Hasta La Gadget!

This year’s Electronics Entertainment Expo was pretty amazing, featuring plenty of fresh new hardware and some… innovative titles for serious consoles. Sony renamed its NGP to PlayStation Vita, while Nintendo unveiled its Wii successor, designated only by an extra vowel: U. Despite the (now even more) goofy name, the Wii U stole the show, its 6.2-inch touchscreen controller opening the door to a world of potentially awesome games — and to what will surely be a whole new generation of shovelware. The show may be over, but the our coverage still burns — just like our hearts after one last night at Daikokuya.

Liveblogs

• Microsoft
• Sony
• Nintendo

Major announcements

• Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 UI has Bing voice search across Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and live TV
• Sony introduces PlayStation-brand 3D monitor and 3D glasses, bundle available for $499
• Sony’s PlayStation Vita official: $249 for WiFi, $299 for 3G
• The Wii U, Nintendo’s next console
• The Wii U controller, revealed!

Impressions

• Sony’s PlayStation Vita: first hands-on impressions
• Nintendo Wii U controller, first hands-on!
• Kinect Star Wars hands-on: Engadget and Joystiq get in touch with the Force
• Hyperkin SupaBoy portable SNES console hands-on
• Minecraft Pocket Edition on Xperia Play hands-on
• Forza Motorsport CSR and CSR Elite wheel and pedals hands-on
• Xbox 360 Wireless Speed Wheel hands-on

But that’s only the beginning! Be sure to check out our E3 2011 event page for the full suite of news.

E3 2011 wrap-up: Wii U, PS Vita, and a whole lot of motion gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve diligently followed the Microsoft v. i4i Limited Partnership patent dispute as it wound its way through the courts, and now comes the day of reckoning: by a unanimous decision, the US Supreme Court has upheld the patent-infringement finding against Redmond. For those of you just catching up, MS had been taken to court by Toronto-based i4i over a portfolio of XML-related patents — patents it had already offered to license to the software behemoth. In court, Microsoft claimed it had not infringed and that the patents were invalid; a 2009 Texas court disagreed and awarded $200 million in damages. A subsequent appeal failed. Oh, and the government sided with i4i. Today’s Supreme Court verdict upholds the lower courts’ decisions: Microsoft Word is an infringing product, and the company now owes $290 million. The finding likely won’t affect consumers, as the offending versions of Word are now obsolete. Still, $290 million isn’t chump change, even for the world’s largest software company. There’s probably a joke in here about i4i justice, but we’ll be dadblasted if we can find it.

Microsoft loses $290 million patent battle, begins searching couch cushions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft asked us to drop by at E3 to chat up a generically identified “Xbox executive,” imagine our surprise when we found Kudo Tsunoda hiding behind door number six. Wearing his signature shades, Kudo gave us a brief primer on what makes Kinect great, or at least a heavy endorsement of Kinect Fun Labs. While we can certainly dig the bit-sized gadgetry Fun Labs has to offer, we like to dig deeper — will the Kinect hardware ever be integrated into other devices? Any plans for Microsoft’s 3D tracking camera and Windows 8? Kudo did his best to feed our ravenous appetite for answers.

It wasn’t easy on poor Kudo, of course — more than once we saw him glance longingly at his wrangler, a friendly PR rep keeping him from spilling the beans on anything too awesome. Probing about Windows 8 and Kinect produced one such look, and while our man very lightly suggested that Microsoft does more than games — and that the dual-camera device might start showing up on other devices — the big M had nothing to announce at that time. Kudo did go on to say, however, that we can expect to see new, innovative, “oh my gosh, I can’t believe Kinect can do that” experiences at E3 year after year, citing this year’s keynote for some recent examples. While we couldn’t coax any leaks about Xbox or Kinect successors out of the man, it’s good to see Microsoft’s continued dedication to improving the platform.

Kudo Tsunoda doesn’t tell us a thing about Windows 8 support for Kinect originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on February 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

FastStone Image Viewer 3.0 is moving along quite nicely and just the other day they released Beta 2. I have already raved about their screen capture utility (that is free as well) which we use quite heavily on our site, but the Image Viewer is sure to amaze you just as much.

Basically, with Image Viewer you can manage all of your images located on your PC in one convenient location. It is something that kind of reminds me of Google’s Picasa photo management software, but there is something about Image Viewer that makes it seem powerful yet slim. Maybe it is the fact that you can download a portable version that doesn’t require any sort of installation…I’m not quite sure what it is, but it is quite sleek.

The custom interface really looks nice and gives the application a professional look and feel. It has the tree navigation on the left-side of the Image Viewer so that finding images is as simple as browsing your hard drive. There is no more having to add albums or fuss over why images aren’t showing up, because this just pulls stuff straight from your hard drive.

As you can see in the screenshot I took above, the Edit menu offers an array of effects and customizations that you can choose from which is what makes this so useful for me. There are a lot of really simple operations that I like to do such as resizing images or cropping them, and this lets me do it in just a few operations. Not to mention that you can fix the red eye in photos in a few clicks!

Those of us that struggle trying to manage and view images on a small monitor will also find their full-screen mode to be quite useful. As seen in the screenshot above you can view an image in full-screen mode and still have access to all of the tools that the Image Viewer offers. The best part is that the menus automatically hide themselves and they pop-out when you hover your mouse towards one side of the screen. In the example above I am hovering over the left-side of the screen so the photo editing menu and each side of the screen will reveal a different tool.

The newest Beta has some nice improvements including saving photos as a PDF or cropping multiple images in a single batch operation. Maybe we’ll see some new features in the next pre-release as well, but since you don’t even have to install anything there should be nothing holding you back from giving this version a shot.

Download FastStone Image Viewer 3.0

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Daily Downloads: Paint.NET and FastStoneDaily Downloads: iTunes, uTorrent, Sandboxie, and MoreCyberWare: Free FastStone Capture 5.1 Screenshot SoftwareDaily Downloads: Opera Mini, FileZilla, PSPad, and More*Sigh* FastStone Capture Turns to Shareware…now $30

Microsoft gave us an early preview of Windows 8

Microsoft to date still hasn’t delivered a response to Apple’s iPad tablet, and the software leviathan might be taking matters into its own hands.

Sources at DigiTimes claim that Microsoft has talked with Texas Instruments and Taiwanese OEMS about possibly distributing a Microsoft-branded Windows 8 tablet by 2013.

According to the source, “Microsoft plans to copy its branding strategy from product lines such as Xbox 360, Zune, Kin smartphone and TV, to compete in the tablet PC segment.”

To date, the Microsoft-branded Xbox 360 line has been one of the company’s rare hardware success stories. Microsoft’s other hardware products haven’t had much luck: The Kin smartphone, Zune PMP, and Microsoft-branded televisions have, for lack of a better word, flopped. Microsoft revealed the core functionality of Windows 8 earlier this month at the D9 conference.

Microsoft didn’t return our request for comment. But company representative Frank Shaw did tweet this morning: “Nothing like starting the day with a hot steaming cup of speculation.”

The move seems unlikely from a business standpoint. Developing a Microsoft-branded tablet could sour its relationship with other Windows 7 and Windows 8 hardware suppliers, something that Microsoft can’t afford to lose. However, computer manufacturer Acer has already expressed discomfort about some of Microsoft’s tablet plans: The company’s CEO J.T. Wang claimed that Microsoft is imposing “troublesome” restrictions on makers of processors who are making Windows 8 tablets.

Wang didn’t elaborate on what those restrictions are. But it’s possible that Microsoft’s strategy with Windows 8 will be similar to its approach with Windows Phone 7, in which the company issues a strict list of criteria to phone manufacturers, requiring their handsets to contain specific hardware in order to run Microsoft’s operating system.

See Also:

• Windows 8 Tablet OS Is Just Windows 7 With a New Skin
• Microsoft Patching Up Windows Phone 7’s Ragged Update Process …
• How Microsoft Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Phone