Mobile Devices

Posted Feb 11th 2008 8:03PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Gaming
Early last year, we polled the grand audience and found out just what you liked (and disliked) about Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 for PS3. Fast forward 13 months, and those still waiting on the sidelines have yet another option for jumping in. As of now, Terra Soft Solutions is offering up Sony’s 80GB PlayStation 3 with YDL 6.0 pre-installed for $549.95, and yes, that includes the DVDs containing the OS. Interestingly, it seems as if you’ll still have to pony up for a component or HDMI cable, but at least the option’s there, right?

[Thanks, Fiddlesworth]

Posted Feb 12th 2008 4:41AM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Household
Energizer is definitely on the right track with it’s new Light-on-Demand modular LED lighting system, which features battery-backed LED light units that plug into a variety of fixtures and keep going even when the power goes out, but we’ll wait until the designers can shake a little more ugly off this kit before we bring it home. The line is launching with several standard fixtures like the wired desk lamp and wireless wall sconce shown here, as well as a wireless motion detector and several emergency lighting solutions. Energizer says the gear was developed in response to research that showed people were “frustrated” by power outages and wanted lamps that stayed lit even during blackouts — which seems fairly obvious to us, but we’re not lighting researchers. Light-on-Demand units should be popping up in Targets later this month, but if Energizer really wanted to make a go of this, they’d hit us with a battery-backed LED light bulb, no?

Posted Feb 11th 2008 5:32PM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Peripherals
You may remember seeing an eBay auction for a NIB Optimus Maximus keyboard a few weeks ago on Engadget. As you can imagine, the news generated a lot of excitement — particularly from the folks at eBay, who decided it would be a sweet item to feature on their homepage. Thus the auction was ended quickly and relisted in accordance with special rules and regulations, and now some poor, poor soul (or wealthy, as it were) is the proud owner of an auctioned Optimus Maximus. Hey, it only cost $2,750… or just a little bit less than double the list price ($1564.72). Oh you crazy eBayers.

[Via TG Daily]

These days, whether you are an actual businessman or simply a technology geek, checking for Wi-Fi can be like checking the temperature before deciding whether you need to bring a jacket to work or not.

The watch will let you know the signal strength of the wi-fi with a simple press on a button. The signal strength is displayed in a number value, from 0 to 8. this will let you know what to expect and you may need to move to an area that has a bit higher strength. Not only this, but this wrist watch is stylish and you would not need to be worried about wearing this around town, regardless of the nerdy capabilities it might offer.

If wearing a watch isn’t your thing, then you may want to check out some of the other WiFi Detector devices out there.

Gimme!

Suggested Price: $29.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Posted Feb 11th 2008 6:56PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Laptops
Somewhat lost in Sony’s massive CES VAIO spec bump was an update to the super hot (but generally overlooked) top-end VAIO TZ that features both an SSD and HDD, which allows you to speed up booting and other system tasks that rely on quick random reads by running Windows off the SSD while still being able to lug all your data around on the traditional hard drive. The no-compromises model got bumped to 64GB of SSD and 250GB of HDD, up from 32 and 160, but we didn’t know a ship date until now — looks like Sony’s taking preorders now on sonystyle.com for delivery in March. The new model also includes 2GB of RAM, a Sprint EV-DO card, fingerprint sensor, and external dual-layer burner, as well as the TZ’s usual 11.1-inch XBRITE screen and 1.33GHz U7700 Core 2 Duo processor — looks like the TZ isn’t going to give up that “hottest ultralight” crown to the MacBook Air so easily, now is it?

[Thanks, Tim]

Two of the slew of new phones launched today by Sony Ericsson are the G700 and G900. Both are billed as lifestyle smart phones. And both have touch screens (this year’s must-have feature), web browsers, organizer functions and UMTS radios.

The G700 is supposed to be for the rugged outdoor type, with its 3.2MP camera and RSS news ticker. At least, that’s what the Sony Ericsson rep told me. He also struggled not to describe the G900 as a girl’s phone, finally stammering out that it was instead “stylish”. The G900, available in hot pink, sports a 5MP camera with touch focus: you touch the screen where you want the camera to focus.

Nice features, and they’ll be popular on looks alone. What they are not, despite the claims, is smart.

Press release [Sony Ericsson]

Posted Feb 11th 2008 1:06PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Cellphones
We heard you poor souls loud and clear — hoping, begging, praying for a CDMA Curve announcement during CES. Apparently, said device is on the way. According to non-blurry (gasp!) pictures over at BBGeeks, the CDMA Curve is rockin’ a 8330 model number, integrated GPS, built-in camera and a temporary sticker on the back warning that what you’re looking at is absolutely not for sale under any circumstances. Excited? You should be, now hit up the read link and take a peek.

Modu has announced its tiny modular cellphone after much teasing. At GSMA in Barcelona I sat down with vice president Ronit Maor to check it out. The little handset contains the guts of a cellphone, including an MP3 player and one GB of flash memory, but to really use it you’ll need some extras.

These add-ons come in the form of “Jackets” and “Mates”. The jackets are essentially bigger gadgets into which the Modu will slip: a cellphone, a camera or an MP3 player. Because these jackets are simple, perhaps containing a fancier interface, extra memory or a big screen, they can be cheap and plentiful.

Modu’s plan is to sell the phone and license 3rd parties to come up with jackets of their own. And because the customer already has the phone part, there is no expensive and long (six months plus) FCC licensing to do.

The Mates are more like a standard iPod accessory. Alarm clocks, car stereos and even a bike computer have a slot to accommodate the Modu. Some of these are already at the prototype stage, as you can see in the pictures below.

Modu has already signed up with Sandisk (where Modu founder Dov Moran invented the USB thumb drive), Blaupunkt, Magellan and a mystery Dutch company (clue: LCD picture frames).

The handset itself is tiny. Not Zoolander tiny, but it’ll fit into the small, inner jeans pocket (I tried). It also feels pretty solid, although very light . In fact, it’s the lightest cellphone in the world at 40.1g (1.4oz) – the 0.1g is the SIM card.

Product page [Modu]

In what must be quite an embarrassing episode, Indian anti-virus company AvSoft Technologies has had its website hacked. Rather than offering protection from viruses, the site started downloading a virus to users’ machines.

AvSoft is a little-known security company, offering two main products, SmartCOP and SmartDOG. It also offers a service for recovering data after a virus attack has occurred

The infiltration has been identified by third-party security researchers, including Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG. The vulnerability has been exploited on the download page of the AvSoft S-Cop site and manages to open an invisible window, which loads to an alternative server and downloads the malicious software–all without the user’s knowledge.

Thompson commented:

They let one of their pages get hit by an iFrame injection … It shows that anyone can be a victim…. It’s hard to protect Web servers properly.

The attack is known as an iFrame injection, and the software used is of the Win32/Virut family. How the malicious code got on to the site has not yet been clarified, since AvSoft hasn’t yet commented on the matter. Dave Marcus, McAfee Security Research Manager, believes it may just come down to programmer error in the SQL or PHP code used on the site.

Read more at InfoWorld.

Matthew’s Opinion

Anti-virus companies have a lot riding on how the consumer perceives them, and nothing can be more detrimental to their brands than a successful attack on their own site or software. If this had been a bigger anti-virus company, then the news would have been on the front page of every technology site.

I think this attack just highlights how easy it is to attack a website–regardless of who owns it and what security measures are in place. If the systems being used have some known vulnerabilities, then someone is going to take advantage of them until they are fixed.

As ever, if you own a website, ensure you stay up-to-date with patches, follow any security bulletins relating to the software and plug-ins you use, and do regular checks on your server files.

This sounds like a joke, but it is actually serious: Cargo Cosmetics has a line of cosmetics called Blu_Ray (underscore), not to be confused with Blu-Ray (dash). Cargo even uses a very similar font and blue tone.

But it all makes sense when you read Cargo’s moto: “Make-up developed for High-Definition filming”.

The idea that someone would make this is already stunning, but it’s even more surprising to think that someone might buy it. But hey, who wants make up for low-definition filming, huh?