Hasta La Gadget!

What’s better than a Cruiser? Why, a Cruiser2! A year after unveiling the original, Jabra is using CES to launch its first revision of the aforementioned in-car speakerphone. This guy packs Bluetooth 2.1, dual microphones, an internal speaker and a built-in FM transmitter that beams tunes and talk to your car stereo. You’ll also be greeted with voice guidance in nine different languages, and the internal battery will last through a solid 14 hours of yapping (or 13 days in standby). Moving on, the Chill corded headset and USB-powered Speak410 PC speakerphone are also debuting here in Vegas, with prices on those set at $29.99 and who-knows, respectively. Get the whole skinny just after the break.

Continue reading Jabra debuts Cruiser2 in-car speakerphone, Chill / Speak410 VoIP calling accessories

Jabra debuts Cruiser2 in-car speakerphone, Chill / Speak410 VoIP calling accessories originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Panasonic’s blowing it out here at CES, partciularly on the HD front. There’s a boatload of new content to disgest, so we’ll take you through it all step-by-step below:

• For starters, Panasonic is dishing out seven new plasma HDTVs, six new LED LCDs and five new standard LCD HDTVs. For the 2011 model year, Panny’s introducing the VT30 series, GT30 and ST30 lines, and two of the LED LCDs are joining its array of Full HD 3D TVs. Naturally, the biggest addition to the new sets is the Viera Connect system, but the Easy IPTV functionality is another boon.
• For those who’ve got a Viera Cast-enabled BD deck, Panny’s adding Skype voice and video calling. The addition of Skype to Panasonic’s new DMP-BDT310, DMP-BDT210, and DMP-BDT110 VIERA CAST-enabled Blu-ray Disc Players allows consumers to make Skype voice and video calls on virtually any HDTV using a Skype-compatible camera.
• As for new Blu-ray and DVD players? There’s a near-limitless flow of them, with the DMP-B200 (8.9-inch display) and DVD-LS92 (9-inch) portable players serving the road warriors. The DMP-BDT210 3D Blu-ray deck is now holding down the top spot in the company’s at-home range, and if you’re still down with DVD, you’ll find a load of new options with USB ports for loading up additional media.
• The company is also debuting the April-bound SC-HTB520 soundbar, meant to match up with flat-panels that are 42-inches or larger, and it’s also throwing in a wireless, down-firing subwoofer.
• Finally, Panny’s introducing 3D video conferencing (HDVC), which may or may not make your weekly boardroom meetings entirely more tolerable.

Head on down to the source for more, but don’t expect to find much in the way of price and availability.

Panasonic’s CES 2011 HD lineup: Blu-ray players, 3D video conferencing, HDTVs, audio gear originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 21:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s turning out to be a pretty rough month for the folks at Skype. First there was that whole major service outage that the service suffered during one it its busiest times of year. And now it seems that the VoIP provider may soon become illegal in the world’s most populous country.

Communist Party-run paper The People’s Daily declared all Internet phone services not run by state sanctioned China Telecom and China Unicom to be illegal. The article stated that The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is set to take Skype and other VoIPs out of commission in China.

The Ministry reflected the statement in a recent announcement, “Currently, our ministry is working with relevant departments to focus on the crackdown on illegal VoIP [voice over internet protocol calls] and we are now appealing to the public for clues for illegal VoIP cases.”

For now, Skype is currently available in the country. Said a spokeswoman, “Users in China currently can access Skype via TOM Online, our majority JV partner. TOM Online offers local versions of Skype for Windows, MAC as well as mobile platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile. More details can be found at skype.tom.com.”

If Skype is indeed officially made illegal, it will be in good company, joing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

All signs have been pointing to this release for a few days now, but we’ll admit: we expected Skype to wait until CES next week to pull the covers off what could become its crown jewel service over the coming months. Skype’s official iOS client has finally sprouted the ability to make video calls, allowing iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and fourth-generation iPod touch users to share real-time video amongst each other and users of Skype’s Windows, Mac, and Linux clients along with the ASUS Videophone (obviously, 3GS users won’t have the convenience of a front-facing camera, but they’ll still be able to broadcast video from the rear-facing one). Additionally, you’ll be able to receive video from others if you’re using an iPad or a third-generation iPod touch. The service is free and works over both WiFi and 3G — and considering Skype’s existing PC footprint, we’d argue this stands a very real chance of putting the hurt on FaceTime usage. No word on when Skype will be making video-capable clients available for Android or other mobile platforms, but Skype says that there’ll be “plenty more” announcements in Vegas next week, so we wouldn’t be surprised.

Update: So we just gave 3.0 a spin, calling iPhone-to-iPhone (both WiFi), iPhone-to-desktop (both WiFi), and again iPhone-to-iPhone (both 3G). The first two worked great, although the desktop camera produced better quality. As for the worst-case scenario, 3G-to-3G video calling, well… we wouldn’t recommend it unless absolutely necessary. Video after the break, and be sure to note the battery life — after about 10 minutes of use, we dropped from 66 percent to 61.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Skype video calling for iPhone is official, available now (update: hands-on)

Skype video calling for iPhone is official, available now (update: hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you wish to raise your fist in the air and curse anyone for the massive global Skype outage, direct your anger towards 5.0.0.152. That’s the Skype for Windows version that crashed when a December 22nd cluster of support servers responsible for offline messaging became overloaded. While that’s the only version affected — the latest 5.0.0.156 and 4.0 versions were fine, as were the clients for every other platform you can think of — the number of users running point-152 globally represent 50 percent of all the users. More importantly for the other half of the world, about 25 to 30 percent of all supernodes were affected, too, whose role is establish connections, among others.

So… up to 30 percent of supernodes are down worldwide. The other 70 percent were taking on the increased load. The crashed Windows clients were by and large being restarted simultaneously by affected users. All this happened just before the usual daily peak hours and during the holiday season. It’s almost a comedy of errors, were it not impossible at the time to call someone and share in the laughter. For its part, Skype goes into detail over how it fixed the current situation and how it plans to be better equipped to handle any future duress. It’s a pretty interesting read, we suggest you set some time aside and check it out.

Skype outage post-mortem puts some blame on the elder Windows clients originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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