Hasta La Gadget!

Are you sick of hearing from Lodsys? We know devs are, but the rather outspoken patent troll is at it again, hitting the blog to defend its good name. Hidden among today’s posts is an announcement that the firm is taking the next steps with its accusations, filing a lawsuit against some of the developers it previously targeted and, get this, blaming Apple. It explains: “Lodsys chose to move its litigation timing to an earlier date than originally planned, in response to Apple’s threat, in order to preserve its legal options.” We’re not sure which developers are targeted by this suit, specifically, but the firm has promised a $1,000 payment to each dev, “if it turns out that the scope of Apple’s existing license rights apply to fully license you with respect to our claim relating to your App on Apple iOS.” Devs may be tempted to spend that promised gift on a well-deserved vacation (or a WWDC conference pass), but with layers of LLCs protecting the man behind the curtain at Lodsys, we wouldn’t be surprised it the firm disappeared before anyone sees a cent (or 99) of payment. Unfortunately, it appears that the saga continues, so if you’ve had enough of the patent troll, feel free to enjoy the rest of our content, Lodsys free.

[Thanks, Andrew]

Update: We’ve been told that the list of devs named in the lawsuit include: Combay, Iconfactory, Illusion Labs, Shovelmate, Quickoffice, Richard Shinderman, and Wulven Game Studios.

Lodsys hits devs with lawsuit, $1,000 offer, and 1,000 words of eloquent prose originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 May 2011 18:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That’s right human beings — it’s happening again! The Engadget crew is getting together their best party outfits and shipping out west for another installment of our fabulous reader meetups. Our last event in NYC drew loads of people and was an all around blast, and the San Francisco installment is sure to be just as explosive (or maybe more? c’mon… show us what you’ve got). This time around we’re partnering with Sprint, as well as Sony PlayStation, Motorola, HP, Roku, Samsung, VUDU, RIM, Sling, Sonos, HTC, Corning, Sphero, OnLive, Plantronics, Snapstick, and more to bring you a night of gadget geeking, giveaways, delicious foodstuffs, and some awesome music (provided by none other than our podcast producer, Trent Wolbe). Also, a whole mess of the Engadget editors will be on hand to entertain and inform, so if you have any pressing questions — jot them down!

The all ages shindig will take place at City View at The Metreon, which is located conveniently in downtown SF. If you’re a nerd in the city, you most likely already know what we’re talking about. The doors will open at 6:30PM, and capacity is limited to 1200 people — so if you want to get inside, get there early!

Update: Whoops! Looks like the previously mentioned sweepstakes have ended (a trip for two to the event). Congrats to the winners! Don’t stress though, there should be plenty of room for everyone (provided it’s no more than 1200 humans).

Continue reading Engadget’s next reader meetup is this Friday, February 25th in San Francisco!

Engadget’s next reader meetup is this Friday, February 25th in San Francisco! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That’s right human beings — it’s happening again! The Engadget crew is getting together their best party outfits and shipping out west for another installment of our fabulous reader meetups. Our last event in NYC drew loads of people and was an all around blast, and the San Francisco installment is sure to be just as explosive (or maybe more? c’mon… show us what you’ve got). This time around we’re partnering with Sprint, as well as Sony PlayStation, HP, Roku, Samsung, VUDU, RIM, Sling, Sonos, HTC, Corning, Sphero, and loads of other players in our industry (we’re still adding to the list!) to bring you a night of gadget geeking, giveaways, delicious foodstuffs, and some awesome music (provided by none other than our podcast producer, Trent Wolbe). Also, a whole mess of the Engadget editors will be on hand and entertain and inform, so if you have any pressing questions — jot them down!

The all ages shindig will take place at City View at The Metreon, which is located conveniently in downtown SF. If you’re a nerd in the city, you most likely already know what we’re talking about. The doors will open at 6:30PM, and capacity is limited to 1200 people — so if you want to get inside, get there early!

Hate standing in lines? Enter the Engadget Reader Meetup Sweepstakes for your chance to win an all expense paid trip for 2 to the meetup in San Francisco on February 25th! Click here to enter now! (rules apply, read them after the break)

We’re going to be flooding the interwaves with more information soon, but for now, mark the date on your calendars, and get ready to party.

Continue reading Engadget’s next reader meetup happens February 25th in San Francisco — enter to win a trip for 2 to the event!

Engadget’s next reader meetup happens February 25th in San Francisco — enter to win a trip for 2 to the event! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So it turns out that NVIDIA roadmap we saw last month was as true and pure as driven snow. The barely conceivable quad-core Tegra chip that it listed has now been made official by none other than NVIDIA itself, with the company also informing us that the new silicon is already sampling out to prospective clients. Known as Kal-El internally, this will most likely turn into NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 as and when it’s ready to enter the consumer market. Tonight NVIDIA whetted our appetite for what’s to come with a demo that can most fittingly be described as an exhibition of unadulterated computational muscle. A 2560 x 1440 stream was being decoded on a developmental device, scaled down to that slate’s native 1366 x 768 resolution, and additionally displayed on a connected 30-inch, 2560 x 1600 monitor. That entire voluminous workload was being handled in real time by Kal-El and we saw no signs of it struggling.

By NVIDIA’s own estimation, the quad-core newbie provides roughly double the processing power of Tegra 2 and triple the graphics-crunching prowess. In the second demonstration of the evening, we saw an instance of Great Battles Medieval — ran at 720p with 650 enemy soldiers on the field — on both a Tegra 2 and a Kal-El platform, which showed the baby superhero handily dusting its still very new brethren. This was in large part down to the full dozen GPU cores contained within Kal-El, though before you freak out about battery-draining insanity, NVIDIA claims things are much, much more efficient as well — up to 12 hours of HD video playback are promised under the right circumstances.

It’s a big fat wedge of awesome boasts we’ve heard from the GeForce maker today, however the company’s given us a schedule to hold it to as well. The “August timeframe” is when the quad-core Kal-El is expected to land in tablets, while smartphones will have to wait until the holiday season to benefit from what’s likely to be a slightly downgraded variant. Skip past the break to eye the future Tegra roadmap for the next few years plus video of the wildly impressive demos we were witness to.

Continue reading NVIDIA announces quad-core Kal-El SOC, promises it in tablets by August (video)

NVIDIA announces quad-core Kal-El SOC, promises it in tablets by August (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Boy oh boy, HTC is entering the tablet arena with quite a bang. The company has just taken the wraps off its brand new 7-inch Flyer Android tablet, which touts a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, 1GB of RAM plus 32GB of flash storage, an aluminum unibody construction, 1024 x 600 resolution, a tablet-optimized version of Sense, and… what’s this, a pressure-sensitive stylus! The HTC Scribe trademark we saw floating around in legal waters turned out not to be the branding for a tablet, it’s actually the name HTC gives to the technology enabling what it calls a “groundbreaking pen experience.” Other details include a 5 megapixel camera on the back paired with a 1.3 megapixel imager up front, a 4000mAh battery rated to last for four hours of continuous video playback, and memory expandability via a microSD card.

The Flyer will ship in Q2 2011 with Android Gingerbread 2.4 on board. HTC says it’ll be indistinguishable from 2.3 as far the end user is concerned, though we all know it won’t be quite as good as the 3.0 stuff. We’re told not to worry, however, since the new version of Sense being introduced with the Flyer will be the focal point of the company’s software offering. As far as HTC is concerned, Sense matters more than the underlying platform, and the reason Honeycomb isn’t the shipping OS here was explicitly stated as HTC not having enough time with the latest Google code to customize it to the full requirements of Sense. Guess that settles that.

There are a couple more software enhancements, both marking the introduction of the fruits of HTC’s recent deals: OnLive cloud gaming will be coming with the Flyer in the form of an app you open up to access the web-connected bored-relieving service, while that Saffron Digital acquisition has turned into an HTC Watch app for movie streaming and downloading.

We spent a bit of quality time with a Flyer unit recently, although we weren’t allowed to turn it on, and our early impressions are rather mixed. On the one hand, we do appreciate the ruggedness and durability that’s afforded by the one-piece aluminum shell, but on the other, the Flyer is quite the chunky beast in your hands. We’d imagine strapping in such an extra-speedy processor is the main culprit for its extra girth, though the Flyer is, ironically enough, not terribly light either. We found it heavier and generally a lot less polished from a design perspective than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Anyhow, HTC should have functional units for us immediately following its MWC presser this morning, and we’ll be delving in deeper with this super-specced device. Hang tight!

Update: Pictures of the Flyer can now be explored below and we have video awaiting your audience just past the break.

Update 2: Even more video!

Continue reading HTC launches 1.5GHz, 7-inch Android 2.4 Flyer into the tablet wars (update: hands-on video!)

HTC launches 1.5GHz, 7-inch Android 2.4 Flyer into the tablet wars (update: hands-on video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 05:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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