Happy Monday, everybody! We thought we’d start off this week with a nice little give away to prove our affection… the kind folks at MusicSkins have provided us with five special edition Beatles Abbey Road MusicSkins to give to you. These particular MusicSkins are for iPhone or iPod touch so if you’re in the market for one of these, read the rules and get commenting. (The full rules are after the break).
Special thanks to MusicSkins for providing the gear.
Yeah, that’s right, we’re six years old this week. Thanks for noticing, jerks! Actually, we forgot too (it was Tuesday), and to make up for it we’re giving away a Motorola Droid, courtesy of Verizon Wireless! The phone was recently selected as the Gadget of the Year both by you, our illustrious readers, and by this rapidly-aging Engadget staff you hold so dear, so we didn’t think you’d mind. But that’s not all — the winner of the Droid and 10 lucky runner-ups will also receive one of our fancy new Engadget t-shirts! All you have to do is leave a comment to tell us how much you care (about us, not the environment) and you’ll be entered to win. The full instructions and typical rules can be found after the break. Good luck!
Hey, you love winning stuff, and we love giving it away. Joshua Topolsky recently spent part of the weekend cleaning out his office (always a fiasco), and as a result, we’ve got a huge amount of stuff to give away. So huge, in fact, that we’re not even going to tell you what you could potentially win — just that we’ve got three large and heavy boxes of stuff to give away to three lucky winners. We will tell you however, that there’s some good stuff to be had in there! The usual rules apply (and you can find them after the break), so get commenting and good luck!
The MiFi, a cellular-powered mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, has taken off with business travelers since it launched. Now Novatel, the company behind it, is having a contest to find out how people are using it.
Visit Novatel’s site to enter the “How Do You MiFi?” contest. The company is looking for success stories, and some will be featured on the company’s Web site. If your entry is chosen, you’ll be entered to win a 55-inch Samsung flat screen TV with a Wi-Fi LinkStick. Make those stories good, because only the chosen ones will be eligible to win. The set, by the way, will be delivered in time for the start of March Madness.
The contest is open now and will close on February 12. The winning story will be announced a week later. This is open to U.S. MiFi users only.
Everyone is trying to guess what the features are of the tablet that Apple may announce on Wednesday 27. What’s its name? What’s the OS? How big? Tell us what you think and win an Apple tablet.
• You fill out the survey linked below before the Apple event, and whoever gets closest to having all the answers right is eligible to win a free Apple tablet—whatever it ends up being called—courtesy of us.
• If the final feature is not exactly like one of the answers we provided, we will pick the closest answer. If the feature is not in the answers, that question will be void, but the rest of the questions will still be valid towards winning.
• There is a reasonable chance that many people will get the correct answers. In the event that there are, all of those who made the cut will go into a drawing, from which we’ll pick a winner at random.
Your name and email will only be used to contact you in case you win the tablet.
Here are my guesses:
Name I think they will call it iBook, just because it’s a good brand, a short name that sounds great, and ties in with the whole tablet format.
OS The tablet will run a variant of iPhone OS, with additional software classes to address its special features. Fundamentally, it will be like the iPhone OS—it should be able to run apps straight away (although developers will tailor them to the new screen size, selling them in the app store as fatter apps that support both the iPhone OS and the Tablet OS).
Screen The screen won’t be OLED, but I would like to think that—given Apple’s push towards LED backlighting, with its energy savings and better image quality—they will use a 10.1-inch LCD-LED display.
Connectivity The connectivity is a tricky one. Since I believe the Apple Tablet is a complete new paradigm in computing, one goes away from desktop metaphors, and is always connected—it makes sense that it supports 3G. But would Apple tie this thing to a carrier, like some rumors say? And if they do, and it’s AT&T, would I be able to have two SIMs under the same AT&T number?
Camera Another tricky one. Some people say no webcam at all, other say no cameras at all, others say both. I want to believe that this thing will, at last, support videoconferencing.
Storage The top model will have 64GB.
Material I like the idea of the back being chrome, so I can touch up my makeup.
Keyboard Another tricky one. I want to believe that Apple is including a stylus and that their handwriting technology—already present in Mac OS X, coming from Newton OS—is good enough. However, this will require multiple-language support, something that doesn’t seem to be implemented right now. So I want handwriting, but I’m leaning to a screen-based keyboard.
User interface The iPhone has been a huge hit because it’s simple. No complicated desktop metaphors, no confusing windows, just a modal device that morphs into different devices. Normal people, regular consumers who hate normal computers—the majority—get it. It will be like the iPhone, modal, hopefully with aggressive multitasking, and a clever way to navigate through running applications.
Extras Another wild guess. USB 3.0 support would be nice, or even Lightpeak, but I really want this thing to support a stylus.
Battery life This could have 10 hours of battery life. If its guts are not much different than an iPhone, there will be a lot of empty space in there, enough to fit some extra battery cells.
Price People are guesstimating a wild range. Mine: $600, and they will still make money out of it. My gut feeling is that Steve Jobs and Co. believe this will be their biggest contribution to computing since the original Apple Macintosh. And they will want it to be cheap, so it can spread quick, like wildfire.
Main functions Like the iPhone was a phone, an iPod, a web browser and a mail machine, this device will also have three or four main functions (apart from the thousands that it can take thanks to the applications). My wild guess is that movies will be a good one, as will web, ebooks, and videochat/communication.
Main role While many computer fans will see this device as a secondary device or a peripheral, I believe Apple will position it as a full computer. Like I said before, most people don’t need a computer. Most people don’t spend hours writing emails or documents outside of the office. Most people don’t spend hours doing spreadsheets or painting photos outside of work mode. Most people just browse, send the occasional image, do some chat, access Facebook, tweet a bit, read, browse, watch movies, listen to music… that’s why the iPhone has become such a driving force in the industry, with many regular consumers adopting it as their main computing device. My guess is that this computer will be the main computer of most of the people who buy it. Not for the office, but their personal computer.
Now it is your turn to give us your guesses, and get a chance to win an Apple tablet.
Imagine the day when all-in-one desktops really mean it — no keyboard, no mouse, and not even a screen panel. This is precisely Pauline Carlos’ idea with her Froot concept — supposedly an entry for a Dell sustainable design contest. Sure, the color options are rather odd if not unappetizing, but if it only takes a virtual keyboard, a projector (maybe an efficient pico), a biodegradable chassis and Windows XP to save the planet, then we’re happy to oblige. Hey, there’s even a slot-loading optical drive, but bamboo discs are hard to come by these days. Now add some touchscreen Light Touch magic and we might be tempted to buy it, otherwise that cursor isn’t going to work without a mouse. One more pic after the break.
The Genius Bar horror stories are in. And they are horrible. Geniuses obliterating iMacs, covered in roaches, even stealing customers’ girlfriends. The evil Genius Bar is real, and it’s in your local mall. Update: We’ve added another truly shitty experience.
Click here to see all of the stories on one page, though it might be too much horror at once.
Now, reach down into the bottom of your hearts, and tell us who most deserves that free pizza. (And keep sending in your own horror stories.)
We’ve got no idea how this nugget of glorious mechanized boogie snuck past us — we’ll blame it on the horror we experienced while watching Doka Harumi’s robot dance routine. Another entrant in that same Japanese robo-dance contest, this red-blazered drone brings the pain, the funk, and all necessary accessories to rock your world. We’re not kidding — if you don’t like this, you don’t like technology. Skip past the break for not one, but two doses of that mind-altering video action.
We’re so hard at work here at CES that we almost forgot that we just got brand new t-shirts! To celebrate our time in Las Vegas, we thought we’d share a little love and give away five of these precious bits of thread. You probably know the drill already, but the full rules (and another shot of our kind friend Roger modeling the shirt) are after the break so read on and get commenting!
Is it any surprise that when I asked a bunch of Gizmodo readers to share their holiday horror stories, you guys sent in tales of frozen cameras, techno-challenged dads and—yes—porn-filled PS3s?
Frosty the Frozen Nikon
A fellow who goes by Skunkabilly sent his pictorial tale on Flickr, which documents a camping trip to Monument Valley and the miserable story of a D90 which froze up—literally. Apparently the poor camera was set up outside the tent in an attempt to capture one of those gorgeous swirling-star slow exposures of the sky.
I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life, so I don’t really understand how this whole cold and frost thing works.
When he woke up, his precious DSLR was covered with frost. “What the crap is this?” he asked himself. “Ahhh, yes. All hail Frosty the Nikon!” He tried to thaw his camera on the engine block of his Subaru, but ultimately decided to take it inside the car. Sure, it fogged up on the inside for a bit, but it was fine eventually, and the rest of the trip was smooth.
The part that caught our attention though? Skunkabilly ended the tale by saying, “Hopefully I won’t rappel into a pool and drown it to death like I did with my D200.” Yikes! Sounds like there’s a history of gadget abuse here.
How the Phone Guy Saved Christmas
Marte, better known as infmom, sent in this photo from 1961. It’s Christmas morning, and she and her brother are admiring the elaborate electric train set their father had bought and built for them. Only that fact in itself was mysterious, as their father “could barely change a lightbulb.”
Marte explains that, to his dying day, her father referred to record players as “Victrolas” and refrigerators as “iceboxes.” Not so much Luddite as someone who didn’t usually get involved with the technical processes of the household, he decided that year to break the trend, and get constructive.
A few days before Christmas, Dad brought home the train set and the plastic scenery and the controllers and a bunch of wood and nails and smuggled all the stuff into the basement through the outside door and told us to stay out of it. He borrowed a hand saw and a hammer from the neighbors and set to work trying to build a table to put the train set on. Including sawing a sheet of plywood to size. With a hand saw. Laid across our basement coffee table, which was a hollow core door on legs. When my mom heard the language coming from the basement she told us to stay way away from it.
Though his effort to this point was valiant, the electrical engineering—and a certain amount of required drilling, for which he lacked a drill—did him in. Still, on Christmas morning, the train set was up and running. How?
We were thinking some kind of miracle had occurred, until our mother told us that later that day we were to go over and thank our neighbor, who worked for the phone company, for responding to Dad’s late-night cry for help.
Marte thinks that’s the point where she vowed to grow up learning how to fix things herself. And considering that she’s lurking around Lifehacker and Gizmodo, odds are that she did. I feel bad for her father though. While Marte and her brother got to enjoy their gift, to him this must’ve been a genuine holiday horror.
Floppy Disks Sold Separately
We’ve heard of coal in the stocking, but Jeff’s story sounds worse. One Christmas, he hit the jackpot, scoring not just a cool RC car, but a set of Crazy Bones figurines too. So the next Christmas, he was reasonably quite excited:
I used to love sleeping by the fireplace at night, right next to the Christmas tree. Every season, I would do this with my little brother, and fall asleep to the warm glow of the fire, and wake up in the morning with presents all around us. I went to sleep too giddy to even imagine what I was going to receive the next morning.
I awoke to the sound of wrapping paper crumpling around me, as I stared at two of the biggest packages I had ever seen. I immediately started shredding the paper [the first one] was wrapped in, like a hungry wolf digging into its prey. What did I uncover? Two brand spankin’ new… comforter and blanket sets. [And in] the smaller package next to it? A 100-capacity floppy disk lock box.
Sadly, he did not even receive any floppies to put inside it.
Son, You Can Play With Your Toys When I Sell You the Batteries
Luckybob343 grew up in the ’80s, a time when “Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a remote-controlled, battery-operated something.”
The trouble was, Santa brought all the cool electronic toys but he never brought any batteries. Those we had to buy ourselves, but in our house we could only buy batteries from my dad’s independent electronics store.
Sure, sounds nice to keep it in the family, but there were two catches: First, his dad bought hisbatteries in bulk from Walmart, and jacked up the price by $2 per pack. And second, Luckybob’s dad’s store was closed from Christmas Eve until January 2nd.
Come the new year, we’d fork over three weeks of allowances over to my dad to get to play with our toys one week after we got them.
Luckybob finally got some revenge though. This year, he got a multi-instrument weather station that he knew his dad had been eying, and he took out all the instructions except the ones written in French.
Jose was happy to return home after finishing Navy boot camp last Christmas. Most of his family members, from age one to age 65, were gathered at his house. There his step-father had recently installed a 50-inch plasma TV and all the gaming console goodies that should go with it, including a PS3.
One of my little cousins wanted to play the PS3 so he turned it on and a porno came on. Everyone’s mouth just dropped to the ground. My sister quickly turned it off but it was too late.
Jose told us that about 25 dear family members heard and saw what was likely a film by the Bang Bros. Everyone stared down his step-father, giving him “the look of shame.” Some family members left because of it, and are pretending Jose’s step-father doesn’t exist. Needless to say, his mom had to throw out some DVDs. There is a silver lining, though: “We are having the Christmas eve party at my aunt’s now!” Yikes.
So, who wins the pizza? Each story has its own particular charm (and nastiness), so we thought we’d put it to a vote. Have at it, and by the end of Christmas Day, whoever has the most votes on this baby wins.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
The MiFi, a cellular-powered mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, has taken off with business travelers since it launched. Now Novatel, the company behind it, is having a contest to find out how people are using it.
Is it any surprise that when I asked a bunch of Gizmodo readers to share their 
