If you’re lookin’ for a barebones QWERTY candybar on the cheap, Sprint and Sanyo have a handset you should see. Well, they will in May. We’re not quite sure why they announcing this one a whole month early, but Sprint and Sanyo have let it be known that the SCP-2700 will be hitting the shelves (exclusively at Sprint) come May 10th. For a cent shy of $30 dollars, a two-year contract, and a few weeks waiting for the $50 mail-in rebate, you’ll get the QWERTY keyboard, a 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, threaded text messages, and Sprint Family Locator/Navigation/Social Zone. It’s not exactly a big deal – but hey, it’s $30 bucks. The handset will come in “Deep Blue” or “Impulsive Pink”. Impulsive? As in without forethought? Are they trying to rub in the fact that everyone who buys the pink one will feel buyer’s remorse by that evening, or something? → Read More
Today, Mozilla Labs released the 0.3 version of Weave, its project that syncs multiple browsers in the cloud. Weave lets users sync their bookmarks, tabs, passwords, and histories in the cloud across Firefox browsers on different computers. With today’s release, you can also sync with Fennec, Firefox’s mobile browser, which unfortunately right now only works on one kind of phone: a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Yeah, I don’t have one of those either.
But the idea of syncing your browsers is a powerful one for anyone who uses more than one computing device on a regular basis. Originally launched in December, 2007, Weave is now faster and more reliable. In other words, now it actually works (or so I’m told).
The one thing Weave doesn’t sync is all of your add-ons. But that is planned for a future release. → Read More
German-language site NewGadgets.de got a hands-on with a preproduction X-Slim X340 from MSI (see our previous coverage here) and, although I don’t understand more than a few words of German, the video leaves some of the following impressions: → Read More
It looks like Sharp is seeing its (near) future in LCD TVs and solar panels. The company tomorrow sets up Sharp Display Products Corporation (SDP), a subsidiary based in Osaka. In addition, Toshiba will be partnering with Sharp to step up production of solar panels. The picture shows a solar-powered LCD TV Sharp showcased in July last year. → Read More
When it came to light that Dell was offering their Mini 10 with a HD display, I immediately thought about the HP 2140. It was supposed to ship with a high res display back in mid-February, but never did. And Dell’s Mini 10 wouldn’t be shipping with the 1366×768 display for another two weeks so I pinged HP to see what the deal was. Maybe there was a delay or quality issues with the 10-inch displays. Well, I just heard back from HP and it looks like high res displays will appear for the 2140 starting on April 1. Let’s see if Dell actually starts shipping their HD display Mini 10 in two weeks. → Read More
Gather ’round for the time-honored American tradition of pretending to be outraged by something. (If we’re to believe that outlet of populist outrage monger, the Drudge Report.) It’s one of those airport security body scanning devices, this time going on trial at the Salt Lake City airport. The left two images show a woman, while the right two are a man. → Read More
Now here’s a portable emulator system that actually looks nice and has an old-school four way gamepad. Chinavasion’s Multi Platform Portable Gaming Entertainment Station “is often lovingly called the Delightfully Small (DS) gaming entertainment system,” according to the product page. While it doesn’t look quite like a traditional DS, it borrows a lot of the same styling cues from one of Nintendo’s other portables, the Game Boy Micro. → Read More
If you refuse to take up real instruments but insist on showing your love for Guitar Hero or Rock Band AND you have to wear a nice suit or a tuxedo more than two or three times each year, might I suggest these $50 Guitar Video Game Cufflinks? → Read More
Presumably your Korean is as rusty as mine, so apologies in advance for not taking too much away from Samsung’s official reveal of the Instinct Mini, more accurately known as the S30. There’s a good chance that Samsung will show off the phone sometime this week at CTIA, where Greg is currently running about. → Read More
Tucked away in a Korean press release alongside the likes of the long ago announced Samsung Behold, Memoir, and Omnia HD was one little gem we’d yet to have seen in any official light: the Instinct S30. Of course, it’s not the first time we’ve ever seen it – but it’s nice to know it wasn’t some incredibly elaborate hoax put on by some crafty gent just looking to crush the spirits of Instinct fans everywhere. Besides the press image to the right, confirmation of a 3.2″ touchscreen, and word that they’ll be showing it at CTIA 2009 this week, there’s not much to glean from the release – but if you wanna dig around it yourself, the full translated version is hiding right behind the jump. → Read More
It is going to take more than just an open search platform to take on Google. Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced today that he is shutting down Wikia Search, the company’s experiment in creating better search results through crowdsourcing. Wikia Search attempted to port the Wikipedia model over to search by allowing anybody to modify results by including new links or moving natural results up the page. The initial launch last year was awful, but the experience improved over time. Still, it never really attracted anything more than a trickle of searchers. We are placing it in the deadpool.
Then Wikia Search got Googled when the search juggernaut launched its own Search Wiki feature, which lets you do pretty much the same thing on Google itself (move results up the page, block results, add comments—except it only affects your search results, not everyone’s). And so it goes. You cannot compete in search if your idea can be easily copied by Google. → Read More
Aircell and American Airlines have just announced that the domestic carrier will continue to deploy Gogo throughout 300 planes in the next two years. Starting this year, AA will outfit 150 MD-80 aircrafts followed by Boeing 737-800s. Gogo is currently available on non-stop AA flights originating from JFK to SFO, LAX and MIA. Flights longer than three hours cost $13 while flights shorter than that cost $10 and there’s a mobile device plan for $8. That is all. → Read More
Not that ANY of you would ever sell your console without deleting all your personal files and credit card information off of it first but just in case, here’s a reminder why you should do just that. Apparently a refurbishment center bought up a bunch of Circuit City’s pre-owned consoles that were to be “in working condition, and with maybe a few components missing.” → Read More
Picli.com, a photo sharing community site launched in private beta in March 2007, has relaunched with a slew of new features and a more clearly defined business model. Two years seems like a long time for a site to be in beta, and Picli’s developer/designer founder duo of Sam Street and Sean Miller acknowledge this in the FAQ, referring to 2008 as ‘the dark age’ in which, well, nothing much happened. Still, Picli managed to gather a passionate core user community of about 2,000 in this time, whose feedback has contributed to the recent refinements. Picli’s a bit like Flickr meets Digg – users submit their photography under Creative Commons licensing, which then gets rated up or down by the community. The central focus of the site is the Showcase, a gallery of the most popular photos. With the relaunch comes tiered membership packages, which the founders are currently soliciting user feedback on before any final decisions are made. There are plans to build upon the online advertising options, currently revolving aorund Google AdSense, and to implement a photo buying service where Picli users could sell usage rights on their images to picture buyers, using a commission-based system which Miller and Street call ‘targeted tagging’. The guys also plan to release an API that will encourage developers to extend the site’s functionality to mobile devices and web apps. While on the face of it Picli may seem like yet another Flickr, the founders are adamant this isn’t the case – it’s less about acting as a giant harddrive for users to upload all their photos to, and more about community-driven quality control, where photographers share only their best work and take inspiration from others — not dissimilar to what FFFFound does for visual artists. Miller and Street are bootstrapping Picli for the moment, and say they would love the site to drive traffic to members’ personal portfolio sites as a result of the interest generated on Picli. The site’s gone a ways in proving the concept around a free-to-use model. Whether or not it can compete with the likes of fotoLibra and Demotix will depend on how readily the user community coughs up for annual subscriptions, and whether or not picture buyers find on Picli what they can’t find elsewhere. Watch this space. → Read More
Dogs barking, bells ringing, the mass of men living in perfect peace. This is what synthesizers are all about. This video shows the OLED test on this beautiful-looking syth made by Japanese synth company Teenage Engineering.
I just kind of want it for the screen and the sounds it makes. Insane. → Read More
MySpace and Citysearch are jointly announcing a new MySpace property this morning called MySpace Local. The site combines Citysearch business listings (including address, photos, menus, videos, maps and hours of location) from a thousand cities with the MySpace community. The site is launching into private beta this week, with a general U.S. launch next month.
The new site will eventually include listing information for all Citysearch businesses via small business listing pages. To start just restaurants, bars and “nightlife” listings are included. Users can rate and review businesses, which is shared via the MySpace activity feed.
Don’t just skip over that last sentence. This is good stuff – users will be able to see the restaurants, bars and other businesses that their friends are interested in, and how they rated those businesses. When you first visit MySpace Local, the first thing you see are reviews from friends.
Listings are grouped into city hubs for all major U.S. cities and include new local search functionality. And eventually, MySpace says, users will be able to make reservations and upload their own photos and videos. Features will also be built into MySpace mobile products. → Read More
Honda today announced a “brain machine interface” (press release in English), which makes it possible for human beings to control robots by thought and does away with all the button pressing and joystick holding that usually gets on our nerves when we control our robots. The technology was developed jointly with Japanese tech company Shimadzu and Tokyo-based research institute ATR. → Read More
Amazon has a one-day deal on Wii Music, the game that “lets you play musical instruments and make music using the Wii Remote and the Wii Balance Board.” → Read More
Online financial trading platform eToro has secured $6.3 million in Series B financing from BRM Group, Cubit Investments and other unnamed investors. In 2007, the Cyprus-based startup raised $1.7 million in Series A funding from Cubit Investments, Chemi Peres, and other investors.
The financial trading company, which launched originally as an online foreign exchange trading platform, is small but growing with an average of 2,000 new accounts opened every month. eToro is also announcing the addition of commodities trading for its users as well as significant additions to its trading methods which will allow traders to conduct more long-term, lower-leveraged trades in both the forex and commodities markets. Jonathan Assia, eToro’s founder and CEO says that the funding will be used to hire additional staff to keep up with demand and it will allow the company to further extend its current platform into the commodities and stock index markets over the next two years. → Read More
