Hasta La Gadget!

More details have finally surfaced on the intriguing Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia’s first foray into the competitive netbook space. Nokia is partnering with AT&T to sell the gorgeous machine for $299 with a 2-year contract, starting Oct. 22. The Booklet 3G will be available exclusively at Best Buy stores through the holiday retail season.

Unfortunately, a 2-year contract with AT&T for its 3G data services costs $60 a month. That doesn’t really make $299 a very good deal, since the total cost ($299 + [$60 x 24 months]) with the data services is $1,739. The average consumer might do better to purchase the unit for $599 and buy a wireless card or cellular modem.

We really enjoyed getting our hands on the Booklet 3G at CTIA and think it warrants a much closer look. It has an aluminum chassis and a 10-inch screen with 1280-by-720 resolution, weighs 2.76 pounds, and runs Windows 7 Home Premium. The Booklet 3G also offers Wi-Fi, 3G connectivity, GPS, a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom processor, a 120GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, and supposed 12-hour battery life.

Look out for a full review of the slick machine later this month from laptop analyst Cisco Cheng at PCMag.com.

In no uncertain terms, a Barnes & Noble representative at what looks like the CTIA show says that a color (color!) Plastic Logic e-book reader will launch in Spring 2010. Now, we’re not sure if Daniel Joresson is authorized to make announcements about its Plastic Logic partner but he did so nonetheless. The Plastic Logic e-reader will feature a color screen about the size of a paperback and runs the “Barnes & Noble e-book reader application.” It’s not clear, but it sounds like the B&N application will also be available for cellphones including the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Right, similar to the Kindle app. So how does this jibe with rumors about a 6-inch Barnes & Noble e-reader from Plastic Logic launching as early as next month? Easy, the first version will be grayscale while a new model featuring a color display will launch in Spring. In fact, Plastic Logic’s own web site says that its color reader is “around the corner” and expects to be “first to market with a large, flexible color display” — take that Sony and Amazon with your PVI built E Ink-based displays. Watch the flirtatious B&N reveal after the break.

[Thanks, Tom]

Read — Plastic Logic FAQ (color reader)
Read — Video

Continue reading Barnes and Noble ‘confirms’ color Plastic Logic e-book reader for Spring 2010 (video)

Filed under: Handhelds

Barnes and Noble ‘confirms’ color Plastic Logic e-book reader for Spring 2010 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We had a chance to take a tour of Nokia’s research and development facility in San Diego this week — and while we’re afraid to say we didn’t see any Maemo 6-powered devices or Symbian^4 emulators lying around, we did see some pretty cool stuff, particularly in the product testing laboratories where engineering samples and final products are put through pure hell. The idea is to simulate years’ worth of real-life product use in just a few days — individual tests last anywhere from a few hours to three weeks or longer — by pressing buttons, sliding sliders, actuating hinges, heating, cooling, wetting, drying, dropping, whacking, shaking, rubbing, bending, and generally defacing the phones in every way imaginable. Once a phone finally breaks, they look for obvious reasons — cracked plastic, broken springs, and the like — but if that initial analysis fails, they’ve got a well-equipped lab on site complete with a scanning electron microscope and CT scanner for taking microscopic looks at failed components in both two and three dimensions; from here, they can find broken connections on chips, incorrectly-fabricated materials, and the occasional ant eye magnified a couple thousand times (it’s posted on the wall in the lab, and yes, it’s scary). Follow the break for a cheerful montage of a few Nokia phones getting mercilessly beaten beyond recognition.

Continue reading Nokia’s product testing labs in 3 minutes, 42 seconds (video)

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia’s product testing labs in 3 minutes, 42 seconds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We finally got a good, hard look at the Verizon-customized version of Samsung’s Omnia II, and we’ve got good news and bad news: the good news is that the phone’s a darker, more reasonable shade in person than it was in that press shot we’d seen before, but the bad news is that we’ve confirmed it’s running 6.1. Anyone daring to release a 6.1 phone at this point is at serious risk of getting laughed out of the room unless they offer an upgrade path mere minutes afterwards, so we’re hoping that by the time this is on shelves, it’ll either be running 6.5 out of the box or there’ll be an update program announced in conjunction with the release. Otherwise, the display’s absolutely phenomenal (indoors, anyhow) and TouchWiz seems to work as well as it did on the original model, though scrolling through menus got a bit laggy at times — isn’t it kinda weird that a years-old platform can practically max out a circa-2009 device? Check out a quick gallery below.

Samsung Omnia II for Verizon in the flesh, Windows Mobile 6.1 on board originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re big fans of reality and feasibility, we swear, but something like this “EOS” concept phone Kyocera was showing off at CTIA is just too good to pass up. The handset folds up into what could roughly be described as a wallet shape, but folds out into two configurations: portrait QWERTY mode (pictured), and full-on widescreen OLED display (after the break). Samsung was showing similar screen-folding folding abilities, but a much less impressive handset, at CES. Things get even wilder, tough, with Kyocera envisioning shape memory keys that can morph flat when not in use, and a kinetic charging method based on piezoelectric generators and Mary Poppins. Sure, our great grandkids are going to have a good laugh at us for thinking this is lovable, but they always were a bunch of theoretical brats. Kyocera plans on implementing some of the concept ideas into its “near future” lineup of devices. We’ll see how that pans out.

[Via Inhabitat, photo courtesy of Jeffrey Sass]

Continue reading Kyocera shows off preposterous, beautiful EOS folding OLED phone concept

Filed under: Cellphones, Displays

Kyocera shows off preposterous, beautiful EOS folding OLED phone concept originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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