Hasta La Gadget!

We tinkered with the OS X build of the browser on our Macbook Pro and although pages appear to render quickly, we can’t quite figure out how to navigate backwards. You can pinch-to-zoom with the trackpad and scroll with the d-pad, but once you’ve loaded a page, it seems you need to be on a mobile device do any further navigation. Of course, as you’ll see in the gallery below, the beta comes packed with the usual — preferences, downloads, add-ons, bookmarks and Firefox Sync. If you want to give the software a whirl, hit the source link to grab the build of your choice.

Firefox 4 beta 5 for mobile released, available on Android, N900, your computer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So what’s this Thunderbolt stuff, and why is it in your new MacBook Pro? Intel just broke it down for us, and now we’ll do the same for you. Simply put, Thunderbolt’s a familiar-looking port, a brand-new chip, and a cord, which allows devices to pipe two data streams simultaneously — in both directions — over a single cable at up to 10 gigabits per second to start, primarily using PCI Express x4 for data and DisplayPort for video. The Thunderbolt controller chip — required for the system, but Intel says it’s hardware-agnostic and doesn’t require an Intel processor or chipset to use — acts as a miniature router of sorts that rapidly switches between the two bidirectional channels of data.

Sounds great, but why would you want to buy into yet another copper cord? Intel defends that Thunderbolt will be backwards and forwards-compatible depending on the cable used. Representatives explained that the basic system can work with any other PCI Express 2.0-compatible I/O system with, say, a FireWire or eSATA adapter doing the dirty work –Intel wouldn’t specifically comment on USB 3.0 — and that the port you’ll find in new MacBook Pros and storage devices can actually take an optical cable when those are cost-effective enough to roll out, because Intel will eventually bake the optical transceivers into the cables themselves. In the meanwhile, you can get up to three meters of range out of a basic cable, plus a fairly generous 10 watts of power over the bus, and since Thunderbolt devices are designed to be daisy-chained, you may be able to get another three meters for each device you add on that sports a pair of the ports.

Though Intel wasn’t talking about likely prices for the chips or cables in even the most general terms, Promise and LaCie had prototype devices on hand headed to the market soon — get a peek at them and a closer look at the cable in our gallery below, and we’ll have video up in a little while too.

Update: Looks like LaCie’s product now has a name and vague release date: it’s the LaCie Little Big Disk, coming this summer, with a pair of solid state drives inside.

Update 2: Video after the break — get a load of Thunderbolt streaming four 1080p clips from a MacBook Pro and attached Promise NAS simultaneously!

Continue reading Intel Thunderbolt: a closer look (updated with video)

Intel Thunderbolt: a closer look (updated with video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re pretty certain that once embedded wireless sensors catch on, they’ll pervade every aspect of our lives, and Green Goose is building a microcosm of that eventuality in the form of a role-playing game. The five-person SF Bay Area startup has embedded custom 915MHz radios and MEMS accelerometers in a variety of tiny transmitters which you can mount to household objects — like a water bottle, bicycle, or the toothbrush above — which report back to the receiver with your actions and thereby increase your score. Brush your teeth on time, take your vitamins, or exercise repeatedly within a couple hundred feet of the receiver, and you’ll eventually level up. (Or, optionally, muck with the sensor just right, and it’ll register points anyhow.) Presently, that level isn’t worth anything, but founder Brian Krejcarek says there are tentative plans to tie these points into a real game and an API to build the idea out, and he’s presently looking for partner companies here at the Launch Conference in San Francisco to help roll out the sensors (which cost approximately $4 each) under branded marketing initiatives of some sort. If you don’t want to wait, the company will sell starter kits starting February 28th for $24. Not bad for a head start on the future, right?

Update: VentureBeat reports that Green Goose raised $100,000 in funding at the conference. Another interesting note: ReadWriteWeb reports that the sensors were originally pitched as a money-saving tool.

Update 2: $100,000, not $100 million. Whoops.

Green Goose sensors monitor your life, you earn experience points (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon has just turned on its Prime Instant Video service, letting paid Prime subscribers (sorry, students) in the US (sorry, foreigners) stream any of 5,000 movies and TV shows directly to their machines free of charge — well, free beyond the $79 Primers already pay. Jeff Bezos has confirmed that there will be no extra charge going forward for this service and that Prime itself will not be getting more expensive to pay for all these bits and bytes. Right now the selection is limited, particularly if you already have a Netflix subscription, but we just had to try it out. Click on through for our impressions on a variety of devices.

Continue reading Amazon Prime Instant Video hands-on

Amazon Prime Instant Video hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Despite its variety of new tablets, Acer’s already told us of its plans to continue on with its Aspire One netbooks, and the new D257 is all the proof we need of that. At this point, we don’t know much about the latest 10.1-inch laptop, except that it does have one funky lid. It looks like a stone was dropped smack in the middle of the O in the Aspire One logo to create a ripple-like effect, and it’s more than just an interesting paint job — the plastic has actually been molded. It’s a noteworthy design move, but we’ve never really been big fans of the huge logo in the first place. We were actually hoping Acer would nix it after the AO521. Spec-wise, Notebook Italia is reporting it will be powered by Intel’s dual-core Atom N570 or N550 processors and the placard on display at MWC said that it will dual-boot Windows 7 Starter and Android. Ironically, the model on hand wouldn’t boot at all, but we’ll be listening out for an official announcement on this one.

Acer’s Aspire One D257 attempts to send ripples through MWC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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