.::REALITYRECALL::.

At last count RIM reported BlackBerry PlayBook shipments reached 700,000 in 6 months. This number is certainly not up to par with all the other tablets that saturated the market in the last year, but RIM always stated the PlayBook is the “world’s first professional-grade tablet”. The price points of all models recently received a price drop, which was well accepted, but owners are still waiting for native email, calendar and contacts to appear. The last rumour was from Bloomberg’s sources who pegged a September availability for these features.

The good news is that RIM is “highly committed to the tablet market” and will be releasing new versions of the PlayBook, most notably a 4G LTE PlayBook that should drop sometime “during the second half of 2011” (time is quickly running out). We’ve been given word that the 16GB version has been placed on the “to be discontinued” list. The screenshot is from TELUS and the doc shows the final date of returns is on November 8th and the last day to place orders is on October 10th. Finally, the date the PlayBook will no longer be available is currently blank, most likely will be that way until stock reduces. Bottom line, the 16GB is being discontinued and no indication of the 32GB or 64GB models.

(Thanks tipster!)

Related posts:

1. Virgin Mobile to release the BlackBerry PlayBook
2. Update: BlackBerry PlayBook reduced to $249 at Walmart Canada, $299 at Future Shop & Best Buy
3. RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook becomes the “first tablet certified for deployment within U.S. federal government”

If you envision Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest iteration of Android — as a revolutionary update that satisfies every single one of your geeky lusts, we sure hope you’ve been aching for a photo editor. It appears that AndroidPolice has hunted down a variety of icons and logos presumed to be associated with the feature, but it’s not certain if these will actually appear in the final build. The icons hint at a smattering of image editing tools: crop, sharpen, flip, rotate and a selection of 19 possible photo effects are among the options. Again, this is highly speculative, and rumors such as these will likely ramp up as we approach the official announcement. ‘Course, we won’t scoff at the idea of a native photo editor in Ice Cream Sandwich, but we’re sincerely hoping this won’t be the coolest thing about the new OS at Tuesday’s announcement in Hong Kong.

[Thanks, Paul]

Ice Cream Sandwich may have a built-in photo editor to help your pictures turn out halfway decent originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android: GTD-style to-do manager Remember The Milk announced a major update to its Android app today, including an overhauled interface with new features, and a free version of the app with basic features for all users. Remember The Milk 2.0 now allows you to edit multiple tasks at once, offers a dashboard that lets you skip quickly between items due today, tomorrow, or later, and even a reminders bar so you’re always aware of what’s next. More »

Continue reading RIM offers free apps to make up for that whole BlackBerry outage thing

RIM offers free apps to make up for that whole BlackBerry outage thing originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The last time we saw the plucky survivors of The Walking Dead — way back in December 2010 — they were trapped in Atlanta's Center of Disease Control by a very depressed scientist, shatter-proof glass, and an invisible force field of melodrama. More »

So it looks like Halo: anniversary will have some additional goodies to go along with pre-order skull and 3D support. Namely, voice commands via Kinect.

In addition to smack-talking your friends, you’ll be able to make use of some very useful-sounding single-word commands, including ‘reload’, ‘analyze’, which will let players capture elements from the game to review in Halo: Anniversary’s ‘library’, and best of all, ‘grenade’, which will no doubt be the source of endless lulz. Naturally, you’ll need a Kinect to use them, but cool nonetheless.

Via Kotaku.

With all the advancements in mobile technology it still comes as a huge surprise when a smartphone manufacturer neglects to add a notification light to their device. There are not a whole bunch of phones that are plagued with this dilema but for the ones that are, it’s known to be a pain in the arse.

For some reason Samsung has decided to crank out a few popular mobile devices and at my dismay, they are sans notification LED. I , like many others, own a Samsung device and hate not knowing that I have a message waiting for me unless I activate the screen and check for myself. Sounds like an easy task but when you find yourself checking for messages all day long it gets old real fast.

XDA member, MADMACK, has come up with a solution by using the phone’s display as a notification light. When you receive a message (or anything that you want a notification for) your screen will activate flashing different color dots or icons based on the type of message received. The dots/icons are customizable allowing the user to create different notifications for each type of reminder making it easy, for example, to differentiate between email and text messages. There are many ways to tweak this app from battery conservation to delayed notification, NoLed  gives more options than most factory notification lights.

With over 10,000 downloads from the Android Market and an average rating of 4.4 stars, MADMACK seems to have come up with an acceptable solution for not having a notification light. I have been using it since I got the Samsung Charge and I highly recommend checking it out for yourself.

Join us after the break for more screenshots, download links, and a NoLed explanation from the creator himself.

Read More…

Does your Android device lack a notification light? Try the NoLed app

The anticipated hype behind the upcoming Nexus Prime/Galaxy Nexus is climbing and all eye will be on the official reveal of this “pure Android” next week. Although there has been no talk of this Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich device coming to Canada, a tiny – and very unavoidable – hint has shown itself in the Wi-Fi Alliance database. Similar to other Samsung devices that arrived on our shores, the Galaxy S (GT-I9000M) and the Galaxy S II (I9100M), the “GT-I9250M” has surfaced in the database with a certification date of October 13th, 2011. This is this Galaxy Nexus model and “M” could mean that it’s destined for our Canadian carriers.

Hopefully good news will come to us in a few days.

Source: Wi-Fi Alliance (PDF)
Via: Android Police & XDA
(Thanks Jonathan!)

Related posts:

1. Samsung exec says Nexus Prime will be available “sooner than you think”
2. Samsung to unveil the Nexus Prime at CTIA on October 11th?
3. Samsung and Google postpone the Nexus Prime event

The iPhone 4S is here. One of new, not-so-visible features? A re-spiffed antenna, and stuffed inside the AT&T 4S, new guts that (should) mean faster data speeds. But theoretical max speeds are not real world experiences. So which iPhone is the fastest: AT&T, Sprint or Verizon? And how does the 4S stack up against the most jacked Android phones? More »

Google Buzz, the company’s much maligned foray into social networking that was about as popular as genital herpes, is dying. Oh, you thought it was already dead? Not yet. But that’s probably why Google is killing it. More »

Mobile developer Spacetime Studios has a hit on its hands with Star Legends, the sci-fi-based follow-up to its MMO Pocket Legends. That game has a community of better than 3 million fans, and Star Legends seems to be growing just as fast as its free-to-play mobile predecessor.

Now, players itching for a new (slightly smaller scale) MMO fix who aren’t really into the whole mobile gaming scene will get access to Star Legends for the first time. The game is coming as a native client to Google Chrome, the search company’s free web browser, where players will be able to team up with other players on PC, Mac, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. It’ll also be the first 3-D game on the Chrome platform. It’s not available yet, but when it is, you can get it from the Chrome Web App Store.

Star Legends isn’t as robust an MMO as some of the other free-to-play clients out there, but that might be to its credit. It’s totally pick-up-and-play-able, which is nice, and the casual nature makes it fun to spend some time with but not necessarily as insanely time-consuming as, say, World of Warcraft.

The marketing geniuses at General Motors launched this campaign this week. It’s aimed at convincing college kids already paying exorbitant tuition and living well beyond their means that they can go another $20k in debt and somehow pay the monthly insurance on a sweet new car. You’ll recognize the humiliated cyclist riding an uncool bike from the 80s and a similarly dull helmet because that’s you and me a few years back.

What I adore about this campaign is its boldness. GM makes garbage cars. And you know what? None of us bought them, and then they took our money anyway in the form of a bailout. Here are the fruits of that cash. Luckily the folks at Giant Bicycles have a limber ad department and a sense of humor. They dropped the below great ad the next day. Ahh, it’s nice to have a sense of humor, and it resulted in GM yanking the ads. Too bad about all that money wasted on cars.

Android: Samsung’s alternative texting, multimedia messaging, and chat app is now available in the Android Market. Similar to Apple’s iMessage and BlackBerry’s BBM service, ChatON could possibly help you save on messaging fees—once Samsung starts sending verification codes, that is. More »

We present the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.

[Via @Johl; Images courtesy of Jonas Pfeil, CC]

(Credit: CERN)

The relativistic motion of clocks on board GPS satellites exactly accounts for the superluminal effect in the OPERA experiment, says  physicist Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, The Physics arXiv Blog reports.

“From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg. By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. The OPERA team overlooks this because it assumes the clocks are on the ground not in orbit.

Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observed.

Ref.: Ronald A.J. van Elburg, Times Of Flight Between A Source And A Detector Observed From A GPS Satellite, arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685:

Rene Bourque scored twice and Miikka Kiprusoff got the Flames’ all-time wins record as Calgary spoiled the Montreal Canadiens’ home opener with a 4-1 victory on Thursday night.