech availability originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re the type of individual who can never decide between the Cobb salad, the lobster bisque, and the sesame prawns and end up ordering all three, take note — your phone has arrived. The long-rumored LG Versa lets you have your cake and eat it too by starting life as a full touchscreen slate, and when the time comes for some serious emailing, texting, or notetaking, you just snap on the included cover that includes a full QWERTY keyboard. The cover also features its own OLED display — handy, since the Versa’s 480 x 240 main display is concealed while the cover’s closed — while the phone itself rocks EV-DO Rev. A with tethering capability, a 2 megapixel cam with face detection and video recording, microSD expansion, and GPS. It’ll be available starting March 1 for $249.99 on contract before a $50 mail-in rebate.

Filed under: Cellphones

LG Versa heading to Verizon on March 1 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looks like that red Resident Evil 5 Xbox 360 bundle wasn’t just some tripped out figment of your imagination. Just moments ago, the package popped up for Xbox Live subscribers, detailing a handsome red Xbox 360 Elite with a 120GB hard drive, Resident Evil 5, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and a few other odds and ends (like a handful of cables). There’s an indication that you can pre-order the kit, but at this point, we’re not aware of any place to follow through. We’ll keep our eyes peeled, of course.

Update: According to the German press release we just received, the limited edition bundle will hit Europe on March 13th for €299 — likely $399 Stateside. Gallery updated with official press pictures.

Update 2: Boom! Pre-order at Best Buy for $399. [Thanks, Ivan]

Continue reading Red ‘Resident Evil 5’ Xbox 360 unveiled! (updated)

Filed under: Gaming

Red ‘Resident Evil 5’ Xbox 360 unveiled! (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look, we’ll level with you: we don’t know exactly what we’re looking at. After seeing that Mac mini pic yesterday, we were about 140 percent sure it was a classic Photoshop disaster. Now we don’t know what to think. One thing is for sure — this isn’t done with Photoshop. The above video was offered up by the original poster of the first pic to back up his or her claims of a “2009 Penryn” mini. Something feels fishy about this, but it’s hard to write off the video as pure sleep-deprivation-induced fantasy. So what do you guys think? Crazy mod, new mini, shared hallucination? Fire back in comments!

[Thanks, Blake]

Filed under: Desktops

New Mac mini revealed in video? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So is Vodafone’s HTC Magic the same as T-Mobile’s G2? Could very well be, considering Google’s little slip-up during a demo of its offline Gmail support on mobile devices. What we have up there clearly ain’t a Voda logo, and if our knowledge of T-Mobile logos around the world is accurate, this isn’t a European T-Mobile logo, either — it’s straight-up Yankee. Would certainly make a ton of sense for this thing to shake out as the G2, and there’s no shortage of folks holding out for a keyboardless Android device ’round there… so your move, T-Mob.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Google’s offline Gmail demo reveals seemingly US-bound HTC Magic — is this the T-Mobile G2? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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