.::REALITYRECALL::.

Pop star Michael Jackson’s death has been ruled a homicide by the L.A. County coroner.

Today the highly anticipated Batman Arkham Asylum game has been awarded a Guinness World Record for the Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever.

This one caught us by surprise, but it comes from a source that has always been 100% reliable: Not only Apple may be working on a 10-inch tablet, but also in 13″ and 15″ models, one running Mac OS X.

This source claims that the two touchscreen prototypes—made of aluminum, but on the shape of big iPhones—were in a factory in Shenzuen, China. One of them "was running Mac OS X 10.5." When I asked, the source didn't know if these were built for demonstration purposes, or if they were preproduction units. The company has a tight relation with Apple but "it's not FoxConn."

As I said before, with everyone focused on the 10-inch tablet with iPhone OS, this sighting is quite surprising. It is possible that Apple may be just exploring other form factors, and these two models may or may not end being future products.

According to rumors, Apple is in the final stages of developing the Apple wet dream, a 10-inch tablet allegedly running the iPhone OS. Several sources claim that Steve Jobs—back in Campus—is now personally driving this project. However, until now there has been no reliable rumors on 13″ and 15″ models, much less one running full Mac OS X.

This shouldn’t really come as too much of a surprise, but anyone wanting to enjoy Twitter and Facebook on Xbox Live will have to pony up for Gold member subscription, the same premium prerequisite currently needed for Netflix Instant Watch and pretty much all online gaming. Silver membership will be given a “free trial,” but exactly what limitations that entails, or if they’ll be an option to “upgrade” to the full version, is anyone’s guess.

Filed under: Gaming

Twitter and Facebook for Xbox Live will be free for Gold members, ‘free trial’ for Silver originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.

Facebook has agreed to make changes to better protect users’ personal information on the social networking site and comply with Canadian privacy laws within one year, Canada’s privacy commissioner said Thursday.

While most of us don’t frequently find ourselves needing to translate our documents to various languages on-the-fly, Google Docs just announced a new feature that’ll be great for those who do: The service now automatically translates docs in 42 different languages with a few mouse clicks.

Translating docs is a breeze: Just hit up the Tools menu, select Translate document, then choose the language you want to translate to. Docs will open the translated document in a new window, then offer to replace the original document with the translation or copy the translation to a new document. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s a nice feature, nonetheless, and yet another example of Google’s continued march toward integrating their various services.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft is planning a Windows 7 launch party on October 22 in New York City. Microsoft has been extremely secretive about the launch details but according to Foley company officials have begun sending out invites to bloggers and the media: "We also wanted to let you know that you will be receiving an invitation to a Microsoft event in NYC on October 22nd to celebrate the availability and launch of Windows 7. With Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaking and exciting new hardware from our partners, we're looking forward to sharing Windows 7 with the world." With Steve Ballmer looking after the launch it's bound to be a good show.

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Owners of Sony eReaders, users of the Stanza iPhone book reader, and anyone else with a device that reads the ePub format can now grab more than 1 million works from Google Books’ archives. The books may contain some mistakes, as most were simply scanned and run through an OCR image-to-text process, but it’s free content in a free format, which is hard to beat. [Inside Google Books via ReadWriteWeb]

Royal Bank of Canada beat analysts’ expectations by posting a 24 per cent surge in third-quarter profits on Thursday.

Starting Friday, August 28th (tomorrow) the price of the Xbox 360 Elite is getting a one-hundred dollar price cut in the United States.

Here is how the new pricing breaks down:

Betcha didn’t see that coming…did you ?

In addition, we’ve rolled out some new packaging, that some of you may have already spotted in your local stores. I’ve uploaded pictures of the new packing images to my Flickr account you can take a peak.

Epson has been fined $26 million for its part in a price-fixing scam, says the US Justice Department.

One person and two companies are the first telemarketers to be fined by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for violating its do-not-call list.

Hugely popular torrent indexer Mininova has been slapped with a debilitating ruling, in the Netherlands: Within the next three months, the site has to remove all links to infringing torrents, after which it’ll be fined 1000 Euros for each one. This means that Mininova will either A.) Become the premier torrent indexer for Linux ISOs and public domain FLAC music, or B.) die.*

With two major torrent sites all but snuffed out in the last few weeks, there are only a few decent alternatives left. Although if you’re of a hardier type, there’s always Usenet. [Torrentfreak]

*Spoiler: It’s B.

Hugely popular torrent indexer Mininova has been slapped with a debilitating ruling, in the Netherlands: Within the next three months, the site has to remove all links to infringing torrents, after which it’ll be fined 1000 Euros for each one.

Mininova’s been working on a copyright filter for a while, but with the stakes so artificially high, it would need to be almost perfect to make operating the site worthwhile. This means that Mininova will either A.) Become the premier torrent indexer for Linux ISOs and public domain FLAC music, or B.) die.*

With two major torrent sites all but snuffed out in the last few weeks, there are only a few decent alternatives left. Although if you’re of a hardier type, there’s always Usenet. [Torrentfreak]

*Spoiler: It’s B.

We’ve been playing hide and seek with this peskily mysterious Android MID for a few weeks now, and it looks like at last some light has been shed on the situation. The device is actually just a concept built by Rockchip to display its new RK2808 chipset, which is capable of decoding 720p and apparently squeezing into incredibly attractive, Apple-aping form factors. There’s some action video which reveals that the hardware perhaps isn’t so capable of pumping a smooth web browsing experience to its 5-inch screen, but sometimes you can forgive a bit of clunky when faced with this much sexy. No word on plans to put the RK2808 into a real product, but it sure seems off to a nice, buzz-filled start. Video is after the jump, but you’d better be prepared to rock out.

[Via pocketables]

Continue reading Mystery Android MID found out to be Rockchip-built concept, caught on video

Filed under: Handhelds

Mystery Android MID found out to be Rockchip-built concept, caught on video originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail’s auto-complete is convenient when you know exactly who you’re writing to, but adding lesser-known or oddly named contacts can be a pain. Gmail’s new pop-up contact chooser makes digging your contacts’ depths far less painful.

A click-to-pick contact chooser has long been a rare advantage of desktop email clients over Gmail in the interface department, and it's nice to see Gmail close that gap. Click on the To, CC, or BCC links in a compose window, and you can add contacts, or pre-sorted groups, to your message recipients—without having to save a draft, head to contacts, copy a name, then head back to drafts. Pick the wrong name? Click on the contact name again to remove them.

Most convenient of all is the search function in the contact chooser, and the ability to select all the results that come up from a particular search. That makes it easy to, say, pick everyone you know from the Rochester Institute of Technology by searching rit.edu and picking everyone who comes up.

The big irk that some are noting is that Gmail’s contact chooser opens in a new window, confounding Firefox users that have relegated new windows to tabs, and forcing those with pop-up blockers to set them to allow Gmail’s chooser through. If you’ve found a convenient work-around to the pop-up window, let us know in the comments.