Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Trouble is a-brewing in Palm land. According to their most recent annual report, Palm is pulling out of a co-development agreement they had with PalmSource (now Access) in regards to the next-generation of Palm OS. They're obligated to pay through December 2, 2006, but they're stopping the multi-million dollar royalty payments after that due to a failure by PalmSource to meet certain promised milestones. Of course, milestones or no, a lack of royalties means a lack of a next-gen OS license to pep up our Treo. Palm states that they will keep producing new products based on the current version of the OS, and are "presently in negotiations with PalmSource to expand our development and distribution rights to the current version of the Palm OS." This would seem to imply that Palm wants to try their hand at their very own branch off of Palm OS 5, but if that were the case it would mean we're in for some more waiting -- the practice of which Palm users must be pretty good at by now.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

If you can look past the circa-1999 Cinema Display design and the 4:3 aspect ratio, OPPO Digital's new LT-2007 LCD TV/DVD Player Combo doesn't look too incredibly shabby. Beyond the obvious DVD playback provided by the display's base, there are VGA, Component and S-Video inputs for use with a general selection of 480i/p, 720p and 1080i devices. To further its stand alone properties, the unit includes built-in stereo speakers, and supports USB storage devices for a good selection of video, audio and photo formats. This actual display is a 20-inch LCD at a 800 x 600 resolution, and features a 500:1 contrast ratio. There is also a built-in NTSC tuner and a shiny remote control to round out the package. The LT-2007 goes for $600, and looks to be available now.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Portable Audio, Wearables, Wireless

Alright, dear readers, you know the drill: proceed with caution. We have no confirmation here, but sometimes a tip is too juicy not to share, no matter how suspect it might be. A reader is reporting to us that a coworker's tech-unsavvy friend, who is regularly hired by Apple to do marketing photo shoots, was recently brought on to take some shots of "the sleekest, sexiest damn phone he's ever seen." The launch date? "Some time in August." Yeah, not a typo -- August. Now, to be perfectly clear, we don't know what the iPhone (if it exists) will be actually called, we've never seen a real pic of the elusive beast, and this doesn't really jive with the time frame suggested by Peter Oppenheimer's recent comments -- but we want to believe, and we don't have to wait very long for this one to get debunked or confirmed.

[Thanks, Frazer]

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Filed under: Laptops, Portable Video

The latest from BenQ is a well-specced AMD Turion-based laptop with plenty to love. Beyond the large range of dual-core Turion 64 X2 processors, the Joybook P52 features an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 card with 512MB of memory, up to 2GB of RAM, a 120GB SATA HDD, dual-layer DVD burning and DVI-D in/out. There’s four USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11a/b/g WiFi for connectivity, along with a 5-in-1 card reader. The 15.4-inch screen manages a 1280 x 800 resolution and 16ms response times, and there’s an included DVB-T tuner to round it all off. The main thing the computer seems to lack is the built-in webcams of its contemporaries, but at 1.2-inches thick and 5.6 pounds, it seems BenQ did a pretty job with this one all the same. No word on price or availability, but hopefully those AMD chips point to budget-friendly leanings.

[Via Engadget Chinese]

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Filed under: Software, Palm, Palm OS, ALP

Trouble is a-brewing in Palm land. According to their most recent annual report, Palm is pulling out of a co-development agreement they had with PalmSource (now Access) in regards to the next-generation of Palm OS. They're obligated to pay through December 2, 2006, but they're stopping the multi-million dollar royalty payments after that due to a failure by PalmSource to meet certain promised milestones. Of course, milestones or no, a lack of royalties means a lack of a next-gen OS license to pep up our Treo. Palm states that they will keep producing new products based on the current version of the OS, and are "presently in negotiations with PalmSource to expand our development and distribution rights to the current version of the Palm OS." This would seem to imply that Palm wants to try their hand at their very own branch off of Palm OS 5, but if that were the case it would mean we're in for some more waiting -- the practice of which Palm users must be pretty good at by now.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Peripherals, Motorola

Do you think it’s a fashion faux pas to mix and match phones and accessories? Motorola does, and in the vein of the original RAZR headsets, they’re pumping out a couple new ones to match their fresh MOTOKRZR and MOTORIZR phones. The H601 and H800 complement the new models, respectively — no interesting or exciting new features to report, though the H800 does have a slide-out tip in a nod to its RIZR heritage. And don’t you dare let Moto catch you pairing an H601 with anything but a KRZR, alright?

[Via Phone Scoop]

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Filed under: Handsets, Others

Alright, dear readers, you know the drill: proceed with caution. We have no confirmation here, but sometimes a tip is too juicy not to share, no matter how suspect it might be. A reader is reporting to us that a coworker’s tech-unsavvy friend, who is regularly hired by Apple to do marketing photo shoots, was recently brought on to take some shots of “the sleekest, sexiest damn phone he’s ever seen.” The launch date? “Some time in August.” Yeah, not a typo — August. Now, to be perfectly clear, we don’t know what the iPhone (if it exists) will be actually called, we’ve never seen a real pic of the elusive beast, and this doesn’t really jive with the time frame suggested by Peter Oppenheimer’s recent comments — but we want to believe, and we don’t have to wait very long for this one to get debunked or confirmed.

[Thanks, Frazer]

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Filed under: Digital Cameras

Pentax certainly isn't new to the budget-DSLR scene, and its K100D is another fairly affordable offering into the single-reflex lens world. When we first got wind of this camera a few months back, our biggest excitement stemmed from the more manageable naming system, but ePhotoZine actually found quite a bit more to love about the K100D than the refreshing model name. While this unit is an awful lot like the *ist DL 6.1, that's actually not such a bad thing. The most substantial update to the 6.1 megapixel camera is the CCD-shift shake reduction system -- a first in the Pentax DSLR lineup -- that presumably helps reduce blur in moving and low-light situations (i.e. OIS). Reviewers found the system beneficial, but poorly implemented nonetheless; there's no visual indication the system is actually working or how effective it is until you view the finished image, which isn't exactly useful in the field. Also, the camera had a tough time digesting more than 3 RAW shots in succession, often forcing the operator to wait until the buffer was clear before shooting could resume. However, if those two relatively professional complaints won't apply to you, the K100D produced excellent images and was said to "perform well for its price point." While the 2.5-inch display, sturdy enclosure, 200 to 3200 ISO settings, and impressive 11-point AF system were viewed quite fondly, it should be noted that your CF cards aren't welcome here, as only the SD format is accepted, and 4 AA batteries are used in favor of a proprietary cell. But if you've been chomping at the bit to grab a DSLR on the cheap, and you can live with the, um, unstable anti-shake system, you can snag the K100D now with a bundled 18-55mm lens for $699.99.

[Via Photography Blog]

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Filed under: Culture, Handsets, Others, Windows Mobile, GSM

If your dreams have been haunted by visions of VIPN's $300,000 Black Diamond but the thought of mortgaging a cell phone wasn't really sitting too well with you, might we direct your attention to the Black Diamond's less-costly sibling, the White Pearl. At "just" $1,500, the White Pearl's price should be music to the ears of folks who are merely rich -- you get the same Jaren Goh design in white instead of black and you lose the diamonds, but the rest of the specs remain the same. Heck, you even still get the 2GB SD card bundled in the box. We weren't able to track down the White Pearl on VIPN's site, but if this all checks out, look for the nifty candybar to drop about the same time as its bejeweled counterpart in early 2007.

[Via I4U News]

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Filed under: Home Entertainment, Peripherals

Evergreen is back at their game of low price USB oddities again, and this time around they have produced the DN-SCM81, an inexpensive 7.1 surround USB audio device. This little guy may not have a fancy casing or even a clever name, but it sure gets the job done with its extensive array of inputs and outputs. They loaded it up with one line level, one optical and two microphone inputs, along with one headphone, one optical and 5.1 outputs. We have seen devices like this before, but none have ever reached the rock bottom cost of $25 -- a price for which your surround sound audio will surely suffer. Then again, with a box this cheap you really have no excuse not to enjoy 7.1 off of your laptop into that high-priced audio system you just had to have.

[Via Engadget Japan]

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Hands On
LG Chocolate, Due July 31 + An Almost Hands On First Look

News
Other Bits & Bytes
Seiko Epson Developing Tiny Portable Fingerprint Sensors
Advertiser Thanks: Gizmodo Suckles From the Teat of Sponsordom
Top 10 Samsung Product Models
CECT A1000 Touchscreen Phone With 1000 Hours Standby
Pantech PG-6200: Cellphone With a Fingerprint Reader
Breast-Shaped Shampoo Dispenser
Sharp SD-SP10 1.1 Surround Sound Reviewed (Verdict: Virtually Great)
Stolen mobiles ‘will be blocked’, Phone Hackers Left to Rot In Jail
Plantronics Discovery 655, 640E, Explorer 330, 340, 350
Pure Chronos DAB/CD Alarm Clock
Still Life Wall Mounted Fruit Holder
iPodweek - The Best of iLounge
Lenovo 3000 V100 Subnotebook: Hands On the Thinkpad’s Ugly Little Sister (Verdict: Go Subnotebook, go!)
Samsung SGH-E908 Cellphone With Touch-Sensitive Buttons
Alltel Gets LG AX390 With Touch2Talk
Unwrapping the LG Chocolate
Shure Thing Scavenger Hunt: Final Day
Use a Shoe Organizer To Organize Your Gadgets
LG LW25-EV Core Duo Laptop With EVDO, DMB - Boobies Sold Separately
Hoverstop Mouse
Casio ClassPad 300 Touch-Screen Graphic Calculator
Another Dell Laptop Goes Ka-Bloom
Parabola Light: Blasting Lumens From a Satellite Dish
Apple Sez iPod has 4 Year Lifespan
Plantronics Bluetooth Headset Doubles as Necklace
DIY MacBook Pro Sleeve Case
Depeche Mode i.Beat Vision MP3 Player
Sling Media Looking for Beta Testers
High-Tech Carpet Knows You are Fat, Old
Signeo SN-A800 MP3 Player, Now With English OS
Open Labs MiKo: Watch Out, Oakenfold
Google Talk Client Updated, Still Obscure
Lomographic Fisheye Camera #Two: Still Capturing 180-degrees of Cool
Nokia Creates Self-Destructing Cellphone
Logitech Developing VX Revolution Mouse
LG KG920 5-Megapixel Camerphone Gets Official
Quiet Supersonic Transport: Private Mach 1.6 Travel by 2013?
Samsung SCH-a990: Frankenreview roundup of the 3.2-megapixel Phone
Man Stuff - The Best of Uncrate

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops, Peripherals

As microprocessors increase in efficiency and semiconductors diminish in size, the power required for them to function would also decrease -- in an ideal world, anyway. Unfortunately, this hasn't exactly been the case. If we're to believe the rumors, ATI's next major graphics core, dubbed the R600, will be packed to the brim with pixel pipelines and shader processors to handle the tasks that lie ahead in Windows Vista (if it ever comes out, of course), and, you know, games. But the crazy part here is that the chipset will supposedly require so much power that only an external implementation could provide the level of power necessary to satisfy those demands. An outboard graphics card, however, would one-up internal boards by providing a new level of flexibility. For starters, the same board could power your notebook and desktop, and laptop gamers would have access to bleeding-edge graphics that could turn a relatively weak notebook into a suitable LAN-party machine without the expense of an entirely new rig. Of course, the issue of an external interface that could handle the multi-gigabit bandwidth required to make this system feasible doesn't yet exist, but who knows, maybe those microchip wizards from AMD can give ATI a hand in bringing this to fruition without kicking our kilowatt meters into overdrive -- for now though, our quad-SLI setups are doing just fine, thanks.

[Thanks, Mack S.]

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•Apple Ponders a Touchless iPod [Red Herring]
•Price Wars Intensify as Intel Slashes Chip Prices [PC World]
•Intel aims to ship 1 million Core 2 Duo processor within seven weeks [TG Daily]
•Nvidia to bring SLI to Intel chipsets? [Reg Hardware]
•Headon Ringtone [MAKE]
•Firefox 1.5.0.5 Available [Mozilla]
•10 Cellphone Radiation Protection Tips [Textually]
•The Transformers' Ironside Spotted In LA [Jalopnik]

Seiko Epson is commercializing a tiny 0.2mm fingerprint sensor that will allow manufacturers to secure any kind of mobile device. The sensor reads fingerprints by detecting the miniscule electric current from your finger when you touch the device.

Possible applications are self-identifying credit cards, cellphones, and MP3 players. When a wrong fingerprint is entered, that item is disabled, so your credit cards won’t be charged and your phones won’t be used to make strange calls. Unless they take out your SIM and stick it in another phone, that is. Then you’re screwed. – Jason Chen

Nikkei Net [via Pink Tentacle]

It's because of these fine wetnurses that Gizmodo's flourish into man-boyhood: Sprint, HP, MS Windows Server, Sodaclub, Banana Republic, American Apparel, Ask.com, Intel, Toyota Yaris, Maxell, Best Buy, Nokia, Sony, Dice, Texas Instruments. If you'd like to help rear little G into a big, strong site, then advertise with us. Please.

Samsung always seems to bring the goods whenever they roll out the goods, be it a new TV, cellphone or cellphone with TV. And by “goods”, we mean hot product models. Here are the top 10, in an order that we felt like putting them in.

10. These models above are notable just for their Korean to non-Korean ratio. It’s not often that Samsung finds off-peninsula models to demo their goods—and for good reason. Look at the way the middle one’s angling that cellphone! The glare just blinded my whole family.

Click through to see the rest.

9. This model clearly has the four cellphone fan-display down pat. The camera captures her friendly smile while showing off Samsung’s new sliders, but what it doesn’t capture is that she has 13 fingers to hold up those phones with.

8. Blu-ray enabled PC. Very nice. No points off for this one, save for our general tepidness towards anything Blu-ray.

7. We couldn’t decide what to focus our attention on when we first saw this one—the huge Samsung screen or the model’s gorgeous gams. After 20 minutes of our eyes darting back and forth, we decided to take a nap. That was a good day.

6. Like a reader noticed when we first posted about Samsung’s digital photo frames, either those photos were taken the same day, or that lady should probably change clothes once in a while. Nice frames though.

5. Pow! Pow! If you liked the legs on #7, you’ll love the double action for Samsung’s Anycall slider phones. Sophisticated, yet kind of slutty at the same time. We heard that young woman in the red is actually the daughter of LG’s CEO. He was furious.

4. This one’s notable for being one of the only male product models Samsung’s used. What? Oh.

3. ARE YOU AS EXCITED ABOUT THIS SAMSUNG PORTABLE DVD PLAYER AS I AM?! HUH!? MY FACE IS CONTORTED BUT THE CAR’S NOT EVEN MOVING!

2. Does the model on the right have a lazy eye, or is her thousand-yard-stare a result of Samsung’s lackluster whatever-that-is that she’s holding. Enthusiasm, kid. That’s the ticket! Try and be more like #3.

1. And our number one Samsung product model shot is of…some PCs or something. The one on the right is a looker, while the one on the left brazenly insults my manhood. Thanks lady, but the wife , my secretary, the kids, some lady at a bus stop, my mechanic, and grandma can handle that find on their own. – Jason Chen

The CECT has a large 2000 mAh battery that provides its most compelling feature, the 1000 hours of standby time. Coupled with 10 hours of talk time, 2.2-inch touchscreen display, 32MB internal memory, transflash slot, and 4 megapixel camera, this cellphone may be the best thing to come out of China since Yao Ming.

But unlike Yao, this boy's going to do all his playing in the mother land. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Yesky via Slashphone]

The Pantech PG-6200 has stats that, on a Friday afternoon, I can’t even pretend to care about. What does make me perk up is the Pantech’s fingerprint scanner that can be used for biometric security. Scan your digits to lock and unlock the phone. Sweet, eh? Stats? Oh fine. Those, and more details, after the jump.

The phone is a clamshell with a 2-megapixel camera, that can capture MPEG-4 video. The phone is EGSM, at 900MHz, and has PCS support, too. (or, more likely, that’s a different model.) Not very impressive in it’s support for frequencies. And yet, more:

• Internal Display: 30.096 mm x 37.62 mm (1.9″), supports up to 262K colors in 176 x 220 pixels
• External Display: 18.144 mm x 24.192 mm (1.2″), supports 65K colors in 96 x 128 pixels
• 7 lines for text in basic mode with 18-pixel font
• Two programmable “Soft” selection keys; five-way scroll/selection key
• Melodies:MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, G-MIDI, SP-MIDI, C-MIDI, SMF, XMF, RTTL, IMelody
• Integrated UXGA (2MP) CMOS camera
• Resolution up to 1600 x 1200
• MPEG4 Video recording/replay up to 30 f/s (QCIF size)
• MPEG4 Video maximum size QVGA
• Self timer function (5 sec or 10 sec)
• Phone display used as a viewfinder
• Photo Gallery for image storage and editing
• 3 image quality options: Fine, Normal, Low
• Flash light supported
• Weight: 92g
• Dimensions: 87.0 mm x 43.6 mm x 20.9 mm

– Brian Lam