If you’ve been astounding friends and family with your thousands-of-words-per-minute typing skills on your Blackberry, RIM’s latest patent may come as a bit of a heart-stopper. According to “recent” filings from the smartphone manufacturer, a new style of keyboard is on the table which may move your familiar key placement into a slightly more angular position. The purpose of the proposed pad is ostensibly to improve accuracy by creating a more “natural” placement for your thumbs — though this concept might be a little more effort than required. Of course, since all kinds of crazy designs get filed with the patent office, we wouldn’t put too much faith in this seeing the light of day, though it is an intriguing look into RIM’s design process.

[Via Mobilewhack]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

We were pretty stoked about the Blusens G-series PMPs that overlay guidance information on Google Maps satellite imagery when we first heard about them in October, and now Spanish site Xataka has a hands-on video with the G01, which appears to be just as impressive as we’d hoped. The satellite maps automatically appear when available for the area you’re in, and Xataka says the unit itself is quite fast. Sadly, there isn’t a ton more detail in the review, but those of you aching for some shaky camera work and cheesy country-rock tunes can check out the vid after the break.

Continue reading Hands-on with the Blusens G01 satellite imagery GPS

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

Mio’s been generating some buzz with its new C620 series of personal navigation devices, thanks to their innovative digital elevation mapping and preloaded landmarks which allow for a 3D experience that trumps most other products on the market. Well the 4.3-inch C620 and TMC-equipped C620t are finally available for purchase, although pricing wasn’t set in the announcement, probably because these split-screen Bluetooth units are being sold in a number of European countries but not where we want them most, right here in the good old US of A.

[Via Slippery Brick]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

Tried visiting Blu-raydisc.com lately? You know, that site created by the Blu-ray Disc Association? If you’re a newcomer, go on and click that “United States” location button upon arriving — and shield your eyes if you fear the sight of HD DVD. As of right now, some clever (and equally meddlesome) individual has hacked the website to redirect to the The Look and Sound of Perfect, which is the official website of the HD DVD North American Promotional Organization. Of course, it’s impossible to say who did this or what’s really going on, but it should provide a hearty chuckle if nothing else. Peep the gallery shot below for a full-screen image of the redirect result. You wanted a format war? Oh, you’ve got one.

Update: Seems to be fixed now — ’twas fun while it lasted!

[Thanks, Tom]

%Gallery-12150%

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Not nearly as intrusive as it first sounds, the Body Orifice Security Scanner (BOSS) is a chair-shaped mobile metal detector that officials are considering installing in every prison in England and Wales. Designed mainly to weed out one of the most popular forms of contraband — cellphones — the new BOSS II is said to be sensitive enough to detect even a single SIM card being smuggled somewhere inside an individual. So far the two £6,500 ($12,900) chairs that have been used at the Woodhill jail in Milton Keynes since April have helped authorities seize 21 handsets, with inmates who trigger an alert segregated and swiped down by a metal detector every time they leave their cells until the metal object has been, um, passed. While this system does humanely do away with uncomfortable cavity searches, those poor souls with a knee replacement, a bit of shrapnel embedded in their hip, or the like seem destined to toil away in solitary confinement for eternity.

[Via SlashGear]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

As if an office full of guitar-controlled lights weren’t enough to get you in the holiday spirit, along comes a self-proclaimed geek to play Jingle Bells on his graphics card. We know, it’s hard to really grasp what we mean, so jump on past the break to catch a video that will undoubtedly do our explaining for us.

[Via TheInquirer]

Continue reading Jingle Bells played with graphics card, Santa wonders why

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

It is commonly misunderstood that we’ve been waiting for CableCARD 2.0 in order to have two way communications between our cable host device and our cable co’. We’ve talked about how this just isn’t true before, and in fact the CableCARDs we’ve had since day one are capable of authorizing a host device for two way communications. Part of the reason for all the confusion is CableLabs — the entity responsible for this whole thing — and now it appears they’re going to continue to mix things up. What we thought was CableCARD 2.0 is really Open Cable Application Platform (OCAP) and later named OpenCable for short, and now according to Mike Robuck at CED reports, the name is likely to be changed to Tru2way. Sure, we see how much more sense this makes, but if they do end up changing the name as CES this year, we just hope that this time they stick with it.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

It’s been a tick since we saw the oh-so-snazzy RoverPC G5, and we must say, the RoverPC P6 cranks up the sexy by a few orders of magnitude. The Windows Mobile 6-based handset, which is sure to make those not in Russian mighty envious, sports a 300MHz Samsung 2442B processor, a 2.4-inch 320 x 240 resolution touchscreen, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of Flash ROM, a microSD expansion slot, Bluetooth, miniUSB, a 2-megapixel camera and a built-in media player to boot. Additionally, the phone checks in at just 15.1-millimeters thick, rocks a dark gray motif and touts tri-band GSM connectivity. So go on, pick one up for around 7990 rubles ($323) — just don’t rub it in when you do, alright?

[Via MobileWhack]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

It’s really a bit hard to believe that this is anything more than a stunt, but apparently, Warner really has established a hotline to replace botched discs found in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. After waiting for ages to finally see the release, it appears that the title plays back in 1080i (rather than 1080p, as advertised) when the In Movie Experience (IME) is not activated. Interestingly, it seems that 1080p output is achieved when IME is active, which leads us to believe that two encodes of the movie are indeed on the disc. If you’ve been so unlucky, you can phone up Warner’s customer support center at 1-800-553-6937 to request a replacement, and be sure to ask what’s going on in the QA department while you’re at it.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Share This

Royal Pingdom has taken it upon itself to commemorate the best outages of 2007, and we’re taking the opportunity to reflect on these disasters of servers and technology as we close out the year.

Remember when…

Skype Went Doooooooooooown? Skype users around the world found themselves unable to communicate freely using this popular VoIP tool. The debacle not only lasted for nearly two days, but marked the beginning of the end for Skype’s good fortune. The outage prompted a slew of Skype backlash, some coming from its parent company, eBay. Hopefully Skype’s new partnership with MySpace will bring about a new generation of oblivious users.

Twitter took a Turn for the Worse? A scheduled maintenance for the micro-blogging network never seemed to take place, but a whole lot of mobile users found themselves going through withdrawal as nearly 6 days went by without Twitter functionality. While an isolated occurrence for some, the whole situation left a bad taste in many users’ mouths. The scheduled maintenance excuse eventually became an announcement of a required upgrade consisting of a move to a new data center. Hopefully that will hold Twitter down for 2008.

San Francisco Lost Power? A major outage at Pacific Gas and Electric left several big-name websites and web-based services out in the dark. From Craigslist to AdBrite, Technorati and LiveJournal, and even Second Life and Yelp, the power outage in the world’s center for technology-based applications used on the Internet hit us all pretty hard.

See here for Pingdom’s full list. Also be sure to check out coverage of Pingdom’s look at the uptime of popular social networks.

[image via green as a thistle]