Hasta La Gadget!

Smart phones and tablets are great and all, but sometimes you just need something simple to jot down notes. And notebooks are so last year.

The NoteSlate attempts to recreate the experience of writing on paper, but without the actual paper. The main appeal of the tablet, which comes in both black and white, is its single use focus. You can take notes and save them, and that’s about it. It features a matte, e-ink screen and the creators claim that you can get a whopping 180 hours of battery life.

Expected to launch this June, the NoteSlate will run you $99.

Via Wired

Call us crazy, but we’re having a hard time interpreting this line of fine print in any other way:

“To activate WiFi functionality on this device, a minimum of one month data subscription is required.”

That’s listed under Best Buy’s most recent ad highlighting the world’s first Android 3.0 tablet, and it most certainly sounds both ominous and ridiculous. Hardcore Verizon followers may remember the days of Big Red crippling Bluetooth radios in phones in order to “coerce” users to purchase ringtones and such from them rather than snagging one on the subway from Tom, Dick and / Jane, so we definitely wouldn’t put something like this by the company. It’s hard to say how this will be implemented once the $800 Xoom hits retail shelves, but it’s certainly hard to believe that this is a Best Buy policy (and not a Verizon mandate). We’ll be digging for more details (after all, this could all be some strange, terrible dream), but we’ll be straight with you — we don’t like the potential implications here.

Update: We’re hearing from some Best Buy Mobile employees that these simply won’t be able to be sold without being first activated on Verizon’s network, so even though you could theoretically cancel the same day, you’ll still likely get hit with a one-time activation fee (and possibly one month of data). Then again, there appears to be typos on the flyer, so you may want to wait for Verizon’s official word before getting up in arms.

[Thanks, Michael]

Verizon locking WiFi on Motorola Xoom until you buy one month of data service? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Feb 2011 19:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are leaks, and then there are leaks. As you can probably glean from the headline, this is most certainly a case of the latter. FoneArena has received shots of what appears to be a Vodafone Germany inventory system, and it’s a system currently overflowing with both rumored and heretofore unheard of product names. HTC’s Flyer and Pyramid are all but confirmed for a MWC unveiling, while the Desire 2 is popping up on our radar for the first time. We’ve also been told that LG’s Optimus 3D will be fully revealed next week in Barcelona, but the Star Tab? Now that’s a new one. Of course, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to see a swath of new names pop up just days before the year’s most gargantuan mobile show, but it definitely brings about a metric ton of questions. Is the Star Tab a phone? A slate? A unicorn-based gaming console? Will the Desire 2 simply be more desirable than the original, or will it utilize one of those new screen technologies HTC is feverishly working on? Hard to say from a simple list of names, but you can bet we’ll be keeping an ear to the ground for more as Mobile World Congress approaches.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

HTC Desire 2, Flyer, Pyramid and LG Optimus 3D, Star Tab surface in Vodafone Germany inventory system originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We already got teased on this, but it turns out that the first teaser — which, let’s be honest, didn’t have the highest production value — was strictly a teaser. Now, Motorola’s sent us a fragment of the real commercial they’ll be debuting during the Super Bowl this Sunday, and it’s got pretty much everything you’d expect: a handsome gentleman with flowers reading 1984 on a Xoom, white headphones, and thousands of emotionless drones “enjoying” their Apple products. The whole thing is an obvious swipe at Apple for seemingly endorsing the very homogeny it waged war against in its Ridley Scott-directed Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh back in 1984, and we suspect you good folks are going to have some very strong opinions about it. Follow the break for the first 15 seconds of the ad.

Continue reading Motorola teases the real Xoom Super Bowl ad: George Orwell, flowers, iPhone-using automatons in white hoodies all involved

Motorola teases the real Xoom Super Bowl ad: George Orwell, flowers, iPhone-using automatons in white hoodies all involved originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before Angry Birds mania swept mobile device users everywhere, the masses were interested in words.

The Scrabble-like Words With Friends app, that is. An upcoming new platform release for the game may prove that while pigs may be dying in droves, words are still alive and well.

Previously exclusive to iOS mobile devices, the Scrabble-like Words is coming to the Android OS as soon as next week, says social game developer company Zynga. Playing the game on an Android device will be pretty much the same as if you played it on your iPhone, the company says.

Now, people will also be able to play in the same game across both platforms. That means no more Droid lovers feeling left out while their iOS-using pals are geeking out on triple-word scores.

Words With Friends on the iPhone/iPad platform has proven its immense popularity in the past. The app boasts 2.5 million daily active users, with over 10 million downloads since its creation. Currently supported by ads, the app is free for download from Apple’s app store. A paid version with no ads displayed will be coming soon to the Android Market and Apple app store.

But releasing the app on Android is not as simple as slapping a bunch of iOS code onto your Android phone.

“We wrote Words from the ground up with Android in mind,” Zynga Senior Engineer Jason Tomlinson told Wired.com in an interview. “For instance, because there’s so many different resolutions across Android devices, screen size compatibility is a serious issue.”

Leading a small team of three or four engineers, Tomlinson and his crew worked since October writing code in Java, the primary programming language for the Android OS. Knowing software update fragmentation across devices has been a serious issue for Android users, Tomlinson’s team made the Words app compatible with hardware running the most up to date 2.3 version (Gingerbread) all the way back to 1.6 (Donut). It will also run on Google’s yet to be released version 3.0 (Honeycomb), the version of Android optimized for tablets.

Some transitions to the Android OS environment were easier than others. “The art ports over mostly seamlessly,” Words co-founder Paul Bettner told Wired.com. “Same with the sounds we use. And the same set of servers on the back end are supporting both iOS and Android users,” Bettner said.

But when Bettner founded Newtoy Inc., the developer studio that created Words, in 2008, the whole studio was focused on iOS coding, and has continued to be until last year.

“When a relatively new platform like Android comes along,” Bettner said, “it’s difficult to find coders in the beginning. Even the most experienced Android developers in the world would have only a few months of experience doing it. Once Google’s OS started growing in popularity, the requests for an Android version of the app came flooding in. That’s when we started looking for help.”

Help came in the form of Tomlinson, who has worked with Google on Android since the open-source code’s inception. Tomlinson worked with the existing engineers to help acclimate them to coding in Java rather than the Apple-preferred language, Objective-C.

“Whichever platform an engineer begins programming for, there’s always going to be a few hurdles jumping from one to another,” Tomlinson told Wired.com. “Generally, however, the learning curve for switching from Objective-C to Java is much simpler, as Java is easier to pick up.”

With the success of the iOS version of the game in mind, Zynga is preparing its servers for “the most optimistic projections” of new user adoption rates, says Bettner.

If the game takes off for the Android OS, it’s probably not a stretch to expect other big cross-platform releases in 2011.

Photo: Words With Friends running on a Motorola Xoom tablet.
Mike Isaac/Wired.com

See Also:

• 10 Apps We’re Excited to Try on iPad Launch Day
• Wired.com Readers’ Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Scrabble Is First Paid Game App for Kindle
• Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Google Removes Flash App From Android Market
• Google Launches Android Market Web Store, Improves Payment System …
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Malware Sneaks Into Android Market
• Android OS Now World’s Leading Smartphone Platform