Archive for April 16th, 2009

And you wonder why people refuse to take wireless HD / HDMI seriously. A full 15 months after Belkin’s FlyWire was introduced at CES 2008, the world is still waiting for it to ship. When launched, it promised the consumer world a device that would take multiple HDMI devices and stream them (one at a time, obviously) to your HDTV sans wires. The box itself relies on AMIMON’s WHDI technology, and while we’ve seen with our own eyes just how marvelous it works, Earthlings won’t be able to purchase one until — drumroll, please — August 2009. According to a Belkin PR manager that we spoke with on the matter, the January 2009 ship date has now slipped to late summer for the US market, though the altogether painful $1,499 price tag remains firmly in tact. So, what’s the over / under on Belkin actually keeping its word this go ’round?

Update: Contrary to some reports, the delay is absolutely not related to WHDI. Belkin’s own PR team has confirmed that the hold-up is in no way related to WHDI, but that it is “paying very close attention to the user experience.” In other words, it’s delaying things to get things totally right, and for $1,500, we’d expect nothing less than perfection.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Wireless

Belkin’s $1,500 FlyWire delayed again, now slated for August release originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Kindle should be a pretty straight forward proposition, but this just goes to show you how sometimes folks can stir up controversy even with something as innocuous as an e-book reader. First there was the hassle with the Writers Guild over text-to-speech, and then Amazon threatened MobileRead with legal action for merely linking to software they didn’t take kindly too. And now we’re hearing alarming tales of Kindle owners who have had their accounts turned off when inadvertently running afoul of company policy. Case in point, a user on the MobileRead forums reports being locked out of his account for what was termed an “extraordinary” rate of returns (that is, he returned electronics that arrived damaged or defective). Because of this, our man was unable to purchase new books for his device, or even check out magazine / newspaper / blog subscriptions he had already paid for. Luckily, this gentleman was able to plead his case and get his account reactivated — but other users haven’t been quite so fortunate. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, Amazon — so let’s try and play nice for now on.

[Via Channel Web]

Filed under: Handhelds

Amazon suspends Kindle account after too many product returns originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Pirate Bay itself may now be entangled in a high-profile court battle, but it looks like Sweden’s National Museum of Science and Technology figured that was the perfect time to grab a piece of the site’s controversial history and put it on display. While it may not look like much, that server above is in fact one of the original servers that was used by the Pirate Bay and confiscated by the police in January, 2008. Despite that storied past, however, the museum was apparently able to acquire the server for just 2,000 kronor (or about $240), and it’s now found a home alongside a 1970s-era cassette tape recorder in an exhibit that’s intended to “stimulate interest in finding out more about the area of intellectual property rights” — which, unfortunately, is not called “Steal this Exhibit.”

[Via The Register]

Filed under: Desktops, Networking

Swedish museum puts Pirate Bay server on display originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s already delayed its controversial broadband capping plan in a number of markets, and it looks like Time Warner Cable has now gone one big step further in Rochester, New York (one of the initial test markets), where it has reportedly scrapped the new tiered pricing plan altogether. As you no doubt recall, the plan was more or less modeled on cellphone pricing plans, and had intended to cap customers’ data usage at a certain level and charge upwards of $1 per GB for any overages (eventually maxing out at $150 per month). That, naturally, didn’t go over so well with folks, and even New York Senator Charles Schumer eventually got in on the act and complained directly to Time Warner Cable. Of course, this still doesn’t officially mark the end of the pricing plan in other markets, but it certainly seems to be getting increasingly difficult for Time Warner Cable to move ahead with it.

[Thanks, Phil]

Update: As a few of you have helpfully pointed out in comments, Time Warner Cable has now put out a statement of its own that confirms in not-at-all Orwellian terms that it is shelving all of its consumption-based billing trials “while the customer education process continues.” The company also says that it’ll soon be making bandwidth measurement tools available to customers, which it hopes will “aid in the dialog going forward.”

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Networking

Time Warner Cable scraps broadband capping plan in Rochester, NY originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, we’ve already seen a couple video clips, but Canon’s new EOS Rebel T1i / 500D certainly deserves a proper unboxing, don’t you think? Nothing you probably don’t already know if you’re into this cam, but we will say the menu screen looks a little nicer than on previous models. Hit the read links for the full rundown.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Canon Rebel T1i / 500D gets unboxed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While it’s certainly not all that uncommon to see giant robots wandering the streets of Japan, it looks like even the jaded folks on the Japanese TV show “Nanikore Chin Hakkei” were impressed by this massive beetle robot built by an Ibaraki man, who apparently spent a full 11 years toiling away at it. Of course, it’s not a fully autonomous robot (thankfully), but it is able to be controlled from afar with a truly impressive remote control, or from the inside, which is fully kitted out with a spaceship-style cockpit and plenty of seating for passengers. It also isn’t quite able to fully stand up on all those legs, which are instead used to pull it along the ground as some wheels provide a bit of extra assistance. Still, it’s quite a sight to behold, and we can’t think of a single reason why you wouldn’t want to check out the video after the break — unless, of course, you hate things that are awesome.

[Via NerdwithSwag.com]

Continue reading Giant mechanized rhinoceros beetle makes its Japanese TV debut

Filed under: Robots, Transportation

Giant mechanized rhinoceros beetle makes its Japanese TV debut originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know how we know this here TAG Heuer Meridiist isn’t the real deal? Not because it isn’t sexy, and not because we don’t really, really want to believe. No — it’s because the authentic handset can’t be found for under five or six grand, while this little impostor can be had for the unfathomably low price of just $290. So yeah, you’ll miss out on the fancy box and veritable bragging rights, but you will get twin SIM slots and a choice of black or red “leather.” You know, come to think of it, maybe we would be willing to deal with a fake in order to save a few mortgage payments…

[Via Tehnozona]

Filed under: Cellphones

Keepin’ it real fake, part CXCVIII: TAG Heuer Meridiist gets way-too-low MSRP originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a tip folks: don’t get in car wrecks. If you someday find such a situation unavoidable, however, here’s another: keep that laptop of yours in the trunk, or at least in a case tucked down behind the driver’s seat. Mounties in British Columbia are reporting that a Canadian woman who perished in a car accident last month was actually killed by the laptop within her vehicle. As the story goes, the 25 year old’s vehicle was struck by a tow truck, flinging her laptop into the rear of her head. A coroner pegged the cause of death as a “blunt force trauma,” and investigators believe that the whole thing was survivable had the machine not been in the back seat. Not surprisingly, officials are using the incident to encourage others to secure their belongings whilst traveling.

[Via Switched]

Filed under: Laptops

Canadian killed by unsecured laptop during car wreck originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Take a good look at the box above, folks — it just might be the first, the last and the only Open(3) you ever see. Psystar‘s latest Mac clone, which was launched right around a month ago, has miraculously managed to ship out (or, at least one has). If you’ll recall, the company has been battling with Apple for months on end for selling OS X-equipped machines without Cupertino’s blessing, but apparently it’s still doing at least a bit of business under the table. Hit up the read link for a Flickr gallery full of this here slap in the face. It’s good stuff, trust us.

[Thanks, Mike]

Filed under: Desktops

Psystar Open(3) manages to ship, gets unboxed by lucky customer originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Companies and enterprising individuals have been dabbling with the tantalizing concept of slapping Android on a cheap netbook for months now, and seeing how Android and Symbian could end up locked in a heated battle for the hearts and minds of the open-source mobile platform world, it stands to reason that the boys and girls at the Foundation would want to counter the OHA’s every move. Some good people in the S60 On Symbian Customer Operations group (try fitting that on a business card) have managed to compile and run an S60-skinned Symbian build on one of Intel’s Atom reference boards, showing a stock S60 screen and an OpenGL demo — which, as you might imagine, runs circles around the performance of a garden-variety S60 handset. To quote the Foundation’s boss, “I was most impressed with the responsiveness of the UI and upper application layers” — the only question left to be answered is whether there’s a place in the world for a Symbian-powered netbook.

Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops

Symbian ports its platform to Atom, just for the heck of it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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