Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been a while since there was a decent BlackBerry phone, and while there are plenty of smartphones available, there are still legions of Crackberry addicts that have been awaiting a new phone from the aforementioned RIM, which is now known simply as BlackBerry.

With the release of the BlackbBrry 10 OS platform, the eponymous company has introduced their latest smartphone, the Z10. This is their first full-touchscreen device, with a 1280×768 resolution 4.2″ display, a 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus processor with 16GB of memory and 2GB of RAM. The rear-facing camera is 8MP and the front-facing one is 2 MP. The phone is capable of capturing HD video in 1080p.

It has NFC connectivity and works on 4G LTE networks, allowing it to be quite speedy. BlackBerry’s big differentiator with this phone is that they’re aiming to provide a single device that can seamlessly allow you to bounce between personal and business data and applications, while keeping them separated in the UI.

The BlackBerry Z10 will be coming to the U.S. via AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in Mid-March for $199.99 (with a 2-year contract). If it’s not already, it’ll be available andy day now in the UK and Canada, and coming to various other carriers around the globe soon.

At the rate that I change smartphones, about once or twice a year, I could probably bankrupt myself pretty quickly if I were to buy Vertu phones instead of the brands I usually do. Recently, there was a rumor that Vertu would be using Android in its next smartphone. According to Japanese gadget site Blog of Mobile!!, the rumors are true, and Android specs have turned up in its certification testing data.

The Vertu Constellation Ti RM-828V is expected to be Android-powered, running 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich. The CPU is a 1.5Ghz Snapdragon MSM8260A processor, and the phone will support Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC. It has a 800 × 480 resolution display, and a paltry 1,250 mAh battery.

For all you kids with trust funds, the Vertu Constellation Ti will come in Red Gold Mixed Metal, Titanium Black Alligator, Titanium Black Leather, and Titanium Black PVD Leather, with prices rumored to start around $5,500(USD). Think that’s pricey? The most expensive phone Vertu ever made cost over $300,000.

It always amazes me how these “luxury” phones always seem to have slightly outdated tech.

[via Ubergizmo]

Today we’ve seen quite the showing by the company formerly known as Research in Motion, starting with no less than a complete re-naming of the company to “BlackBerry”. If that gesture weren’t enough to convince the public that the group was and I all-in on their 2013 bid to necessitate the BlackBerry universe, two new devices and a fully functional reboot of the operating system were certainly meant to. We’ve got hands-on with both of the newly delivered smart devices, accessories they’ll be using, and details on the whole day ready for your perusal right this minute.

You’ll want to start your journey with a few news bits appearing before the main event in NYC this morning, with the company still known as RIM way back then (two days before today) showing movie and music deals galore for BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry 10 was also granted the ability yesterday to do 12-person video chat with ooVoo technology as detailed by the company once again. Just this morning we also saw BlackBerry World gaining loads of new apps and games prior to the official launch of BlackBerry 10.

RIM’s European Managing Director Stephen Bates was put in the hot seat twice this morning as well, getting out some answers that will help BlackBerry 10 along in its immediate future and a few answers that made the company look rather unsure of itself. Leaks of BlackBerry Z10 prices began to flow right as the main event began, with quite a few mobile carriers having added their 2-cents since (this post is continuously being updated, mind you). Verizon made their presence known as one of the first groups to reveal pricing for one of the two devices revealed today.

The actual BlackBerry 10 event began with the President and CEO of the company known as RIM, then BlackBerry, mister Thorsten Heins congratulating those that worked on BlackBerry 10 and held fast with BlackBerry over the past two years. Two years ago was when the process to create BlackBerry 10 began, and as Heins assured the world this morning, they’ll be here for some time to come: Today is not the finish line, it’s just the starting line.”

The rebranding of RIM to BlackBerry should be seen as nearly as important from an advertising and image perspective as the launch of BlackBerry 10. With BlackBerry replacing RIM, there’s now “One Brand. One promise.” BlackBerry 10 has been assured to be “re-designed, re-engineered, re-invented” and ready for action in 2013.

We saw the official announcement of the BlackBerry Z10 as well as the official reveal of the Q10. The first is a 4.2-inch touchscreen display-toting BlackBerry 10 device devoid of physical keyboard keys while the second is a more “classic” design with the widest physical keyboard interface the company has ever delivered on a smartphone.

We’ve got BlackBerry Q10 hands-on for all you lovers of the keyboard and the touchscreen. We’ve got BlackBerry Z10 hands-on for all you lovers of the full-touch interface. We’ve got BlackBerry 10-era accessories hands-on for all you lovers of holsters, speakers, and battery chargers for the future!

BlackBerry 10 has been announced to be launching with 70,000 apps right out of the box including big names like Angry Birds and Skype. Angry Birds, in fact, has been pushed as a free app for early adopters and will be coming to the market with all of its back-catalog titles as well!

Then there’s one of the oddest announcements of the day, that being Musician Alicia Keys being revealed as the new BlackBerry Global Creative Director. At the moment this appears to be a move not unlike Will.i.am joining Intel as Director of Creative Innovation or Futura 2000 representing Samsung. The celebrity / artist / entertainer cross-branding continues!

Have a peek at our ever-expanding BlackBerry 10 tag portal for more information into the future and stick around for our imminent full review of the BlackBerry Z10!

BlackBerry 10 event wrap-up: RIM sheds name for bright future is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Here in the first few months after Microsoft introduced Windows 8 to the world, we’re still looking for the perfect set of homes for this touch-friendly operating system – and in the Dell XPS One 27 (Touch Screen enabled model 2710), we may have found the best all-in-one solution yet. This beast works with a 27-inch 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution (Quad HD) display ready for 10-finger touch on an articulating stand. This stand will allow you to move 60 degrees, nearly flat to an ever-so-slightly forward-leaning position – your choice!

Hardware

The Dell XPS One 27 is a machine that comes in several different iterations – and you may have seen it in the past without an articulating stand or a touchscreen. This version is the newest and, of course, greatest of the pack with a relatively massive 19.32 x 26.14 inch chassis with depth ranging from 1.25 inches to 2.82 inches. This beast has been called competition for the newest iMac, but as you’ll see in our iMac 27-inch (2012) review, aside from the “all-in-one” name, these computers are altogether different, essentially top to bottom.

This XPS monster weighs in at 35.16 pounds as you’ll see plainly in the hands-on video above. The neck is made to make the computer’s bulk feel light, and indeed it does – we’re able to easily tilt the display back and forth with one hand, no problem. Moving the display up and down will require a couple of hands to manage, but again you’ll have no trouble – it’s picking the whole machine up and moving it from table to table that’ll give you a back-ache, but since you’re only going to have this bulk in one place the whole time you own it, that shouldn’t be a problem.

The front of this machine has about an inch of bezel surrounding the display, a bit more than that at the bottom with an additional bit of casing under the glass that brings you down another inch. The display glass sits out and above the casing rather than being flush with it, this giving you the impression that it goes from left to right to top almost magically – not an easy feat and certainly appreciated in the final aesthetic. The back of the machine is a simple gray on the back, all hard plastic casing with the largest collection of ports sitting below the neck.

This set of ports includes four USB 3.0, HDMI out, HDMI in, SPDIF 1 (7.1 ch), and ethernet. On the right side of the machine you’ve got a disk drive for 12.7mm action, DVD+/-RW and BluRay Combo for your pleasure, HDD LED light, and a power button. On the other side you’ve got an 8 in 1 media card reader with support for SDXC (SD3.0), Secure Digital (SD), Multi Media Card (MMC), Hi Speed SD, Hi Capacity SD, Memory Stick (MS), Memory Stick PRO, and xD Picture Cards alike. Also on the left side you’ve got two more USB 3.0 ports that are Sleep Charge Capable – how about that?

Up on the front you’ve also got a set of four relatively hidden buttons that are capacitive and only appear when you tap them. The first two buttons increase and decrease the brightness of your display, the third controls the input of your display (if you’re using your HDMI-in, for example), and the last button will eject a disk from your disk drive, no questions asked. Each of these buttons is marked with an LED light that, again, only appears when you tap it.

The front-facing camera on this machine offers you the ability to speak with Skype (or whatever other video chat apps you like), extremely easy to use and decent at least for video chat in general. While you wont be recording any Hollywood-quality videos with this camera, it’s certainly nice to have as a given. It’s also relatively hidden from view if you don’t plan on using it all – no unrelenting design cues here!

Software and Performance

The machine we’ve got here works with Intel HD Integrated Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 2GB GDDR5, so you know good and well you’ll be packing high graphics power from top to bottom. While we’ve been drawn immediately and continuously to playing HD video as this machine cannot be denied as a great motion picture player, gaming is certainly a reality here right out of the box. You may want to pick up a few gaming-centric peripherals if you do want to go that route as wired may feel slightly more perfectly accurate than Bluetooth for mouse and keyboard action, the power under this hood is good to go.

Have a peek first at the system components included in this particular build, then see below the results of our standard benchmark test in Geekbench. Feel free to compare this score with past reviews of similar systems, keeping in mind that each system is indeed unique and benchmarks, no matter how accurate, show numbers, not your overall positive or negative experience.

Windows 8 is running as smoothly and as beautifully as we’ve ever seen it here on the Dell XPS One 27, making its case for what’s easily one of the most high-quality presentations of the operating system to date. Windows 8 is coming in to its own with more official full-screen and touch-optimized apps every day (see: Office 365 for example) and you’re sure to find yourself lost in exploration with this machine if not ready for full-on entertainment action from day one. Video looks great out of the box, graphics and settings can be optimized instantly with NVIDIA’s newest iteration of the GeForce Experience (still in Beta at the moment, but working great), and touchscreen action has never felt more natural.

Wrap-up

This machine will be costing you right around $1300 USD, and for that price you’re getting one beast of a computer. The Dell XPS One 27 with multi-touch display is easily one of the most solidly put together total packages running Windows 8 today, and makes us feel right at home with the touchscreen user interface immediately on startup. Dell has created a computer that makes us confident that touchscreen interfaces are indeed the future of home computing, especially in the entertainment realm – grab it now!

Dell XPS One 27 Review: a real touchscreen Windows 8 All-in-One hero is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Windows powers tablets and PCs. It supports desktop and “Windows 8-style” apps using touch and keyboard / mouse and can run on x86 and ARM CPUs. You can even get it on hardware from Microsoft and third parties. Microsoft refers to this as creating a “no-compromise” operating system.

Some of its users will run Windows on an Intel Ultrabook, which an Intel blog post has referred to as a “no-compromise” notebook. But it won’t run on the Google Nexus 7, which Google describes as a “no-compromise” Android tablet. And it certainly won’t run on a Wang 2200 SVP from the early 1980s, which was hailed by a sales brochure as “the low-cost, no-compromise computer.”

Companies should play to a product’s strengths.

What? My no-compromise operating system won’t run on my no-compromise tablet? That could compromise expectations. Tech companies occasionally position their products as having fewer compromises or no compromises. It’s an alluring ideal, but one that is of course unachievable. There is no compromising on the notion that all products involve compromises, lots of them. Show me a product with features and I will show you one with compromises. Rather than hide from compromise or pretend that it doesn’t exist, companies should embrace it. For the compromises or tradeoffs a product embodies reflect the thoughtfulness of how it was designed.

No one would suggest that a company should highlight what a product does poorly nor should they deny potential disadvantages. Companies should play to a product’s strengths. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he prefaced the device’s appearance by acknowledging it had to do only some things better than a smartphone or laptop. Apple customers clearly got the message and accepted the product for what it does well while continuing to purchase plenty of iPhones and MacBooks. Apple didn’t, for example, talk about how typing on an iPad can be a frustrating experience compared to a physical keyboard. (Jobs did, in fact, praise typing on the iPhone’s screen at its introduction.) But it does embrace the tradeoffs of the iOS touchscreen focus by refusing to put touchscreens on the Mac.

Similarly, Microsoft deftly highlighted the benefits of its compromised Surface Touch keyboard. It focused on the thinness of the resulting product and claimed that it was still far more effective than typing on glass. Plus, it has the added benefit of not obscuring half the screen. The compromise of a lack of tactile feedback is implied.

Even when technology advances to allow such simultaneous benefits as better battery life and faster processing speed (via multicore technology, for example), companies must evaluate whether it is worth raising the price to include such a chip or delaying a product to take advantage of such benefits. Engineering is about making the right compromises and marketing is about communicating them to achieve the ideal position at the intersection of mass appeal and profitability. So, as we move further into 2013, let us no longer pretend that there is such a thing as a no-compromise product, or at least one that doesn’t compromise a company’s credibility.

Come on technology companies; work with me on this.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at@rossrubin.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Apple, Microsoft

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