‘Gadgets’ Category

AT&T To Make Femtocells Obligatory for iPhone Owners

Friday, April 1, 2011 12:00PM - By

att home manager msp3 AT&T To Make Femtocells Obligatory for iPhone Owners

As we all know, often from painful experience, AT&T has a terrible network. So terrible, it had to buy an entire other carrier just to get up to speed on 4G. Unfortunately, until that happens, there needs to be other solutions, especially since iPhone customers are jumping ship to Verizon left and right. So AT&T has to get proactive to keep those profitable customers and boost its network.

So, free femtocells for everyone!

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Android Not So Open After All?

Thursday, March 31, 2011 3:00PM - By

google android angry logo Android Not So Open After All?

One of the key selling points of Google’s Android platform was its open source mentality; anybody could have the code! Anybody could do anything with Android! It’s your mobile phone OS! It’s free! Free!

Many analysts predicted that this would do two things: make Android the number one smartphone OS and backfire horribly and cause dozens of broken versions of Android. Guess what? They were right. Now Google is yanking some control back, and its partners are less than happy about it, as in “talking to the Justice Department” unhappy.

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Aircell: The First Airplane-Safe Cellphone? Or Just a Scam?

Friday, March 25, 2011 3:00PM - By

In Flight Cell Phone Usage Aircell: The First Airplane Safe Cellphone?  Or Just a Scam?

It’s an article of faith among travelers: you have to shut off your cell phone on the flight because it might disrupt the navigational equipment. And while you won’t be able to take it on a commercial flight yet, Aircell, leading providers in in-the-air telephony, are happy to sell you the first Android smartphone for in-flight use. Price is currently unavailable, but we’re going to guess “expensive”.

Or you could just use your actual cell phone, since the entire reason you can’t use your cell phone in-flight is due to bureaucratic problems, not science.

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Android Can Now Take Your Money In-App

Friday, March 25, 2011 12:00PM - By

 Android Can Now Take Your Money In App

It may not to be a function that most Android users care about, but it’s something developers have been eagerly anticipating for months. No, not Google unlocking Honeycomb. No, not Google repairing Honeycomb from its painfully busted beta state. Nope, they’re finally ready to test…in-app billing.

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ST Ericsson PowerHUB Promises To Be a Faster Charger

Thursday, March 24, 2011 12:00PM - By

 ST Ericsson PowerHUB Promises To Be a Faster Charger

OK, so it has nothing whatsoever to do with cars. But visual puns are just too powerful to resist sometimes.

Kind of like ST Ericsson neat new charger. One of the big problems with the newer generation of gadgets is that they’re huge power sucks. And while they have the high-capacity batteries necessary to last more than ten minutes, those batteries still have to be charged, and there’s no quick way of doing that. This is due simply to how much charge you can get into a battery through a charger.

The PowerHUB addresses this problem with a brisk boot to the rear.

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Inkling Brings Textbooks to Your iPad

Thursday, March 24, 2011 9:00AM - By

inkling ipad app2 Inkling Brings Textbooks to Your iPad

The iPad exists for textbooks. Really, let’s not beat around the bush here; it’s practically designed for college students to just load up their texts and bring to class so they have everything at their fingertips. And yet, nobody was really pursuing that angle, despite all the chatter about “digital publishing” and how it was going to save the industry of applying carbon suspended in fluid to dead tree pulp.

That’s where Inkling comes in.

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Draft Kit 2011 Improves Your (Fantasy) Game

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 12:30PM - By

american handicappers money making Draft Kit 2011 Improves Your (Fantasy) Game

Fantasy baseball started out as a pastime for nerds, and has rapidly become an extremely popular pastime for nerds. For those unfamiliar, it involves selecting a bunch of real players and bashing their statistics together like a couple of action figures. It gets complex and almost as heated and violent as actual discussions about baseball. But one of the biggest problem is that you actually have to keep track of all those statistics, which is supposedly part of the fun.

Fortunately, Draft Kit is coming along to take some of the…”fun”…out of fantasy baseball.

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BlackBerry Playbook Coming April 19th

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:30AM - By

BlackBerry PlayBook BlackBerry Playbook Coming April 19th

Pretty much everybody is getting into the tablet game these days in the wake of the iPad actually making it a viable market. Samsung has the Galaxy Tab, Motorola is putting out the Xoom, and we’re sure there are a bunch of cheesy Chinese knockoffs coming as well. But one competitor people have been awaiting is Research In Motion and how they were going to respond to the tablet craze. Back in September, we found out it was going to be with the PlayBook, but we didn’t know when it was coming out.

Well, guess no more; it’s coming April 19th.

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Is the Google/China War Still Hot?

Monday, March 21, 2011 12:30PM - By

GoogleChinaFlag Is the Google/China War Still Hot?

What with the Egyptian unrest, the Tunisian unrest, and the erupting civil war in India, dictators around the world have been a wee bit edgy. And nowhere is this truer than in China, which is trying to become as capitalist as quickly as possible without having all that pesky democracy and government accountability. And this, in turn, means it will confront yet again its most dangerous enemy: Google.

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