Hasta La Gadget!

Remember Romo, the adorable iPhone-faced track-equipped robot? We met up with Romotive in Vegas at CES 2013 to play with the 3rd generation model that was recently launched on Kickstarter. The company also gave us an exclusive first look at a 3rd generation prototype with Lightning connector. We sat down with CEO Keller Rinaudo to discuss the new robot and catch up on what the team’s achieved over the past year.

As a refresher, we first encountered Romo when we covered it for our Insert Coin feature in October 2011. Back then, the robot used rudimentary analog electronics and plugged into the iPhone’s headphone jack. After a successful initial Kickstarter campaign, Romotive moved from Seattle to Las Vegas where we caught up the team on our stage during CES 2012. The 2nd generation model was available both pre-assembled and it kit form with support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It was upgraded to digital electronics but still used the audio interface to control its tracks and featured hacker-friendly auxiliary ports. Hit the break for more.

Continue reading Romo gen 3 gains Lightning connector, we go hands-on (video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Robots, Mobile, Apple

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If you asked Netflix, it’d probably agree there’s more money to be had from the Bluth Family’s banana stand — after all, it did buy the exclusive rights to it. After months of waiting and anticipation, the company has confirmed that the fourth season of Arrested Development will arrive in May. This run of the revived sitcom will consist of 14 episodes in total, all of which will only be streamable from the house of Hastings servers. All we can hope for in the meantime is that, Maeby maybe, just maybe, a certain Gob Bluth will finally get his act together.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Netflix (Twitter)

The PC ecosystem is no longer as simple as it once was — first there were desktops, then laptops, then tablets, then all-in-ones. Buying a PC now is more nebulous than it ever was. You could build your very own rig, piece-by-piece, or you could buy one of the many, many pre-fab options out there (or some mixture of the two, of course). And then there’s even more outside-of-the-box options, like Razer’s recently re-introduced Edge (aka “Project Fiona”), which occupies a space all its own. Part laptop, part tablet, part home console, and part portable console, the Razer Edge is the fruition of Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan’s dream to create a “true” portable PC gaming machine. And weighing in at just two pounds, the Edge is dramatically lighter than Razer’s other portable gaming machine, the Blade (which clocks in at a whopping 6.6 lbs.), making it the company’s first actually portable game console.

Keeping those Blade comparisons rolling, the base level Edge at $999 features a slight step down from the Blade’s Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor to a 1.7GHz Intel’s Core i5 (the Edge Pro at $1299 boosts that CPU to a 1.9GHz Ivy Bridge i7, more closely matching the far costlier Blade). Thankfully, the Edge’s GPU is not only discreet, but also powerful and (thankfully) not fragmented between the two models: an NVIDIA GT640M LE powers the graphics on both, while 4GB or 8GB (respectively) of DDR3 RAM keeps it all running smoothly. The base model Edge holds 64GB of content in a speedy solid state drive (128GB in the Pro model, upgradeable to 256GB). But let’s be honest — you already know most of these specs, right? What matters is how all this stuff pans out, and we’ve just gotten our first chance to find out. Head past the break to see how Razer’s Edge fared.

Continue reading Hands-on with Razer’s Edge, a $999 gaming tablet / home console

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, Tablets, HD, Mobile

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Earlier today a kind anonymous tipster shared the above product shot of a ZTE Z753, which is allegedly the Chinese manufacturer’s contribution to the ever-growing list of five-inch 1080p devices — including those from HTC, Sharp, Oppo and eventually Nubia, Huawei, Lenovo plus Sony. Conveniently, ZTE’s also been teasing its upcoming Grand S flagship on Sina Weibo ahead of its CES debut, and we’ve been able to confirm that this is indeed the aforementioned Z753 — not that we don’t already know the Grand S’ main selling points thanks to a brief description on CES’ website: “the world’s thinnest for 5 inch FHD smartphones.” There isn’t much information about the guts at this point, but we do know that the phone will feature a unibody design, along with a slight bump around the off-center camera on the back. Until we make it to CES next month, you can see more in the official sketches after the break, courtesy of ZTE’s Sina Weibo account.

Continue reading ZTE’s 5-inch 1080p Grand S leaked, teased and confirmed for CES debut

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Sina Weibo

The HTC Windows Phone 8S was announced as a lower-end alternative to its bigger brother, the flagship Windows Phone 8X, but the company has remained relatively quiet about it since. While we’re still awaiting official details on pricing and availability across the globe, HTC has filled us in on one crucial nugget of information: it won’t be coming to the United States. While we’ve been suspicious that this might be the case, we had been holding out hope that it might have at least some amount of reach in the US market. Essentially, HTC is focusing all of its stateside efforts on the 8X, its signature device. With that said, we’ll still likely see the 8S show up as an unlocked and unsubsidized smartphone on various etailers, so Windows Phone enthusiasts with a penchant for bright colors will want to keep their eyes peeled. Now that we know more about the markets that won’t be graced by the presence of the 8S, all we need now is a confirmation on when we can expect it elsewhere. Stay tuned past the break for HTC’s official statement.

Continue reading HTC confirms the Windows Phone 8S will not be coming to the US

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, HTC

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