Hasta La Gadget!

What with all the excitement about Sony’s quad-core handheld and Nintendo’s autostereoscopic screen, we have to say, we nearly forgot about the open-source Pandora handheld slowly but assuredly shipping from the UK. Well, we’ve got some bittersweet news to share, and here it goes: you can now purchase a Pandora for $500, and have it ship within a week. What’s bitter about that? Because normally you pay $350 and get put on the pre-order waiting list. That extra $150 sounds like quite the surcharge, but it’s an option if you simply can’t wait for your number to come up, and OpenPandora chief Craig Rothwell tweets that some portion of those monies will help support the project. Still, those extra units have to come from somewhere, and if you’ve been standing in line for months, we imagine you won’t happy to hear that some rich kid can just swoop in and buy your Pandora out from under you without a care in the world.

OpenPandora begins ‘private’ sales, fast-track your open-source gaming handheld for an extra $150 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Details of the new BlackBerry Messenger are leaking out all over the internet today, and what we’re seeing is an app that could make your CrackBerry even more impossible to put away. In a move that shows RIM’s eagerness to loosen up a bit, BBM 6 could be adding at least one new feature that isn’t exactly boardroom-appropriate: gaming. Rumor has it that the app’s new iteration, which will run on OS 5.0 and greater, incorporates a function that allows users to use their BBM name as their gamer name, as well as update their status automatically to reflect completed gaming tasks. BBM 6 would also allow for larger chat groups and cross chat. We’ve no real way of predicting the app’s impact, but if the rumors turn out to be true, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a second coming of the BlackBerry massage.

BlackBerry Messenger 6 details leaked, we fear for addicts everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Betcha didn’t think this day would come, but it finally has. Sony has just come clean with its next-generation PlayStation Portable. It’s actually codenamed NGP and will revolve around five key concepts: Revolutionary User Interface, Social Connectivity, Location-based Entertainment, Converging Real and Virtual (augmented) Reality. It will be compatible with the PlayStation Suite and is backwards-compatible with downloadable PSP games and content from Sony’s PlayStation Store.

Specs include a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 5-inch touchscreen OLED display with 960 x 544 resolution, dual analog sticks (not nubs as on the current generation), 3G, WiFi, GPS, a rear-mounted touchpad, the same accelerometer / gyroscope motion sensing as in the PlayStation Move, an electronic compass, and cameras on both the front and back. Available this holiday season. Wait… what?!

Games will come on “new media,” not UMD anymore, but we’re unclear on what sort of flash memory is being used. Sony’s rather proud of the fact it’s offering the world’s first dual analog stick combo on a portable device, though we’re more geeked about the quadrupling of pixel count from the original PSP.

Sony’s live event has been graced by demos of some pretty popular games, including Killzone, Resistance, Little Big Planet, and Uncharted — with the latter serving as a demo platform to show off how the NGP’s rear touchpad can be used to more intuitively climb up some vines. That touch panel on the back is the same size and positioned directly under the front OLED touchscreen, which allows for some pretty sophisticated controls when using the two simultaneously.

The new console’s UI will be called LiveArea, which has a bunch of vertically navigable home screens and built-in social networking through PlayStation Network. You can jump between games and the LiveArea without losing your progress and comment on your buddies’ great feats of mobile gaming.

In closing its presentation, Sony trotted out Hideo Kojima to show off a cutscene from MGS 4 rendered in real time on the NGP. It was pulled directly from the PS3 version of the game and ran at 20fps, which looked very smooth indeed to our liveblogging eyes. Videos and Sony’s full PR are now available below.

Continue reading Sony’s next PSP, codenamed NGP

Sony’s next PSP, codenamed NGP originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on November 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

If you walked into a Best Buy store to browse one day and you happened to see an employee carrying a Wii above their head and proclaiming “The Last Wii!”, you might be intrigued to buy it, right? We all know that the Wii has been a rather hot commodity over the last year, and they continue to be short on supply with the current demand. Even if you had no intention of buying a system when you walked in (or you already own one), seeing it and hearing that it’s the very-last-one would be enough for anybody’s ears to perk up. You could sell it on eBay, give it to your kids, or keep it for yourself, the possibilities — endless! A Best Buy in New Jersey knows this, and so they’ve been selling “The Very Last Wii” over, and over, and over again. I’d call this a sleazy sales tactic, but one that obviously works. The story goes like this:

Saturday morning (11/10) I witnessed some amazing sleaziness over at the Princeton,NJ Best Buy. I was standing near the back of the store when one of their salespeople came strolling from a back door holding a Nintendo Wii over his head, and started walking the aisles announcing that it was their last unit. I followed, wondering both how quickly would it get snatched up and how quickly could I decide if I wanted to buy it. It took a few minutes for a couple to come rushing up to claim it, exclaiming how happy their kids were going to be. I went back to looking around the store. About 30 minutes later, I heard this announcement on the store’s PA: “Attention Best Buy customers! Julie is now walking through the store with our last Nintendo Wii! If you’re looking for a Nintendo Wii, please look for Julie!” And there was another salesperson doing the same thing as the first – walking the aisles of the store holding the Wii above her head.

I was now in the store solely to witness more of this sales technique. The second Wii took just over 15 minutes to sell – I overheard two manager-types (one in a suit, the other a yellow shirt) discussing it, the suit asking “Did Julie sell that Wii, yet? How long?” And then “Wait 40 minutes and send out the next one.” Too long for me to wait around, so I left (after stopping in at the store’s new Apple niche to set the a Macbook’s home page to the Best Buy tagged stories on Consumerist).

I suppose there’s nothing illegal or unexpected about this, but as some one tentatively in the market for a hard-to-find Wii I’m annoyed enough to swear off Best Buy this holiday season.

After reading that, I have a hard time believing that a Best Buy would feel that such a tactic were necessary! I mean, these things have been flying off the shelves on their own, without problems. Obviously we weren’t there to confirm whether or not this story is true, but it sounds like something a Best Buy would be capable of doing. If they were doing this with a Playstation 3, I’d be able to understand it a little more, but a Wii? Give me a break!

Source: The Consumerist

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This article was written on February 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

It just doesn’t seem right to be writing an article about a shortage of a game console that isn’t the Wii. We’ve been writing about those Wii shortages for a long time now, so when “shortage” was combined with “Xbox 360″ it was surprising to say the least. It’s true though, Microsoft has announced that they are seeing shortages of the Xbox 360 console in the United States and retailers are not happy.

So how is it that they are running low? Well, according to Reuters, there was a strong holiday demand. More consoles sold than they had anticipated in the month of December, about 1.3 million to be exact, and now they’re running short.  Jeff Bell, head of global marketing for Microsoft said “We are really running short of product here in the United States.  You could say we misjudged demand.” He went on to say, “We’re literally out of stock in many stores.  We think this will have an impact on our sales.”

I haven’t been out to my Best Buy or Circuit City stores lately to see whether or not they’ve got empty shelves, but many people in the comments over at Gizmodo said that their stores have had them. The other thing that crossed my mind is the number of defective consoles that people ship back to Microsoft. It’s possible that the overwhelming demand during the holidays combined with the number of replacement consoles they’ve had to send out is causing the shortage. Microsoft doesn’t expect that they’ll be able to meet the demand until Spring.

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