Sure, you like the Motorola Q but hate the fact that it’s missing WiFi. And the lack of 3G on the HTC Excalibur is also a deal breaker. Well, look no further for your QWERTY fix brother, ’cause our favorite maker of boxy black devices is showing off their SGH-i600 Smartphone at IFA in Berlin. This tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 baby brings it all: HSDPA, EDGE, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, a 1.3 megapixel cam with another up front for video calls, a 2.3-inch, 65k color, 320 x 240 TFT display, Microsoft’s Push Mail, and 128MB ROM / 64MB RAM with MicroSD expansion all powered by Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone on a TI OMAP 1710 processor. The phone looks small enough for single-handed operation, can pull double-duty as an HSDPA modem and can even be switched into USB mass storage mode for easy drag-n-drop data transfer off your PC. And yeah, it’s FCC approved so the estimated Q4 2006 release date is certainly do-able. Now sop-up the drool and click-on for more pics.

[Thanks, Martin]
more info
from engadget
Continue Reading

Take a healthy dose of Samsung’s YP-K5, sprinkle in some LG chocolate, and bake-in the latest Korean design trends for a pair of new DAPs from Safa. The SS220 is a bit of a mystery. In addition to featuring touch-based controls and a built-in speaker, we know it’s capable of splashing a range of unspecified video, photo, and text formats up onto its tiny 1.5-inch screen. It also packs in an FM tuner just in case the few reticent GBs of audio dumped to flash can’t slake your jones. We know a bit more about the other player — the SS200 — a 71 x 48 x 12-mm wafer with a 2-inch, 260k color, 220 x 176 pixel display. The SS200 is capable of 6/8-hours of video/audio playback with support for MP3, WMA, and WAV media formats. No ship date or pricing unfortunately, hell, we can’t even say for sure which of the two is pictured above. Let’s just be thankful for the scraps they’ve thrown, mkay?

From engadget
more info

Just in case you didn’t already know how to “secure” (ish) your home WiFi network, the California State Assembly is making sure that you do. Assuming the Governator signs Assembly Bill 2415, starting October 1, 2007, your new neighborhood-friendly WiFi router sold in California will have to come with a security warning, a sticker, or “other protection” to alert consumers to the ultra-scary problem of “piggybacking.” As the bill puts it, piggybacking, is “becoming a serious issue for people who reside in densely populated areas.” Funny, because we always thought that free access was the best part about the democratization of WiFi, and most definitely not a “serious issue” — but leave it to the California State Assembly to spoil our fun.

[Via Reuters, thanks, David]
more info
from engadget

Oh hell yes, did we call it or did we call it? That mystery device has a keyboard, and it turns out that HTC’s totally sick successor to the Hermes / TyTn is the O2 Mars which nails the aesthetics where the Hermes suffers so, and will supposedly come equipped with a 520MHz XScale, GPRS / EDGE / UMTS (sorry, no HSDPA), 64MB ram, 128MB flash, WiFi, Bluetooth, miniSD, and a 2 megapixel camera. Ok, so maybe we’re only excited about this thing because it’s one of the only QWERTY devices we’ve seen lately out of HTC that wasn’t a little hard to look at (Excalibur, we’re lookin’ at you, buddy), but we don’t need to excuse our love of gadgets, so if you’ll let us continue our fawning. Thank you.

P.S. -Sorry, we didn’t mean to gloss over the Jupiter, which appears to be the successor to the Breeze — there’s just not a lot of info there.

[Via the::unwired]
more info
from engadget

The M42 is a major British motorway that has a reputation for being a testbed for new roadside technology, with a current traffic management scheme including sensors for tracking traffic built into the road and variable speed limit signs every 500 meters. The latest piece of kit to be tested out during roadworks is a radar-assisted speeding sign that not only flashes when it detects a speeding car, but also displays the license plate number of said car. Yeah, scary. Apparently the public shame (or swift realization that it could also be an automated ticket-writer) that the sign dishes out to speeding motorists is having some effect, with 50% of drivers slowing down once they see their number is up. Presumably the other half were concentrating too hard on getting out their digicams — look ma! I’m on a roadsign! — to slow down.

[Via Autoblog]
more info
from engadget

It’s not often that you read a review of a computer with a line like “You could kill someone with this thing,” but the folks at bit-tech.net got to write that gem in their look at Dell’s new gaming-oriented XPS 700, referring to the deadly-looking 3-millimeter thick piece of aluminum that forms the case’s side panel. Unfortunately, they weren’t as impressed with the system’s performance as they were with its decapitating potential, finding it decidedly lacking when put up against their comparable custom-built rig — although much of the blame seems to be pegged on the slow memory that Dell ships with the XPS. Still, they did find the system got most of the core elements right and delivered decent gaming performance at a reasonable price; given the cost of upgrades from Dell, though, they recommend going light on the memory and video card options when you order and swapping them out yourself when you get this sucker home.

More info
from engadget

Acer isn’t really messing around with their rollout of Core 2 Duo laptops. They’ve got 13 new ones, including six TravelMates and seven Aspires, and they’ve even managed to get Blu-ray or HD DVD drives into a few of them. The headliner of the bunch is the new TravelMate 8210, which runs the full range of Core 2 Duo chips, boasts of the Windows x64 OS, and tops it all off with a Blu-ray drive. You can upgrade the RAM to a max 4GB to really get the use out of the 64-bit Windows, and there are plenty of other perks like 802.11a/b/g WiFi, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB of VRAM, a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera, and even an option for a Bluetooth VoIP phone. As for the rest of the TravelMates, it’s just model number soup, with the 14-inch 3270 and 3290; 15.4-inch 8210, 4230 and 4280; and the 17-inch 5620 all rocking the Merom. The Aspires include three HD DVD capable laptops in their midst, the 9120, 9520 and 9810. The bottom of the barrel is the 14.1-inch 5590, followed by the 15.4-inch 5630, 5680 and 9120. Finally there’s the 17-inch 9420 and 9520, along with a 20.1-inch monstrosity, the 9810. As generous as Acer is with laptop releases, they’re a bit stingy on prices and release dates, but we expect to be seeing most of these laptops — at least the ones that don’t get stuck waiting around for a blue laser — before long.

Read – Acer’s Merom lineup
Read – Acer TravelMate 8210

From engadget