Hasta La Gadget!

We already got teased on this, but it turns out that the first teaser — which, let’s be honest, didn’t have the highest production value — was strictly a teaser. Now, Motorola’s sent us a fragment of the real commercial they’ll be debuting during the Super Bowl this Sunday, and it’s got pretty much everything you’d expect: a handsome gentleman with flowers reading 1984 on a Xoom, white headphones, and thousands of emotionless drones “enjoying” their Apple products. The whole thing is an obvious swipe at Apple for seemingly endorsing the very homogeny it waged war against in its Ridley Scott-directed Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh back in 1984, and we suspect you good folks are going to have some very strong opinions about it. Follow the break for the first 15 seconds of the ad.

Continue reading Motorola teases the real Xoom Super Bowl ad: George Orwell, flowers, iPhone-using automatons in white hoodies all involved

Motorola teases the real Xoom Super Bowl ad: George Orwell, flowers, iPhone-using automatons in white hoodies all involved originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP and Palm aren’t being shy about hyping up next week’s big webOS event, and they’re following up on that nod to our leak and CEO Leo Apotheker’s comments with this “Think Beyond” teaser video. As is undoubtedly intended, we can’t make much of the product from these brief glimpses of tapered curves, elegant switchgear, and what appears to be a charging connector — but we’d like to think it’s a tablet, because we are fundamentally very hopeful people. In any case, we’ll see what Palm has in store for us next week — and whether it can live up to all this buildup.

Update: We were just sent a longer version of the video, which we’ve swapped in above — it shows a rear-facing camera and what’s either a microphone or speaker grille. And is it just us, or is this thing looking pretty chubtastic or what? Original Palm video after the break. [Thanks, Raphael]

Continue reading Palm ‘Think Beyond’ teaser shows off glimpses of… something (updated with longer video)

Palm ‘Think Beyond’ teaser shows off glimpses of… something (updated with longer video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Android Market now has a web client. Finally! And guess what else, it’s already live. Hit the source link below to get exploring. It’s very simple, really, you can browse the entire Market catalog on your desktop or however else you’re accessing the web, you can purchase anything that takes your fancy, and then — via the magic of over-the-air transfers — it downloads and installs onto your Android handset. A neat My Market Account section will let you nickname your registered devices to make them more recognizable as well.

Google has also just announced that Android will soon support in-app purchases. Widespread developer interest has been cited as the major reason for doing it, so you’ve got those lovable coders to thank for the oncoming wave of micropayments you’ll have to deal with in your Android apps. The in-app purchasing SDK is releasing to devs today and will be “live to users prior to the end of this quarter.”

Update: Invalid request. Yep, that’s the message we keep getting when we try and download an app. Google promises that it should be working soon…

Update 2: And now it appears to be working!

Android Market gets a web store with OTA installations, in-app purchases coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only magazine The Daily, once described as “The New York Post Goes to College,” is now a go. Launched at a New York event this morning, it pledges to offer “the best of traditional journalism” with “the best of contemporary technology” like 360 degree photos and, naturally, lots of fancy multimedia content that is all pushed directly to the iPad every day. It’s priced at $.99 per week or $39.99 annually and launches today, unsurprisingly with Egypt taking the “cover” image. The team behind the new-age zine showed off plenty of that technology, including a magazine-like reading interface, letting you flip through pages, and a “carousel,” that gives you a higher-level view of the pages for easier browsing.

The Daily also includes audio versions, with professional voiceover so you won’t have to worry about GPS voice, plus video overviews of all the content if you just don’t have time for reading or listening. You can share stuff you like on Twitter or Facebook and others will be able to read those stories for free via the web — but not all the content, naturally. The site will offer app reviews and features with links right to the App Store. Sports fans get full schedules and news updates for the teams they like. Again, The Daily launches today, and we’re told that the first two weeks will be courtesy of Verizon. Good on ya, VZW!

Update: It’s now available in the App Store.

Continue reading The Daily iPad ‘newspaper’ launches, $.99 weekly or $39.99 per year

The Daily iPad ‘newspaper’ launches, $.99 weekly or $39.99 per year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thought Honeycomb was just for tablets? Well, it’s not! Sure, tablets might be Google’s main thrust with the release, but we’ve been able to dig up enough evidence in the preview SDK’s emulator released yesterday to suggest that these guys are still keeping their eyes on the smartphone prize.

Here’s how it works: the emulator can be set to load at an arbitrary screen resolution. By default, that’s WXGA, 1280 x 768 — perfect for tablets, but obviously a wee bit large for even the biggest smartphones. Well, it turns out that setting the emulator to WVGA (like you might find on a modern mid- to high-end smartphone) triggers a moderately different shell UI that lacks most of the whiz-bang home screen stuff Google’s shown on the Honeycomb tablets. In fact, the default launcher crashes out entirely, which means you need to install a replacement (Launcher Pro works nicely) just to play around.

Once you get in, it’s pretty raw, but you immediately notice that the emulator’s got some traces of smartphone support. Notably, the status bar reverts to a more smartphone-friendly form, albeit one with pre-Gingerbread background coloration and incorrectly-inverted font colors. The lock screen (pictured above) is back to its old form, not the webOS-esque circular lock in the Honeycomb tablet UI. The browser — which has been completely revamped in Honeycomb — works, though without visible tabs; Google might be thinking that they’d take up too much real estate on a screen this small.

Again, you can’t glean much here, but it’s interesting primarily because the emulator knows to revert to a smartphone UI layout at the lower resolution — a possible sign that Honeycomb will be a true dual-mode, dual-purpose platform from day one. And even if it isn’t, it looks like they’re setting themselves up for a two-UI strategy down the road.

[Thanks, Andrew]

Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator has traces of smartphone support originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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