Hasta La Gadget!

It’s pretty wild that neither Palm nor AT&T have fessed up to a release date for the GSM-ified versions of the Pre Plus or Pixi Plus yet — especially considering that there are already unboxings going on — but we’ve now got confirmation that dummy units (of the Pre Plus, anyhow) are filtering into retail stores, so it definitely shouldn’t be much longer now. Dummies of an updated version of the ultra-simple Pantech Breeze (uncreatively named Breeze 2) is also coming in, so between these two, you should pretty much be able to outfit every member of the family from grandpa to the newborn. Seriously though, AT&T — wait much longer on this release, and this sucker’s going to be obsolete.

[Thanks, Kal]

Palm Pre Plus, Pantech Breeze 2 dummies showing up in AT&T stores originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Engadget Podcasters ‘double down’ on the juicy goss from this week. And when we say “juicy goss from this week” it means more than in other weeks – like if the juice were from a succulent, perfectly ripened, just about to fall from the vine grapefruit of a gossip week as opposed to a shriveled, 2-month old lime you forgot to use that’s been sitting out in the sun of a gossip week.

Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel, Paul Miller
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Syphus – Save a Prayer

Hear the podcast

00:02:37 – HP buys Palm
00:03:03 – HP: ‘We’re doubling down on webOS,’ Palm: ‘That was the whole point’
00:03:15 – HP: opportunities for webOS ‘smartphones, slates, and potentially netbooks’
00:08:55 – HP buys Palm: the liveblog
00:21:00 – HP and Palm: what happens next
00:30:40 – Palm Developer Day reveals interesting bits on the webOS 2010 roadmap
00:40:00 – Microsoft confirms, kills Courier in one fell swoop
00:49:09 – Microsoft says Android infringes on its patents, licenses HTC (update: talking to other Android manufacturers as well)
00:56:25 – Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash
00:58:21 – Adobe’s CEO: Jobs’ Flash letter is a ‘smokescreen’ for ‘cumbersome’ restrictions
01:17:03 – RIM shows off BlackBerry 6 on video
01:19:40 – BlackBerry Bold 9650 hands-on: yeah, it’s a Tour with an optical pad
01:19:50 – BlackBerry Pearl 3G first hands-on!
01:22:28 – Engadget app update: iPhone app passes the 1m download mark, Android and webOS get an update!


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Contact the podcast

1-888-ENGADGET or podcast (at) engadget (dot) com.

Twitter: @joshuatopolsky @futurepaul @reckless @engadget

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Laptops, Podcasts, Tablet PCs, Wireless, Internet

Engadget Podcast 194 – 04.30.2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How much information is out there?

For most of us, “a crapload” is a sufficiently accurate answer. But for a few obsessive data analysts, more precision is necessary. According to a recent study by market-research company IDC, and sponsored by storage company EMC, the size of the information universe is currently 800,000 petabytes. Each petabyte is a million gigabytes, or the equivalent of 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives.

If you stored all of this data on DVDs, the study’s authors say, the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back.

That’s a 62% increase over the amount of digital information floating around the year before — but it’s just a down payment on next year’s total, which will reach 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.

If these growth rates continue, by 2020 the digital universe will total 35 zettabytes, or 44 times more than in 2009.

It’s interesting to compare IDC’s study with a recent UC San Diego report on how much information Americans consume per year. According to that study, media consumption in 2008 added up to 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, or about 34 gigabytes per person per day.

Much of the media we view (TV shows, streaming video from YouTube) is centrally stored, on internet-connected servers, so the totals for consumption are naturally higher than the storage requirements.

IDC notes that while data storage will increase 44-fold by 2020, the number of IT professionals worldwide will only grow by 40%, which means each IT guy is going to have a lot more data to oversee.

Good luck with that, guys!

See Also:

• Just How Fast Is Cisco's New Router? Really Freaking Fast
• In the Future, One CF Card Will Hold 200 Years' Worth of Porn …
• Internet Mysteries: How Much File Sharing Traffic Travels the Net …
• Wired 11.02: VIEW

Gadgets on the Go: Follow Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter for real-time tech updates.

EMC-IDC Digital Universe Study

There have been robots that can balance themselves and even objects and people on top of them (think Segway and the Honda U3-X)–but the robot that can balance on top of a ball is a rarer species. Now there’s one that can do this and, adding a new wrinkle, rotate around its vertical axis.

Like a toy dog in a circus, BallIP (short for Ball Inverted Pendulum) can roll along atop a rubber-coated ball without falling over. It can even balance objects on top of itself while balancing on the ball–a trick even the circus dogs can’t duplicate.

According to a post on the IEEESpectrum blog, the robot is the brainchild of Dr. Masaaki Kumagai, director of the Robot Development Engineering Laboratory at Tohoku Gakuin University, in Tagajo City, Japan. He began building what’s known as “inverted pendulum” robots back in 2004 with the goal of creating a single ball-balancing bot. BalllP works to keep its inclination at zero degrees and to keep the rolling ball under it in the same spot.

What makes BalllP a standout is its ability to roll with the ball in virtually any direction. This is thanks to the three sets of omnidirectional rollers that drive the ball’s stability and direction from above. It can also manage to stay upright even if pushed.

[Image is from a video of a 2008 BalllP prototype]

At first glance, you might mistake the Polaroid 300 for the Fujifilm Instax Mini, but that’s only because the new Polaroid shooter was indeed developed in partnership with Fujifilm.