Archive for June 24th, 2009

We have no idea why Seagate buried this in a warmed-over press release touting rehashed FreeAgent for Mac drives, but there’s a new $40 FreeAgent Go Dock+ that doubles as a powered three-port USB hub. Pretty convenient if you’re into the whole FreeAgent Go lifestyle, we’d say, but we’re sticking with our versatile bareback SATA docks.

Filed under: Storage

Seagate introduces FreeAgent Go Dock+ with powered USB hub originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not sold on Toshiba’s new NB205 netbook or one of its many new Satellite laptops announced earlier this week? Don’t worry, ’cause Toshiba’s just announced four more Satellite models, all of which fall under its budget-minded L Series line. Those include the 14-inch Satellite L510/L515, the 15.6- and 16-inch Satellite L500/L505, and the heavyweight 17.3-inch Satellite L550/L555, each of which pack either AMD Athlon or Turion, or Intel Pentium or Core 2 Duo processors depending on the configuration, along with integrated graphics or ATI’s discrete Radeon 3100, a 10-key numeric keypad on the 15.6-inch and larger models, a minimum 2GB of RAM and 250GB hard drive, and Toshiba’s trademark “Fusion” finish on the whole lot of ‘em. Best of all, starting prices range from a reasonable $550 to $650, and all are apparently available to order right now.

Filed under: Laptops

Toshiba’s still not done, rolls out new Satellite L Series laptops originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Stealth startup Small Batch has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from True Ventures with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, WordPress/Automattic Founder Matt Mullenweg, renown investor Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel participating. Small Batch is launching Typekit, a service that lets designers build sites with web-native typography.

Small Batch was co-founded by Jeffrey Veen, who was one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool that was acquired by Google. After the acquisition, Veen worked at Google and started Small Batch in January of 2009. Veen was also the recipient of TechFellow award a few weeks ago.

More than a few people have left comments on our Twitter posts related to the Iranian situation wondering if they weren’t really articles by the satirical site, The Onion. Here are two that come to mind, Twitter Reschedules Maintenance To Allow Iranian Protests To Continue and Bush Advisor: Twitter Founders Should Get Nobel Peace Prize. Well, The Onion finally has one of its own. And as you might expect, it’s good.

The post is short, sweet and to the point. But the best parts are the fake quotes by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey:

“Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them,” said a visibly confused Dorsey.

Chalk up another huge win for Samsung in its long-running patent dispute with Sharp: the US International Trade Commission has just issued a ruling banning importation of Sharp LCD panels that infringe one of Samsung’s viewing-angle patents. As you might imagine, the ban covers a wide swath of Sharp’s consumer products, including the Aquos TV line, but it’s not clear on how it’ll affect other companies that use Sharp panels — this ruling could potentially have a huge impact on the entire tech market. On the other hand, we’d bet that Sharp’s lawyers are furiously putting together a request to have the ban delayed while an appeal is sorted out, so this is far from over — in fact, we’d say the real fireworks are just beginning.

Filed under: Displays

Sharp LCD panels banned from US import until further notice originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A researcher from the University of Nottingham and his Ukrainian colleague have built the world’s first Saser: a device that generates a highly concentrated beam of sound waves at terahertz frequency. Not unlike the frenetic warblings of Welsh chanteuse Bonnie Tyler, when alternating layers of aluminum arsenide and gallium arsenide are exposed to an intense beam of light, photons are released, causing them to bounce back and forth between the layers. Eventually the sound waves combine into much stronger, highly concentrated sounds in which every particle is synchronized — creating an ultra-high frequency “phonon” beam. Although practical applications for this technology have yet to be developed, it is hoped that Sasers could someday be used to probe and manipulate electronic devices at the nanoscale level, with results that include terahertz-frequency processors which would make the “computers of the future” a thousand times faster. Video after the break.

[Via Gizmag]

Continue reading Sonic ‘laser’ developed, makes quite an impression at 80s night

Filed under: Science

Sonic ‘laser’ developed, makes quite an impression at 80s night originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.

Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”

The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content.

One of my favorite recent Twitter-related trends is the onslaught of jokes from late-night talk show hosts pointing out how laughably dull (or stupid) some of our favorite celebs’ tweets really are. Read aloud, even the most seemingly innocuous Tweets are often hilarious.

Now Break.com, a video site heavily geared towards a male audience, is looking to get in on the action. The site has signed on comedian Mike Polk (formerly of HBOLabs) to host a show called Tweet Boxx, which is specifically focused on making fun of the Twitterverse. You can catch the first episode here.

Polk kicks off the inaugural show saying that each week he’ll “be sharing with you my favorite celebrity Twitter tweets of the week” following that up a moment later with, “what am I saying here, these are words?” Welcome to my life, Mr. Polk.

A month after Lenovo announced its new IdeaPad U350 the thing is finally ready for the prime time, and let us tell you: it wasn’t hard to spot. While in theory this is “just another thin-and-light” in a rapidly growing, CULV-aided market segment, the craftsmanship and materials used on the U350 make it our favorite bit of Lenovo design since the U110, and very well might set it apart from the budget-minded pack. We’re particularly digging the textured rubber back, but the ribbed metal palm rest also excellently avoids the glossy-plastic-of-death. Otherwise the laptop settles pretty nicely into a thin-and-light groove, with both of those particulars in spades and CULV under the hood. We would prefer some NVIDIA 9400M to Intel’s integrated graphics, but at least there’s HDMI out, and Intel’s chipset tends to be a bit better on the power sipping front. Check out the gallery for some head-to-head shots with Lenovo’s T400s — which is clearly superior in most regards, but goes for double the price.

Filed under: Laptops

Lenovo IdeaPad U350 thin-and-light hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Teenagers spend their days texting, tweeting and hanging around on YouTube, Facebook and MySpace! Honestly, that’s what I assumed too. Turns out I’m wrong, and I needed Nielsen to teach me that. The audience measurement company is releasing a brand new report on teens and media with a lofty promise of serious myth busting and hard fact presenting that will downright knock your socks off.

Ready for some eye-openers? Here we go: