Color us fairly skeptical friends, but the word from the web is that Moto’s new line of multimedia handsets are going to be dubbed Motorola ZiNE — yeah, we thought the same. We’d heard rumors that new and wildly unoriginal ideas would be rolling out of the labs and design studios at Motorola in the near future and (fingers crossed) hopefully these’ll bring a change of fortune. Apparently the “ZiNE” line will feature a Z10 successor with a big touchscreen, WiFI, and GPS and an 8 megapixel monster with optical zoom purportedly created in conjunction with Kodak. Of course, all of this is fluff and smoke ’til we see the real deal, but know we’ll be posting the dodgy and blurry pics if and when we get our hands on ‘em.

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TomTom just lit up its High Definition Traffic, premium traffic service in The Netherlands. Announced in parallel is the ONE XL HD Traffic navigator, for what’s a traffic service without a GPS device to take advantage of it? The ONE XL HD Traffic shares the same 4.3-inch LCD of its ONE XL brethren only now with the addition of 1GB of built-in storage and a new SIM card (no activation or configuration required) for live traffic data feeds over Vodafone’s GSM network. Traffic information collected anonymously from Dutch Vodafone mobile phones and third party traffic authorities is updated every 3 minutes — that’s 5x the traffic updates and 10x the road coverage of typical traffic systems according to TomTom. Available in TomTom’s home country of The Netherlands this month (UK in first half of 2008) for €399 (about $581) including a one year HD Traffic subscription renewable for €9.95/month. An HD Traffic accessory for existing TomTom products will be available in early 2008.

[Via Pocket-lint]

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Blu-ray once again pulls ahead with help from Bruce in this week’s Nielsen VideoScan numbers courtesy of Home Media Magazine. In fact this week’s 72/28 (2.57:1) is the biggest lead Blu-ray has enjoyed since we started our weekly post a couple of months ago. HD DVD has a few hot titles of their own this week with Sherk the Third making the top five as well as Transformers which held on to HD DVD’s only other top ten spot. Not surprisingly, the very expensive Star Trek box set failed to make the top ten. Judging by this list, it doesn’t appear that Blu-ray recent discount sales had much of an impact on this weeks numbers and was more impacted by big titles — surprise, surprise. The other trend that continues is Warner’s Blu-ray titles make the list while its HD DVD brother does not — we can’t wait to see what happens in December when Harry hits the shelves. Judging by last week’s titles, (not counted here) we’d expect much of the same next week, unless of course all those new HD DVD owners finally got done watching all those free titles and finally start buying movies to actually help red’s cause.

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South Korea, which has already seen two people supposedly struck by lightning drawn to their cellphones, has now experienced its first death due to an exploding handset battery. According to the AP, a quarry worker was found dead Wednesday with the remnants of an LG mobile melted into his shirt pocket, much like the welder who died under similar tragic circumstances this summer in China. For its part, while acknowledging that one of its phones was indeed the culprit, LG reportedly claimed that dying due to such an accident was “virtually impossible.”

[Image courtesy of Yonhap News, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Ok everybody, this is the final round! We’ve got a huge Wii bundle, which includes the console, Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, Batallion Wars 2, a Wii Shirt, and some other Wii swag. It’s so on. Ready? Just don’t forget the rules. (Yeah, there are always rules.)

• Leave a comment below. That’s it! Who loves you, baby.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.) You can enter different giveaways in today’s Black Friday giveaways, but you can only enter this one once.
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers or US contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winners will be chosen randomly.
• Entries can be submitted until Sunday, November 25th, 11:59PM EDT. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

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Although WealthTV has been available in select areas for awhile now, the channel is finally making its way down to the Bayou. Reportedly, Charter Communications added the station to the HD lineup in 11 Louisiana cities, including Thibodaux, Bourg, Slidell, Hammond, Marksville, New Roads, Pointe Coupee, Opelousas, Jennings, Church Point and Eunice. Unfortunately, Charter failed to mention if it would be rolling WealthTV out to other areas, but as we always say, we’ll take any additions that we can get.

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There was a time when seemingly everyone was adding Digg-like voting to some of their products and services: Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft. Now, a bit late to the game, Google follows suit by adding user voting to their search results. The feature is currently in experimental phase and it may not ever be introduced to actual Google results.

The users can mark a particular search result as useful or remove it from their result list; the changes are permanent for that particular user, but they show only if you’re logged in.

Unlike Digg, however, these changes don’t affect the search results for other users in any way. This is a good thing, for one simple reason: while Google’s results are fluid and ever-changing, these changes usually happen over longer periods of time. If you type a certain phrase into Google’s search every now and then, you can be fairly certain that you’ll get the same results. If you’d let Digg-style voting actually affect the results for everyone, as Parislemon suggests, you could kiss that kind of reliability good bye. On the other hand, the oft quoted “wisdom of crowds” could probably add some value (positive or negative, you decide) to Google’s search results. So, while I think that some aspects of Digg-like voting can be added to Google, I’d personally prefer that the changes other users make do not reflect on the actual results, as it would open countless new possibilities for spamming and it would make Google’s results a lot less predictable.

It’s important to note that Google was not the first one to think of this. A search engine called AfterVote (previously called Younanimous) comes to mind: besides voting, this search engine also lets you bookmark results, prioritize a domain, check the page rank, do whois lookups, and several other more or less useful features.

While Orange seems to be holding out until the last minute to announce exactly how much its unlocked iPhone will cost, France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard has apparently dropped a few less-than-specific details on the matter in a recent interview, saying that it’ll cost “over 500 euros, but well below 1,000 euros.” Or, in US dollars, roughly somewhere between $740 and $1,500, but apparently closer to the former. A bit pricey to be sure, but it would certainly be cheaper than the €999 unlocked iPhone that T-Mobile is selling in Germany. As previously announced, a locked iPhone on Orange (complete with a two-year contract) will set you back €399. Look for things to get fleshed out further when Orange gets official with its iPhone offerings on Thursday.

[Thanks, Holger]

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Although we don’t use them around the Engadget HD labs, we love HD movie playback software for the computer. Not only does it enable the enjoyment of HD movies on a computer, it also opens up the possibilities to free our favorite movies, but most of all cause it is also easy to update when new features become available. WinDVD has been around for some time and now it appears that in early 2008 — yeah we know real specific — it may be the first Windows software to support Blu-ray’s profile 1.1 features like PIP. Sounds like a non-announcement doesn’t it? Seriously, no real date, but what we really want to know is how something can get certified at something it can’t even do yet — sounds like Blu spin to us.

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We tend to shed a tear or two for humanity each time one of these stories crosses our radar, and unfortunately, this one had us bawling. Apparently, residents in Llangadog have been frustrated time and time again as drivers of large trucks came rumbling through blindly following directions spat out by navigation systems. Wide vehicles have now failed to successfully traverse a very narrow road and not destroy any property in the process not once, not even twice, but three times, leaving a previously restored building in the community damaged (thrice) by recklessness. Reportedly, around £1.5 million ($3.12 million) is being spent to beautify landmark properties in Llangadog and Llandovery, but there’s mounting concern that GPS-reliant motorists could reverse any progress by striking buildings as they attempt to squeeze through. It sounds as if signs are being erected to inform drivers of their navigator’s cluelessness, but who knows if folks will actually take their eyes off of the LCD long enough to notice.

[Thanks, Josh]

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