Hasta La Gadget!

A day after becoming official, the Desire Z has received its first price: €549 if bought from Amazon.de. Alas, you still don’t have the option to actually purchase or pre-order the unlocked Froyo slider, but at least we’ve got a relative idea of where its pricing fits within HTC’s handset hierarchy. The answer is pretty highly, considering the original Desire, a flagship product in its time, debuted on the same web outlet at €519. And here we hoped the G2’s decent US pricing would translate to similar affordability for its sister device. Seems like the usual rule applies: you’d better be patient, rich, or both if you want to have the latest smartphone.

[Thanks, Peter]

Update: Amazon’s UK branch also has a teaser page for the Z, pricing it at £499 and suggesting an October 18 launch date. Thanks, David!

Update 2: UK e-tailer Play.com is now one-upping Amazon by suggesting an October 11 release date and taking pre-orders for the Desire Z at £430 and the Desire HD at £470. If this keeps going, they’ll be giving them away for free by the end of the day. Thanks, Greg!

HTC Desire Z priced at €549 by Amazon.de, £430 by Play.com originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“If you see it, just say it,” says Microsoft’s Kinect, but only in the US, UK, Mexico and Japan to start — those are the only four countries that will support Kinect voice control by the motion-sensing peripheral’s November launch. So said Microsoft PR manager Lidia Pitzalis in an interview with Eurogamer Spain, adding that Germany, Italy, France and even Canada and Spain would have to wait for a Spring 2011 update for additional language support. Microsoft claims it’s a matter of accents throwing off the voice recognition, as the company’s already had to build separate software versions for US and UK English, but if you’re an Italian who can fake a good Cockney, you’re still out of luck, as Microsoft’s reportedly disabling voice control entirely in said regions until it can formally support it. And game companies wonder why we try so hard to hack those DVD drives…

Update: Canada will in fact have voice support, according to Microsoft. So long as you speak English and not French.

Kinect won’t support voice recognition in some countries until 2011, putting on airs won’t help originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ID cards and RFID tags are similar in one key respect: they get a lot of bad press — one for constricting civil liberties, the other for being a lousy security risk — and yet are widely used around the world. It’s fitting, therefore, that Germany has decided to marry the two for the latest version of its own personalausweis. Dutch company NXP has begun production of the requisite RFID chips for these new slices of plastic, which will roll out from the beginning of November this year. The Deutsch state sees a vastly expanded role for the modernized cards, including validating your identity for online shopping and communicating with your local authority (e-government, they call it). And, of course, your biometric data is loaded onto the chip as well, just to make things nice and neat. You know, we remember the good old days when identity theft used to be hard.

Germany slapping RFID tags on its populace for the sake of brisker bureaucracy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’d bother telling you up front that it also gives them a new sense of purpose, but you’re already versed in how the impending Robot Apocalypse is going to go down. Wolfgang Stürzl and his best buds over at Bielefeld University in Germany have just published a report detailing how an artificial bee eye could improve the vision of miniature robots — ones that fly, in particular. By using a catadioptric imaging system, which captures an image using both mirrors and lenses, they were able to utilize a single camera to capture a full 280-degrees of vision, and a lowly internal computer is able to stitch the two panes together in order to create a usable image that humans can interpret. The idea here is to provide more sight with less space, bringing us one step closer to actually having our very own ‘fly-on-the-wall’ moment. Comforting, no?

Artificial bee eye gives diminutive robotic air drones wider range of vision originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Billed as “the Segway‘s little sister,” this self-balancing electro scooter comes from a small German company called Ewee. The idea behind it is pretty simple: file down all the extraneous bits, keep the stuff that keeps you going, and presumably try to sell it to hardy macho types who like the barebones aesthetic. You accelerate by leaning forward and decelerate by doing the opposite, while steering is handled by a joystick (apparently “driving pleasure is gauranteed”). We’re not sure how much trust we’re willing to invest in either the company or its product, but exclusive retailer fun-components does have it ready for pre-order today, so if you’re feeling adventurous with your €799 ($1,039), feel free to pay their site a visit. The rest of us are going after the break to watch the video.

Continue reading Ewee-PT is how you say ‘Segway’ in German (video)

Ewee-PT is how you say ‘Segway’ in German (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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