This $290 phone-ish device runs Linux and handles music, movies, photos, e-mail, documents, and more. It comes with 4GB of memory and can hold a customized computing environment, allowing you to hook it up to any computer and use your own operating system, web browser, e-mail client, and all that good stuff.

There’s also a 1.71-inch 256,000-color OLED screen, FM radio, image viewer, DivX support, office suite, Web 2.0-compatible browser, and VOIP compatibility. You might say it almost sounds too good to be true but the Linux community never ceases to amaze me. If anyone ends up buying this, please let us know how you like it.

WizPy [Turbolinux] via Red Ferret

Filed under: GPS

 

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

A report from the New York Times implies that Facebook mislead advertisers who signed on to be “Landmark Partners” when the company announced its Beacon platform on November 6th. According to Coca-Cola’s vice president of global interactive marketing:

“I … certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”

Of course, the buzz around Beacon since it launched has been the fact that the system isn’t opt-in and requires a user to proactively have information on their activities withheld from the Facebook News Feed, and is thus, a major breech of user privacy. This week, the company made modifications to Beacon to make users more aware of what might be published about them, but the solution falls short of the global-opt out that many think is warranted.

However, the accusation that Facebook essentially lied to advertisers is an even bigger issue now. Aside from the user backlash against Beacon, the company’s integrity is being called into question, which could have implications for all of its online ad inventory, including that served up by partner Microsoft.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Yeah, teaching a canine how to operate a computer may sound pretty complex, but considering that one such animal was actually trained to sniff out and snag cellphones for its dubious owner, we guess it's not too difficult to conceive after all. In a recent study published in Animal Cognition, researchers from the University of Vienna in Austria taught four dogs to use computer automated touch-screens in order to carry out classification tests, theoretically eliminating any "potential human influence." In experiments that sought to see if dogs could indeed visually categorize pictures and transfer learning to new scenarios, the four subjects "were shown landscape and dog photographs and expected to make a selection on a computer touchscreen." Eventually, the authors concluded that using computers in animal testing could open up new windows of opportunity in testing cognitive abilities, but c'mon, you know those pups were just clicking around to see if their testing station would in fact play Doom.

[Via TheInquirer, image courtesy of Itchmo]

 

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

It was announced on Friday that AOL, formerly America Online, has stopped selling online videos, and, instead, have teamed up with Amazon’s Unbox service.

Just over a year old, it seems that AOL wants to shift all of its focus to the advertising business model, so has decided to remove its self from the competitive online video sales game all together. As of Friday, the AOL Video page instead displayed an ad for Amazon Unbox, the mega-retailer’s digital download service, and directed consumers to go there for their purchases.

Amazon will share a portion of the revenues with AOL, but no numbers were disclosed. Also unknown was if the video segment of AOL had performed to expectations or not.

This is the second major coup for Amazon in the video war as of late. Back in September it was NBC who left Apple’s iTunes Store to join with Amazon. Apparently Amazon isn’t happy with just shipping millions of boxes a day any more.

(via AP)

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Filed under: Laptops

 

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

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An interesting article over at the NY Times details the failure of Coca-Cola to follow through on its initial commitment as a Facebook partner in Beacon. Coke had been named as a “Landmark Partner” in Beacon along with Verizon and Blockbuster when Facebook announced Beacon November 6.

Notably Coca-Cola didn’t realize that Beacon wouldn’t be opt-in, and this was key in their withdrawal of support, and continued absence from the program:

“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing, this morning..“I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”

As we know Facebook has now flipped on Beacon, switching to an opt-in model after widespread criticism from users and groups including Moveon.org. The evolving story though is how Facebook got to this point, particularly given key partners were led to believe that the program was opt-in, suggesting that someone, or something caused Facebook to switch to an opt-out model at the 11th hour.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Filed under: HDTV

Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV -- with its 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a ridiculous 3mm thin enclosure -- has been unboxed over at TV Snob. Next to all of its accessories, the XEL-1 looks rather less appealing when compared to the clean press shots. In particular, we're left a little confused as to what the deal is with that ugly external power brick: isn't that what the big box underneath the screen was for?

 

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