Hasta La Gadget!

For years now, hotel chains have been toying with alternative ways to letting patrons check-in, access their room and run up their bill with all-too-convenient in-room services. Marriott began testing smartphone check-ins way back in 2006, and select boutique locations (like The Plaza Hotel in New York and Boston’s Nine Zero) have relied on RFID, iris scanners, biometric identifiers and all sorts of whiz-bang entry methods in order to make getting past a lock that much easier (or harder, depending on perspective). This month, InterContinental Hotels Group announced that they would soon be trialing OpenWays at Chicago’s Holiday Inn Express Houston Downtown Convention Center, enabling iPhone owners to fire up an app and watch their room door open in a magical sort of way. Other smartphone platforms will also be supported, and as we’ve seen with other implementations, users of the technology will also be able to turn to their phone to order additional services, extend their stay or fess up to that window they broke. There’s no word on when this stuff will depart the testing phase and go mainstream, but we’re guessing it’ll be sooner rather than later. Video after the break, if you’re interested.

Continue reading OpenWays makes your smartphone a hotel room key, provides a different kind of ‘unlock’

OpenWays makes your smartphone a hotel room key, provides a different kind of ‘unlock’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 May 2010 01:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That’s right, we’re downloading the brand new Sirius XM app to our favorite, not-at-all-fragmented Android handset as we speak. Sure, we don’t actually have a paid satellite radio subscription, but if you hit up the source link you can sign up for 7 days free while you multitask it up against Robo Defense on your own phone. There’s no mention on the download page of specific handset compatibility, so let us know if you have any trouble running the app on that Motoblur phone your mom bought you.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Sirius XM Android app hits the Market originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 12:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Barnes & Noble might be pushing the Nook as hard as it can, but the retailer has always said it wants to build a reading platform across devices, and it’s making a big step in that direction with the launch of its eReader for iPad app today. The app allows Nook users to download most of their content to the iPad — the books all work, but some periodicals like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal aren’t available yet — and there’s a nice bookshelf view with jacket art and a library search function, which the Kindle app and iBooks don’t have. As with the Nook and other B&N clients, the iPad client supports LendMe for certain titles, but there’s no in-app purchasing — selecting “add books” from the bookshelf view kicks you out to the browser, just like the Kindle app. We’re not sure if this is an Apple restriction or a design decision, but we were told B&N is looking into adding in-app purchasing in a future release.

As for reading, eReader is actually quite flexible — you can customize the page, text, highlight, and link colors any which way you want (we made some hideous combinations), and there are some nice presets themes as well, ranging from “The Printed Page” to an inverted setting called “Night Light.” You can also set books to display using the publisher’s settings, and there are the usual line spacing and justification options as well. The only issues we had were with page turns and rendering — flipping from portrait to landscape too fast would result in some brief wonkiness, and flipping pages too quickly would eventually stall the app and lead to a brief load time. Neither was a deal breaker, but there’s clearly some room for polish here — we’re sure B&N is planning to iterate this rapidly, so we’ll see what happens. All in all, though the eReader app is a worthy competitor for your iPad ebook dollar — as long as iBooks has the only in-app store it’ll remain our favorite iPad reader, but if you’ve already purchased Nook content this is a solid free addition to the ecosystem.

Continue reading Barnes & Noble launches eReader for iPad app, we go hands-on

Barnes & Noble launches eReader for iPad app, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Interested to know how you were gonna fill up that Chrome OS app page? Google just announced its new online web app store at I/O. So far they’ve shown off Dark Room for image editing, a pretty slick version of TweetDeck, and yes, like every other platform known to man, there’s Plants. vs. Zombies and Lego Star Wars. Paid-for software will be offered — Dark Room is $4.99, if you want to go ahead and put that money aside. No word on a launch date, but we’ll keep pushing for more. We were just shown a demo of Sports Illustrated‘s interactive magazine, and we gotta say, it’s mighty impressive — embedded video, fully searchable, and some pretty clever tricks with geolocation that frankly exceed most anything we’ve seen on the iPad thus far. The web store — for Chrome and Chrome OS — will hit the dev channel “soon.”

Google unveils Chrome web store, Sports Illustrated app impresses originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Slacker Radio 2.0 for iPhone to feature station caching, out ‘soonish’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 May 2010 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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