Gadgets Control

The $100 Centro smartphone is already a hit with budget conscious consumers but Palm is looking to up the cool factor by putting it in the hands of a few celebs. The company has teamed up with designer label Ed Hardy to create a custom-bejeweled Centro phone for the presenters gift lounge at the upcoming Primetime Emmy Awards. The blinged out phone will be part of the swag available to hosts, presenters and performers including Heidi Klum and Eva Longoria-Parker who are expected to visit the backstage gift lounge on September 20 and 21, says Palm. The Ed Hardy designed Centros are custom creations and don’t have a published price tag nor will they be available to the general public. (Read the full post about ‘Palm Hits Up Emmy Awards Stars with Blinged Out Centro’…)

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Despite the seemingly unstoppable success of the Palm Centro, it is not enough to stop the downward spiral in terms of earnings. Palm bled $41.9 million this quarter, compared to the $0.8 million loss from the corresponding period a year ago. Half of the loss has been attributed by Palm to increasing stock prices as well as related compensation and securities, but the remainder points toward performance-related problems. As time goes by, it doesn’t look as though the long-delayed Linux-based Palm OS sequel that is tipped for a 2009 release will help bolster the company’s bottomline. Guess waiting for that operating system is more or less like waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come out - exactly that long. (Read the full post about ‘Palm Earnings Down’…)

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Regardless of whether your iPhone is of the 3G variety or not, XtremeMac has your best interests at heart with a trio of speaker docks that is compatible with both handsets. First off is the Luna Voyager Clock Radio that is highly portable and can have its time set via the iphone instead of manually. Just in case there is a power outage, the Luna Voyager has a battery backup to power its clock and buzzer. As for the Luna X2, this update improves on its predecessor with a more advanced nap, sleep, and snooze timers, supporting four FM presets and an aux-in jack for non-Apple devices/ipod Shuffle. Last but not least is the Tango X2 that leads the pack, offering 2.1 channel audio to do your music tracks justice. (Read the full post about ‘XtremeMac Speaker Docks Support iPhones’…)

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Netbooks — aka mini-notebooks — are the surprise hits of this year’s tech market. Asus has sold more than a million of its groundbreaking Eee PCs, and other manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon with mini computers of their own. Who knew that consumers would be so excited about super portable, inexpensive, easy-to-use laptops? But these hatchlings are far from fully-formed. The basics are certainly there, but we need more. Specifically, netbooks need five things before they can turn into a full-blown, mass-market phenomenon. Minimum Four-Hour Battery Life This is the biggie. For a netbook to be truly useful, it needs to last for more than an hour and a half. (Read the full post about ‘Five Things That Netbooks Need Now’…)

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Looks like there just may be two new E series Nokia phones in the works if images on the ‘Net are to be trusted - the upcoming E72 and E75. Apparently, preventing leaks from those doing proto testing, or having promo videos leaked onto the web before they are supposed to be, is a problem companies are seeing more and more often. These images were initially found on the ever-popular YouTube site, before tech and gadget fans started to discover them. It appears the E72 has the benefits of the E60 with a side sliding form factor. With text messaging, email and sms being all the rage, the full QWERTY keyboard both styles feature will probably also be considered a bonus by many. (Read the full post about ‘Two Nokia QWERTY phones leaked’…)

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Intel has recently finished a proof of concept test that removed the use of air conditioning from cooling a data center located in New Mexico. Instead, air from outside of the facility was pumped through the building to see if it was sufficient to provide the cooling required by the hardware. A system known as the air economizer.

The test was conducted over a 10 month period on a center that housed 900 blade servers in typical compartments across half of a 1,000 square foot facility.

(Read the full post about ‘Intel proves you don’t need AC in data centers’…)

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Yahoo! and Rhapsody have teamed up to offer a new service which will integrate features of Rhapsody into Yahoo! Search. If a user searches for an artist and there is available content the user will be able to play a stream of full-length songs by that artist. The stream will be available through the FoxyTunes Player powered by Rhapsody.

The stream will appear in a Yahoo! shorcut box in the top of the search results. 25 free full-length tracks will be available every 30 days. After 30 days, the songs will be limited to 30-second samples until a new 30-day cycle has begun.

(Read the full post about ‘Rhapsody to offer music stream in Yahoo! search results’…)

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Stanford University has decided to make a number of its computer-related courses available for free online. The initiative is being called the Stanford Engineering Everywhere portal and has begun by offering ten courses that actually mirror the courses taught in Stanford’s School of Engineerring.

The first ten courses on offer include:

Introduction to Computer Science

• Programming Methodology
• Programming Abstractions
• Programming Paradigms

Introduction to Robotoics

• Introduction to Robotics
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning

Linear Systems and Optimization

• The Fourier Transform and its Applications
• Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems
• Convex Optimization I
• Convex Optimization II

Materials provided for each course include lecture videos, slides, reading lists and the handouts used on the University version of the course.

(Read the full post about ‘Comp Sci, AI & Robotics courses free from Stanford University’…)

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Asus has grand plans of breaking into the top 5 notebook vendor in Japan sometime next year by building on their Eee PC success. Currently, up to 85% of Asus’ sales in Japan consist of Eee PC products, and the Taiwanese company hopes to use this leverage and brand power by adjusting the ratio to 70% Eee PCs with the remainder as mainstream notebooks. Netbooks might be the in thing at the moment, but they’re definitely not as profitable or lucrative as notebooks. Tags: Gadget, gadgetry, DVD, CD (Read the full post about ‘Asus Wants To Break Into Top 5′…)

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If you opt for one of the growing range of netbooks, one of the big decisions regards the hard drive: Do you go for solid state or a traditional spinning magnetic platter? SSDs don’t necessarily improve battery life, but they do weigh less. They’re also rather cramped: even the 16GB available on the top-of-the-line Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is too small for modern day use. Dell’s answer? Cloud computing. Dell has teamed up with Box.net, the online storage people, to offer 2GB free online storage, expandable (for pay) to 25GB. In itself, this is insignificant — anybody can grab the free 2GB plan; Dell just puts a link on the desktop to make it a little easier. (Read the full post about ‘Dell to Push Cloud Computing with Inspiron Mini 9′…)

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