Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t take this as the gospel, but online retailer Expansys has gone ahead and listed Dell’s Venue Pro — affectionately known as “the Windows Phone 7 device with a portrait QWERTY slider” — with pricing and availability date in tow. Which, if you’re wondering, is £499.99 (or about $783 in US dollars, when crudely converted) and Monday, November 8th, respectively. That’s just over two weeks away, which means if it is true, you won’t have long to wait… and if it’s not true, you’ll know soon enough, anyway.

Dell Venue Pro gets Expansys listing: £499.99 for November 8th originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was hinted at back in September, now the Chinese-language Economic Daily is reporting that the Garmin-ASUS joint venture will end in January after the two-year deal expires. We’ve heard this from our own sources as well. At that point, Asus will return to flooding the market with indistinguishable product iterations and Garmin will go back to watching GPS-enabled smartphones (and now tablets) eat away at the dedicated personal navigation device market. ASUS is expected to continue making GPS-enabled smartphones under the ASUS brand with Garmin providing navigation and mapping software.

Garmin-ASUS collaboration said to be ending in January originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 03:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So, we’ve just been discussing the rumored, and long overdue, MacBook Air refresh with a trusted source. This person recently had a working model in their possession for a few minutes and managed to glean quite a bit of detail that would seemingly confirm Apple’s plan to announce an 11-inch MacBook Air at the “Back to the Mac” event later today. Here’s what we’ve been told to expect:

• Smaller 11.6-inch display.
• 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (with a 2.33GHz option possible).
• 2GB of memory in the base configuration.
• No optical drive, naturally.
• Mini DisplayPort, USB, and SD card reader along the left-hand side and USB and power on the right (that’s 2x USB).
• The trackpad has been updated to match that of the new MacBook Pros.
• Although smaller due to the 11.6-inch display, it’s still about the same thickness as the current MacBook Air.
• A black power key now sits immediately to the right of a smaller eject key on the MBA’s keyboard — the round aluminum power button is gone. A design decision that might support the MBA’s rumored instant-on capabilities though our source didn’t see this functionality exhibited (possibly because it was running OS X 10.6.4).

Unfortunately, our source couldn’t identify the graphics or the storage related to the rumored “SSD Card.” So where does that leave us? Well, it looks like a smaller (and presumably, cheaper) MacBook Air originally rumored by AppleInsider is in the bag for a Steve Jobs announcement later today as is a refresh to the 13.3-inch model we broke last week (pictured nekkid above). So check back in a few hours and watch the reveal live, won’t you?

Update: Reader Lucas F. subimtted a mockup of the new power and eject keys which you can see after the break.

[Thanks, Anonymous]

Continue reading 11.6-inch MacBook Air detailed

11.6-inch MacBook Air detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Oct 2010 04:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’d told you back in July that Verizon would migrate away from unlimited data and toward a tiered model very quickly; turns out it wasn’t quite as quickly as we’d thought, but as Ivan Seidenberg said last month, it’s still going down. We’ve now been tipped that the switchover is expected on October 28, and this is how it all shakes out:

• Smartphone owners will choose between $15 for 150MB with $0.10 / MB overage, or $29.99 for unlimited access. This stands in contrast to AT&T, which offers another 50MB (for a total of 200MB) at the $15 price level or 2GB for $25 with no unlimited option.
• As we’ve already seen with the MiFi-equipped iPad, there’ll be $20, $35, and $50 tablet plans for 1GB, 3GB, and 5GB, respectively, all with overage of $10 per gigabyte. There will also be a $80 plan for 10GB with the same overage rate.
• MiFi, FiveSpot, and integrated netbook / notebook modem owners will choose between $50 / 5GB and $80 / 10GB plans. The MiFi and FiveSpot will also have access to the tablet-centric $35 / 3GB plan as part of a 90-day promo. All of these plans have overage priced at 1GB for $10.
• Feature phones will need to choose between $1.99 “pay as you go” (though it’s not clear what that means — could be unlimited at $1.99 per day, but we really don’t know), $15 for 150MB, or $29.99 for unlimited. The old $9.99 / 25MB option will be killed off.
• USB modem pricing remains unchanged at $39.99 for 250MB or $59.99 for 5GB. We’d say this means Big Red is strongly discouraging folks from buying these right now.

Notably, this is just 3G data pricing — the company says it’ll announce 4G plans closer to the launch of its 4G network. Existing customers can stay grandfathered on their existing plans if they so choose, just as AT&T’s been playing it. Thing is, the fact that Verizon is preserving its unlimited smartphone option is a big deal — it’ll be interesting to see if it twists AT&T’s arm hard enough to bring it back. Follow the break for Verizon’s full internal Q&A.

[Thanks, Jay]

Update: We’re being told that the $1.99 pay as you go option on feature phones is simply the current $1.99 / MB option. Thanks, anonymous tipster!

Continue reading Verizon’s tiered data plans hitting October 28, smartphones still getting unlimited option?

Verizon’s tiered data plans hitting October 28, smartphones still getting unlimited option? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It would seem Dell’s suffered another of its signature pre-release leaks, as the folks over at Logicbuy have a full trio of new laptops from Round Rock to tease us with. The three new Studio machines — imaginatively titled the XPS 14, XPS 15, and XPS 17 — are said to come with anodized aluminum shells and brushed aluminum palm rests, NVIDIA Optimus switchable graphics (up to the GeForce GTS 445M on the XPS 17) and options for Blu-ray drives, 16GB of RAM, and Core i7 CPUs. The accompanying pictures of each laptop are what leads us to believe Logicbuy has simply stumbled upon some prematurely published Dell pages, which in turn leads to the deduction that their proper launch can’t be too far away. Sherlock Holmes, eat your stony heart out.

Dell Studio XPS 14, 15 and 17 packing NVIDIA Optimus lunch for imminent launch? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 04:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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