The common wall socket is, despite what you may think, a very well-engineered piece of work. There’s no way to put plugs in wrong, it’s difficult to electrocute yourself, and they put through plenty of juice as well as grounding your device. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, but people seem set on fixing it anyway. The pull-out looked good, but the Node was a disaster waiting to happen.
This “Rambler” modification adds a length of extension cord to a removable wall outlet, but I’m skeptical of its compatibility with existing wiring spaces. → Read More
File this one under “why?”. Vespa South Africa has launched a stretch scooter. Apparently, it’ll allow you to roll with three other people on a scooter. Or one prawn. → Read More
Now here is something I may just order right now. This straightforward adapter from Unitek will turn any hard drive with standard SATA and power connections into an external drive with no frills and no gimmicks. Plug in the one side, plug in the other, and boom, it’s there on your desktop. → Read More
It seems that the TSA is slowly backing down rules that were implemented after the foiled Christmas Day bombing. According to a Reuters report flight crews will now be a sort of Judge Dread enforcer. It will be up to the pilot and crew to determine if passengers need to stay seated or if they can have items in their lap. In-flight entertainment that shows the plane’s relative location will also be under their jurisdiction.
With this much power in their hands, you better be good for the sake of everyone else on board. A simple request for a glass of OJ might result in everyone having to put their heads down for the rest of the flight. → Read More
Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.
Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below. → Read More
Following a bit of planned iTunes Connect downtime for the holidays, LinkedIn came out with the latest version of their iPhone app today. As you might expect from a 3.0 release, the app has been much improved, namely in its user experience. In fact, it looks a lot more like Facebook’s iPhone app now — which we’ll forgive, since that’s an excellent app.
As you can see, there is a new main screen that features 12 main buttons. Yes, this is just like the new Facebook app main screen that features big buttons. With LinkedIn’s you’ll get easy access to “All Updates,” “Status,” “Profiles,” “Discussions,” “Connections,” “Favorites,” “Inbox,” “Invitations,” “Recents,” “Reconnect,” “In Person,” and “Themes.” Of these, the Reconnect, In Person, and Themes areas are entirely new. Reconnect allows you to find people you likely know on LinkedIn with the click of a button. In Person lets you use the iPhone’s Bluetooth to easily swap contact information with any other LinkedIn iPhone use you happen to be nearby at a conference or event. And Themes allows you to change the color of the main screen icons — you can choose pink, orange, gold, and a bunch of other crazy colors to ugly-up your app to your heart’s content. → Read More
The 1.5-pound, half-inch thick Sony VAIO X Series notebook is easily one of the most impressive portable computers I’ve seen in quite some time. I can’t convey how light it is. It seems to defy logic. My brain doesn’t understand that it’s seeing my hand hold up an 11.1-inch notebook that weighs less than half of what most other notebooks its size weigh. → Read More
I loves me some AMOLED screens. They’re easier on the battery, easier on the eyes, and the colors tend to be so damned strong that they just about jump off the screen and punch you in the face. I mean, what’s not to love? Oh, that’s right – they tend to fail miserably as soon as you step outside. Mix one part direct sunlight with one part AMOLED screen, and you’ll find yourself with a completely illegible screen.
At least, that used to be the case.. We’re not quite sure why they didn’t play this up with deafening fanfare, but it seems like Samsung has stealthily solved the direct sunlight dilemma. → Read More
It looks like Samsung has at least two CES-bound cameras. We already saw product shots of the NX-10 and now here’s pics of the pocketable CL80. Depending on its MSRP it might be a hot cam, too. → Read More
Of all the things Google has launched this past year, the most useful may be its Music Onebox feature that allows you to easily play popular music from Google Search results. Following its debut in October, I found myself using it left and right for songs I wanted to listen to. One thing I noticed was that while deals were in place with iLike, imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, the majority of the one-click play results were from the streaming music service Lala. This was awesome because most of the songs served up by Lala were the full versions. But fast forward to today, and it’s a much different story: Lala Onebox results are few and far between.
Why? It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that Apple’s recent deal to purchase Lala is at play. At the very least, it would seem that behind-the-scenes politics are dictating the results now being shown. We noted at the time of the Apple/Lala deal that it could change the Onebox offering, and it looks like it has. Plenty of results that used to serve up a Lala play option now default to iLike, which itself is now a part of MySpace Music (as is imeem). In fact, doing a random sampling of 30 popular songs brought yielded 28 iLike Onebox results, and only 2 Lala results. The problem with this is that for the majority of iLike Onebox results, you can only listen to either 30 or 90 second clips, rather than the entire songs, like you could on Lala. That obviously makes Google Music Onebox music much less useful. → Read More
On the face of it, today’s story that 2009 was Hollywood’s best ever (so thanks for rewarding creativity, America), raking in some $10 billion, should be good news for a few people. It should be good news for the movie studios, which will now invest that money in yachts, caviar, human growth hormone, and sequels to today’s sequels. It should be good news for theatre owners, who were concerned that people would stop going to the movies as a result of the recession. Not so! (As if they didn’t have a precedent to cite…) It should be good news, in a weird way, to people who pirate movies and bleat that their doing so isn’t harming the industry one bit. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: The Trek Thumbdrive In 2000, something strange happened. Overnight, we changed the way we carried data. Those of us coming up in the 1990s first used floppy disks then CDs and then Zip drives and generally the transfer of large amounts of data was a Sisyphean task. I personally still remember sending our entire university newspaper paper to the printers on a Zip disk. That year marked the launch of the Trek ThumbDrive, the world’s first usable USB storage device. You could slip it into a computer, drag over a few files, and pop it back out. You could drop it into a bag or pocket and it was cheap enough to lose – at least in theory. Thumbdrives would max out at about 256MB in 2000, but that soon changed. Now we can carry 32GB in our pockets – more than the entire computer system running that selfsame student newspaper back in 1997. → Read More
Looks like one more Android-phone wanted to sneak onto the radar before 2009 was over, though we’re probably not going to hear much more about it until CES next week. → Read More
Music fans looking looking for an alternative to the iTunes/iPod ecosystem are getting a new option this week with the release of Songbird 1.4, which introduces support for CD ripping and syncing Mass Storage Class (MSC) Devices. The first feature is fairly self explanatory (and frankly I can’t believe it took this long to include), but it’s the latter that’s the most compelling: Songbird now features improved sync for a number of popular MSC devices, including the HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Nokia N900, and the Palm Pre. The new features are available on Windows only for now, with Mac support planned for release early next year.
To be clear, Songbird has actually offered some MSC support before now, but CEO Jerrell Jimerson says that oftentimes devices don’t work as well as they should using generic support. Songbird has been working with manufacturers to try to make the syncing process as seamless as possible. They’ve inked a deal with Nokia, and are also engaged in less formal partnerships with a number of other manufacturers. → Read More
For most of this year, Digg was on a roll, racking up more users, adding Facebook Connect, speeding up its site, launching new features like Digg Trends, and hiring key executives.
But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below). → Read More
<img src="http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/umabanana.jpg"Spore was the most pirated game of 2008, but that needs to be viewed through the lens of EA wrapping the legitimate, retail copy of the game with all sorts of DRM nonsense that made it unplayable under certain situations. You know, like putting the disc in your drive and expecting it to work. It was easier to pirate it than play the copy you bought at the store. Insane, yes. Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of 2009, also known as “this year,” primarily because it was backed by a zillion dollar marketing campaign. That, and people like shooting at each other, virtually. → Read More
It has all the makings of a drama that no one could possibly care about: a giant corporation looking to make even more money than it already does; an even bigger corporation looking to stand firm and not be bullied into making any decision against its will; helpless consumers with no one to turn to, no altar to pray at; and the Internet. If you’re a Time Warner subscriber you may loose all Fox-owned stations on Friday if certain conditions aren’t meant, namely that Time Warner send Fox (News Corp.) several large sacks of money. → Read More
You would have been foolish to assume that Modern Warfare 2 would treat foreign cultures with any sort of reverence. First there was the rubbish accents in the Rio de Janeiro level(s). Then there was “No Russian,” which, well you know what happened there. Now there’s this: there’s Arabic all over the Karachi multi-player level. Why is this an issue? Oh, only that Arabic isn’t spoken in Pakistan (Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city). → Read More
After the xpPhone was announced back in May, word of its development went surprisingly quiet – enough so, in fact, that I’d been convinced the project had gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever.
With this recent media dump, however, the xpPhone is looking realer than ever. ITG released a handful of prototype images just weeks ago, and followed it up shortly thereafter with a video of the Windows XP-powered handset booting up. This latest video goes on to show a bit of what the phone can actually do — that is, make phone calls in Windows XP.
With that, there’s not much doubt left in our mind on whether or not this thing will make it to the shelves; whether or not anyone will actually buy it, however, is still up for debate. → Read More
You can thank Best Buy for making your post-holiday Monday morning a bit more enjoyable thanks to the retailer’s latest advertising snafu. → Read More
