Hasta La Gadget!

Sony patent application points to dual-screen, dual-use tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 19:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ll allow us to do a little dot-connecting and hand-waving here, we think we may have just stumbled across a new version of Barnes and Noble’s Nook that drops the GSM connection and soldiers on with WiFi alone, matching up nicely with a rumor that spread across the webs not long ago. You see, the Nook’s FCC ID is BNRZ100, and this thing that we just found in the FCC’s filing system under Barnes and Noble’s name has an ID of BNRV100 — and the test reports are very explicit about the fact that this is for “EBOOK, WLAN, AND USB PORTS WITHOUT WWAN.” WWAN, of course, is a fancy way of referring to a cellular connection, so that’s that. If this thing can sell for, say, $100 less than the Nook’s $260 — a price that puts it out of reach of the average person’s impulse purchase limit — we could see some significant new uptake of the platform, we’d wager. No word on a release, but we’ll keep our ears to the ground.

WiFi-only Nook gets FCC approval? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 18:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Electric motors can make a hybrid economical or powerful. BMW steered the performance course with the BMW ActiveHybrid7, a $107,075 variant of the V8 gasoline-only BMW 750Li that accelerates to 60 mph in 4.7 seconds (half a second better than the 750Li) and also gets about 15% better fuel economy. You only lose a small corner of the trunk to the lithium ion battery pack, and none of BMW’s sporting ride or luxury.

A contest tasking high school students with envisioning the dashboard of the future yielded some great ideas. Which option would you most like to see?

Shots of some docs over on BGR have us believing that AT&T is on the cusp of launching a program called “MobileProtect,” but don’t be fooled by the fancy name — this is basically an Asurion-operated handset insurance plan just like any other, the only real difference being that it’s for the iPhone and offered directly by the carrier. Interestingly, it seems that you’ll buy the protection through the App Store of all things, automatically billing the credit card that you’ve got on file with Apple, but you’d better really want the protection because it’s going to run $13.99 a month. Oh, and you’ll have to pay a $99 deductible to fix an 8GB 3G, scaling up to $199 for a 32GB 3GS. To put that in perspective, that means it’ll cost you $367 to replace an insured 32GB 3GS after a year of coverage, at which point you’ll say “well, I’d rather have an iPhone 4 anyway” and shell out $200 with an upgrade pull-ahead. Yeah, call us jaded.

AT&T prepping MobileProtect insurance program for iPhone? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 17:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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