The nominations are in, the picks have been sorted, and now it’s time for you, the reader, to help us judge the best in tech from 2009! We’ve put together a long, long list of the top selections below — all we ask is that you cast your vote for the gadgets nearest and dearest to your hearts.
Votes will be tallied until Saturday February 20th, 11:59PM EDT. You can vote in this post — the nominees are after the break. After we’ve checked for abuse (just say no!) we’ll publish the results alongside our own Editors’ Choice picks the following week. May the best gadgets win!
Continue reading Vote for the 2009 Engadget Awards!
Vote for the 2009 Engadget Awards! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The feds simply aren’t backing down from their incessant warnings of a wireless broadband spectrum crunch the likes of which the world has never seen, and they’ve seemingly found a great vehicle — the iPad — to help spread the message just a little further (and at a higher volume) than before. This time around, it’s the Omnibus Broadband Initiative’s director of scenario planning Phil Bellaria who’s sounding the alarm, saying that the iPad foretells “even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon” and asking that the people with the money and the power (the carriers and the FCC, respectively) do what it takes to make sure that the nation’s broadband infrastructure and policy are appropriately managed in light of that. Perhaps most provocative is his statement that “reaching an always-on wireless broadband future means that the spectrum can no longer remain attached solely to uses deemed valuable decades ago,” possibly a veiled reference to the FCC’s ongoing spat with TV broadcasters over the future of over-the-air broadcasts. Free TV or an iPad with a fast, functional browsing experience — if it came down to it, which would you prefer?
Government warns of wireless network congestion again, rides iPad to push its spectrum agenda originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_We_measure_our_work_by_its_broad_impact’;
You had to know Microsoft would respond to former VP Dick Brass saying the company didn’t have “a true system for innovation” in the New York Times this morning, and it looks like Redmond’s VP of corporate communications Frank Shaw is on the move: he’s just posted up a reply on The Official Microsoft Blog. Frank says that what matters is “innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed,” and that “it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact.” Frank also points to OneNote in response to Dick’s claim that Tablet PC was doomed because the Office team refused to make a version of Office designed around stylus input, and then refers to the Xbox 360 as an example of Microsoft’s leadership — and says Project Natal is a “magical experience” that’ll keep the trend alive. That’s pretty much exactly how we would respond, although we’d also argue that Dick’s individual criticisms are less important than his larger thesis about systematic innovation — and we’d love to hear what Frank has to say about that.
P.S.- Can we all please stop calling everything “magical” for a minute, though? Thanks.
[Image from Robert Scoble]
Microsoft responds to Dick Brass: ‘We measure our work by its broad impact’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sanyo just announced a
trio of 1080i camcorders for Japan last week, and its now gotten official with some ever so slightly different model for the US, which look to just be the beginning of a
new wave of Sanyo camcorders rolling out in the coming weeks and months. As you can see, these ones a bit more subdued than their brightly colored Japanese counterparts, and Sanyo has naturally changed the model names to keep everyone on their toes (they’re now the VPC-GH2, VPC-CG102, and VPC-CG20). You’ll still get the same 1080i video and either 14- or 10-megapixel still images as before, along with a somewhat unique 12x “double-range zoom” on the GH2 and CG102, which apparently lets you switch between a wide-angle and telephoto zoom for videos. Sure, full 1080p would have been nice, but it’s hard to complain too much with prices of
$229 and $199.
Sanyo rolls out GH2, CG102, CG20 1080i camcorders in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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You know how it is — another day, another “magical” and “intuitive”
input device — not unlike
Immersion’s Cubtile, which we first saw about a year ago. This time around the culprit is Gesture Cube, the heathen spawn of Ident’s “GestIC” electric field sensing technology (for 3D spatial movement tracking) and a couple German design studios. GestIC detects movements and distances in 3D space, enabling touch free gesture control. If this sounds good to you, wait until you see the YouTube demonstration, complete with all sorts of “magical” and “intuitive” interface ideas! It will really make you with you were a designer living in Germany, starring in YouTube videos for “magical” and “intuitive” design firms. We don’t know how much of a hurry we are to see this implemented in our fave hardware, but who knows? Maybe we’ll come around eventually — after all,
Grippity did wonders for our words-per-minute. Video after the break.
Continue reading Gesture Cube, the magical, intuitive, theoretical 3D interface (video)
Gesture Cube, the magical, intuitive, theoretical 3D interface (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Motorola’s official spec sheet for the Devour reveals that there’ll be a Flash Lite runtime on board — presumably version 3.1, which offers support for a variety of video codecs and Flash 9 content — and more importantly, it’ll work in the browser. That’s pretty cool — it gives the Devour one small leg up on its Droid big brother and matches capabilities that HTC has rolled out in the past on the Hero, but what’s more interesting is that the Devour allegedly uses the same next-gen low-cost smartphone processor from Qualcomm, the MSM7627, as the Pixi. Palm has elected not to roll out the Pre’s upcoming Flash support to the Pixi on account of its lower-end specs, which begs the question: is Android’s Flash Lite 3.1 player significantly more efficient than webOS’ Flash 10.1 player, does the Devour have more horsepower packed in there than it’s letting on, or does Palm just have higher performance standards for annoying ads than Moto does?
[Thanks, StevenQ]
Motorola Devour has Flash support, makes Pixi look like an underachiever originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ready for some hot ThinkPad action? Lenovo’s shipping out its new ThinkPad T410, and like clockwork an unboxing video has arrived. (This is the Core i5 T410, not the brand-new Core i3 T410i — confused? Yeah.) Changes to the venerable T400 formula are minor, apart from the new Core 2010 processors inside — the trackpad is the same nice dimpled multitouch unit we fell in love with on the T400s, a powered USB port for charging other devices, a DisplayPort instead of DVI, and… a modem port? You just keep on being crazy, Lenny. Don’t you ever change. Check it on video after the break.
Update: Laptop has a review up — as you’d expect, it fared quite well.
Continue reading Lenovo T410 gets unboxed, handled, reviewed
Lenovo T410 gets unboxed, handled, reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Solar-charged batteries aren’t exactly wow factors these days, unless they’re dirt cheap like this Scosche solBAT II. With 1,500mAh of juice, this dongle can carry slightly more power than your average smartphone, and can also take any device with a USB cable. However, before you fork out $29.99 to Scosche, you should know that the solBAT takes between four to five days (!) to charge up fully under sunlight — not ideal for most power-hungry smartphones nowadays. There’s always the $93.23 Energizer SP2000 (2,000mAh) for your consideration — it’s bulkier, but with three solar panels it only needs six hours of solar-charge time. Guess we’ll just take the faster one, thanks.
Continue reading Scosche solBAT II collects solar power, distributes it to USB devices
Scosche solBAT II collects solar power, distributes it to USB devices originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As we’d figured out last night, Symbian’s big reveal for today was the completion of its move to a fully open, royalty-free platform — meaning you no longer need to be a paid-in-full member of the Foundation to see all the code — and they’re ready to talk about it and spread the word far and wide. Though Symbian’s certainly not getting as much share of the mobile discussion these days as some of its smaller competitors, it’s certainly important to keep in mind that these guys have software deployed on literally hundreds of millions of devices, making this perhaps the largest-scale conversion of a closed operating system to open source in history. Because the code has been licensed under the Eclipse public license rather than the harder-core GPL, device manufacturers will be able to continue to tack on custom features and hardware support without open-sourcing it, which should make them less gun-shy about throwing weight behind the platform — and considering how badly these guys need to get back into the spotlight, that’s a good thing. Follow the break for the Foundation’s intro video to the wide, wide world of open source and Symbian^3, the first version to be fully spread out for everyone to see.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Continue reading Symbian Foundation talks about its move to open source
Symbian Foundation talks about its move to open source originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’ve already seen Lenovo and others pair an SDD up with a standard hard drive for maximum speed, but SilverStone now has a fairly novel solution to let you build your own hybrid storage device. Dubbed the HDDBOOST, the device itself is just a simple chassis that lets you plug in any SDD drive and any standard hard drive and connect the whole rig to your computer — you can even apparently daisy chain multiple hard drives and have them all take advantage of the SSD boost. Of course, those drives will be recognized as one by your computer, and the initial setup appears to be minimal, with only a simple mirror backup required to copy all your priority data to the SDD — which the company says could result in up to a 70% increase in speed. No word on an official release over here, but this one should be available in Europe later this month for €33 (or about $45).
[Thanks, Alex]
SilverStone HDDBOOST lets you build your own hybrid SSD hard drive originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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