Hasta La Gadget!

In case you ever of the mindset that e-cigarettes were somehow toxin free, at least compared to the more traditional smokes, along comes the FDA to shatter your illusions. A report this week from the government agency calls out the product with a safety warning, charging that the cartridges they examined contained “carcinogens and toxic chemicals such as diethylene glycol, an ingredient used in antifreeze.” The FDA says it can’t confirm the extent of the health issues, as it’s only done limited testing and it hasn’t been formally submitted for review, but it doesn’t look quite as risk-free as previously touted. Don’t say the WHO never warned ya. So remind us again, what’s the point in smoking one of these over an old school cigarette?

[Via Switched; thanks, flatlander85]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

E-cigarettes contain carcinogens and toxins after all, FDA warns originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Best Buy today introduced its second series of customized laptops called Next Class, all designed in response to student feedback. The four-unit line was manufactured in partnership with HP, Toshiba, Sony, and Dell, and is priced between $649.99 and $799.99.

Next Class laptops offer the following features for the college student who needs to keep up with his workload:

• 3 to 6 hours of battery life
• Weighing between 5 to 6 pounds, the laptops don 14 to 15.5-inch screens
• Each laptop comes preloaded with a full version of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One Note) and 12 to 15 months of free antivirus protection

Get a full list of Best Buy’s exclusive laptops specifically designed for the college student, after the jump.

Some healthy escalation in the Palm vs. Apple iTunes scuffle: Though Apple tried to block the Pre from syncing with iTunes, Palm has struck back with WebOS update 1.1, which un-breaks Pre-iTunes coupling and adds some great new features.

There are a ton of minor fixes to the Pre, which you can read about in the changelog below. The big standout is re-enabled iTunes compatibility. As Palm says in their blog, “That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).” How they managed to hold back from adding in “…Bitches!” at the end of that, we’ll never know. But there are a bunch of other sweet new features, especially “person reminders,” which let you set individual reminders for each person in your contact list (imagine a buddy calls, and a message pops up, reminding you to, say, congratulate him—or, if you’re like me, to ask him to pay you back the money he owes you). So cool! [Palm]

Update: Confirmed.

Version information

* Version: webOS 1.1.0
* Release date: 23 July 2009
* Configuration: Sprint 1.7

New applications
NFL Mobile Live from Sprint

* Watch or listen to live NFL games right on your phone.

Feature changes to existing applications
Calendar

* For Calendar accounts you create on your phone, the default reminder intervals are 15 minutes for timed events and one day for all-day events. A few notes:
o This change applies only if software version 1.1 was on your phone when you bought it, or if you did a partial or full erase on your phone and signed in to your Palm profile again after updating to version 1.1. If you simply update your phone to software version 1.1, the default reminder intervals in Calendar do not change.
o This change applies only to Calendar events you create on your phone, not to events that are synchronized to your phone from an online account.

Camera

* The Photos application opens more quickly when launched from the camera.

Clock

* Enhanced support for time zones in Clock.
* When you set an alarm in Clock, an alarm icon appears in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. Tap the icon to display alarm details. Alarm details include the following:
o If the alarm is set for the current day, the alarm time appears.
o If the alarm is set for tomorrow, the alarm time and “Tomorrow” appear.
o If the alarm is set for any day other than today or tomorrow, the day of the alarm appears.

Contacts

* Friends added and deleted in Facebook on the web are now correctly added and deleted in the Facebook account in Contacts on the phone.
* As soon as you create or makes changes to a Google contact on the phone, the phone begins a sync to reflect those changes in Google on the web.

Email

* When you set up an Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) email account, you can enter the mail server name as an IP address.
* Support for self-signed certificates with multiple common names has been added.
* When you reply to an email in HTML format using an EAS account, the formatting of the sender’s original message is now retained in the reply.
* Palm’s EAS implementation now supports several Exchange ActiveSync Policies, including the following:
o PIN/Password Required. IT administrators can ensure a password is assigned to the phone. Administrators can also specify the minimum length of the password.
o Inactivity timeout. IT administrators can ensure that an inactive phone goes into a locked state after a certain time period. You cannot set a higher timeout interval for your phone, but you can set a shorter interval.
o Remote Wipe. IT Administrators can remotely erase all data on a phone from their Exchange console. IT administrators can also have the device wipe itself if an incorrect password is entered more than a specified number of times.

Messaging

* You can enter emoticons in new text, multimedia, and instant messages. Emoticons also display in incoming messages.
* If you set the phone to use a 24-hour time format, the message times shown in a conversation appear in 24-hour time.
* If you go into an IM account’s preferences, all the options are available even if you are signed in to the account. You can tap Remove Account to delete the account, enter a new password to update the password, or tap Sign In to sign in with your updated password. Previously, you needed to sign out of the account before you could use these preferences.
* When you delete an IM account, a message now appears asking you to confirm that you want to delete the account.

Phone

* When multiple missed call notifications are displayed on the dashboard, the time of the most recent missed call is shown.
* When you slide the ringer switch off, a bell icon with a slash is displayed. Previously, the icon was a speaker with a slash.
* In Phone Preferences, the Show Contact Matches preference is now turned on by default. When typing on the keyboard in the phone app, the phone automatically displays both the numbers being entered and any contact matches for the characters entered.

System

* Improved functionality of person reminders. A person reminder is a notification that you create in a contact entry. The notification appears when you have a call or exchange an email, text, multimedia, or IM message with a contact.
* Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (8.2.1).
* When you enter a search term in Card view or the Launcher to perform a universal search, if you select the Wikipedia web search option, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.

Web

* You can now use symbols from the symbols table (Sym Sym key icon + key) when you enter text into a web page dialog box.
* If you have a page open at a certain zoom level, leave the page, and use the onscreen Back Web Back button button or the back gesture to return to the page, the zoom level is restored right away.
* A new gesture is now available that works the same as the onscreen Forward Web Forward button button. To move forward through open web pages, make a short swipe left to right in the gesture area.
* When using the Wikipedia drop-down search feature in the address bar, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.
* When you tap a link, the link appears highlighted to indicate it has been activated, even if it takes a moment for the linked page to open.

YouTube

* After you enter search text, you can tap the Search Search icon icon to perform a search. You still have the option of pressing Enter Enter key to perform the search.

Buying an HDTV these days is almost like buying a Ford in the early 1900s; you can get any color you want, as long as it’s glossy black. That might not exactly work in your modern kitchen decor; at least that’s the thinking behind Toshiba’s recently announced …

It’s been widely rumored that the next version of the iPod Touch and iPod Nano to be released by Apple will have cameras inside. Now, a series of photos from Chinese iPod case manufacturers suggest that it’s more than just speculation.

Cases purported to be for new iPods …