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Xbox 360 802.11n adapter rebirths on Costco site, ships November 10th for $88

by Ross Miller posted Nov 5th 2009 at 4:54PM

You can't keep a phoenix down and this Xbox 360 wireless n adapter seems to be a bird of similar feather. After discretely showing up on US retail sites and subsequently managing to drop off into internet obscurity, the 802.11n-compliant peripheral has returned to the scene via Costco's site, this time with a November 10th shipping date and a more attractive than before $88 price tag. With only five days until the 10th, will this finally be the price and date that stick? Who knows -- but at least this time we won't have to wait long to find out.

[Thanks, WeakSasco]

T-Mobile 7.2Mbps HSPA rolling out now?

by Ross Miller posted Nov 4th 2009 at 11:27PM

Reports are coming in, by and large it seems via Android and Me, that T-Mobile's begun its rollout of its 7.2Mbps HSPA network for some extra speedy mobile browsing. We've done some testing in the listed cities, notably Chicago and New York, but so far are coming up with the usual, mundane speeds. It'd certainly make up for yesterday's snafu (almost), but at this point we're classifying as unconfirmed. Anyone else having better luck?

Read - 1MB mobile speed test
Read - Android and Me's report

Microsoft Courier interface explained in more detail

by Nilay Patel posted Nov 4th 2009 at 1:51PM

Steve Ballmer might have no idea what's going on with the Microsoft Courier tablet, but a new set of documents leaked to Gizmodo certainly suggests the product is more than just a couple videos the boss-man hasn't seen. The images detail the Courier's unique user interface, which draws on everything from multitouch gestures to pen-based handwriting recognition. The heart of the interface appears to be the Smart Agenda, pictured above, which pulls together all your disparate content like calendar entries, emails, and to-dos into one unified starting place, described as "Cliff Notes" to the Pagestream "novel." The journal itself appears to be searchable by all kinds of data, including time, location, and tags, and it's all accessed by a special multi-button pen. There's also a camera and an offhand mention of "boos and subscriptions," so it sounds like whoever was dreaming this all up considered using the Courier as an ebook reader as well -- which would be totally sweet, given the types of annotations you could do. Of course, none of this is real yet, but we're hoping against hope -- please, Mr. Steve, make our holiday dreams come true?

Leaked Walmart ad reveals Xbox 360 Arcade with $100 gift card, $300 HP G60 laptop

by Ross Miller posted Nov 4th 2009 at 12:29AM

It's not quite a $99 Xbox 360, but if this apparent Walmart scan via Kotaku is to be believed, that $199 Arcade version is getting a $100 gift card promotion going into effect this Saturday. In real terms, that boils down to a $234 Xbox 360 Pro for first-time buyers, seeing as you'll be needing that $135, 120GB hard drive, too. Also listed are a Sony Blu-ray player for $148 (we're guessing the currently-MSRP'd $199 BDP-S360), and a $298 HP G60-519WM, which touts a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron, 15.6-inch HD display, Windows 7 Home Premium, 3GB RAM, and a 250GB HDD -- not a bad followup at all for that Compaq CQ60. Some interesting spy shots from the Slick Deals forum seem to give credence to the scan, although we're still playing wait-and-see -- that $100 gift card with the Xbox 360 arcade is almost too good to be true, even if it is just a clever tactic to clear shelf space in the lead-up to Black Friday.

Update: Sure as the sun, an official ad has popped up on Yahoo's front page. Screenshot after the break.

[Thanks, just4onepost]

Read - G60-519WM spotted
Read - $199 Xbox 360 Arcade with $100 gift card?

Continue reading Leaked Walmart ad reveals Xbox 360 Arcade with $100 gift card, $300 HP G60 laptop

Droid Eris turns up in Verizon training course

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 27th 2009 at 6:31PM

Again, we have no idea why Verizon is burying the launch of the HTC Droid Eris alongside the Motorola Droid tomorrow (well, apart from the slow CPU and older Android build) but if you had any doubts that Big Red was going to launch this riff on the Hero, well, these screenshots of the employee training course should put those to rest. Interestingly, the buttons and logo placement are slightly different from the pic that was leaked to gdgt, but this version certainly looks like what Eric Schmidt was holding the other day, so we're thinking this is the final iteration. We'll see what's what tomorrow, we suppose.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

The TwitterPeek is... a Peek for Twitter?

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 27th 2009 at 6:13PM

Peek's never been one to shy away from the wacky and opportunistic marketing schemes but launching a whole product just for Twitter? That's courage, drive, and possibly a mental health issue. Yet here's the TwitterPeek -- what looks to be the same old Peek you know, love, and probably haven't purchased, stripped of its email and SMS functionality and re-oriented towards telling the entire world too much about your body and what you're doing to it every waking moment of the day. Now, to be fair, we're getting a distinctly strange feeling of phoniness about this whole thing, but there's already an Amazon listing and a picture of the box has already surfaced on -- where else? -- Twitter, so this could really be happening. Just think about that for a second. And then tweet about it, of course.

[Via LiveDigitally]

Read - Amazon TwitterPeek listing
Read - Peter Ha's TwitPic of the box

Continue reading The TwitterPeek is... a Peek for Twitter?

Verizon's HTC Droid Eris to run Android 1.5 on a 528MHz CPU

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 27th 2009 at 5:11PM

We can certainly understand why Verizon wants to brand all of its Android devices under the "Droid" label, but at this point we can't say we understand why it's launching the HTC Droid Eris alongside the Motorola Droid at all -- BGR says it's going to run Android 1.5 on a 528MHz Qualcomm CPU, which means it'll be instantly obsoleted by Android 2.0 on the Moto's OMAP3 at launch. What's more, it sure seems like Verizon knows it's mismanaging this situation, as we haven't heard a single peep about the Eris in the runup to the Droid launch tomorrow, even though Eric Schmidt and Lowell McAdam were waving both devices around a few weeks ago. We'll see how this all plays out -- HTC certainly has Android 2.0 phones of its own in the works, so the Eris might not be long for this world.

Google developing free navigation app?

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 27th 2009 at 4:24PM

We already know plenty of people who've eschewed traditional turn-by-turn GPS systems in favor of plotting it out for free on Google Maps, and now there's whispers that Mountain View is coming after the rest of the market with a free nav app. That's at least what nav services providers are saying to Forbes, who think El Goog is gearing up to release a free ad-supported navigation app after making moves to use its own US maps instead licensing data from Tele Atlas and putting ads on the iPhone Maps app. Obviously that would shake things up a ton -- and make Android devices a huge bargain -- but we'll see where this all leads over the next few months.

[Via Fierce Mobile Content; thanks Elad]

NEC working on an Android tablet for suits?

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 27th 2009 at 12:29PM

Super-vague report in the Nikkei this morning about NEC working on a seven-to-eight-inch "mobile device as capable as a personal computer" that's aimed at business customers -- no specs are given, but the tiny accompanying pic definitely shows the Android app tab at the bottom of that custom UI. Very mysterious. The report says NEC thinks it'll move 100,000 to 200,000 of these a year after it launches next fall, and plans to sell a million a year over time, but we'll wait to see what's real and what's not before we tackle that prediction.

[Via Slashgear; warning, read link requires registration]

Nintendo DSi with larger screens coming this year to Japan?

by Ross Miller posted Oct 27th 2009 at 12:05AM

The Nintendo DSi in its current form is just about to round its first Japanese birthday on November 1st, and if Nikkei has anything to say about it, the two-screener's all set for an oncoming growth spurt. According to a report from the publication, who has a good track record on Nintendo reports thus far, a new DSi with 4-inch screens (versus 3.25 currently) is coming to the land of the rising sun sometime before this year's out. No other spec differences, the report claims this was in response to older gamers having trouble seeing the action. It'll replace the current model and retail for the same price, ¥18,900 (US $205.50). If history tells us anything, we'll be waiting a lot longer for this new model to make it overseas.

Update: As noted by our Engadget Japan friends, the original Nikkei piece does mention a possible increase in resolution, to the effect of saying games and apps can display more info on screen, but it's very unclear if that was the intended message here or simply a confusion in terminology.

[Via Joystiq]

HTC Dragon coming to Verizon as the Passion?

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 26th 2009 at 12:21PM

We've been hearing about a 1GHz Snapdragon-based Android handset called the HTC Dragon ever since the HD2 came out, but now it looks like some pieces are falling into place -- apparently this mystery HTC set we spotted over the weekend is a CDMA version of the Dragon headed for Verizon as the HTC Passion sometime in Q4. Apparently Verizon's trying to unify the hardware UI of its Droid lineup, which is why the Motorola Droid, the HTC Droid Eris, and the Passion share a set of buttons along the bottom edge of the screen, and some people are also claiming that the white notification bar is further sign of similarity. As for us, well, we'll wait to hear more before we start to get too excited -- and we can't help but wonder if this thing will run Sense or stock Android 2.0 when it hits, as HTC's big new ad push is all about personalization. Still, it's looking like a hell of a year for Android (and Verizon), no?

Dell Adamo XPS specs leak out: ULV processors, integrated graphics

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 23rd 2009 at 1:20PM

At this point we have no idea why Dell won't just up and launch the Adamo XPS, but if they can't get it sorted we'll just piece it together ourselves -- and today we've got two different sources providing specs for the super-thin laptop with the funktastic hinge. Inside that crazy 1.5-pound case lies some pretty standard internals: we're hearing there'll be 1.4 and 1.9GHz dual-core Intel ULV processors with integrated X4500MHD graphics and 4GB of DDR3 RAM, all under (well, behind) an LED-backlit 13.4-inch WXGA screen and either a 128 or 180GB SSD. That's good for a reported score of just 3.3 on the Windows 7 experience test -- pretty sad for a $2,000 machine. The two available batteries are said to be rated at either 20Wh for 2.5 hours of juice or 40Wh for four hours, and here's the crazy thing -- that touch sensitive case latch we've been hearing about? Yeah, it doesn't work without power, so you can't open the machine if your battery is dead. Nice. Now Dell, honestly, can we dispense with the run-around?

[Thanks, Anonymous]

Barnes & Noble 'Nook' e-reader with color touchscreen out Tuesday for $259, says WSJ (update: Best Buy connection?)

by Ross Miller posted Oct 19th 2009 at 7:23PM

Looks like the cat's out of the bag. The Wall Street Journal's had a glimpse at what it says is an upcoming ad for Barnes & Noble's impending announcement, which just so happens to be a e-book reader with color touch screen (sound familiar?) dubbed the Nook. According to the article, it'll be out Tuesday, retail for $259, and will let users "lend e-books to friends." Very interesting, indeed -- so who's excited for tomorrow?

Update: We can't say with 100 percent assurance, but a reliable source of ours claims that Barnes & Noble will be partnering with Best Buy for sales of the device, and units will actually be available this Thursday. That last bit sounds daring at best, as it's Windows 7 launch day, but you never know what folks will get up to these days. Stay tuned!

Mysterious HTC Android phone spied, might lean the way of the Dragon

by Ross Miller posted Oct 18th 2009 at 7:52PM

In an almost perfect world, this spy shot would be of the rumored HTC Dragon, reminiscent of the HD2 with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and packing the latest version of Android / Sense UI -- in a more perfect world, this would all have been confirmed last week and in our hands today delivered via unicorn express, but that's obviously not happening. Still, there's something new and exciting about this device, but we're grasping at straws beyond the handful of pics The Unlockr managed to obtain, several more of which can found just beyond the read link.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

T-Mobile's Project Dark includes option for buying phones in monthly installments?

by Ross Miller posted Oct 18th 2009 at 4:59PM

Still no confirmation on any all-you-can-eat data plans, but Boy Genius Report has some convincing screens that seem to reveal some other precepts of T-Mobile's enigmatic (and purportedly company-saving) Project Dark. Two new plans have emerged, Even More and Even More Plus. The former is the traditional two-year contract, along with options to do data only and get a subsidized phone. Even More Plus doesn't require a contract, going month-to-monthly instead, and subsequently the phone is full price. However, what's gonna be interesting to see is the FlexPay option, which allows you to pay for a device in monthly installments instead of upfront, a plan we've seen before in markets like Germany and Japan. In the example above, a $400 G1 on the non-contractual Even More Plus plan is divvied out to an initial $170 payment and 19 subsequent installments of $12.10, or $33.33 over three months after the related upfront cost. It's no game-changer on its own, but it's certainly an intriguing prospect that's gonna make some (initially) cash-strapped individuals very happy to be able to walk out with a decent Android device.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]