Apple: “You ripped off our shit! Intellectual property robbery! You owe us a bunch of money!” More »
How Do You Avoid Sitting Down All Day? [Ask The Readers]
Most of us have desk jobs that involve sitting down for at least six hours of the day, and it isn’t news that sitting down for that long is bad for you, even if you exercise. Standing desks are a great option for some, but aren’t necessarily an option for everyone. What else can you do to regularly get off your butt during the day? More »
PureSync 3.0 puts files where you need them
By Nick Peers
Improvements include copying open and locked files, compression and encryption and email notifications.
How to Create a Custom Windows Installation DVD or USB Install [Always Up To Date Guide]
When you need to reinstall Windows, you shouldn’t have to spend an entire day installing years of updates, drivers, and necessary software along with it. Here’s how to create a Windows installation disc (or USB stick) that’s up to date, customized, auto-installing, and far less time-sucking than your original. More »
Google Map Maker Crowdsources Google Maps and Google Earth [Video]
Google’s looking to improve its local neighborhood coverage with your help, opening the United States map in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge. More »
The royal wedding live on YouTube
Cross-posted on the YouTube Blog.
As the historic day approaches, the much-anticipated wedding of Britain’s Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton has people around the world buzzing with excitement.
While millions will be in London for the big day, it’s clear that people around the world have wedding fever. Google search trends show that in addition to the UK and the US, the top ten countries searching for “royal wedding” include places like Singapore and the Philippines. In response, we’ve been working to make as much of the big day as possible accessible to everyone. We previously announced the expansion of our Google Earth 3D imagery to offer a “Royals’-eye” view of the entire wedding procession, complete with 3D images of iconic landmarks and five species of digital trees that can be seen along the route.
Today, we’re thrilled that the Royal Household has just announced that footage of the entire ceremony will be live-streamed on their official YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel.
The live stream will begin at 10:00a BST (9:00a GMT, 2:00a PT, 5:00a ET) on Friday, April 29, and will follow the wedding procession, marriage ceremony at Westminster Abbey and balcony kiss. Alongside the live stream, The Royal Channel will also feature live blog commentary of the event to give timely updates and insights as the day unfolds. For those of you in different time zones, the footage will be reshown in its entirety directly following the event and will be available in full on the site to view afterwards.
You don’t have to wait until the big day to “attend” the wedding, though. A video guest book has just been opened on The Royal Channel for anyone in the YouTube community to upload messages of congratulations, inspiration or well wishes to the happy couple.
More than 50 years ago, the marriage of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and Antony Armstrong-Jones was the first royal wedding to be broadcast on television and had over 20 million viewers. This one is already heralded as the first of the Internet age, where for the first time in thousands of years of royal history, the moment will be captured online and preserved forever.
Posted by Rachel Ball, Partner Development Associate
Samsung sells HDD division to Seagate for $1.375 billion
We’re firmly of the belief that SSDs are our future and Samsung would seem to agree. The Korean electronics giant has just announced that it’s selling its hard disk drive-manufacturing arm to Seagate Technology for a neat $1.375 billion in equal measures of cash and stocks. As a result, Samsung Electronics will own approximately 9.6 percent of Seagate and get to nominate one new member to join Seagate’s Board of Directors, while the two companies have further agreed to deepen their strategic relationship with related cross-licensing and supply stipulations. Samsung will provision Seagate’s solid state drives with NAND flash memory, whereas Seagate will furnish Samsung’s PCs and consumer electronics products with hard disk storage. The deal is expected to complete in full by year’s end and you can read all about it in Seagate’s press release after the break.
[Thanks, Pavel]
Continue reading Samsung sells HDD division to Seagate for $1.375 billion
Samsung sells HDD division to Seagate for $1.375 billion originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Panasonic chains Toughbook to a snowmobile, shows signs of life post-torture (video)
We’ve never questioned the rigidity of Panasonic’s Toughbook line — after all, we’ve been shown just how rugged these things are time and time again — but a new video from the company is just too clever to pass over. Sure, it hardly makes any clearer what’s already clear, but just in case you were still having doubts, Panny’s Toughbook line is mighty tough. As in, tough enough to survive being towed behind a snowmobile in bitterly cold conditions. Unfortunately, the company only shows the screen lighting up after the ride’s done, so there’s still the possibility that the keyboard is totally shot — but hey, props for being alive at all, right? Have a look yourself in the video above.
[Thanks, Tsuyoshi]
Panasonic chains Toughbook to a snowmobile, shows signs of life post-torture (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Apple spent nearly $5.7b on Samsung parts in 2010, faces ‘strong’ response to its patent suit
Want some numerical context to last night’s revelation that Apple is suing Samsung Electronics for copying the iPhone and iPad? How does $5.7 billion sound? That’s how much Apple spent on buying up parts from Samsung last year, according to the AFP, which cites the Cupertino company as Samsung’s second-biggest client after Sony. Given the breadth of Samsung’s component manufacturing, these expenditures can and probably do span everything from flash storage and RAM to processing chips to displays. What’s fascinating here — and illustrative of the psychopathic nature of corporations — is that in spite of this massive interdependency, Apple’s lodged a broadly worded patent assault on a major prong of Samsung’s business (smartphones and tablets) and now Samsung’s been quoted as saying it has “no choice but [to] respond strongly.” A company official has apparently expressed the belief that Apple may be infringing on some of Samsung’s wireless patents, which means we can probably look forward to another fat batch of papers being submitted to the Northern District of California court. Lovely.
Apple spent nearly $5.7b on Samsung parts in 2010, faces ‘strong’ response to its patent suit originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
BlackBerry PlayBook now on sale in the US and Canada, starting at $500 with 16GB of storage
Today is the day in BlackBerry land. The wait for a dual-core device with an up-to-date operating system and that stylized BB logo is now over, and a vast array of stores in the US and Canada are now ready to sell you your PlayBook. Whether you’ll actually want to buy one is less clear-cut, however, as basic productivity apps like native email and calendar aren’t yet available, Android app compatibility hasn’t yet been rolled out, and the PlayBook has an unfavorable dependency on having a BlackBerry smartphone nearby in order to be the best tablet it can be. Still, if you believe in RIM’s ability to overcome those early software hurdles, the PlayBook’s ready for ownership in exchange for $500 for the 16GB model, $600 for the 32GB version, or $700 for the 64GB-equipped top option (prices are the same in both US and Canadian dollars).
BlackBerry PlayBook now on sale in the US and Canada, starting at $500 with 16GB of storage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 02:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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T-Mobile G-Slate review
The tablet wars are building, petty disputes that will soon lead to bloodshed. Products will be launched into battle only to be gunned down straight out of their boxes, crying for their fabricators as bigger, faster, better slates step over the stricken chassis of their predecessors, running on to their own brief bits of glory. At a high level it’s obviously Android vs. Apple vs. The Rest, but battle lines are forming as we consumers, caught in the middle, try to decide just what the right size is for a tablet.
Right now two camps seem to be getting the most supporters: seven-inchers, like the Streak 7 and BlackBerry PlayBook, and 10-inchers, like the Motorola Xoom and the Apple iPad. But, sometimes weapon systems need to be a little more specialized. Sometimes the templates don’t fit, and the $530 (after rebate, on-contract) T-Mobile G-Slate by LG isn’t fitting into those categories, slotting somewhere in between with its 8.9-inch display backed with Tegra 2 graphics, 4G HSPA+ wireless, and all the oomph you want in a modern Android device. It’s a little smaller and little lighter than the 10-inchers, bigger and meatier than the sevens and, by cutting down the middle, it hits almost all the right marks.
Gallery: T-Mobile G-Slate
Continue reading T-Mobile G-Slate review
T-Mobile G-Slate review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Nokia launches Ovi Maps 3D beta, challenges Google Earth as your virtual tour guide of choice
Still searching for today’s internet time sink? Then look no further than Nokia’s just launched beta version of Ovi Maps 3D. Thanks to some software wizardry and mysterious mapping know-how, it’s now able to display cities in a new 3D view that you’re able to zoom in and around to your heart’s content. You can also do the same thing in Google Earth’s 3D view, of course, but Nokia just might have a leg up in some respects. Unfortunately, it’s still staying mum on exactly how it all works, but you can dive right in and start exploring for yourself at the link below.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Update: Nokia’s now finally gotten official with this on its blog, and revealed that C3 is responsible for the impressive 3D mapping technology. Hit up the links below for some additional details, and head on past the break for a quick video demo if you need a bit of incentive to install the necessary plug-in.
Nokia launches Ovi Maps 3D beta, challenges Google Earth as your virtual tour guide of choice originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
SaskTel earns $155M profit
SaskTel earned a $155.2 million operating profit in 2010 but will sell some assets the government says no longer meet its “Sask First” policy for Crown Corporations.
5 Minutes of Falling Skies footage shows how the alien invaders will kill us all [Video]
Spielberg’s new show Falling Skies may be much darker than we anticipated. Watch this five-minute sneak peek (which was shown to the crowd at WonderCon) of little kids drawing pictures of how their parents died in the alien invasion. Chilling. More »
ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (UK edition) review
The world’s love affair with tablets may have been bubbling along under the surface for a while, but it really got started in earnest during CES 2010. Back in those wild days, you could see 15-inch jumbo screens, TV tuners, and even hybrid pseudo-laptops stalking the tablet area of your favorite trade show. ASUS was there too, of course, though it still believed in the upstart smartbook category — a modernized take on the netbook that relied on an ARM CPU and a mobile OS to extract more battery life out of a lighter, thinner device — and was busy showing off a seductively slim prototype of just such a machine. Alas, nothing came of that Neo concept, most likely because it was relying on Android 1.6 and a Tegra 2 system-on-chip that was then still months away from hitting the market.
Today, however, is a different day. The 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 is finally being produced in volume, Google has evolved Android to version 3.0, specifically targeting higher-resolution displays, and ASUS has abandoned the idea that a keyboard is crucial to mobile computing. No, wait, that last bit’s still there. The Eee Pad Transformer is a 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet very much in keeping with the current trend, but it also has an optional keyboard dock that turns it into a, you guessed it, instant smartbook. So, does that mean you'll get two devices in one or has ASUS been overly ambitious and compromised too much? We got to grips with the £380 16GB WiFi-only model and its keyboard buddy (£430 when bought as a pair) in an effort to find out. Answers await just past the break.
Continue reading ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (UK edition) review
ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (UK edition) review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Watch People Take to a Hill To Escape the Japanese Tsunami’s Destruction [Video]
This video was posted a week ago, and the tsunami itself was early March. But a point of view this powerful—this terrifying—resonates today, and will long after Japan has picked up the pieces and put them back together. [The First Post] More »
Relieve a Burnt Tongue with Sugar [Clever Uses]
Whether we’re starving and impatient and there’s a plate of hot food we desperately want to eat or we just don’t anticipate the level of heat that’s about to enter our mouths, we often burn our tongues. Fortunately, it’s easy to get rid of the pain with a bit of sugar. More »
Marvel superheroine pajamas are a great gift (if you want your wife to divorce you) [Badvertising]
Do you wish that special lady in your life had the gamma-irradiated décolletage of She-Hulk? The 40-10-40 measurements of Black Widow? The willingness to traipse about in her underwear like Emma Frost? Body proportions out of a Rob Liefeld comic? More »
Apple iOS 5 Devices to Get Flash-Supported Browsing
Shared by Terren
In a recent announcement, Adobe has made it clear that iOS5 devices can stream Flash video content using a new method. The new tweak will work only with the HTML5 supported browsers.