Everyone loves the feeling of a brand new BlackBerry trackball; you slide your finger across it, and it rolls in place like a hamster in a ball on top of a sea of butter. A few weeks later — primarily on the older devices — it starts to get a bit chunky; within months, it feels like the inside of your BlackBerry is filled with sand. → Read More
Suddenly, Apple’s $275 million acquisition of mobile ad company Quattro Wireless makes even more sense than it already did when the deal was announced earlier this year.
Early adopters who will be among the first to unbox and fire up an Apple iPad in a couple of months, will have nearly 140,000 applications readily available from the App Store right out the gate. That’s the approximate number of applications that are currently offered for free or for a fixed fee on the iPhone / iPod Touch App Store, which will soon be known only as the App Store (or under an entirely different moniker, though unlikely). → Read More
Looking to turn your PC into a live video production studio? Ustream has just launched a new desktop application to help make that happen. Today, the company is launching a new desktop client called Ustream Producer that boasts high video quality and editing tools that can help give your streams an added layer of polish. The application is available for both Mac and PC, and you can grab it here.
Now, you’ve always been able to broadcast to Ustream via your web browser, which uses Flash to access you PC’s webcam. But Ustream says that the desktop client offers both increased video quality (you can stream in HD and H.264), and perhaps more importantly, it allows you to create broadcasts that can be far more complex than just a single stream from your webcam. The application includes support for Picture In Picture, which means you simultaneously show two streams at the same time. → Read More
One of the features highlighted on the location-based service Gowalla that I’ve never gotten into is Trips. The idea behind this feature is to give a list of spots to check-in at to complete a certain trip and earn its badge. For example, the Golden Gate Gallop contains 18 stops that you must hit to complete it. It’s a good idea from a game-perspective, the problem is that most of the trips don’t mirror my actual social life, and so I’d have to go out of my way to do them. That is, until today.
Starting today, Gowalla is opening the ability to create trips to all users. Previously, it was only the Gowalla team and a select group of their friends that have made these. To make a trip, you simply have to visit the Gowalla webpage of a spot you want to add to a trip and click the “Add to Trip” button. From here you’ll be able to name your trip, give it a description, and add up to 19 more spots needed to complete your trip. In other words, this makes Gowalla the perfect app for creating your own pub crawl among friends. → Read More
Straight from the source, you can now get the official $45 desktop dock for your shiny new Nexus One. When you dock your phone, the clock automatically launches. Behold the future! → Read More
The Dell Mini 5, Dell’s Android-powered Snapdragon slate, popped up at CES this year but we never got a clear look at it. However, when the CEO of Dell rolls into the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he can show off anything he wants and our boss got a quick hands-on in the Swiss slush.
To recap, the Mini 5 is a 1GHz Snapdragon-powered netpad (did I just coin a phrase?) running Android 1.6 with 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G mobile. It should be selling for $1,098 before carrier subsidy. → Read More
Hot damn, you guys. Hot damn. Good Old Games — GOG.com — is now selling old Activision games for six bucks a pop. And you know what Activision owns? All the old Sierra games. → Read More
Remember the BlackBerry Magnum? That half touchscreen, half physical keyboard handset that supposedly got nixed in lieu of something better? Good news! → Read More
Walking vehicles, also known as mecha, don’t play a big role in today’s robotics industry, but that might soon change. (You might remember one of the protagonists in Avatar sitting in a mecha, called AMP in the movie, during the final fight.) Now Tokyo-based robot venture Activelink, a Panasonic spin-off company, says it can make one for you, too.
The startup has begun accepting orders for their aptly named Power Loader, a power-amplifying robotic suit that enables humans to carry loads of up to 100kg. Users need to strap their feet to the mecha’s legs and hold the grips to control the two utility arms. They are then able to lift heavy loads as high as 2m and carry them around. → Read More
Open the floodgates, Jimin! We’ve got a rush of tablets coming from all directions. Too bad most of the internet will call them iPad clones even though they were clearly in the works for some time, eh? Just like this $500 MSI 10-inch tablet. → Read More
Do you like novelty keychains? Do you like classic gaming titles such as Street Fighter II? Do you like novelty keychains that produce the sound effects from such classic titles as Street Fighter II? You must! You’re reading CrunchGear! → Read More
Beyond the Rack, a private sample sale site, has raised $2 million in funding from Oleg Tscheltzoff and Oliver Jung, and Montreal Start Up. This brings the startup’s total funding to $4.5 million.
Similar to Gilt, HauteLook and Ideeli, Beyond the Rack is a members-only shopping site that offers steeply discounted (from 50 to 70 percent) on designer brand clothes, accessories and other goods. The site says that it is seeing 4 million monthly unique visitors, with revenue has growing over 50 percent per month. And Beyond the Rack has 600,000 members after only 9 months of operation. → Read More
In case you missed it, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad yesterday. And while there’s been no shortage of coverage by just about every technology-related blog on the planet, perhaps you’d like to be able to use Google Reader without every third post being about the device. If so, there’s a very simple search trick you can use to filter out all the iPad-related hoopla. → Read More
I’ve used VoIP apps on the past few iterations of of the iPhone as well as a number of other devices including some from Nokia, HTC, and Samsung. Those apps always only worked over WiFi and have mostly worked as advertised. Experience shows that if there’s one thing cellular companies are good at it’s ensuring a call can get from point A to point B (although AT&T has been sucking wind lately). It’s what they’ve been doing for almost two decades.
Now that Apple has lifted the ban VoIP over 3G – note it is Apple lifting these restrictions, not AT&T – you have to wonder what’s going on. Won’t 3G tear down the network around our ears? Won’t dogs and cats start living together? → Read More
The rumor: Activision is looking to bring DJ Hero to mobile devices. You can assume the iPhone would be among the platforms supported. The facts: DJ Hero didn’t do too well, but Activision put a hell of a lot of money into it, so it wants to make as much of that back as possible. → Read More
This just in: Woz reads magazines. And he wants to read them on the iPad. → Read More
Come on, who’s had a tech boner over the red and white Panasonic Lumix GF1? Be honest. Maybe their attraction all this time over the standard black model was that they were always hard to come by here in the States, available only from shady ebay sellers. But no worries, Amazon finally has them available for purchase — through a shady 3rd party reseller. → Read More
While everyone is raving about the iPad, one person who doesn’t like it is Hitler. The YouTube parody above takes the now all-too-common final scene from the movie Downfall and replaces the subtitles with a rant against the iPad. It’s the meme that will never die (there are at least 50 Hitler parodies using the same scene with different subtitles, here’s one about Facebook buying FriendFeed).
So what exactly does Hitler have against the iPad? Watch the video after the jump. → Read More
Sanyo Japan announced [press release in English] the LP-WL2500 today, an ultra short-focus projector whose newly developed filter and lamp makes it possible to use the device for long periods without maintenance. To be more specific, Sanyo says they boosted lamp life by 30% (when compared to the previous model) to 4,000 hours. The hybrid filter has the main lifespan, which was 20 times lower previously. → Read More
Editor’s note: Ever since yesterday’s debut of Apple’s iPad, the debate has been raging about what it means for Amazon’s Kindle. Will it kill it? Will it not? Is comparing the two like comparing a computer to a typewriter? To add fuel to the fire and, well, because we love top 10 lists, we present this guest post from Ben Elowitz, who comes down very firmly on the Kindle-is-kaput side of the debate. Ben is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a media company with an audience of 10 million monthly unique users; and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, he co-founded Blue Nile (NILE), the largest online retailer of fine jewelry.
1) The multi-functional capability. Buy a Kindle and you get… a reader. Another dedicated device to carry. Buy an iPad, and you get a whole new companion that can do pretty much anything. Games, movies, browsing, documents, and more—all in one. And zillions of iPhone apps. It’s sooooo much more than a reader, it’s a whole-life device.
2) The screen. Full color, multi-touch screen, gestures, and more. It’s a pleasure to look at it – and we all can rely on Steve Jobs’ aesthetics to know that it’s a pleasure to hold as well.
3) The compatibility. iPad supports ePub out of the box, overcoming publishers’ resistance to having to support a proprietary format such as Kindle’s; and creating compatibility with books sold through a leading standard format through any channel. (Something tells me Amazon will be making an announcement about ePub support real soon…) → Read More
