Sprint and Kyocera have announced the release date for the Kyocera Echo, the first 3D phone. Staring this April 17th, you can buy the Echo for $200 with a 2 year contract from Sprint.
Thus far, Kyocera has not released any info about other carrier options. However, the company didn’t state that the phone will be exclusive to the Sprint network. Only time will tell if it will be offered on additional networks. You can pre-order the phone starting on March 26th.
Via Engadget
The iPhone 4 does a lot of things really well, so one might, perhaps, be able to forgive it for falling short at a few simple tasks. Perhaps, that is, if those tasks were quite so simple as making phone calls and telling the proper time. While most the rest of the country was springing ahead, Apple’s handset fell back an hour, assuring that users relying on the device as a handset were two hours late for work, instead of the customary one.
Apple has confirmed what we already knew (thanks to past Apple confirmations). The white iPhone 4 is real, and it’s really coming this spring. For real. In response to a self-proclaimed “16-year-old kid from Albuquerque, future Engadget editor” on Twitter, Apple SVP Philip Schiller confirmed that the long awaited handset is arriving soon. “The white iPhone will be available this spring (and it is a beauty!),” wrote the exec.
[photo via petergtrimming on Flickr]
You might text your friends when you see a small animal scurry by, but the government of Aberdeen, Scotland is asking you to keep them in the loop too. A program designed to keep an eye on gray and red squirrel populations is asking residents to text their squirrel sightings to a special number.
The program, called “Text-a-Squirrel”, ran last October with impressive success. 154 people reported sightings, giving researchers with the group Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels valuable information on the number of squirrels in the area and where they congregate. According to the group’s website, there are only around 121,000 red squirrels left in Scotland, and Scottish environment minister Roseanna Cunningham called them one of the most “iconic and beautiful species” in Scotland. This program aims to be an innovative way to keep tabs on the protected squirrels and study them using readily-available technology.
Researchers asked that anyone sighting the animals should include where they saw it, either the park, intersection or any other identifying information. I can’t help but think they’d appreciate GPS coordinates from the smartphone users in the city. Don’t know if they’d complain about a cute squirrel photo either, you know, for science.
[via STV]
A massive 8.9 off-shore earthquake struck Japan earlier today, at around 2:46 PM local time. The impact of the quake is being felt as far away as Hawaii and California, where authorities have notified citizens to brace for Tsunamis.
Apple and Microsoft are butting heads again, the latest in a long line of disputes against the tech giants. This time out, the companies are doing battle over Apple’s trademark claims on the admittedly broad term “App Store.” Apple, essentially, is claiming that it can own the term, seeing as how when people think “App Store,” they think “Apple.”
As the company put it in a recent filing,
The vastly predominant usage of the expression ‘app store’ in trade press is as a reference to Apple’s extraordinarily well-known APP STORE mark and the services rendered by Apple thereunder.
Microsoft’s point, thus far, is that the term was generic long before Apple laid claim to it,
Any secondary meaning or fame Apple has in ‘App Store’ is de facto secondary meaning that cannot convert the generic term ‘app store’ into a protectable trademark. Apple cannot block competitors from using a generic name. ‘App store’ is generic and therefore in the public domain and free for all competitors to use.
As of late, however, the arguments have become far more nuanced, and now Microsoft is calling out Apple over the length of a legal filing, and the font size used in said filing. According to a newly discovered motion filed by Microsoft with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, “Apple’s response brief is 31 pages, including the table of contents and table of authorities, and on information and belief, is printed in less than 11 point font.”
Full text of this exciting motion can be found here.
Meet the new iPhone, same as the old iPhone. Or so the story goes, at least. Chinese gadget blog M.I.C. (that’s “Made in China”) picked up the above iPhone prototype from some unnamed source. According to the site: “The owner of this engineered prototype told us that he got it from a source who has a small quantity of these prototypes. They are definitely leaked from Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen.”
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