Hasta La Gadget!

If you’d like to give your iPad the same cosseting your posterior receives when you slot into the sport buckets in your Continental GT then you, good chap, are in luck. Bentley’s “luxury leather partner” Ettinger, which ensures no surface of the vehicles is bereft of animal hide, is releasing a line of gadget cases to cover your iPad, iPhone, or BlackBerry — though it’s unclear exactly which model for the latter. Prices? You’re looking at £45 for either of the phone holsters or £89 for the iPad-sized model. That’s about $73 and $145, respectively, and a lot of cash for a little hide. If you’re still not dissuaded there’s another image of the tablet-sized version and a press release below. Those, at least, are free.

Continue reading Bentley Collection iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry cases are made of rich, non-Corinthian leather

Bentley Collection iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry cases are made of rich, non-Corinthian leather originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Google had executed Google Wave correctly, it would’ve looked something like Beluga, a cross-platform group chat client available for Android phones, iPhones and any computer with a web browser.

The free service has a streamlined interface for group chatting. Conversations are called “Pods,” so when you start chatting with a friend you create a Pod, and then you invite others to join it.

On the Beluga smartphone apps, inside a Pod you can send messages and photos extremely quickly. If you choose to share your location, Beluga displays a map with your coordinates below each of your messages, so you can let your friends know where you are.

Whenever you receive a message, Beluga sends a push notification to your Android device or iPhone; the app is running in the background so you can stay signed on constantly. In this way, Beluga could be a free substitute for text messaging, if you get enough of your friends hooked on it. Getting people to sign up shouldn’t be very difficult, because you can log in through your Facebook account.

You don’t lose your Beluga conversations either: all the Pods are saved in the cloud on Belugapods.com, through the web version of the chat client.

Group chat clients are becoming increasingly popular in the era of smartphones, where e-mail doesn’t adequately keep up with our real-time movements, and threads tend to get chaotic. (Google Wave could have solved this problem, but Google didn’t seem to have a clear vision on what it was trying to deliver.) Other examples of group chat clients include HeyTell, a walkie-talkie app for groups to interact, and Yobongo, a group chat app that will emphasize location features when it’s finished.

I’ve tried many group chat apps and Beluga comes closest to delivering what I need: most importantly it’s cross-platform and pushes notifications in real time so I can keep up with multiple people on the go, which will be useful for coordinating get-togethers and collaborating with coworkers on team projects. Plus, it’s fast, and the interface is straightforward and polished.

The big piece still missing from Beluga is a fully functional web client. The web version of Beluga is still in beta mode, and it lacks the ability to send images as well as geodata. Once that’s finished, Beluga is probably going to be a big hit.

Beluga download link [iTunes]

Beluga download link [Android]

Don’t pay any attention to rumors and the lack of lines at Verizon and Apple stores at launch. Verizon’s CEO Daniel S. Mead is going on the record to tell you that the Verizon iPhone sold well. Real well. How well? He’s not really saying. The carrier is refusing to release any numbers (a rare thing for a briskly selling Apple product), but Mead went on record over at The Wall Street Journal to state that the handset had the biggest launch in carrier history.

The nine-dot pattern lock option is one of those uniquely Android things — it’s been there ever since the G1, and even if you don’t personally use it, odds are good that you recognize it. So when we see it on an iPhone — apparently on an app used by Apple internally — you can appreciate why we’re going to do a double take. What you’re looking at here is one of several screens obtained by 9 to 5 Mac, allegedly showing a version of Apple’s employee-only AppleConnect app with support for pattern locking to keep prying eyes out. It seems that the app enforces some minimum gesture length to constitute a secure lock — and considering some of the forensic science going on there, we bet it’s gotta be pretty long. Of course, none of these means we’ll see the feature show up in an actual iOS build, but the site says that the company’s testing the mechanism in other internal tools… and if nothing else, Apple seems to be acknowledging that lock patterns aren’t a terrible idea.

[Thanks, Jacob]

Apple adds pattern locking to an iPhone app that you can’t have? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 21:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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