Hasta La Gadget!

Oh, brother. This just keeps getting better and better, and by “better and better,” we mean “uglier and uglier.” Google’s abrupt decision to stop censoring results in China and redirect users on the mainland to the outfit’s Hong Kong portal has stirred up all sorts of tense feelings around the globe, and if you thought this whole war would be confined to the desktop, you were sorely mistaken. China Unicom, which is gearing up to present its customer base with a few more smartphone options with Android loaded on, recently announced that it wouldn’t be using Google as the search engine on those very phones. Lu Yimin, president of the operator, was quoted as saying that his company was “willing to work with any company that abides by Chinese law,” but that it didn’t have “any cooperation with Google currently.” Granted, this is just the latest in a series of blows to Android’s proliferation in the world’s biggest nation, but you can really tell it’s getting personal now. C’mon guys — can’t we just hug it out?

China Unicom won’t use Google’s search engine on Android phones originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not déjà vu, it’s just all happening again. Just over a year after Canon had to bow its head in shame due to a black dot / banding issue that plagued the EOS 5D Mark II, along comes yet another heartache surrounding one of the company’s finest DSLRs. The v2.0.3 firmware update that was issued earlier in the week is apparently causing audio problems for some users, with the actual quirk going a little something like this:

“Recently we have discovered a malfunction that occurs with Firmware Version 2.0.3, in which the manual recording levels for C1/C2/C3 are changed and the camera becomes unable to record audio if the power is turned off (or if Auto power off takes effect) after registering “Sound Recording: Manual” in the camera user settings. We apologize very sincerely for the inconvenience, but we are going to stop making this firmware available for download. For customers who have already updated to the new firmware, when using the camera with the mode dial set to C1/C2/C3, please either set the sound recording settings to Auto.”

In the meanwhile, Canon has pulled the update from its support site while it works on a new firmware version to patch things up, but aside from a promise of “soon,” there’s no way to tell when exactly the new file will hit the pipes.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Canon EOS 5D Mark II 2.0.3 firmware yanked due to audio issues, fix is on the way originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mama always said that some folks just never learn, and we reckon there’s plenty of wisdom to be had from that very statement. Year after year, German police are called in to raid select booths at CeBIT (and IFA, to be fair), and yet again we’ve seen a booth cleared out at the request of powerful lawyers from a few companies you may have heard of. Word on the street has it that Apple, Siemens and Sisvel were all kvetching over patent infringements made by an unnamed company exhibiting at last week’s show, and within an hour or so of the fuzz showing up, the whole thing was stripped and a hefty fine (€10,000) was levied. Unfortunately, the exact details of who was violating what remains clouded in mystery, but for whatever reason, we get the feeling that something extremely similar will be going down in Hannover next year. We blame KIRFers determination.

Updated: Turns out one of our editors at CeBIT saw this whole situation go down at the FirstView booth. Within minutes the entire booth was surrounded by the Polizei, and though we tried to dig further on the situation our inability to speak German caused some communication issues so we decided it best to move on to the next craptablet on the floor. We will, however, always have the shot above to remember the confusing experience.

[Thanks, TheLostSwede]

Apple, Siemens and Sisvel patent infringement leads to CeBIT booth raid originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The early belief that the PSN was spreading a brickitis infection to PS3s around the world has turned out to be not quite accurate. Yes, PSN was inaccessible over that extremely stressful day (for PS3 owners, the rest of us have been quite fine, thank you), but we’re hearing from Eurogamer that the villain in this story was an ARM chip inside the console — the very same one, in fact, that led to a few Zunes losing their minds back in 2008. The big problem here was simply a bit of hardware that couldn’t get its bearings straight after expecting 2010 to be a leap year, and the arrival of March 1 “fixed” everything for all eight affected PS3 SKUs (of a total of eleven). That leaves Sony with four years to make sure this problem isn’t heard from again, and if it doesn’t, we’ll be placing blame for the real 2012 apocalypse firmly on Howard Stringer‘s shoulders.

The apocalyPS3 ends in global resurrection, ARM chip at fault originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For a device with as much superphone street cred as the Milestone, you’d think a basic task like listening to music through the headphone jack would be a cakewalk. No problems, right? So straightforward, really, that it’s not even worth testing thoroughly — and therein lies the problem, it seems. Milestone owners on both sides of the pond are reporting en masse that music playback occasionally skips over the jack — though stereo Bluetooth, ironically a more CPU-taxing operation, seems to be fine. For many owners, particularly those who don’t carry a separate PMP, that can totally be a deal-breaker. It’s said you can work around the issue by putting the phone into airplane mode, which effectively makes it a dedicated PMP anyhow — not an optimal solution, right? Yeah, Moto, this seriously isn’t shaping up to be your week, so let’s just make sure you earn some brownie points with awesome customer service through this rough patch.

[Thanks, Vlad G.]

Motorola Milestone skipping on music playback, perfect for Billy Joel’s ‘Movin’ Out’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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