Hasta La Gadget!

The saga of the Milestone’s firmware update to Android 2.1 is finally over for one more territory. The United Kingdom is today awaking to the news that Motorola has made the freshest Eclair available to its loyal British users, with the download already awaiting those eager to be surfing along the cutting edge of Android innovation. What else do you need to know, it’s the finest software Google has to offer for your phone and it’s downloadable at the source link — get going!

Milestone gets Android 2.1 update in UK, available to download now originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 05:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, CLIQ, better check that rear-view mirror, because you’ve got an interesting competitor coming right up on your tail. T-Mobile is launching another midrange Android QWERTY slider — some might argue the G1’s true successor — christened the myTouch 3G Slide (not quite the “myTouch Slide” we’ve been hearing for a few months) with a 3.4-inch HVGA display, 5 megapixel camera, and a pretty heavily-customized skin based on Android 2.1. How custom are we talking, exactly? Well, it’s not quite like anything we’ve seen on a production Android device before, featuring a host of custom apps including the “Faves Gallery,” a social aggregator for your most dearly beloved contacts; “myModes,” a profile manager that can change the phone’s themes and settings based on time or location; the Swype keyboard in place of Google’s option; and the so-called “Genius Button,” which seeks to extend Android’s already decent voice command and text-to-speech systems by allowing you to do just about anything on the phone using your voice, hear messages read back to you, and so on. In the myTouch 3G tradition, the Slide will come in a selection of colors when it launches in June — black, white, or red — for a to-be-announced price. Check out T-Mobile’s full press release along with our impressions of the device after the break

Continue reading T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide official: Android 2.1, QWERTY, coming in June (we go hands-on)

T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide official: Android 2.1, QWERTY, coming in June (we go hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 May 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nintendo’s Wii has been available in black overseas for quite some time now, and while there were ways to get one in North America, those ways weren’t exactly cheap — nor legitimate. Now Ninty is finally giving us a color option, releasing a black Wii to American consumers for $199.99 on May 9. In other news, you’ll have a copy of Wii Sports Resort included and a MotionPlus adapter to match, along with the controller and nunchuck that were previously included. In fact that looks to be the standard bundle going forward on the white models as well, which equates to something of a soft price drop assuming new Wii owners were going to buy Wii Sports Resort. And of course they were, because who can resist bopping their friends over the head with pretend wooden swords?

Continue reading Nintendo Wii goes ebony and ivory on May 9, includes Sports Resort and Motion Plus

Nintendo Wii goes ebony and ivory on May 9, includes Sports Resort and Motion Plus originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 07:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Considering the almost complete absence of love in the commercial marketplace for Moorestown and Moblin — and the fact that there’s no sign of MeeGo building serious momentum just yet — we’re sure that Intel would’ve just loved for the drop-dead-sexy GW990 to serve as the platform’s crown jewel for 2010. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, because we’ve just been able to confirm that the 4.8-inch beast (and potential Dell Mini 5 foil) has been wiped off the product roadmap. Though we don’t know exactly what happened, the fact that Moblin is effectively dead and MeeGo isn’t ready for prime time might be part of LG’s justification for killing it off; if you might recall, the GW990 was introduced before MeeGo was official, and the original plan was to have it on the market in the second half of this year. Then again, this might be just as well — we weren’t impressed by the fact that LG was positioning the phone as a closed device back at CES, and there are still plenty of open questions as to how Intel and Nokia plan to offer apps on MeeGo — so let’s just hope this form factor reemerges from LG’s labs soon enough, yeah?

Confirmed: LG’s Moorestown-based GW990 won’t be made originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well this is depressing. Word has just gone fluttering out of Redmond that work on the Courier project — a heretofore rumored dual-screen tablet which rightfully set the tech world ablaze — has been spun down by the company. Here’s the official line from Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s VP of corporate communications:

At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, and incubated. It’s in Microsoft’s DNA to continually develop and incubate new technologies to foster productivity and creativity. The “Courier” project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.

All very sad, of course. So how did we get here? And was this thing ever really real to begin with? After all, it’s hard to kill something that never lived. Well here’s the deal, according to a source familiar with the situation: the Courier did indeed start life as a potential new product category for the company, one which was being incubated internally with very real plans for a marketable device. It seems, however, that things just didn’t manage to take shape, and word was handed down very recently that the incubation period had reached its conclusion — sans product — and resources would be directed elsewhere. Now, that doesn’t mean that we won’t see some of this technology turn up in other products which Microsoft has in the pipeline (the company does keep quite a few balls in the air), but it does mean that those rendered videos of the Courier in action will remain, unfortunately, renders. As far as the Engadget team is concerned, there isn’t a dry eye in the house right now — but the Courier will always remain in our hearts as one of the finest unicorns that ever unicorned across our screens.

Microsoft confirms, kills Courier in one fell swoop originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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