Archive for July 24th, 2009

You’re going to need to practice on a lot more than Rock Band or Guitar Hero to fully make use of this rig, but Mac users looking to go a step beyond basic GarageBand recording may want to consider Apogee‘s new GiO guitar interface and controller, which is fully compatible with GarageBand 09, as well as Logic Studio 9 and MainStage 2. Designed to more or less give you full hands-free recording, the device packs five Stompbox buttons that are dynamically color coded to match software effects, plus five Transport control buttons that are dynamically lit when engaged, not to mention all the ports you’d expect, including a 1/4″ instrument input, a 1/4″ MIDI Expression pedal input, a headphone jack, and that all-important USB port, which just so happens to also conveniently power the device. You’re still going to have to make do with your current setup for a bit longer, however, as this one’s only set to launch sometime in September for a fairly reasonable (as far as Apogee products go) $395.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals

Apogee debuts GiO USB guitar interface and controller for Macs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For many features and innovations, FriendFeed has been ahead of Facebook, and even Twitter. It’s usually Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites catching up to FriendFeed, not the other way around. Today, FriendFeed added a Recommend Friends feature, that allows you to recommend subscriptions of friend’s feeds to anyone who is subscribed to your feed. The friend suggestions feature was originally born out of LinkedIn and Facebook added the suggestion feature early last year.

When you send friend recommendations, your friend will get an email with all of your recommendations, including a link to subscribe to all your recommendations with a single click, which is actually pretty useful. Especially if you are a new user, it’s nice to have the option of having a friend do all the work for you when it comes to finding people to follow.

Mixx, the Digg-like site that got a total makeover earlier this year, is launching a new site today that takes a different approach to surfacing hot links: Twitter. The site is fittingly called TweetMixx , and it’s currently in private beta. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites by going here and using the following credentials: username=techcrunch, password=tweetmixx_beta.

TweetMixx works by skimming through tweets and looking for links. The more times a given link appears on Twitter, the higher placement it gets on TweetMixx. Likewise, you can log-in using your Twitter credentials and receive a personalized hotlist of tweets based only on the Twitter users you follow.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the idea isn’t a novel one. TweetMixx is facing off with plenty of competition — Tweetmeme has become quite popular, and sites like twitrollr and tweetlinx do very similar things (and we just saw TuneIn launch this month at our RealTime CrunchUp).

Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa at the University of Tokyo has developed two baseball-playing robots — one that pitches, and one that hits. The three-fingered pitching bot throws a plastic foam ball at about twenty-five miles per hour, and lands ninety percent of its pitches in the strike zone, while the batting bot has a sensor which determines whether the pitches are balls or strikes, and hits balls in the strike zone with nearly one hundred percent accuracy. They are currently working on increasing the pitcher to about ninety-three miles an hour. The robots don’t have any human stylings — though, personally, we do detect a hint of Terminator.

Filed under: Robots

Japanese researchers develop baseball playing robots, Mark Buehrle reportedly unimpressed originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA’s Tegra chip has shown itself to be quite a gem, especially in the field of augmented reality zombie destruction. Looks like Samsung agrees with that sentiment, and has confirmed that it’s currently developing a smartphone with the powerful processor. That’s not a lot to go on, but knowing the capabilities of the CPU, we’re excited. It’s probably safe to assume an AMOLED touchscreen is a given, as well as a plethora of TouchWiz widgets, but whether or not the phone goes with Windows Mobile or Android is still a mystery. A recent rumor suggested one of the “top five” smartphone makers would be releasing a $199 GSM-based Tegra device by year’s end — no indication if these two reports are one in the same, but we’d love to see what Sammy has in store sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Cellphones

Samsung confirms a Tegra-based smartphone is in the works, all other details shrouded in mystery originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So, it’s looking more and more likely that a large form iPod touch, which we first reported on last December, is coming sometime in the next 6 months. But there are still a lot of unknown variables and question marks. One is the rumored deal Apple is working on with Verizon for such a device. We’ve just spoken with a source who had some more interesting details that may relate to such a deal. The source, which has been knowledgeable about such things in the past, says that Verizon is racing to have its LTE service ready to go in a bunch of markets for Q1 2010.

While it has been known for a while that LTE will be rolling out in select markets at some point next year. The most recent roadmap has 20-30 markets as a target for the second half of 2010. But our source says that Verizon is putting just about everything it has in to moving many of these markets up to Q1 2010 — which is the same timeframe for this supposed new Apple device. While the source had no information to specifically tie Apple to this move by Verizon, they did note that there was talk of at least one non-dongle (wireless card) product that this LTE launch was being specifically geared towards.

While speaking at Fortune’s Brainstorm: Tech event in Pasadena on Friday, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse apparently got all kinds of verbal when it came to Android and his carrier. The honcho (and TV commercial star) remarked at the industry conference that he was “Glad we waited on Android,” adding “The reviews say now it’s ready for prime time. It wasn’t when it first came out.” While we knew Sprint had interest in Android phones (and potentially some forthcoming models), we hadn’t heard a peep about timeframes, and the last thing Dan had to say was that he thought Googlephones weren’t quite ready for prime-time. That’s all changed now with the appearance of Android 1.5, it seems, as Hesse stated that the carrier will ship at least one model with the OS onboard this year. We don’t want to be zany conspiracy theorists, but the timing of this seems to dovetail nicely with the very public launch of HTC’s heavily modified Hero and Sense UI… a device which has been rumored to be making its way to Sprint sometime this year. The carrier obviously has a storied history of partnering with HTC on phones, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise to see it land on Sprint (we certainly haven’t seen any other carriers pipe up). Regardless, it looks like Sprint won’t be putting all of its eggs in the Palm basket for long. It’s going to be a very interesting holiday season.

Filed under: Cellphones

Sprint’s Dan Hesse says Android coming to Sprint this year, is glad to have waited originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[Additional reporting by Paul Carr]. Back in the heady days of 2007, flush with what was officially announced as $4.5m in funding from incubator Brightstation Ventures, UK Blog network Shiny Media held an event for advertising agencies to come and see how the new world of blogs would change their entire business strategy.

But in a scene straight from The Office, the company’s commercial manager stood up and dismissively told the assembled media luminaries that they were “all sheep [who] should stop following the big media herd and advertise with Shiny… the new wave of blogs”. “Bah!” said the sheep from major media agency Carat, and promptly walked out in disgust. Since then Shiny Media has been, many times over, lauded as the UK’s great new hope of blog publishing. But the shiny exterior of the operation appears to have been quite different to the reality.

Look out, internet! The Engadget Podcast Audio Talking Show has arrived, complete with technical topics of discussion, talented staff members and a guest of note. Ross Rubin, an analyst with NPD and regular Engadget contributer in his Switched On column, was kind enough to drop by and talk it up with Josh and Paul about the HTC Hero and the future of ebooks — things that weigh heavily on all of our minds. Nilay’s out this week, leaving a gaping hole in all of our hearts, but we promise to get the gang back together real soon.

Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Paul Miller
Special guest: Ross Rubin
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Song: OxygenStar – In The Garage

Hear the podcast

00:01:35 – HTC Hero review
00:30:50 – Plastic Logic e-book reader will use AT&T for its 3G needs
00:35:30 – Barnes & Noble partners with Plastic Logic, becomes “exclusive eBookstore provider” for its e-reader
00:53:30 - Apple bucks recession, records best non-holiday quarter in company history
01:01:05 – Microsoft sees first annual sales decline in its history for fiscal 2009
01:10:25 – Wii Sports Resort impressions (and video!): MotionPlus killer app, or killer tech demo?

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Twitter: @joshuatopolsky @futurepaul @reckless @engadget

Filed under: Podcasts

Engadget Podcast 156 – 07.24.2009 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hello, my name is Christopher Hawker. I am a professional inventor, specializing in innovative consumer products. My company is called Trident Design, LLC. I have developed many products in numerous industries and have over 20 products on the market. My most famous invention is the PowerSquid, a cephalopod-inspired power strip with outlets situated at the end of short cords, thereby eliminating the problem of losing outlets to bulky transformer plugs. John Biggs, editor-in-chief of this blog, has asked me to write the story of the birth of the PowerSquid and its development and journey to market. This is the Song of the PowerSquid.

Read part 1 here.

Part 2: Development

With the PowerSquid concept in the house, we began our development process by researching the market, to see if a similar product was already out there. We did our own patent and internet searches and combed through mail-order catalogs and hardware stores. We ordered catalogs from manufacturers and searched them with baited breath. But nowhere did we find another PowerSquid. In fact, there were no interesting power strips on the market at all at that time. They were all just rectangular boxes with outlets.

We brainstormed for weeks about the form of the PowerSquid. We wanted to stand out on the shelf, so we determined our new product should be biomorphic, looking like an actual squid as opposed to something more traditional and square.