Month: September 2010

Tim Allen, the voice of Michigan tourism, Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear, and Home Improvements Tim Taylor will soon be the voice of the 2011 Chevrolet Cruze, and the rest of the Chevrolet brand, GM announced today. The ads running Allen’s voice will start September 7, the day before the official…

7 inch Android tablets

7 inch screen, light weight tablet, is great for reading and big enough  for easy surfing. Many current apps won't fill the screen as nicely as on a phone but developers will adopt to these form factors too. Not gonna fit inside your pocket but not too heavy in your bag. These new tablets have capacitive touch screens compared the many "craptablets" around.
 

Samsung Galaxy Tab – €600 – 900
– 7 inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touch
– 1Ghz Samsung Cortex A8
– Wifi, 3G, A-GPS and bluetooth
– TV-Out
– Front and rear cameras
– Android Market and Google Apps

Samsung made huge buzz over their tablet. Now that we have seen it, tested it and wow’ed it’s great features, we can only cry for cheaper price. It looks like Sammy is priced towards carrier deals, so you may get it later for €99 or $199 with 3G contract. It has it all but if price without contract doesn’t come down it might be too much. Great accessory line.

Hands-on videos: Engadget Carrypad Mobile-Review Netbooknews Slashgear NewGadgets Charbax HDblog

Specifications, Gallery and News links for Samsung Galaxy Tab
 
 
Viewsonic Viewpad 7 – €399
– 7 inch 800 x 480 capacitive touch
– 600Mhz Qualcomm Snapdragon
– Wifi, 3G, A-GPS and bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Front and rear cameras
– Android Market and Google Apps

It looks like Viewsonic got their pricing good from the start. You should see it soon cheaper than $399 from many different places and different brands. 600Mhz cpu and 800 x 480resolution looks bad compared to Sammy but I think they are not deal breakers.

Hands-on videos: Carrypad Engadget Charbax Slashgear NewGadgets

Specifications, Gallery and News links for Viewsonic Viewpad 7

Archos 70 Internet Tablet – $274
– 7 inch 800 x 480 capacitive touch
– 1Ghz TI Cortex A8
– Wifi, bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Front cam

Archos 70 has many things right, specially pricing. Lack of Android Market and their decision  to use software keys and not hardware buttons are let downs. Great kick stand, nice design and support for multiple video files are goodies you won't find on other tablets.

Hands-on videos: Engadget Charbax Liliputing Carrypad

Specifications, Gallery and News links for Archos 70 Internet Tablet

StreamTV Elocity A7 – $399
– 7 inch 800 x 480 capacitive touch
– 1Ghz Tegra 2 Cortex A9
– Wifi, 3G option and bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Front cam

Compal has been showing it from January and Aigo branded it too. Now StreamTV is bringing it to USA and their pricing is looking ok. No Android Market and other Gstuff but it shouldn’t take long when it’s hacked to eat anything you throw in it. Great video power due Tegra 2. It should appear soon on other countries too with different branding.


Hands-on videos: Engadget Netbooknews GigaOM LAPTOP

Specifications, Gallery and News links for NAZ-10/ ePad N7/ Elocity A7

10 inch Android tablets

They are big, you can fit 2 portrait 7 inchers side by side for their width. Best for sofa surfing, web, videos and pictures. A bit too big and heavy for bed reading. Many apps will look weird with big fonts on these big screen. No Android Market nor Google apps on any of then yet.

Archos 101 Internet Tablet – $300
– 10 inch 1024 x 600 capacitive
– 1Ghz TI Cortex A8
– Wifi, bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Front cam

101 is grown up Archos 70. It has the same video file support and kick stand but now bigger screen and higher resolution. If you want it big, this one is the cheapest. No Android market is a bummer but side loading / hacking it might be ok for some. Should be easily available everywhere soon.

Hands-on videos: Engadget  Charbax Liliputing Carrypad

Specifications, Gallery and News links for Archos 101 Internet Tablet

Toshiba Folio 100 – €399
– 10 inch 1024 x 600 capacitive 
– 1Ghz Tegra 2 Cortex A9
– Wifi, 3G option and bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Front cam

Specialty on this device is Toshiba’s Places, which should make sharing content over different screens easier. This tablet has horse power to surf with pleasure and play HD videos either on itself or on big screen TV. It should be the first available 10 inch Android tablet with 3G.

Hands-on videos: Slashgear Charbax Netbooknews Engadget Carrypad

Specifications, Gallery and News links for Toshiba Folio 100

E-Noa Interpad – €399
– 10 inch 1024 x 600 capacitive
– 1Ghz Nvidia Tegra 2 Cortex A9
– Wifi, bluetooth
– HDMI out

Again, Tegra 2 video power. They are also making a 3G version with Android Market but this one still lacks both. As it’s based on ODM design, you should see it branded with different names too. Should be great allrounder on it’s category.

Hands-on videos: Carrypad Engadget Slashgear jkkmobile Charbax

Specifications, Gallery and News links for E-Noa Interpad
 
5 inch Android tablets

These are best for pockets. Bigger than phone size helps surfing the web and apps don’t look too weird. My personal favorites for reading while traveling, casual surfing and social networks. Dell Streak is the only one with capacitive screen, Gtuff and 3G, which shows on it’s pricing too.
 

Dell Streak – $549
– 4.8 inch 800 x 480 capacitive touch
– 1Ghz Snapdragon
– Wifi, 3G, A-GPS and bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Front and Rear cameras
– Android Market and Google Apps

First tablet to get full access to all Google apps and Android Market. I like it a lot. It fits in your pocket but I think it’s a bit big for all-round phone. Great for data centric phone use. Big accessory line, good quality and nicely building community support. Expensive compared to Archos offerings but with 3G and Gstuff has way more mobile value.Great for car navigation too.

Hands-on videos: jkkmobile Engadget Slashgear
 
Specifications, Gallery and News links for Dell Streak

Archos 5 Internet Tablet – €229
– 4.8 inch 800 x 480 resistive touch
– 800Mhz TI Cortex A8
– Wifi, GPS and bluetooth
– TV out

Olden but golden. I have been using A5IT now for almost a year. It was buggy and unstable but Archos gave us almost 15 updates which made it a good allrounder. I use it for ebook reading with Kindel app. Great support for different Video formats, good kickstand.

Hands-on videos: Liliputing jkkmobile Charbax

Specifications, Gallery and News links for Archos 5 Internet Tablet

Archos 43 Internet Tablet – $199
– 4.3 inch 854 x 480 resistive touch
– 1Ghz TI Cortex A8
– Wifi, bluetooth
– HDMI out
– Rear camera

Let down for me, as I was waiting for 3G and A-GPS device with capacitive screen. Pricing makes me feel a bit better, specially as they added rear camera on it. Good pocketable entry level tablet with huge support for different video formats. Works as a mouse pad when connected to TV.

Hands-on videos: Charbax Engadget Ndevil Liliputing Carrypad
 
Specifications, Gallery and News links for Archos 43 Internet Tablet

That’s my current list of top 10 Android tablets. Feel free to add your favorites to comments and contact me if you have good videos to add to these links.

UPDATE: More links added on 6th September

There are many other cool tablets around but these are ones you can actually buy now or soon.

The Konami Code (if you don’t know it, then shame on you!) has long been part of geek lore. But now it can be part of your work day too: Google has added a new, pranktastic easter egg to Docs. More »

Well, this is it. Hell has frozen over, pigs are flying, dogs and cats are living together – MASS HYSTERIA!!

Gearbox has just confirmed that they will be releasing Duke Nukem Forever. If this actually comes to pass, it looks like L.A. Noire may be the new king of the vaporware.

The future of Duke Nukem Forever looked black indeed when 3D Realms finally went bust in May 2009. Take Two retained rights to the game, and they apparently felt that Borderlands developer Gearbox could put the polish to the long-awaited franchise.

No word yet on when it will hit stores, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do. In the meantime, there’s a live stream of the announcement and gameplay footage in this post.

UPDATE: The game has completed development, and will be released in 2011 on PC, PS3 and XBox 360. Said Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, “When Duke ran into trouble, we were glad to [help him out of] a spot. You can’t let the Duke die, right?” Apparently not, since the game is fully playable at PAX right now.

Ridley Scott continues to prepare to return to the “Alien” universe.  Now he shares a little insight into what we can expect from the prequel.

Google has announced that despite Wave’s demise as a Google App, its open source code will continue to be developed into a fully-functional application available to anyone with the desire to host it. More »

Two years. Can you believe it’s only been two years since we started browsing the internet faster than a potato can tear through the air? Well, Google can, and it’s certainly not been sitting around during that time, improving Chrome‘s JavaScript performance by a factor of 3, and throwing in a litany of additional features, like tab side-by-side view, themes, auto-translation, and bookmark and preference sync across machines. To celebrate the anniversary, the company’s uploaded version numero 6 to its stable channel, which brings a few more GUI optimizations and some bug fixes to the table. Hardware graphics acceleration isn’t yet included in the public release, but it too shall be joining the party before long.

Chrome is now 2 years old! Google celebrates with release of version 6 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BP says it has so far spent roughly $8 billion US responding to the disastrous oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

A Yorkton, Sask., woman who tried to block police from entering a home to check on a caller who dialled 911 has been convicted of obstruction of justice.

With students across Saskatchewan returning to school, teachers are divided about whether popular social networks like Facebook have a place in the classroom.

Fans of the Saskatchewan Roughriders have another item they can put in their collection of club gear: one dollar coins, or loonies, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the team.

Ponder, for a moment, this photo of a field in Manor, Texas. Outside Jennie Lane SmartPark, which is also the home to the town’s farmers’ market, hangs a large QR code that directs both residents and curious passersby to this website, which gives a brief history of the land and its re-dedication from “park” to “SmartPark.” The SmartPark now boasts free Wi-Fi and “technology training classes,” all a part of Manor’s government tech upgrade that began back in 2008.

With an estimated population of 5,468, Manor is still a small town. But its upgrade — including services like a redesigned city website, a Web app for reporting street and water issues called SeeClickFix, and a crowd-sourcing website for new ideas called Manor Labs — has made news as representing the evolution of local government into the Internet age. Manor will be hosting a two-day tech conference later this month called manor.govfresh, where city officials will meet with other municipal governments about its programs, and will even give another town — De Leon, Texas — a “Gov City 2.0 Makeover.”

Continue reading Manor, Texas: Government Evolution or Fad Solutions in the QR Code-Connected Town

Manor, Texas: Government Evolution or Fad Solutions in the QR Code-Connected Town originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung exec says next tablet will use Android ‘Honeycomb,’ Galaxy Tab getting Gingerbread originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chrome: TabRocket is a small Chrome extension that allows you to shuttle open tabs between remote Chrome sessions. If you’ve ever wanted to send a tab to your home computer or your laptop across the room, TabRocket can help. More »

Theoretical physicist and official World’s Cleverest Chap Stephen Hawking says there’s no reason to think that God created the universe.

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That Folio 100 (alias Smart Pad) from Toshiba we’d been hearing about? Yep, totally real, and totally Tegra 2-powered — a theme that we think is going to be pretty popular among tablet makers this season. We caught a handful of Folio 100s firmly affixed to a wall at IFA today, showing 10.1-inch multitouch LCD displays paired with a remixed version of Android 2.1, a handful of capacitive buttons, a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera, 16GB of on-board storage, and not much else — there’s really nothing visually stunning about the setup as far as we can tell, and it’s not particularly thin. After bouncing out that crazy Libretto W100, Toshiba’s going to have to turn up the style dial to 11 if it wants to rise above the forthcoming onslaught of Google tablets, we suspect.

Toshiba’s Folio 100 with Android and Tegra 2 spied in the IFA wilds originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Would you like to make your blog look great on all devices, not just computers?  Smartphones and other mobile devices are increasing in popularity, so here’s how you can make sure your blog looks great no matter what people are reading it on.

WordPress is a great tool for creating a blog or traditional website for your business, organization, or simply to share pictures with family and friends.  You can make a free blog on WordPress.com, and if so, your blog will already be ready for most modern mobile device browsers.  Here’s our test WordPress.com site in Mobile Safari; WordPress.com automatically gave it an iOS style theme that’s easy to use on mobile devices.

However, if you want to tweak WordPress and make your site just like you want, you’ll need to use the Self-hosted WordPress.org.  If you’ve created a new WordPress site on your own server or hosting service manually or using an auto-installer such as Softaculous, you may be disappointed that your site looks the same on mobile browsers as it does on your computer.  This makes it difficult to use on small screens.

Thankfully, you can easily get the same iOS style theme on your blog for free with the WPtouch plugin.  Login to your WordPress Dashboard, and select Add New under Plugins on the left side menu.

On this page, enter WPtouch in the search box.

Now install and activate the plugin as normal.

Your site will now have a nice theme that works great on modern smartphones and other mobile devices, but will still show your own normal theme to visitors using computers.  If you’d like to preview how your new mobile theme looks on an iPhone, check out our article on Testing Mobile Websites in Safari for Windows.

Tweak WPtouch Settings

WPtouch works fine without any tweaking on most sites, but if you’d like, you can customize your mobile site and tweak WPtouch’s settings to get it working just like you want.  To do this, click WPtouch under Settings on the left menu.

Here you can tweak many settings, including the mobile theme’s background, fonts, icon, and more.

You can also add Google Analytics and Adsense to your mobile site, so you can monetize your traffic and know how many visitors you’re getting.  If you need to find you Google Analytics code, here’s how you can quickly find it.

You may need to tweak settings in other WordPress plugins, including WP Cache and W3 Cache, to make them work with WPtouch, so be sure to check the list at the bottom of the settings page.

Here’s Techinch.com with a customized logo, menu, and background using WPtouch.  Now your site looks just like you want, on PCs and mobile devices.

On occasion you will need to edit the hosts file on your machine. Sometimes because of an attack or prank, and others so that you can simply and freely control access to websites and network traffic.

hosts files have been in use since ARPANET. They were used to resolve hosts names before DNS. hosts files would be massive documents used to aide the network name resolution.

Microsoft kept the hosts file alive in Windows networking which is why it varies very little whether used in Windows, OS X or Linux. The syntax stays mostly the same across all platforms. Most hosts files will have several entries for loopback. We can use that for the basic example for the typical syntax.

The first part will be the location to redirect the address to, the second part will be the address that you will want to redirect, and the third part is the comment. They can be separated by a space, but for ease of reading are typically separated by one or two tabs.

127.0.0.1 localhosts #loopback

Now let’s look at accessing the hosts files in the different operating systems…

Windows 7

To access the hosts file in Windows 7 you can use the following command in the Run Line to open notepad and the file.

notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Once notepad is open you can edit the file. In this example we will block Facebook. To do this just enter in the following after the # mark.

0.0.0.0    www.facebook.com

Now that you have edited your Hosts file make sure to save it.

Now notice if we try to access Facebook in IE we can’t get to the page.

We also were not able to get to it in Google Chrome… (check notes at the end). Also for more info on editing your Hosts file, check out The Geek’s article on how to create a shortcut to quickly edit your Hosts file.

Ubuntu

In Ubuntu 10.04 and most Linux distro’s you can edit the hosts file directly in the terminal. You can use your favorite editor or even open your favorite GUI text editor. For this example we will use VIM. Like Windows 7, Ubuntu’s hosts file is located in the /etc/ folder, though here it is in the root of the drive. In order to edit the file you will need to open it as root which is why we use sudo here.

Now that it is open we can edit it to redirect Facebook into nothing. You will notice that with Ubuntu there is also a section for IP6. For most needs you will only need to edit it the top section and ignore the IP6.

Now we can save the file and try to go to Facebook.com. Just like in windows we will see that we are now redirected to a site that does not exist.

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)

In Snow Leopard, accessing the hosts file is very similar to Ubuntu. Begin in terminal and use your favorite editor, even is you wish to call a GUI text editor, it is easier to do so from terminal.

The file will look a bit more like Windows, only with a little less explanation. Again we are going to redirect Facebook.

This time it seems that 0.0.0.0 is a loopback and will direct you to the computers Apache test page.

Notes

There are some things to note from this walkthrough that we did notice. When tested it, Chrome did not use the hosts file in any operating system but we were able to block Facebook in Chrome by adding www.facebook.com. Also, make sure to place and extra line after the last entry for the section.

This should get you started in understanding the Hosts file and how it can help protect your computer. You can use it to block sites that you don’t want a PC to be able to access. If you have more suggestions for any of the operating systems we coved, then leave a comment and let us know!

Create a Shortcut to Quickly Edit Your Hosts File in Windows