Hasta La Gadget!

Word on the street from Microsoft savant Paul Thurrott is that Windows Phone 7’s first update might go gold as early as this week — in time for Ballmer’s CES keynote, in fact, which means he might give it a mention and / or spend a few minutes showing it off. It’s said to be codenamed “NoDo,” short for “No Donuts” — a pretty obscure (and odd) reference to the fact that Redmond doesn’t want to release incremental, minor updates like Google did with Android 1.6 Donut. We’re not sure why they’d bother taking a swipe at an Android build that happened… oh, four versions ago, but Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Anyhow, it’ll apparently add copy / paste, CDMA location support (which might be the only thing holding up Verizon and Sprint from launching at this point), support for additional Qualcomm chipsets, and miscellaneous bug fixes.

Moving on, Thurrott says that the rumored Mango update isn’t the next update after NoDo, but it’s real — and it’s big. It’ll add Internet Explorer 9 with HTML 5 and Silverlight support, but notably, its code line is being referred to internally as the “entertainment branch,” so there might be some other magic in store. Current version numbers for Mango are in the 7.2 range, but builds are in the 7500 range, suggesting Windows Phone 7.5 branding is a possibility. An exciting 2011 for Microsoft on the mobile side? Looks like.

Update: Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has chimed in on Twitter in direct response to Thurrott:

“BTW, a guy failed to bring donuts to a meeting after loosing [sic] a bet. The ‘nodo’ codename had nothing to do with Android.”

Makes a heck of a lot more sense — and it confirms the accuracy of the codename. Thanks, CrookedC!

Windows Phone 7 ‘NoDo’ update hitting phones in early February, ‘Mango’ coming later with IE9? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CES is a couple of days from officially starting, and I’m already suffering from a bit of tablet overload–and believe me, ASUS, you aren’t helping. During its press conference today, the company launched the Eee Pad MeMO, a seven inch tablet, which harkens back to a simpler time, when people used a thing called a “stylus” for their touchscreen devices.

The device, which is set to launch in June, will run a future version of Android (the company is calling it “Android 3.0,” incidentally) and ships with a capacitive stylus for note taking and picture drawing (it comes pre-loaded with Media Note and Painter, for precisely those things). There’s a 1,2GHz Qualcomm processor inside and front and rear facing cameras, for all of your teleconferencing needs.

The device also ships with a MeMic Bluetooth headset, to make it all the more smartphone-like. The thing will run you $499, when it launches this summer.

“Oregon Scientific” and “home weather station” kind of go hand in hand, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the company’s unleashing a new three-pack of colorful weather units here at CES this week. Starting on the left, the $24.99 model displays indoor temperature along with up to three channels of outdoor temps; it also includes a clock and calendar with alarm, which makes it a serviceable bedside clock if you’re really into the weather. Moving upmarket a tad, the $39.99 Touch Weather Thermometer with Humidity (pictured center) is exactly that: the aforementioned temperature features plus a daily min / max display and both indoor and outdoor humidity stats. Finally, the $49.99 Touch Advanced Weather Station (right) adds a 12-hour weather forecast along with 24 hours’ worth of historical barometric data. All are powered by a pair of AA batteries and have touchscreen control — hence the names, we imagine.

Oregon Scientific’s Touch Weather Series tells the temperature, doesn’t break the bank originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Asus EE Pad Slider attempts to solve the problem some of us have with software keyboards by including a hardware keyboard.

Originally posted at CES 2011

The news we were all hoping for finally hit this week: HP is getting ready to show off its new webOS-based tablet.

Sadly for those of us in Las Vegas, it’s not going to happen at the Consumer Electronics Show here. Instead, HP’s planning an “exciting webOS announcement” for February 9 in San Francisco.

The invitations (shown above) went out today, and while they don’t mention a tablet, it’s a good bet that a webOS-based slate will be on the agenda — plus, perhaps, HP-branded successors to Palm’s tepidly successful webOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.

Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 for about $1.2 billion, a purchase that more or less saved Palm from yet another ignominious decline into obscurity, but left many observers wondering what HP was thinking.

The Palm and Pre (and their successors, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus) were ambitious attempts to compete with Android phones and the iPhone, and the phones offer striking industrial design, elegant user interfaces, clever multitasking and a web-based development environment.

But the phones haven’t proven popular with consumers, thanks in part to poor battery life and the relative lack of webOS applications.

HP’s intentions became clearer in July, 2010, when HP CTO Phil McKinney started promising a webOS-based tablet and webOS-based printer to come in “early 2011.” For such devices, a lightweight, web-based mobile operating system makes a lot of sense, and competitors have less of a head start than in the smartphone market.