Hasta La Gadget!

Jordi Parra’s Spotify Box is a wonderful reworking of the mix-tape and the radio, all in a hot little Dieter Rams-inspired box.

It works like this. The “radio” part has (or will have) a Wi-Fi connection and runs the Spotify music-streaming service using libspotify on embedded Linux. The radio comes with a clutch of tiny RFID disks. These can be tied to any Spotify track or playlist, so when you pop them into the little RFID-reading circle on the front of the box, music starts to play. Buttons on the faceplate let you skip tracks.

Apart from the wonderful look of the box, I like the concept a lot. You get the convenience and huge music library of Spotify, but the physicality and hand-crafted playlists come from the days of CDs, vinyl and cassette tapes.

That perforated front isn’t just a speaker grille, either. LEDs behind the holes light up in a kind of dot-matrix to make numbers, letter and icons to let your know what is happening inside. Here’s the video:

Spotify box from Jordi Parra on Vimeo.

Parra plans on continuing with his project, and has even been in contact with people from Spotify. Right now the box is little more than a peripheral that needs to be connected to a computer to play music, but those are just details. The idea itself is a good one. And add in some kind of AirPlay or Bluetooth audio capabilities and you have a super useful — not to mention hot-looking — wireless speaker for the home.

Spotify Radio [Jordi Parra / Zenona]

See Also:

• Hands-On With Spotify for iPhone: Is iTunes Dead?
• Six Million Songs in Your Pocket: Apple Approves Spotify for …
• The Hidden Secrets of Apple's AirPlay

It’s perhaps a little too early to be feeling all retro-nostalgic for the netbook, with much of the industry moving on up to your notbooks and your tablets and such, so we’ll just say that Hercules is still kickin’ it old school by launching its eCAFE netbooks. There are two models, the Slim HD and EX HD, the former tipping the scales at 1.9lbs and measuring only .8-inches thick, while the EX model is a bit heftier at 2.5lbs and 1.1-inches, managing 13 hours of “real use” battery life. Both are said to smoothly play 720p video on their 10-inch, 1024 x 600 displays or export it over HDMI, running a custom flavor of Linux and powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. Hercules says this “sets a new standard” in netbooks, but 8 or 16GB of flash storage and 512MB of RAM sounds all too familiar to us, and if that cramped, recessed keyboard is the future we’re quite happy to stick in the present, thanks.

Hercules re-invents the netbook again, launches 10-inch Linux- and A8-powered eCAFE originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Canonical’s still one month away from letting Natty Narwhal (also known as Ubuntu 11.04) out of the cage, but it’s already teasing us with another OS flaunting an alliterative mammalian monicker. Like the Narwhal before it, Oneiric Ocelot (or Ubuntu 11.10), due out this October, will offer a 2D OpenGL-based Unity interface to support older computers, as well as Qt — you know, the framework Nokia loved and left hanging. You can also expect Ubuntu to scale back on the number of cloud services with the Ocelot, as it gears up for the release of the as-of-yet unnamed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long term support). For now, that’s all she wrote, but if you’re dying to find out how they come up with those adorable Animalia appellatives, check out the source link below.

Canonical christens Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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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It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about the NaviSurfer II, but for those patiently awaiting the update of this commuter computer, VIC Ltd. has just given the thing a pretty hefty overhaul. The new NaviSurfer II UBU-3G runs on an auto-specific Ubuntu 10.10 and sports a 7-inch touchscreen, 250GB hard drive, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 3G HSDPA modem, and three USB 2.0 ports. Possibly the most useful upgrade of all, however, is the inclusion of a built-in GPS receiver, rocking a Navit navigation system. Unfortunately for those lacking in the dashboard department, this sucker’s Double DIN, or about twice the size of the standard car radio, but if you’ve got room for the thing, the NaviSurfer runs €300 (about $400).

Update: The VIC Ltd website is currently down — looks like someone might be throwing a little too much traffic their way.

VIC Ltd NaviSurfer II UBU-3G in-car PC gets built-in GPS — finally originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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