Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve all been there — you step into a cab in a foreign place, ask your driver to head to your destination, and then he / she asks you if you’d rather take the highway or go direct. Or, worse still, senses your innocence and proceeds to head the wrong direction for two or three miles. In an effort to give desperate travelers a better sense of how much it’ll cost to get from point A to point B D in a cab, Bing Maps’ new Taxi Fare Calculator was created. Turns out, this add-in for the mapping service was built by someone hankering to win the King of Bing Maps competition, and while it’s only capable of calculating routes around a few dozens cities right now, we get the impression that this could soon grow into a monster of its own. Hey Microsoft, when’s the (badly needed) optimized-for-mobile version coming out?

Bing Maps’ Taxi Fare Calculator keeps your lollygagging cab driver in check originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you buy this IF Mode folding bike, you’ll be glad that it packs up small and can be safely stowed in a corner, because it costs $2,500.

For that, though, you get a bike that rides like a proper, full-sized bicycle, avoiding the tiny wheels that can make folders like the Brompton feel unsafe to newcomers. The wheels on the IF are a full 28-inches, and the single-sided hub-connection lets them squeeze up together when folder making for a skinny package.

Talking of folding, the designer, Mark Sanders, says that it uses a “single-action automatic fold” which does everything in one go, from collapsing the frame and handlebars to swinging the wheels around.

When in use, the bike works like any other. It has a chain (hidden in that tube), a pair of disk brakes and two-speed gears shifted with a heel-switch on the bottom-bracket. Apart from the slick design, its hard to see where your money is going here: after all, for the same price you could pick up a Vespa or other gas-scooter.

It’s heavy, too, weighing in at 32-pounds (14.7 kg). The bike is aimed at commuters, but if I was commuting further than the distance between bed and desk (and sometimes not even that far) then I’d find an old beater road-bike and strip it down to a single-speed. It’ll weigh nothing, it will never go wrong and with the right (ugly) paint job and a big ‘ol lock, nobody will steal it either.

Available now, in cream or black.

IF-Mode: An Engineering and Design Masterpiece [Babygeared via Uncrate]

See Also:

• Giant Clip Folding Bike
• Breezer Zag8 Folding Bike
• Dahon Mu SL Folding Bike
• Birdy Silver Folding Bicycle
• GoBike DLX 8 Folding Bicycle

Apple has sold an almost ridiculous 1.7 million iPhone 4 handsets in its opening weekend, running Thursday through Saturday. This breaks every prediction we saw last week, and almost triples the 600,000 pre-orders reported by Apple just a week before the new iPhone went on sale.

“This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs in an Apple press release. Even so, pre-ordering glitches and flat-out supply shortages kept Apple from selling even more. Jobs again: “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

The customer pays $200 (16 GB) or $300 (32 GB) for an iPhone 4, but Apple gets more than that from AT&T. To find out how much, let’s take the prices from the few countries where the handsets are sold unlocked — France, Canada and Britain. Converted into U.S. dollars, we get the following:

Taking into account that all Apple products get more expensive as they cross the Atlantic, we’ll be conservative and use the Canadian prices. Taking the mean of the two prices (and rounding them) we get $670 in U.S. dollars. Let’s multiply that by 1.7 million to get Apple’s total sales for the weekend (not counting the newly discounted iPhone 3G or the still-hot iPad). The number? $1,139,000,000, or well over a billion dollars. Not a bad start.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

iPhone 4 Sales Top 1.7 Million [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Sells 600,000 iPhones Despite 'System Malfunctions,' Orders Suspended
• Apple's iPad Sales Accelerate: 3 Million Sold in 80 Days
• Video: iPhone 4 Looks Gorgeous, But FaceTime Face Plants
• Apple's iPhone 4 Launch Draws Huge Crowds Worldwide

Visa has announced a contactless payment system for the iPhone which allows you to use the phone as a credit card. It works using RFID tech, and is as kludgy as hell.

Called In2Pay, the payment method uses a modified microSD card with a near-field communications (NFC) chip inside. Because the iPhone doesn’t yet sport a microSD slot, the card sits in a case which powers the chip and allows contactless payments, just like those used to pay for toll booths or public transport. You would be able to hold your iPhone up to a compatible reader and make a transaction. It would work even if there were no clerk present, for instance at a vending machine.

The idea of schemes like In2Pay is to free you from carrying a wallet, allowing you to do everything with your cellphone. But this implementation, which requires carrying a cellphone case, is not much different from just taping your credit card to the back of your phone. (Or slipping it into a credit card-holding iPhone cover.)

It also requires a compatible card reader. What, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t accept contactless payments? Sorry, there are only 100,000 merchants in the U.S. that have NFC payment readers, compared to millions that accept old-style credit cards.

However, it does come direct from Visa, lending a certain weight to the scheme, and when more phones accept the microSD it will be essentially invisible. Add to that the fact that iPhone users tend to be more disposed to trying out new tech and you can easily see that this is a pilot scheme from Visa designed to grow the infrastructure of contactless payments, which have so far failed to meet Visa’s inflated expectations.

In2Pay joins several methods for receiving credit card payments, including Square, a little white cube that slots into the iPhone’s headphone jack and allows you to swipe regular old credit cards. Soon, it seems clear, almost all payments will be made using cellphones, even the ones that involve paying your friend back that dollar he owes you. Just don’t lose that phone.

DeviceFidelity Announces Mobile Contactless Payment Solution for iPhone [Visa via MobileCrunch]

See Also:

• PayPal Fist Bumps Square
• Square Mobile Credit Card System (Beta)
• Swipe Credit Cards With Your iPhone

Every so often, an American wireless carrier will toss out a no-holds-barred 15 or 30-day money back guarantee, likely initiated to spur customer walk-ins, and in turn, boost the adoption rate. Sprint, however, is sick and tired (but mostly tired) of playing such games, and it has today announced a new “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Money-Back” program that it has no current intentions of ever nixing. We spoke to Sprint this morning regarding the news, and a spokesperson affirmed that it will be in place for the foreseeable future, with no expiration date already dialed up in the background. The new deal (which starts tomorrow, all kidding aside) enables any customer to open up a new line of Sprint service for 30 days; if they aren’t feeling it, they’ll get “reimbursed for the device purchase and activation fee, get the early termination fee waived, get a full refund for service plan monthly recurring charges incurred and get all associated taxes and Sprint surcharges associated with these charges waived.” We’ll confess — that’s pretty darn thorough, but do you seriously expect to return that EVO 4G? No, no you don’t.

Sprint rolls out new 30 day ‘money back guarantee’ trial, claims it’s not a promo originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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