Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung just pulled a bit of a “Samsung” and completely blew out its Omnia lineup. We just got some face time with the new Omnia II, Omnia Pro, Omnia Lite and the Omnia-inspired Jet, along with the Pixon 12 — which runs the same in-house Samsung OS as the Jet, but packs a 12 megapixel camera. It’s hard not to notice the stunning AMOLED screens on these phones, especially up against the dull-by-comparison Omnia Lite with its petty LCD. Unfortunately, while the build quality is good and the specs are certainly all there, all the phones were fairly slow in regular operation. The Jet and Pixon were passable (and the Jet certainly ought to be, with an 800MHz “application processor”), but we can’t imagine anybody finding any pleasure in the molasses Windows Mobile 6.1 experiences on the Omnia trio. The Jet has a fun little 3D UI “cube” gimmick, which involves the pointless spinning of a cube to access different media apps, but most of what we saw was pretty standard TouchWiz. We did like the speed of Pixon’s camera, which does a Pre-style trick of sending photo processing duties to the background so you can snap another photo with little delay in between — it’s also pretty good at auto focus and color accuracy for a phone, but we won’t be trading in our regular point and shoot in the near term. None of the phones we looked at had network access, so we weren’t able to test out the WebKit browsers, but it sounds like a major win for the Jet and Pixon. Let’s just work on that Omnia responsiveness a bit, yeah Samsung? Perhaps Windows Mobile 6.5 (the Omnia II and Omnia Pro are 6.5-ready) will help.

Update: we added a video of the Omnia II and Omnia Pro after the break!

Continue reading Samsung’s Omnia family hands-on, Samsung Jet and Pixon 12 come along for the ride

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Samsung’s Omnia family hands-on, Samsung Jet and Pixon 12 come along for the ride originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone OS 3.0 may not be available to the masses for a couple days yet, but that’s not stopping Tapulous (nor Apple’s App Store overlords, apparently) from rolling out a new version of its ridiculously popular Tap Tap Revenge that’s fully ready to take advantage of push notifications right here and right now. We’ve taken the new build for a spin, and in brief, it works as designed — notification times ranged from near instantaneous to just under a minute. One of our editors here was testing on a cellular connection and the other was on a SIM-less iPhone 3G running just WiFi, so it looks like this setup will work pretty seamlessly regardless of what kind of connection you happen to be enjoying / tolerating / loathing at the moment. Follow the break for a quick video demo.

[Thanks, Brandon]

Continue reading Push notifications go live on iPhone courtesy of Tap Tap Revenge

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Push notifications go live on iPhone courtesy of Tap Tap Revenge originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on October 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

As it stands right now there are not many Vista-compatible firewalls available. PC Tools is coming through by not only offering one, but they are even making it free! A comment by bloodsugarwilksm convinced me to try out the new Firewall Plus 3.0 that was recently released, and before I get into some of the details I want to say that this firewall works with Windows XP, 2000, and Server 2003 in addition to Vista.

We included Firewall Plus 2.0 in our list of free antivirus, anti-spyware, and firewalls post that was done back in April, and even then it was the only Vista compatible firewall available. Now they have reached another big milestone, but you won’t notice any difference in the interface.

–What’s New in Firewall Plus 3.0?–

The PC Tools developers made changes where it matters most in a firewall: under-the-hood. Here’s a list of what’s new in version 3:

• New Smart Application Rules
  Firewall Plus now incorporates a set of new smart application rules, designed to make it simpler and easier for you to continue working with minimal interference from your Firewall. Technically, using the Application Rules, you can create a heuristic set of rules that control how applications are allowed to connect to the Internet/network and their permissions on your PC. If an application attempts to connect to the Internet/network and there are no corresponding rules, Firewall Plus will allow you to choose how the application should behave.
• Stealth Mode protection
  Firewall Plus provides you with extra protection via its Stealth Mode feature which enables your system to appear invisible to other computers in the network. When in Stealth Mode, your computer is able to make connections to other computers in the network, but Firewall Plus will prevent other computers from connecting with yours.
• Data Validation using SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection)
  Firewall Plus validates data using SPI – stateful packet inspection – in which it performs a protocol handshake and if successful allows data transfer, otherwise all traffic is blocked – ensuring no unauthorized data is transferred onto your computer.
• Application protection
  Firewall Plus offers additional application protection by guarding all the applications on your PC from unauthorized access. Enabling this option will shield applications on your system from other applications attempting to take control of them and potentially use them for malicious purposes.

–What I think about it–

I’ve always been a big fan of the Comodo Firewall because of its exceptional performance and outstanding protection, but I give a lot of credit to PC Tools for creating a very strong competing product. Firewall Plus takes up a mere 5MB of memory on my Vista machine, which I don’t feel bad dedicating to something as important as a firewall.

By default Firewall Plus is configured to show notifications that are stripped down to only the information casual users would care about. If you’re a power user that likes to see every little detail then there is an “Expert” mode in the settings. Despite being a power user myself I have found that the basic notifications are nice, clean, and setup so that you can quickly respond.

Am I going to use it myself? Actually I think that I will at least until something better comes along. My heart is still with Comodo, but I’m a bit weary running a beta build of their Vista-compatible version, which has been causing some blue screens of death for some users. I’m guessing that Comodo 3 will be out within the next month or two, and at that time I’ll reevaluate my firewall needs. Right now, however, Firewall Plus is what’s protecting my PC.

–Screenshots–

I’ll go ahead and wrap things up with several screenshots of the different areas in Firewall Plus 3:

Get PC Tools Firewall Here

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Related Posts:

• Comodo Firewall 3 Beta to be x64 and Vista Compatible
• Webroot Offers Free Firewall for Vista & XP (Limited Time)
• Comodo Personal Firewall 2.0 Gets Great Review
• Sunbelt Personal Firewall for Vista
• Free ZoneAlarm Firewall Released for Vista

What would you call this? A “fleet” of MacBook Pros? A “catch?” A “murder,” perhaps? In any case, Apple just dropped off the entire line — including the newly-status-bumped 13-inch MacBook Pro — at Engadget HQ, and while we’ll have some in-depth impressions and benchmarks soon, we thought we’d throw up the unboxings and family photos for you right away. We’re sort of struck by how amazingly similar these are in person, but we’re eager to see how the internals stack up — and whether that integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M in the 13-inch can handle a professional workload. Anything else you want to know?

Update: We just noticed that the 13-inch has lost its dedicated audio input jack, we’re guessing because of space constraints with the addition of SD and FireWire 800 — but we’re told the new single jack supports both input and output. We’re testing it out, we’ll let you know.

Filed under: Laptops

Apple’s new MacBook Pro family unboxing and hands-on! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We wouldn’t really say we “have it together” when it comes to remembering where we put our keys / phone / small children, so Apple’s announcement of the Find My iPhone service for MobileMe users came as quite a relief. The service just went live, and with a quick toggle of a preference pane in iPhone OS 3.0 the phone is fully prepared for all sorts of lost and found scenarios — along with acting as an incredibly intuitive (if pricey) stalking mechanism. Find My iPhone works exactly as advertised, giving us a fairly good location estimate from within our lead-lined underground fortress, and sending annoying messages to the phone complete with sound, even when the handset is switched to silent, though unfortunately the sound is a sort of sonar ping that strikes us as incredibly difficult to locate, unless of course our phone is taken by whale. The only other problem is that both the location function and the message service took a couple minutes to track down our iPhone — not a deal breaker, but we don’t know what the hangup could be. After the device is pinged, a confirmation of the event was sent to our MobileMe email address. A live, enthralling video demonstration is after the break.

Continue reading Find My iPhone is live, totally found our iPhone

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Handhelds

Find My iPhone is live, totally found our iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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