Hasta La Gadget!

Even more than in past years, the build-up to Apple’s iPod event this Wednesday has been nothing if not a bevy of The Beatles / iTunes rumors — the company even broke with its traditional Tuesday event date to have it instead on “09-09-09,” the same day The Beatles Rock Band and a new box set are due to hit store shelves. Now it looks like we’ve heard it from none other than Yoko Ono herself, who in a now-pulled Sky News article confirmed that the Fab Four’s headed for digital distribution. All that’s left of the piece is a Google cache of the first sentence, so for the full skinny, it looks like we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Update: EMI is telling Financial Times that, while conversations are still going on, no announcements will be made tomorrow.

Read – Yoko Ono reveals Beatles on iTunes
Read – Google cache

Filed under: Portable Audio, Internet, Software

The Beatles finally coming to iTunes, according to Yoko Ono (update: EMI says not tomorrow) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This one sure took awhile but the oft leaked HTC Click has been renamed and kicked out the door as the Tattoo. While HTC is light on specs with the press release, we know it has a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5-mm headset jack, and microSD expansion. And besides being small and compact, the Tattoo can be personalized with owner-designed covers — hence the name. The HTC Tattoo lands in Europe early October before hitting select global markets in the months to follow.

Update: And… out pop the specs: 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor, 512MB/256MB ROM/RAM, 106 x 55.2 x 14-mm / 113 grams, 2.8-inch touchscreen LCD pushing 240×320 QVGA pixels, 900/2100MHz HSPA/UMTS and quad-band GSM/EDGE, internal GPS, 802.11b/g WiFi, digital compass, accelerometer, and Bluetooth 2.0. Not bad for a mass-market device.

Filed under: Cellphones

HTC Tattoo (aka, Click) brings Android, Sense UI to all originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For all its good looks and lickable icons, the BL40 hardly feels like a “Chocolate” phone — abandoning the featurephone functionality and slider form factors that are usually associated with the moniker. Well, the newly surfaced BL20 (previously spotted as the BL42) is here to solve all that. The slider handset has capacitive touch controls below the screen, but the screen itself is not a touchscreen. The functionality has also been trimmed back from the BL40’s app extravaganza, but the interface looks and actual hardware seem very similar. We had a little trouble getting around in the German interface, but if you can handle our bumblings you can check out a video of the phone after the break.

Continue reading LG BL20 hands-on: putting the ‘slider’ back in ‘Chocolate’

Filed under: Cellphones

LG BL20 hands-on: putting the ‘slider’ back in ‘Chocolate’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Sep 2009 07:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know what’s absolutely useless? A video of Wipeout HD being played in 3D, with some schmuck wearing 3D glasses and babbling on about how much fun he’s having. Well, that schmuck is this Engadget editor, the video can be found after the break, and we’ve gotta say: we loved it. Especially for something like Wipeout HD, whose neon-infused tracks make for an almost too convenient example of rapidly approaching vanishing points, we’d say 3D could really be a quasi-“killer app” for consoles going forward — especially if those fancy new motion controllers don’t catch on for Microsoft and Sony. In many ways, 3D just seems to make more sense in a video game than for a movie, and the whole problem of finding content to deliver in the format has already been solved: a software update for the PS3 sometime in 2010 will enable it to provide a 3D viewing experience to “all” existing games on the system. We’re sure there will be some exceptions, but it sounds very promising. The console itself pumps out a quite regular signal over HDMI, which the TV syncs up with your 3D glasses. A 200Hz TV, for instance, alternates 1080p frames, with 100Hz for each eye. Of course, you’ll need a brand new TV, but at least it won’t be restricted to just Sony televisions. Start saving those pennies!

Continue reading PS3’s new 3D mode captured on video, coming in 2010 to all existing games

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment

PS3’s new 3D mode captured on video, coming in 2010 to all existing games originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T has just announced that MMS — a much-ballyhooed feature of iPhone OS 3.0 — will finally be hitting AT&T on September 25. There’s still no date for tethering, though the company is holding the line that it’ll be offered “in the future.” Expanding on the logic behind the tethering delay, they’re saying that “by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect.” We’re no network engineers, but “exponentially increase traffic” and “AT&T” are two things we don’t typically like to hear in the same sentence — let’s hope the 850MHz, 7.2Mbps, and backhaul upgrades they’re cranking on right now go a long way toward sorting that out. As for MMS, they’re acknowledging that the release “does indeed fall a few days past the official end of summer,” arguing that their support of more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world made a positive launch experience a bit of a challenge. Of course, virtually every other phone AT&T sells (and has sold for the past several years) supports the same tech, so this feels like a pretty active admission that iPhone users blaze through data-rich features at a pace that the carrier has been ill-equipped to handle.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

AT&T rolling out MMS to iPhone on September 25, tethering ‘in the future’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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