Hasta La Gadget!

Pandigital isn’t beating around the bush with the two tablets it’s showing here at CES — they run Android 2.1, they’re not getting Froyo, and they’re most certainly not getting Honeycomb. These slates come in 7 and 9-inch varieties, and the 9-inch Novel comes in both AT&T 3G and WiFi-only models. To rub salt in the wound, these guys don’t have any Android Market support, and they won’t be getting it any time soon (or ever, for that matter). On the bright side though, you get B&N’s Nook app pre-installed on the Novel (get it?). Unfortunately, we’re most upset that Pandigital hasn’t seemed to change any of the things we disliked so much with the first version — the screens aren’t glamorous and the performance is still painfully sluggish. If you’re looking for a cheap Android tablet, we’d probably suggest waiting for something with a little bit lot more flare.

Pandigital 7- and 9-inch Android tablets hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SRS Labs’ suite was sportin’ a number a devices showcasing Surround Everywhere, technology that lets you enjoy surround sound anywhere you go, laptops, phones, so yeah, anywhere. But the coolest thing we came away with was their vision of how surround sound should be mastered. Many in the industry are strungling with the transition from 5.1 to 7.1 and let’s face it, about the time the studios get their arms around 7.1, we’ll be asking for 9.1. So this new idea is to record where the audio is supposed to come from, instead of which speaker it should be played on. This way a movie would never need its audio remastered again, because the fact that the plane coming in at 2 O’Clock wouldn’t change no matter how many speakers you had, it wouldn’t even matter if you had a speaker placed precisely at 2 O’Clock. So basically your AVR would render the audio on the fly based on the number of speakers, and where you placed those speakers by using the recorded sounds and the data about those sounds. Kinda blew your mind right? The problem of course is at this point its just a cool idea and until content is created this way, there’s no chance we’ll actually be able to realize the benifits of this dream. Either way, we do commend SRS Labs for dreaming.

SRS Labs wants us to forget about our speakers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Energizer rolls into CES with new power packs, inductive chargers, solar products, and more originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Vlogging and lifecasting are both things we haven’t really gotten into in this new-age of gadget crazed aliens and humans, but the LooxcieCam is a gadget — and you know us, we kinda-maybe-sorta really love gadgets. Here at the Consumer Electronics Show, Looxcie ousted its new streaming service which it has dubbed LooxcieLive. In addition to the Bluetooth video connectivity to your smartphone, the service allows you to beam the vidcast across mobile networks and WiFi to any other dude or dudette on your contacts list that’s got the app installed. Those looking to get started right away will be disappointed — the service is currently unavailable, but will be live within the first half of 2011.

Aside from the newly announced software, we got a chance to play with the LooxcieCam. The headset we looked at was paired (via Bluetooth) to a Droid X using the LooxcieMoments app, and the streaming quality was something we hope to see an improvement on. The unit, stuffed with 4GB of recording memory, can record one hour of VGA quality (and 4 hours of sub-VGA quality). The app is both available in the Market and App Store, and minimum requirements to run it are 2.0 on Android and 4.2 on iOS. Interested in seeing the headset in action? Head past the break and click play.

Continue reading Looxcie introduces LooxcieLive, enables mobile-to-mobile stream viewing

Looxcie introduces LooxcieLive, enables mobile-to-mobile stream viewing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know that front facing camera on Motorola’s LTE Droid Bionic? Well, it looks like you will be able to use it to make Skype video calls very soon. We were hanging around the Motorola booth early this morning and while playing around with the new 4.3-inch phone we noticed a “Skype demo” application. One click on the application revealed that the video calling capability, which just became available for the iPhone, will be heading to Android soon. There wasn’t a working app, but the video demo clearly showed how easy it will be to log into Skype, pull up your contact list, and make a video call over Verizon’s next generation network. We’ve got a few pictures below and a short video is on the way. Now we just need Skype to make this official at its press conference in just a few hours…

Skype video calling coming to Android, demoed on the Droid Bionic originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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