Category: GReader

The US had to wait for its Eee Pad Transformer launch a little longer than the rest of the world, but it’s finally gotten its wish today and consumers’ reaction seems to have been nothing short of voracious. Amazon’s order page for the $400 Android 3.0 tablet appears to have gone from “in stock” to “out of stock” within mere minutes, while Target — the supplier fulfilling orders on behalf of Amazon — also lists the Transformer as presently unavailable. ASUS’ own Where To Buy page leads us to a bunch of dead ends as well, with Best Buy being the only retailer we can currently find with stock in the US. We can’t say for sure whether we’re looking at overwhelming demand or just limited supply, but it’s hard to argue with ASUS’ excellent value proposition here: a 10-inch IPS display, a dual-core SOC and a feature-rich tablet OS all for less than four Benjamins. You’ll just need to be quick on the trigger if you want one.

[Thanks, Noah]

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer goes on sale in US, immediately sells out at Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Apr 2011 04:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Visualized: ring around the world of data center power usage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Apr 2011 04:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to entertainment website The Wrap, Google’s YouTube has finally locked up all the studio deals to get itself fully into the online movie rental game. The report indicates it could launch as soon as this week with movies from majors including Sony, Warner and Universal, as well as smaller entities like Lionsgate, Kino Lorber and other independents. This doesn’t appear to be a challenge to (now bigger than Comcast, but still smaller than HBO) Netflix, with the unnamed studio exec quoted in the article saying how happy they are to see a new entrant renting (and eventually selling) movies that’s not using a subscription model. Apple currently leads the online VOD market after jumping in with iTunes back in 2008, so obviously that’s a main target but without the important info (pricing, picture quality and content) it’s hard to tell how much of a challenger this is. VOD rumors have swirled around YouTube for quite some time and it rolled out $3.99 rentals of indie movies a little over a year ago, here’s hoping they go the whole way and offer nothing less than 3D and 4K streaming to start.

Update: The store currently shows a slew of Weinstein produced movies (Scary Movie 4, Death Proof) and a few Lionsgate flicks (Made, Reservoir Dogs) available for $2.00 or so but most have been up since 2009 so keep an eye on this page for any new flicks. [Thanks, Rocco G.]

YouTube ready to start renting video on-demand movies from major studios? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 22:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What would you do if you walked into a supermarket with no employees inside? Dump everything into 5 carts and run? Steal all the alcohol you can? Grab store displays? Get a lifetime supply of cereal? Fruit? Or would you pay? More »

Posted by Patrick Doyle, Software Engineer

We’re always looking for ways to make Gmail faster. One of the most common delays happens after you hit that “Send” button, when you’re waiting patiently for a couple seconds for Gmail to send your message. If you send a lot of email, that can add up to a lot of lost time.

To help give you that time back, there’s a new feature in Gmail Labs called Background Send. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, you can get on with what you’re doing while Gmail quietly sends off your mail in the background. You can keep reading your inbox, compose new messages, chat with people — all the things you’d usually do. You can even send more than one message in the background at the same time.

If anything goes wrong (maybe you got that email address wrong, or maybe your connection had a hiccup), you’ll see a warning message that prompts you to go back and fix the issue or try again later.

The “Send errror” message will stay around until you decide to fix things, so you don’t have to stop whatever you’re doing right away. The only catch is that you should wait for your mail to finish sending before you close Gmail or shut down your computer. If messages are still being sent in the background when you shut down, your messages are probably going to be lost. You’ll know you’re good to go when you see a message like this:

We’ve been trying out Background Send for a while here at Google, and we like it a lot. We hope you like it too, and we hope it gives you back a little bit of your day!

Apparently, those young’uns just love their BBM. According to a report by the research group Mobile Youth, young folk (read: those of you between 15 and 24) are increasingly abandoning SMS in favor of instant messaging apps, with texting expected to drop off 20 percent over the next two years. The main culprit? BlackBerry Messenger, which now boasts over 39 million users, many of them living outside the US. In fact, it’s in the UK, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil — all popular markets for BBM — that Mobile Youth expects texting to dwindle the most. And if BBM is to blame, well, that drop-off could be just the beginning.

Shocker! Instant messaging gains popularity as TXTing declines, BBM to blame originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Saskatchewan Teachers Federation has issued a strike threat to try to get contract talks with the province kickstarted.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is the largest shareholder in Montreal-based Canadian National Railway, according to disclosures released ahead of the company’s annual meeting on Wednesday.

There’s little question that the last 50 years have represented the most innovative half-century in human history, and today marks the anniversary of the invention that started it all: the silicon-based integrated circuit. Robert Noyce received the landmark US patent on April 25, 1961, going on to found Intel Corporation with Gordon E. Moore (of Moore’s Law fame) in 1968. He wasn’t the first to invent the integrated circuit — the inventor of the pocket calculator Jack Kilby patented a similar technology on a germanium wafer for Texas Instruments a few months prior. Noyce’s silicon version stuck, however, and is responsible for Moore’s estimated $3.7 billion net worth, not to mention the success of the entire computing industry. Holding 16 other patents and credited as a mentor of Steve Jobs, Noyce was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1987, and continued to shape the computing industry until his death in 1990. If Moore’s Law continues to hold true, as we anticipate it will, we expect the next 50 years to be even more exciting than the last. Let’s meet back here in 2061.

Today marks 50th anniversary of first silicon integrated circuit patent (and the entire computing industry) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s leaked 10.1-inch ThinkPad tablet comes another juicy tidbit about another forthcoming device from Lenovo. This is my next reports that in the PC-maker has a 7-inch Honeycomb-equipped slate in the pipeline sporting a high resolution 1280 x 800 display and ARM dual-core processor. The slides also indicate the presence of the “Lenovo family UI,” which most likely means Le OS. Release is purportedly slated (ugh) for Q4, but given the presence of a placeholder image and the fact that these slides are at least a month old, most of this is subject to change. Still, we hope Lenovo takes the time to get things right with its Honeycomb customizations, since its the little differentiating touches that make all the difference in burgeoning sea of screen-centric devices.

Lenovo 7-inch Honeycomb tablet coming Q4 according to leaked PDF, Le OS genetics in tow originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The SETI Institute is suspending its search for extraterrestrial radio beacons using its most advanced alien signal-seeking tool while it hunts for new sources of funding.

Toyota Motor Corp appeared headed towards losing its status as the world’s top-selling automaker Monday, after reporting a staggering 62.7 per cent drop in production in Japan in March due to a parts supply crunch following the earthquake and tsunami.

If anyone reads books, it’s probably you guys. But according to some recently-gathered (and frankly startling) statistics, you’re a dying breed. To wit:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

I can relate to that last one — I buy lots of books (or check them out from the library) but a significant portion of them I only get about halfway through — or less, if they don’t hold my interest. But that stat about 42% of college grads never reading another book? That’s a little frightening. One thing I’m not certain about, and isn’t mentioned in these statistics, is how they stack up over time — but I’ll bet you money that more than 42% of college grads kept reading books in the 1950s, 60s, 70s.

So what’s to blame? A shift in popular entertainment? The dominance of the screen over the printed page? Are books just less interesting than they used to be? Or are we, as a society, getting … dumber?

What do you think?

Last November, we added the ability to drag and drop files from your desktop to the upload page, improving the ability to upload any file. Over the next few weeks, we’re releasing three additional features to make it easy to upload files to Docs: folder upload, documents list integration, and drag-and-drop upload.

To start, we’ve added folder upload via the new Upload menu in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

You’ll need to install a small applet to use folder upload in Firefox and Safari. The existing folder structure is preserved on upload which means that folders within folders will also upload and become collections within collections.

Second, we’ve merged the upload page’s functionality into the documents list to create a much better upload experience. When you upload files via the new drop-down menu, a window will pop up in the bottom right of your documents list and show upload progress.

Once files are uploaded, they will appear in your documents list within seconds. You can also share them from the pop-up. Uploaded files go into the currently selected collection and have visibility set to private unless the collection is shared.

Upload settings have also moved. The first time you use the new upload method, you’ll see a pop-up asking you whether you want to convert files to the Google Docs format and if you want to convert images via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). You can always return to these settings via the drop down in the upload menu or the pop-up.

Lastly, if you are using Chrome, Safari and Firefox on your Mac or PC, you’ll also be able to drag-and-drop one or more files directly into your documents list to initiate an upload. You can even drop files directly into a collection on the left. Note due to browser limitations it isn’t possible to drag-and-drop folders directly into the documents list.

If you hit your storage limit, the upload will return an error and you’ll need to delete files or purchase additional storage for Google Docs for $0.02 per GB per month ($0.25 per GB per year). Please note that the new upload capabilities don’t support the ability to select a language when converting a document via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or select visibility settings before upload. If you’d like to use these features, you can still use the older version of the upload page by choosing Basic… from the Upload menu.

We’ll be rolling this out to everyone with personal Google Accounts over the next month in all Google Docs languages. Rapid Release Google Apps users can expect to see the feature rolled out shortly thereafter. You’ll know when the features are available to you when you see a popup message at the top of your documents list.

If you have any additional questions about the upcoming changes to uploading files, check out our FAQ.

Posted by: Mike Procopio, Software Engineer

Android: There are plenty of Android package-tracking apps to choose from, but few that handle a total of 37 shipping services (and fewer that do it for free). Parcels tracks packages shipped though services in several European countries, Canada, the U.S., Hong Kong and Japan, among others. More »

Yearning for some diversity in your hunt for a Honeycomb tablet? Acer’s new Iconia Tab A500 doesn’t really stray from the Tegra 2 norm when it comes to internal specs, but it does have that brushed aluminum back, a full-sized USB 2.0 port, and a sane $450 price point going for it. You’ll get 16GB of storage and 802.11b/g/n WiFi connectivity for your money, though ASUS’ similarly outfitted Eee Pad Transformer should also be prominent on your radar as it’ll ask for an even humbler $399 when it makes its slightly delayed US launch tomorrow. Let’s hope the arrival of these Taiwanese cousins nudges other Android tablets makers into engaging in a bit of price competition, eh?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Acer Iconia Tab A500 now on sale, $450 for aluminum-clad WiFi-only model originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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