March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
We hate to turn your entire world — nay, your very belief system — on its end, but it’s at least conceivable here that the so-called Nokia Mystic with the portrait QWERTY keyboard may not be the upcoming C6 after all. Instead, Tom’s Guide is submitting this bright white exhibit as the device lucky enough to wear the C6 name, a phone that looks a whole hell of a lot like a 5230 with a QWERTY slider tacked on for good measure. That would make sense considering Nokia’s goal of turning the freshly-introduced Cseries into a midrange, consumer-friendly brand; this phone could easily slot in below the N97 Mini, for example, particularly in light of rumors that the phone will lack the N97’s beefy internal storage. Word is the C6 is pegged for a European release by Summer, so start cleaning off those 5800s and 5230s for eBay right now, why don’t you?
Nokia C6 is actually a 5230-ish landscape slider? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency.
Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and is likely to offer great protection from hackers, say the researchers.
Currently, most homes use radio-frequency based Wi-Fi signals for broadband service. But Wi-Fi has limited bandwidth, says the researchers, and it is difficult to get more radio spectrum for it. Visible frequency would be a good alternative, they say.
Flickering the lights can generate the signal in a room. The change won’t be visible to the human eye because the rate of modulation is millions of times faster than what we can see, say the researchers. And since, visible light can’t penetrate walls there will be no interference.
Since incandescent and fluorescent bulbs can’t flicker fast enough, LEDs would be the right choice, say the researchers.
Commercial LEDs have a bandwidth of only a few MHz. But Jelena Vučić, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, and her colleagues who have been working on the project have found a way to increase the bandwidth by filtering out all wavelengths but blue.
Using the visible wireless system they built, the team downloaded data at up to 230 megabits per second. The researchers will present their findings at a conference in San Diego later [...]
March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but Android Central seems to have obtained a screen shot from a deep, dark, top-secret Verizon system that indicated that the upcoming CDMA version of the Nexus One will be “available only through www.Google.com/Phones.” That, of course, matches T-Mobile’s strategy of quietly letting Google do its thing — and Verizon’s strategy of keeping its network “open” — so you’ll just have to remember to not line up at your local store at 8PM the night before the launch, otherwise you’re going to come away very, very disappointed. What’s a whole lot stranger, though, is a mention that it runs HTC’s Sense UI, which means one of a few things: Google’s allowing carriers and manufacturers to have their way with the Android builds sold directly through its own store, the Verizon-branded Nexus One is the Incredible, or the document is just sorely confused. The way we see it, there’d simply not be enough differentiation between the Nexus One and the Incredible for them to come to market as separate products if they were both running Sense — and besides, isn’t variety the spice of life?
Verizon’s Nexus One to be sold only through Google, have Sense UI (or not) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
AT&T hasn’t been quite as forthcoming with the exact details of its post-3G plans as T-Mobile and Verizon have been recently, but FierceBroadbandWireless appears to have wrested a tidbit from wireless boss Ralph de la Vega in a recent interview. Though the standard HSPA 7.2Mbps deployment is still AT&T’s short-term focus, HSPA+ — which can theoretically take HSPA to 21Mbps and beyond — is clearly still on its radar prior to LTE. “We will also deploy HSPA+ in certain locations,” de la Vega said on no uncertain terms — without revealing even a hint about where those “certain locations” might be, unfortunately.
Speaking of LTE, the 4G tech still seems to be very much on AT&T’s back burner right now, a strategy that seems pretty difficult to argue with considering HSPA’s considerable room to grow from its current speeds and the lack of LTE devices in the pipeline. Of course, that could end up really hurting these guys three or five years down the line when the first generation of LTE is in its prime and they’re just getting started, but — and this is a huge “but” — if they can save up some cash by rolling cheaper HSPA upgrades now and really dump unheard-of levels of cash into the network when they’re good and ready, it’s conceivable that they’ll be able to build out a big footprint in short order. Ralph, can we recommend you look to Bell and Telus for inspiration on how to pull that [...]
March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / 5 Comments
When it began taking pre-orders for the iPad this morning, Apple also published some new details about how the tablet device will function as an e-book reader.
It turns out the iPad will read books out loud to you with audio dictation, a controversial feature that caused some trouble for Amazon’s Kindle last year. Also, Apple indicated that you’ll be able to use the iPad to read EPUB titles from sources outside of the iBooks store.
The new features are described in the iBooks overview page on Apple’s website. In the section titled “Change your reading habits,” Apple says its VoiceOver functionality — an accessibility tool that works in other parts of the iPad’s interface to help visually impaired users — will also work to dictate e-books.
“IBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page,” Apple’s description reads.
And for EPUB titles that are not offered through the iBooks store, you can manually add them to iTunes and then sync them to the iPad:
“The iBooks app uses the EPUB format — the most popular open book format in the world,” Apple’s site reads. “That makes it easy for publishers to create iBooks versions of your favorite reads. And you can add free EPUB titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad.
That’s good news for iPad customers, because that means bookworms won’t be limited to the offerings in the iBooks store, which are based on partnerships that [...]
March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
How do we know we’re years away from a final resolution to the Nokia / Apple patent lawsuit? It’s been six months since Nokia first filed its complaint, and the two parties are just now starting to argue about which specific substantive claims they’re eventually going to argue about. Let’s do a quick refresh: at the heart of the lawsuit is a conflict over Nokia’s wireless patents, some of which are almost certainly essential to how cell data and WiFi operate. As a member of the ETSI and the IEEE licensing groups which oversee GSM and WiFi, Nokia’s required to license its patents to anyone who asks on fair terms, but those terms aren’t set in stone — Nokia can negotiate separate licenses as it sees fit, and it apparently wanted Apple to cross-license its touchscreen patents as part of the deal. Apple said no, and now we’re all in court, with both sides alleging patent infringement in three different lawsuits (one of which is on hold) and Apple claiming that Nokia is also liable for breach of contract, because it promised fair licensing terms and didn’t deliver. Got all that? Right.
So that brings us to yesterday, when Nokia asked the court to dismiss all of Apple’s contract-related claims, saying that they’re simply a distraction from the real issue, which is patents, and that its license offers aren’t unfair simply because Apple doesn’t like them. In short: Apple and Nokia’s patent lawsuit is currently not really about patents at [...]
March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
Plastic Logic, which was set to ship its large screen Que e-reader in April, is now delaying it to “sometime this summer.”
The company sent notifications to pre-order customers late Thursday afternoon announcing the delay and saying it needed the time to “fine-tune features and enhance the overall product.”
Plastic Logic launched the Que at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The Que proReader has an 8.5 x 11-inch touchscreen display and the ability to handle a range of documents such as Microsoft Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, digital books, PDFs, magazines and newspapers. It can also synchronize with Microsoft Outlook to display e-mails and calendar.
A 4-GB version of the Que with Wi-Fi and storage for about 35,000 documents will cost $650. An $800 8-GB version that can store 75,000 documents and includes both Wi-Fi and 3G capability — powered by AT&T– will be $800.
Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta didn’t reveal the exact reasons for the delay. But if it is to make sure that the company works out all the kinks in the product before it ships, he may have made the right decision. Last year, many e-reader enthusiasts criticized Barnes & Noble for rushing its Nook e-reader to market. Barnes & Noble has since the launch offered firmware updates to fix some of the Nook’s problems.
But the delay is also likely to cost Plastic Logic some ground. Apple’s iPad tablet will be available April 3 and the device starts [...]
March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / No Comments
We talk about the FCC a lot here, but usually the ways ye olde Commission affects our lives are indirect. A little extra spectrum here, a nice leaked image there, that kind of thing. Not this time, though, as the FCC is getting involved directly with its own Consumer Broadband Test app, designed to probe network latencies and download speeds on your home connection or mobile device. Part of the hallowed National Broadband Plan, this will furnish the FCC will useful data to show the discrepancy between advertised and real world broadband speeds, and will also — more importantly perhaps — serve as a neat way for users to directly compare network performance in particular areas. It’s available on the App Market and App Store right now, with versions for other operating systems coming up, so why not get with the program and give it a test drive?
FCC comes through with a Consumer Broadband Test app for iPhone, Android and the home originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / 2 Comments
Solar power combined with fancy-looking cases? The perfect storm for getting an end-of-the-week mention on the Gadget Lab. Today its the turn of the Novothink Solar Surge, an iPhone and iPad Touch case with a solar panel and a lithium-ion polymer battery. Instead of just gluing some photo-sensitive panels to the back of a case, Novothink has, well, actually thought about the design.
In sunlight, the case can grab enough juice in a half-hour two-hours for 30 minutes talk time on 3G and an hour on 2G. That’s enough to make this case useful on its own, especially as outdoors is exactly the place you can’t plug in a charger. The case also has a hole for hooking onto a carabiner and hanging from a backpack — a bad idea in the city, but out in the wilderness and away from pickpockets it is ideal.
For once, the iPod Touch gets some extra love: The Touch version of the case, due to the extra space afforded by the iPod’s slim body, has a 1500mAH battery (the iPhone’s is 1320mAH). Both cases, when fully charged, will double the life of the devices. There’s even a free iPhone app to help you calculate how much sunbathing your case has to do to get you through a day. Other neat touches are the row of LEDs to tell you how much power is left and, on the inevitable cloudy days, the regular USB socket in the case means you can charge [...]
March 12th, 2010 / Gadget-News / gadgets / 1 Comment
We’d had some indication that Europe would be seeing Motorola Milestones running Android 2.1 roughly around this time, and it looks like we are now finally starting to get a few more specifics. According to Mobile Bulgaria, that country’s leading carrier, Vivacom, will begin selling Milestones equipped with Android 2.1 “by March 20th,” which should no doubt be just part of a broader European rollout in the coming days / weeks (that will hopefully extend to Canada as well). Unfortunately, things still aren’t any clearer for Droid users in the US, but you can be sure we’ll be watching every development on that front.
Motorola Milestone with Android 2.1 hitting Bulgaria by March 20th, rest of Europe to follow? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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