Filed under: Handhelds, Portable Video, Wireless

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals

It’s okay, we didn’t know people were still using landlines either. For the last few holdouts, though, Audex (not to be confused with the Burton jacket of the same name) presents its Desk-Free Bluetooth Headset for telephones, which attaches to your fixed line phone and gives you that same great 10-feet of wireless freedom that you’ve come to love from your current cellphone-headset combo. We’ve no idea where you can pick one of these up nor how much it’ll set you back, but if you’re really in need of such a product, we’re confident that you’ll do what it takes to track one down.

[Via Slashphone]

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Filed under: Handhelds

Filed under: Wireless

In what can only be described as extreme paranoia or as an extreme health risk, a Swedish town had a bit of a health scare upon the activation of a WiMAX base-station a few weeks ago. According to Sweden’s SVT, which reported on the incident, the local hospital emergency room was flooded with calls regarding various symptoms such as headaches, difficulty breathing, blurry vision and even two cases of heart arrhythmia. All of this was mere hours after the base station was activated, and the symptoms went away once the station was deactivated, or if the sufferer moved away from that radio tower of death. Apparently Sweden was the first country to recognise electromagnetic hypersensitivity as a valid medical condition, and there are already talks of getting the government to shut down the nation’s WiMAX networks while the claims are investigated. The UN recognises EHS as a “real and sometimes disabling condition,” and say that around 3% of the world’s population is effected by high frequency magnetic radiation in such ways. We’ll wait for a few more studies to come through and completely conflict with each other so we can go on with our happily ignorant mobile lifestyles.

[Via The Inquirer]

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Filed under: Household, Wireless, Networking

No idea if this is the D-Link DPH-540, but the FCC has just approved a phone that looks just like it from D-Link. This one has 16 MB of memory, email support, 802.11 b/g, and works on the SIP protocol. Sorry kids, no native Skype on this one.

Look forward to an official announcement from D-Link soon, whether this is the DPH-540 or a younger model. – Jason Chen

D-Link’s VoWiFi phone has that retro cellphone look [jkOnTheRun]

 
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Related: Verizon Wireless Enabling SMS to Landline Phones
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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Peripherals, Networking

Certainly not the the first solution for streaming HD programming around your house, a new product called the AircordAV promises to dumb down the whole process into what would appear to be a 5-minute-install, and supports that sweet 1,080p resolution to boot. Instead of asking your existing router to do all the hard work, AircordAV comes with a base unit that hooks up to any of your home theater gear using HDMI, DVI, component, S-video, composite, or SCART connections, and creates its own 802.11g network with up to eight clients feeding any or all of your video displays. Aircord claims the product is capable of lossless streaming, and uses a proprietary technology to encode and decode your video signals, although the company's lack of a website or actual product shots makes us a bit wary of the whole thing. We'll find out in December if this clever idea can be turned into a working device -- that's when the AircordAV will supposedly be released -- and if it can, expect to cough up at least $500 to start cutting those cords.

Verizon Wireless customers are going to be able to send SMS messages to landline phones soon. Using TeleMessage’s text-to-speech, the recipient will hear the message spoken to them through the phone. Pretty neat for people who love text messaging, and for parents, who can now get periodic updates about their children’s locations in a stilted, robotic voice.

“I…will…be…home…soon…dad…EL…Oh…EL…exclamation…exclamation…one…one.” – Jason Chen

Verizon Wireless to Give SMS a Voice [Textually]

 
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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Transportation, Wireless

Air travel is about to get just a little bit safer -- though not in the anti-terrorist, heavy-handed security type of way -- thanks to Virgin Atlantic's impending fleet-wide rollout of a device that allows ground-based doctors to remotely diagnose passengers in medical distress. The airline has just announced a deal with Remote Diagnostic Technologies that will result in each of Virgin's planes being outfitted with the Tempus telemedicine system, which contains blood pressure and pulse monitors along with an integrated video cam, and transmits data down to medical personnel via the on-board telephone system. Flight crews will be trained to independently operate each of Tempus' individual instruments, but unlike the in-flight defibrillators that preceded this system, attendants will have the added benefit of live instructions from experts on the ground, if necessary. Virgin will employ the Tempus boxes until at least 2009, and claims that it would like to eventually see an industry-wide implementation, which RDT probably wouldn't mind too much either.

[Via MedGadget]

Filed under: Wireless

Your Bluetooth-enabled PC or handset will soon be able to do more than just stream audio and sync data, as the SIG responsible for the wireless protocol has announced a forthcoming profile that will enable pairing with health and fitness monitoring equipment. Although several proprietary monitoring solutions are already on the market, the so-called Medical Device Profile will allow third-party manufacturers to release hardware with guaranteed interoperability, which should help grow this nascent use of the technology. Scheduled for completion sometime during the first half of next year, the new profile will allow users to both track pertinent statistics on their Bluetooth devices and easily send that data to doctors, coaches, or trainers. Luckily for us heavy Bluetooth users, the profile will also be compatible with the upcoming Ultra Wideband (UWB) standard, meaning that the fitness-related bits traveling to our smartphone won't have to fight for bandwidth with the tethered GPS receiver and A2DP tunes we rock during our workouts.

[Via MedGadget]

Filed under: Wireless

Shortly after winning approval to build a 15-square mile WIFi network in Philly, Earthlink has now gotten the go ahead to build one in New Orleans, replacing the city's free but slow city-owned network. As with the Philidelphia network, New Orleans' will extend for 15-square miles and should cost users about $20 a month for 1-megabit-per-second service, although Earthlink says a slower 300 kbs service will be available for free and without advertising while the city rebuilds. No word yet on when deployment of the mesh network will begin, but it will apparently use gear from Tropos Networks with some additional hardware from Motorola's MOTOwi4 line of products.

Lots and lots of lawsuits this year. Add these two companies to the list: Sprint and Cingular.

Sprint was challenging Cingular’s “fewest dropped calls” claim, and Cingular filed a suit trying to make a judge declare that it actually did have the fewest dropped calls. And of course Sprint has said it would “defend itself vigorously”. What happened to the days of playing nice? – Jason Chen

Cingular, Sprint Nextel tussle over ads about network quality [RCR News]

 
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Filed under: Robots

If you have one of those floors that need very close monitoring throughout the day, the Surveyor SRV-1 is the robot for you. The little unit can crawl around your home at around one foot per second, and reports back on its surroundings with a miniature VGA camera. A 100 meter range Zigbee 802.15.4 wireless receiver is included to let the SRV-1 stream its findings to your computer and up onto the web, and you can control and monitor the bot with any major operating system or via a web browser. If you don’t feel like taking manual control of SRV-1, he can do fine by himself driving around, navigating obstacles, and even communicating with others of his kind via IR. The best news is the price: at $375 for the bot, the charger and the wireless base station, SRV-1 shouldn’t break the bank, and seems ready to provide some good times for the robot hobbyist within us all.

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Wi-Fi Networking News got tipped off by an anonymous IEEE member (it wasn’t us, we only joined for the magazines) that the 802.11n draft is going to be very delayed.

Instead of receiving the standard 2,000 comments on the draft, the committee received 12,000. Thus, the vote is again going to be nowhere near the 75% required to ratify the draft.

Their guess, November ’06 or January ’07 for a draft. That means higher speeds will have to wait. But if you want broader coverage, current generation MIMO gear can provide it with their Multiple-In-Multiple-Out antennas. But those Draft-N device look like an even worse idea now if you want compatibility with future N gear.

802.11n Slides Further into the Future [Wi-Fi Net News]

 
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Filed under: Handhelds, Wireless

When a manufacturer takes styling cues from a number of popular devices — in this case, the RAZR, the Wizard, and the gone-but-not-forgotten Clie — and throws in a number of high end features whose acronyms make us a little weak-kneed, the resulting products are bound to be pretty sexy. Such is the case with a trio of WiBro-capable PDAs being marketed under the Flyvo brand by POSDATA, all of which run Windows CE 5.0 Professional Plus on an ARM processor and let you get your ‘net on with WiFi as well in case you have to travel outside of Korea. Introduced at this year’s Wireless Broadband World Forum, these upcoming devices (which frustratingly lack either names or model numbers) also feature either 512MB or 1GB of flash RAM, with two of them adding T-DMB and VoIP capabilities, and the high-end model throwing in a little GPS action to boot. Lucky Koreans will be able to pick these up — and possibly even drop their cellphone services altogether — sometime early next year.

Read- The one that resembles a Wizard
Read- The one that resembles a PSP
Read- The one that resembles a Clie

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Filed under: Wireless, Networking

More bad news for MIMO fans (if there is such a thing): Glenn Fleishman over at Wi-Fi Net News is reporting that an IEEE member has informed him of a delay in the timetable for expected approval of the final draft of the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, from sometime this summer to late fall or even early winter. Fleishman’s source claims that Task Group N received around 12,000 comments on the proposed draft — compared to the 2,000-some that most drafts generate — which is yet another bad sign following the group’s earlier failure to garner even a simple majority in favor of the current proposal, much less the 75% supermajoirty needed for passage. With draft approval seemingly several months off at the least, it could be a year or even a year-and-a-half before a final 802.11n standard is ratified, meaning that those folks who are already snatching up draft N gear will have to wait even longer to find out if their hardware ends up being compatible.

[Via Ars Technica]

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Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

Ah, summer; the season to kick back by the pool with a cool drink and catch up on all the reruns you've been saving to your DVR. What, you don't want to bring your TV and set-top down to the pool and risk splashing them a little? Well, neither do we. And that's why we're planning on picking up a Princeton PTV-WWTV7 wireless, waterproof display for the Engadget beach house. The seven-inch LCD, due out in Japan this June for 49,800, comes with a built-in battery and WiFi receiver, and a separate unit houses a transmitter that also includes an analog tuner and S-video and composite inputs for other video sources. And, according to Princeton, it really is waterproof, and can be used in the kitchen, bathroom and by the pool, though they don't recommend actually tossing it in the water. That's fine with us; this will be perched on our rubber float all summer long.

Filed under: Handsets, Reviews, Windows Mobile, HP, GSM, GPRS, EDGE

We’ve been on the fence about HP’s hw6000 line of Swiss Army phones ever since we first spotted the GPS-equipped iPaq hw6515 — these models include everything but the kitchen sink, but they also force you to use that non-standard 240 x 240 screen. Still, MobileTechReview’s in-depth look at the latest member of the family, the hw6915, makes us think we could overlook the square screen and lack of 3G data options because, well, the rest of this Windows Mobile 5.0-powered smartphone sounds like exactly what us convergence-geeks are seeking. According to MTR, the quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset impresses on many fronts, including its solid keyboard, powerful internal antenna, GPS performance, and best-in-class benchmark numbers. HP also throws in some nice extras, like helpful Today screen plug-ins, a full-featured wireless radio manager, the ability to location-stamp photos, and even A2DP in the Bluetooth stack, which isn’t normally included in WM5 AKU2 devices out of the box. Besides the fact that this screen resolution may not support all third-party apps, the only real knock to this model concerns the camera’s startup/shutter lags — and if that’s the worst thing to be said about a device that seemingly does it all, then we’re totally sold.

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Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Handhelds

We’ve been on the fence about HP’s hw6000 line of Swiss Army phones ever since we first spotted the GPS-equipped iPaq hw6515 — these models include everything but the kitchen sink, but they also force you to use that non-standard 240 x 240 screen. Still, MobileTechReview’s in-depth look at the latest member of the family, the hw6915, makes us think we could overlook the square screen and lack of 3G data options because, well, the rest of this Windows Mobile 5.0-powered smartphone sounds like exactly what us convergence-geeks are seeking. According to MTR, the quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset impresses on many fronts, including its solid keyboard, powerful internal antenna, GPS performance, and best-in-class benchmark numbers. HP also throws in some nice extras, like helpful Today screen plug-ins, a full-featured wireless radio manager, the ability to location-stamp photos, and even A2DP in the Bluetooth stack, which isn’t normally included in WM5 AKU2 devices out of the box. Besides the fact that this screen resolution may not support all third-party apps, the only real knock to this model concerns the camera’s startup/shutter lags — and if that’s the worst thing to be said about a device that seemingly does it all, then we’re totally sold.

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Filed under: Gaming

We really had gotten used to the boomerang, so we have to admit we felt something of a void when Sony confirmed last month that they were yanking the prototype design and would unveil the real PS3 controller at E3. And unveil it they did, as part of the PS3 dog-and-pony show this evening. Yeah, we’re kind of underwhelmed, too. Still, despite its resemblance to past Sony controllers, it does have some solid features, including X-Y-Z, pitch, roll, yaw and lateral motion detection, and Bluetooth for wireless play. And chances are the learning curve of switching from the PS2 controller to this one will be all of about five minutes.

Update: Sony has confirmed that the new controller will not have vibration functionality, unlike the Dual Shock, Dual Shock 2 and the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii controllers. They claim this has to do with interference of the motion sensing, but we have a sneaky feeling that this could have something to with those lawsuits that started all that “boomerang” musing in the first place.

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Filed under: Wireless, Networking

In a move that came as little surprise to those who know how these things work, but that will still probably hurt manufacturers who've been releasing MIMO-enabled networking peripherals for the last few months, the IEEE 802.11 working group tasked with creating a next-gen WiFi standard has recently rejected the first draft of the highly-anticipated 802.11n. Not only did the first 802.11n draft fail to capture the 75% supermajority needed for passage, it couldn't even muster a regular majority among "Task Group N," which is a troubling development for those consumers who have already gone out and purchased pre- or draft-N gear from Linksys, Netgear, and the like. As we've reported in the past, some manufacturers had warned -- and independent testing corroborated -- that draft-N gear could negatively effect current 802.11b/g products already on the market, by hogging the available 2.5GHz bandwidth and causing performance issues on existing WLANs.  Still, taken in a historical perspective, rejection of the first draft of a proposed 802.11x specification is not uncommon, and actually seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, in the life-cycle of these multi-year, multi-party standards talks.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless

Let's face it, not nearly enough laptops come equipped with Bluetooth out of box. An increasing amount are offering them as options, but if you were looking for an excuse to get a USB dongle, it may have just arrived in the form of Ezurio's new Bluetooth USB dongle. They're claiming their Class 1 300 meter (about 1,000 feet) Bluetooth 2.0 EDR adapter uses just one ten of the juice of most other adapters. We don't yet know what they're asking for it, but there are probably a couple of older machines 'round here at the old office that could use the old Bluetooth treatment on the cheap.

[Via The Inq]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

href="http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/apple_files_patent_for_wireless_ipod_with_ringtones_micro_browser"> vspace="4" hspace="4" border="0" align="right" alt="" src="http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/05/Apple-patent-phone.jpg"
/>Time for another peek into the Apple patent
catalog for some gool ol’ speculation into that mysterious product pipeline which Steve Jobs called the “ href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/27/apple-has-media-center-contender-in-the-works/">best I’ve ever seen in my
life.” This time, a patent titled “reservation of digital media items” filed waaay back in December
2004 (but only published this week on the USPTO website) has broken free. Like the filing for the href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/04/apple-patents-audio-user-interface/">audio interface seen yesterday, this
patent again describes a system relying on the relative computing strength and fast network access of a PC / Mac
working together with a second, portable wireless device. This time however, the “portable wireless device”
is used to browse and then tag an item of interest from an “online media store” with the PC / Mac then being
used to purchase or preview the tagged item at a later time. The patent specifically references eBooks and ring tones
as some of the items of interest for download by a cellphone or wireless PDA. Now, If you’re a believer then this is
just further confirmation of that oft rumored and href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/22/benq-confirms-iphone/">all but href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/19/morgan-stanley-analysts-claim-apple-is-at-work-on-iphone/">confirmed href="http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/30/did-zander-just-confirm-the-apple-iphone/">iPhone. Or perhaps it’s just
insight into an extension of that crippled Moto
partnership. We don’t know. However, these filings do give some insight into Apple’s views on the continued importance
of synchronization between future portable devices and the PC/Mac digital hub.

[Via href="http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-6068654.html?part=rss&tag=6068654&subj=news">c|net News]

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Filed under: Ask Engadget, Peripherals, Wireless

You've got questions, and well, the rest of you have answers. That's right, it's time for Ask Engadget. You hit us up at ask at engadget dawt com with the questions you'd like your Engadget-reading peers to take on, and we'll let them sort it out in our comments. Last time Serge wanted a good home NAS solution, but this time Drew's got an easy one:

Here is a good one for all of the Boot Camp converts. What is the best 2 button Bluetooth mouse!

Well, what do you say? We're sure there's more than a few of you out there who stopped waiting for that god forsaken Bluetooth Mighty Mouse and broke down and bought something else. You like what you got? Let us know!

Filed under: Transportation, Wireless

Parking meters have made huge strides in recent years, with some of them -- such as pay-by-cell systems -- providing increased convenience to change-starved consumers, while others -- like auto-resetting meters -- have made it harder to get away with modest infractions like picking up a previous parker's minutes. Now, what may be the ultimate in parking convenience, the "personal meter" is starting to catch on in more major cities. The small card readers have been around for several years, but have recently become more popular; last month, Buffalo expanded its pilot system from a service for handicapped drivers to a citywide program. Buffalo's system, like many others, relies on the Smart Park reader, from Israel's Ganis Systems. The card reader can hang from a car's rearview mirror, and can be programmed with a city's parking rules. When a driver parks, he inserts the card into the meter, sets it for his location, and the meter starts ticking away. Enforcement officers with handheld receivers spot-check cars, and issue tickets based on data they download via an IR link. The system definitely sounds convenient, and could eliminate all of those tickets for underestimating how long you're going to be parked. However, we can't help but think it could be improved by adding wireless communication with servers that can automatically track violations and issue tickets. This could be more efficient than the spot-check system, even if it would put Lovely Rita out of a job.