Did you know that the new version of Safari included with Mac OS X Leopard has a great new inline Find feature? “To find a word or phrase on the page you are looking at,” instructs Robin Williams in her new book, Peachpit Learning Series: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, “press Command F. Then just type—Safari knows to put the search term in the search field.” What’s more, Safari “dims out the rest of the page and highlights every instance of” the word or phrase you’re looking for. Want to learn more about Mac OS X Leopard? You’ll find Robin Williams’ newest title in the online Apple Store.

Filed under: Gaming

We've been hearing quite a bit about next week's Fall Dashboard Update for the 360, but Microsoft's finally ready to spill all of the beans. Obviously, the biggest update is the "Xbox Originals" downloadable Xbox games, but other improvements include enhanced online profiles, increased social networking, beefed up parental controls, improved menus, and our personal favorite: DivX support. As stated before, Xbox Original games, like Halo 1 and Fable, will be going for 1200 MS points (about $15), which is roughly comparable with your local game store's bargain bin. Also on the fiscal side of things, certain titles on Xbox Live Arcade are getting permanent price drops, akin to "Platinum Hits" of retail titles. As for DivX, Microsoft was a little vague when speaking with Joystiq about it, but it sounds like XviD is in play as well, which is just double fun. It's all hitting as a free download on December 4th, starting at 2AM PST.

[Via Joystiq]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Samsung has announced the r410. The latest slider from Samsung has a QWERTY keyboard, stereo Bluetooth, speakerphone (wow!), a built-in VGA camera with night shot, advanced voice recognition, IM and e-mail. Battery life is a paltry 2.5 hours, though. But it comes in red and black.

OK. If this is real — and there is some indication that it is — then we’ve got ourselves a genuine breakthrough. We reported that TAG is making a phone, but we had no idea that it would be a damn watch phone. TAG Heuer has pretty much gone the sports route, offering quartz pieces to unsuspecting rubes. However, if this phone/watch comes to fruition, they’ll have a hit on their hands.

Keep in mind that these are just mock-ups and there is no indication of how thick this thing is. The UI looks fairly basic — a crown for scrolling through selections along with an MP3 player mode. My question is this, however — how the heck did that stuff all that garbage into there and how do you talk into it. Dick Tracy, here we come.

First mockup images of Tag Heuer Mobile Phone [LuxuryLaunches]

Filed under: Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

At this point, we're fairly certain i-Station will only use a number other than "43" in its product titles once it has exhausted the entire US alphabet, but since we're not quite to that point, we're forced to live with U43 this go 'round. As expected, this Korean PMP is packed to the brim with features, including a 4.3-inch WQVGA (480 x 272) display, WinCE 5.0, a T-DMB receiver, GPS, e-dictionary, 30GB / 60GB hard drive and support for a smorgasbord of file formats. Notably, some features will depend on which flavor you pick up -- Standard, DMB or NAVI -- but the whole lot plays nice with MPEG1/2/3/4, AC3, DivX, XviD, WMV, WMA, OGG, WAV, AAC, FLAC, APE, JPEG, BMP and PNG. 'Course, all this functionality won't run ya cheap, as word on the street pegs this bad boy at â‚©448,000 (or around $481).

[Via AkihabaraNews]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

If you look into the history of innovation, you realize that it's all built on the works of those who came before. The single biggest key to innovation is to try to do something better than what's already been done. There's a great book by Robert Friedel that highlights this called A Culture of Improvement. This is seen quite a lot in the software world, certainly. In fact, it's quite common for people to try to improve someone else's software, just to make it better. Take, for example, the massive success of Greasemonkey scripts to allow people to improve on others' websites. However, in this age of pervasive misunderstandings about the purpose of intellectual property laws, many people take offense to the idea that someone wants to improve their work, as we've seen in cases where people have tried to build better front-ends for confusingly designed websites. It gets even trickier when it comes to "improvements" that conflict with business models. There are still some people who think that Firefox's AdBlock extension is "stealing," for example. And, remember, that the folks behind Kazaa flipped out about Kazaa Lite, a version of their software, which stripped out all the spyware included with Kazaa. These all seem to fall under the heading of "felony interference with a business model" which is the concept formerly called "competition."

Now a similar case has appeared in China, but with more dire results. There's apparently a very popular instant messaging client called QQ, from a company named Tencent, that has a few annoying characteristics. A computer scientist in China created a modified version called Coral QQ that got rid of some of those problems, including adding some features that Tencent charges for. For doing so, the guy was recently arrested for intellectual property violations. The company has been fighting with him for years, previously having filed and won a copyright infringement case against him (for which he paid the fine). However, as his software kept getting more and more popular, rather than taking it as a message that perhaps the company should improve QQ and get rid of annoying features, Tencent instead filed charges with the police, who arrested the programmer. As the folks at Against Monopoly point out, this is yet another situation where the concept of intellectual property is being used to hold back innovation (and put someone in jail for improving a product).

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Somebody over at Boy Genius Report has the hook-up. They’ve got the full specs for the new Blackberry 9000, although the one picture they have (also above) looks kind of shady. Anyhow, here’s the lowdown: 420×380 screen, 1GB of memory, a 624MHz Intel processor. It also has the 1-2-3 punch of GPS, Wi-Fi, and 3G, none of which are to be found on my phone. Depressing? Hell yes. But it seems like my medication (and yours) will be arriving in mid-2008.

BlackBerry 9000 specs revealed [Boy Genius Report]

As many content providers have done in the past year, The Tribune is launching branded YouTube channels for its newspapers and television stations. This initiative comes from Tribune Interactive, which is a division of Tribune Company. The group is launching a branded channel for the Chicago Tribune newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, and its television stations WGN, KTLA and WPIX, located in Chicago, L.A. and NYC respectively. All the channels will offer somewhat localized content as well.

The branded YouTube channel has been a feather in the hat of many content providers as of late, especially in the television network sector, and even online video sectors, as the channel enables furthered distribution capabilities for web content. But the insertion of newspaper content into more popular social networking sites is a more recent development that’s taking shape in different manners across the varied options out there, such as Facebook sponsored pages.

Additionally, the inclusion of more videos to accompany newspaper content, distributed in this manner, gives content providers a multimedia way to attract users and advertisers. As we’ve seen with CondeNet, which is also launching a YouTube-specific campaign, it’s important for printed media companies to diversify and spread content deeper throughout the web.

These branded YouTube channels aren’t the only ways in which Tribune Interactive is hoping to grow its online presence. The company is also working on the national expansion of Metromix, a local event-promotions site.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

In a recent chat with clients, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster did a little name dropping regarding Google's Open Handset Alliance, casually mentioning in passing that Verizon "is a member." Hold up there, chief; last time we checked, that isn't the case. Among US national carriers, only T-Mobile and Sprint have publicly thrown their hats into the Android ring, so we're not sure whether Mr. Munster knows something we don't (which is entirely possible) or whether he's just a little confused. For what it's worth, we can understand why he'd be confused in light of Verizon's recent commitment to open its airwaves to all comers -- the initiative appears to share much of the same spirit as the OHA's charter, after all -- but by the same token, Google's intention to snap up 700MHz bandwidth would seemingly pit the two juggernauts against one another. We'll have to wait and see whether Big Red's name magically appears on the Alliance's member list, but if it does, the pressure's gonna get pretty high on AT&T to cave, eh?

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

comScore has released numbers for September on online video viewing habits, and they show Google-owned properties continuing to dominate market share by a wide margin. In fact, Google’s 28.3% share of videos viewed is more than 6x the share of #2 Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace. Here’s the breakdown:

The margin is much less significant when looking at unique visitors (71 million for Google, 41 million for FIM), but it highlights the stickiness and reach of YouTube versus competitors.

Notably, not a single startup is anywhere to be found in the top ten. Another interesting stat from the report: 3 in 4 American Internet users viewed at least one video online during the month. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise to see a huge amount of VC money continuing to pour into online video ad networks.

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