Archive for December 9th, 2009

It’s not the first time we’ve seen the iPhone used as an experimental means of education, but a London school’s recent announcement of its plans has caught our attention. The Gumley House Convent School — a small, Christian School for girls ages 11 to 18 — in London has laid out its plan to use give Apple’s smartphone to a select group of 30 students as a test educational measure. Previous efforts we’ve seen to rope the iPhone into modern education have been mostly at the collegiate level, but Gumley’s plan is still a bit vague. The girls will have free access to all of the phone’s features with the exception of actual calls, and the trial will last until the end of the school year. Like we said — the school’s not given out details as to what the actual rules of use will be — but we have a feeling this will all end in some wild bout of texting overload.

London school children to get free loaner iPhones in experimental, educational trial originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whoa, we sort of guessed the Boxee Box was going to be small from those press pics we saw the other night, but we didn’t know it was going to be freaking tiny — check out this shot of the asymmetrical set-top next to a Coke can just posted up on the Boxee blog. Sadly, neither Boxee nor D-Link has updated us on what’s actually powering this little guy, but we do now know that it’ll have an RF remote control and S/PDIF and RCA audio outputs in addition to HDMI, SD, USB, WiFi, and Ethernet. Sounds like a tiny little chunk of awesome — we’re looking forward to finding out way more at CES.

Boxee Box pictured in the wild: it’s small! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today’s bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season.

Continue reading Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Docks and Alarm Clocks

Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Docks and Alarm Clocks originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Still haven’t gotten that Android 2.0.1 OTA update on your Droid? You’re not alone (most people are still waiting for 2.0 on their Android handset, you self-centered power user, you), but luckily there’s a simple solution. Basically you just have to manually download the update file, copy it to an SD card and restart your Droid while tapping out a simple succession of hardware keys. You can check out the “detailed” and “badass” versions of the instructions at the two respective source links below.

Manual Android 2.0.1 Droid update detailed for the impatient originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Need a relatively respectable DAP to shove in your next pair of gym shorts, huh? Yeah, we’ve all been there. If you happen to live on the right side of the Atlantic, Archos’ 1 Vision just might be your ticket, as the diminutive, no-frills player is now available to purchase for the tidy sum of £24.99 ($41). For those in need of a refresher, this one’s packing 4GB of internal storage, support for MP3, WMA, APE, WAV and FLAC files, compatibility with JPEG and BMP files and even an audio recording function for vocally jotting down grocery lists. There’s still no word on a US release, but we’re told this is the season for hope. Can we get a confirmation on that? Bueller?

Ultra-cheap Archos 1 Vision goes on sale across the pond originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already expressed our opinion on the PEN E-P2‘s price point (hint: it’s not positive), but for those with more cash than problems to throw blank checks at, Olympus’ second-ever Micro Four Thirds camera is now on sale and shipping from a wide variety of respected e-tailers. Just in time for the holidays, don’tcha know? If you’re still wondering if $1,099.99 is worth blowing on this, The Online Photographer has published an hands-on critique, complete with a few luscious sample shots and interesting gripes about the viewfinder. Make no mistake — the image quality looks fabulous, but man, that MSRP. It’s large.

Olympus PEN E-P2 gets reviewed and starts shipping out originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember Intel’s budget-friendlier Core i3 line that we’ve been talking about since June? Despite recent leaks the company still hasn’t made it officially official, but it’s now unofficially officially thanks to a pre-order at a Canadian retailer. If you’re getting a little déjà vu right now don’t worry, it isn’t a glitch in the matrix; this is exactly the same scenario that played out with the Core i5 back in August, about a month before that proc was finally given its coming out party. In other words, expect this 32nm chip — with its 2.93GHz speed, 512KB of L2 cache, 4MB of L3, and $157 CAD asking price (a mere $10 lower in American) — to be given the full press release rigmarole sometime around the new year.

Intel’s Core i3 530 processor up for order, still unconfirmed by Intel originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was only a couple of months ago that MIT was wooing us with the energy-preserving properties of carbon nanotubes, and in a classic act of oneupmanship Stanford has now come out and demonstrated paper batteries, which work thanks to a carbon nanotube and silver nanowire “ink.” We’ve seen this idea before, but the ability to just douse a sheet of paper in the proper magical goo and make a battery out of it is as new as it is mindblowing. Battery weight can, as a result, be reduced by 20 percent, and the fast energy discharge of this technology lends itself to utilization in electric vehicles. The video after the break should enlighten and thrill you in equal measures.

Continue reading Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries

Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After our adventure in figuring out the particular ExpressCard version of the StarTech USB 3.0 adapter, here’s Buffalo joining the fray and, naturally, there’s zero indication about whether this is an ExpressCard 1.0 or 2.0 device. The difference is that with the latter you can get all the way up to 5Gbps theoretical throughput, which is just above the USB 3.0 max rating of 4.8Gbps (typically advertised as 5Gbps), whereas the former hardware will get you only up to 2.5Gbps. Considering there’s a pair of USB SuperSpeed ports on there, you’ll want to make doubly sure you’re getting what you think you are. Or, given that early bird UK e-tailers are listing it for £35 ($57; no stock yet), you could just order one up and pray to Cthulhu that you get the maximally awesome stuff.

Buffalo outs USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter, we see a trend coming originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever wish your wireless router was more than just a router? So have the folks at Qisda, apparently, who have come up with this wild concoction of a device that certainly does many things and may or may not actually do any of them well. Sort of like a less huggable, less rollable mash-up of a Chumby and a Rolly, this touchscreen-equipped, speaker-packing “router” will let you view YouTube vidoes, tune into internet radio stations (or FM radio, for that matter), access media stored on its internal memory (but not your local network, it seems), and even double as a clock radio, to name a few features. Oh, and as a router it’ll do 802.11n, but packs just one spare Ethernet port. Of course, all of this news comes to us courtesy of the FCC, which means there’s no details on things like price or availability, but there are plenty of less than flattering pics, dissection photos, and test reports. Hit up the link below to dive in.

Qisda-sourced ‘multimedia router’ hits the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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