Archives for May, 2009

Sony PSP Go(Credit: Eurogamer.net)

Details of Sony’s new PSP Go have leaked ahead of the company’s Tuesday press conference in a big way, with photos and videos now widely circulating on the Internet. And while we don’t yet have a comprehensive list of the new PSP’s feature list, the leaked info gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect–including hints of several new games.

The leaked Qore video is embedded below. Host Veronica Belmont talks to John Koller, director of hardware marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, about the forthcoming PSP Go. (Note: The audio is out of sync and exhibits a buzz, but it’s watchable enough–though we wouldn’t be surprised to see it pulled off YouTube soon.)

From the video, here’s what we can glean so far:

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Alienware M17x

Alienware M17x: a beast.

(Credit: Alienware)

Didn’t have time to stay on top of all things Crave this week? Don’t worry, we’re here to help. Following are just a few of the weird, wonderful, and important (well, relative to the gadget world) stories we covered this week.

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Tivoli calls this finish Zebra.

(Credit: Tivoli)

Tivoli Audio didn’t announce any new products at its annual showcase this year in New York, but it did reveal lots of new looks–13 new finishes, in fact–for its NetWorks Internet radio.

The new finishes are broken down into three groups: Texture …

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After a blowout last week, it was a quiet few days at the Federal Communications Commission. Outside of a few new Samsung and LG models, we have only the Sony Ericsson W205 Walkman phone and what should be the Casio Exilim phone. Because the FCC has to certify every phone …

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Samsung SGH-T349 Photos

The Samsung SGH-T349 is the latest messaging phone from T-Mobile, and you’ll be forgiven if you thought this looked more like the RIM BlackBerry Pearl thanks to its partial QWERTY keyboard, also known as a 20-key keyboard. Each key has two letters, similar to the SureType keyboard on the …

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Mobile Spotify(Credit: Crave UK)

Spotifans, it’s the news you’ve been waiting for–Spotify has demoed the first mobile phone version of its music-streaming service, and it’s certainly the most exciting piece of mobile music software we’ve seen this year.

The mobile version is shown running on Google’…

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The attendance reporting app used by the Aoyama Gakuin university.

(Credit: SoftBank)

If American school children have to resort to some special mosquito ringtone to use cell phones at school, a university in Japan is doing the opposite: giving cell phones to students. And not just any cell phone–the iPhone …

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Fujitsu's FLEPia offers color, but it costs $1,000.

(Credit: Fujitsu)

Those of you holding out for a color version of the Kindle may be disappointed to learn that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is telling the world it won’t be arriving anytime soon. In fact, a color-screened …

Originally posted at Fully Equipped

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The attendance reporting app used by the Aoyama Gakuin university.

(Credit: SoftBank)

If American school children have to resort to some special mosquito ringtone to use cell phones at school, a university in Japan is doing the opposite: giving cell phones to students. And not just any cell phone–the iPhone …

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(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

After some slight problems, Verizon Wireless officially announced on Friday that it will release a software update to RIM BlackBerry Storm owners starting on Sunday.

BlackBerry OS version 4.7.0.148 will be available to customers beginning on Sunday, May 31 at 12 p.m., …

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Gwabbit is a Microsoft Outlook add-on, and now a BlackBerry application, that helps business professionals who get the names, numbers, and e-mail addresses from a contact’s e-mail into their address book without all the tedious typing.

Gwabbit on BlackBerry(Credit: Technicopia)

Gwabbit works its trade by automatically searching the signature block at the end of an e-mail and comparing that to the entries in your Outlook or BlackBerry address book. If there are discrepancies or omissions between the two, Gwabbit will launch and ask if you’d like to create a new address book entry or overwrite an existing one. Gwabbit’s edge over Outlook and BlackBerry’s native contact management systems is its proficiency in almost instantly grabbing e-mail, phone numbers, and title to create more information-rich entries than either technology’s contact-builder does alone.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

Just after Verizon Wireless revealed that it would offer the Palm Pre in the next six months or so, Sprint has pushed back and asserted that it will have the exclusive on the Palm Pre through 2009.

The confirmation came on Thursday afternoon from Sprint spokesman …

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LG GD900 Crystal(Credit: Crave UK)

We finally got our hands on the LG GD900 Crystal, which is billed as the world’s first transparent-design phone, and the transparent screen is as cool as we hoped–and not half as pointless.

The GD900 Crystal is a slider phone with a 3-inch touch screen, and a transparent keypad that lights up when opened. But it’s more than just gimmicky, see-through goodness–the keypad is a touch-sensitive controller, too. That means you can use it to move through menus, navigate the Web, and even write using handwriting recognition.

LG has thrown in gesture support too, so you can launch applications with a swipe around the keypad. This includes multitouch, as does the main display, so you can pinch your fingers to zoom in to a photo or map.

If this is a touch-happy overload, you can also use it normally, to dial phone calls, and there’s vibrating feedback to let you know when you’ve hit the flat numbers.

Photos: Looking through the LG GD900 Crystal

So what’s the point of having two touch screens? The reasoning goes that if you’re basking in the glory of the GD900’s screen–watching a video, for example–you don’t want to block the action by waving your sausage fingers over the screen to zoom or rewind. And it’s pretty freaking cool, too.

The GD900 uses the same S-class user interface we’ve seen on the LG Arena. One of our biggest complaints about the Arena was that the touch screen wasn’t as responsive as we’d like, but based on the phones we tried, it’s running with more vim and vigor on the GD900. The little spinning cube is still useless, but there are about five different ways to access each feature, and adding gestures means there should be a user-interface option for every user, if they can be bothered to learn them all.

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LG LH50 TV with Netflix(Credit: LG)

It’s been just over a year since the Roku Digital Video Player was released. That $99 box made it easy for Netflix subscribers to play the rental service’s 12,000-title library of streamable movies and TV shows on their TV set. Since that time, the Netflix service has also appeared on the Xbox 360, TiVo DVRs, and Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung. (A recap follows, for the uninitiated; the Netflix-savvy can jump straight to the list of Netflix-compatible products.)

Netflix offers thousands of streaming titles over the Internet, available on an “all you can eat” basis for any customer on the $9 per month (one DVD movie by mail at a time) or higher plan. So, in addition to getting DVD (or, for an additional premium, Blu-ray) discs by mail, Netflix subscribers also get unlimited access to thousands of hours of on-demand programming. Just add the titles to the “Instant Queue” in your Netflix account, and they’ll be available on any compatible device once you pair it. (The setup procedure, as outlined by CNET’s Molly Wood, is quick and easy.)

There are a few downsides. Almost none of the available movie content would be classified in the “new release” category–the newest titles are usually at least a few years old. Also, the availability of titles ebbs and flows–many are available for a window of 60 to 90 days, after which they may or may not return a few months later. And many of the videos aren’t available in their native wide-screen format.

That said, we think the advantages are palpable.

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