Hasta La Gadget!

Remember when Google acquired Slide way back in 2010? A year after coasting smoothly down the chute into Mountain View, the social gaming company has finally begun to make a splash, launching Prizes (beta) last week, and now teasing Photovine, a social networking app that lets you connect with people through photo-driven themes. You could participate in a vine about your crazy weekend at the lake, join other users in a thread of kitten shots, or share unboxing pics of a new gadget while comparing regional discrepancies with users from around the world. For now, Photovine is little more than an amateurish three-page website with a brief FAQ and a somewhat-hidden reference to Slide and Google, but the service’s objective seems to be on-point, and it has potential to attract a diverse group of users. We look forward to watching the vine bud and grow after its yet-to-be-announced public launch, but head over to the source link for a more detailed look in the meantime.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Google teases Photovine, slides back into image sharing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Close your eyes and imagine that somebody took the second-generation Kindle, colored the plastic to make it look like it had been made in the 1980s and left in the sun ever since. Then imagine that they painted the already horrible keys a brassy gold color.

Now open your eyes and look at this:

Hey iriver: 1989 called. It wants its e-reader back

Hideous, isn’t it? It’s called the iriver Story HD e-reader, and it’s the first e-reeder that integrates with Google books. Clearly, if Google had any input on the design, it came from the pre Google+ era.

But you can’t judge a book by its cover, right? It’s what’s inside that counts. The Story HD allows direct access to Google’s three million titles through its built-in client, and can read Google’s DRMed books thanks to Adobe Digital Editions support. Other supported formats are EPUB, plain text and PDF, plus Powerpoint, Word and Excel files and finally zipped image files (for reading comic books).

The hardware itself is impressive. The HD in the name comes from the hi-res screen. The Story HD has a 768 x 1024 display, compared to the 600 x 800 of the Kindle 3. Given that the Kindle display already looks great, this should be a beauty.

The Story HD is also lighter than the Kindle 3 (Wi-Fi), at 7.3 vs. 8.5 ounces. Oddly, though, it doesn’t have a touch-screen like the latest e-readers, which puts it firmly in the “last-year’s tech” category.

But it’ll come down to the software, and the range of available titles. Currently, the leaders here are Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Available from Target on June 17th for $140.

Story HD product page [iriver via Google]

See Also:

• IRiver Overprices New Wi-Fi Story E-Reader
• iRiver Updates Chic Portable Media Player Line
• Kobo Update Adds New Fonts, Text Layout Controls
• Kobo Launches Touch-Screen E-Ink Tablet

Okay, so maybe it’s not the only reason that Chatroulette is due for a revival, but it certainly won’t hurt matters. SRI Technology has just announced that it’ll be providing image stabilization software to take the jiggles from your future Google Talk videocalls. ‘Course, you’ll need an Android 3.0+ device in order to take advantage, but the general consensus here seems fairly positive. SRI’s press release (embedded after the break) isn’t exactly laced with details, but GigaOM is reporting that this could also improve battery life, but only the heaviest of video chatters are apt to notice the difference. Looks like distracting yourself just got a whole lot less distracting.

Continue reading Google Talk to use SRI technology for stabilizing video chats, revive Chatroulette

Google Talk to use SRI technology for stabilizing video chats, revive Chatroulette originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Having a big, 1280 x 800 10.1-inch screen is just no good if your favorite old Android apps haven’t been updated to use it. Ideally all devs would tweak their products to properly light up those pixels, but that’s not always possible. Google’s stepping in, adding another display option on “a near-future release of Honeycomb” that will simply zoom the app to fit the screen. This is separate from the current stretching option, which sometimes look bad or doesn’t work. When this mode is enabled the app will be rendered at approximately 320 x 480 and that image blown up to fit. Pretty looking results? Unlikely, but a little Vaseline on the lens can only boost the confidence of these aging apps.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Google introducing ‘zoom to fill screen’ option on a ‘near-future’ version of Honeycomb originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By this time, hopefully, all of you who were on the hunt for a Transformer finally got your mitts on one. If you were holding out for the 3G version, though, you can stop fidgeting — it’s already been priced in mainland Europe, putting it almost a month ahead of its expected arrival in the UK. Notebook Italia spotted both the 16GB and 32GB iterations listed online, fetching €499 and €599, respectively, VAT included. Notebook Italia also grabbed a screenshot of an updated product page on ASUS’s Italian site, though when we peeped the listing we just found the WiFi-only versions, with predictably lower prices to match. Either way you slice it, though, both the instruction manual and illustrated product guide are alive and well on ASUS’ site, suggesting you should see this on the streets of Milano soon enough.

[Thanks, Marco]

3G ASUS Eee Pad Transformer spotted online, priced starting at 499 euros originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Notebook Italia  |  ASUS (manual), (guide), (product page)  | Email this | Comments