Toys & Gadgets

Alright, we’ll leave all the zingers for you and our mercurial staff to deliver, and just use this space to dish some info on the hardware. Ivor Kovic, an emergency physician from Croatia, has recently demoed a new iPhone cradle that turns the already multifunctional handset into a CPR assistance device. By using an app titled Pocket CPR and the built-in accelerometer, he can get audio and visual feedback to tell him if he’s doing it correctly, while his basic (but awesome) cradle allows for longer CPR sessions if necessary. Check out the video after the break, then hit the comments with your finest witticisms.

Paul: “Come on Luke Wilson’s Career, stay with me now, you’re not going to die on me!”
Darren: “Man, I could really get a better look at what’s going on if this thing had a 9.7-inch IPS panel…”
Chris: “Everyone is either dying or staying alive these days, and we began to ask ourselves: is there room for something in the middle?”
Nilay: “He then died.”
Vlad: “Our other cradle also measures rhythm and depth, though its purpose isn’t entirely medicinal.”
Andy: “A rare case where a lack of multitasking is actually helpful to the task on hand.”
Thomas: “Can you stop dying for a second, I have to take this call.”
Joe: “This actually adds an intriguing level of complexity to Super Monkey Ball 2.”
Richard Lai: “Come on… COME ON!! Wait a tick… AT&T? No wonder it isn’t working. Dammit.”
Tim: “Looks like this guy’s heart (puts on sunglasses)… has dropped its last call.” Yeeeaaaaaahhhh…

Continue reading Caption contest: iPhone as a CPR device

Caption contest: iPhone as a CPR device originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPhone OS provides no way to interact directly with documents or other files stored on the phone, rendering the device’s owners dependent on application developers to add to their apps methods to work with files. iPhone Explorer addresses that glaring oversight, and it’s free.

Is anyone really surprised that Microsoft Senior Product manager, Mike Tedesco, said, “Yeah, it’s something that we’re looking at,” when asked by T3 about Office for Mac running on the Apple iPad? Like any responsible corporation, Microsoft must keep an eye on developments in computing and align its resources accordingly. And when the majority of its wealth comes from the 1-2 punch of Windows and Office, you can bet Microsoft is looking at every opportunity that comes along. So while we fully expect Microsoft to take a wait-and-see approach to the numbers Apple can generate from the current dead zone between laptops and smartphones, at least we finally get to use the image above in a post.

Microsoft considering Office for iPad? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eager to get in on the whole “using your iPhone to pay for stuff” revolution? Too bad your wallet is vehemently disagreeing right now. At any rate, the folks behind the Square iPhone payment system have finally seen fit to open up their solution to the public, but only in the form of a pilot. If you’re interested to be one of the few scratching the impulse-buy-itch with a cellphone dongle, hit that source link to sign up. For the rest of ya, there’s an explanatory video after the break.

Continue reading Square opens public trial for iPhone payment system

Square opens public trial for iPhone payment system originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here, finally, is one point on which the two giants of computing, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, completely disagree on. Steve says netbooks are better at nothing, whereas Bill’s view is the polar opposite:

“You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that.”

Unimpressed by the iPad, Bill goes on to say that he considers it a “nice reader,” but not something that made him wish Microsoft had done it first. Don’t tell that to Disney CEO Robert Iger though, who brings out the dreaded “game changer” tag when describing the potential he sees in the iPad for the creation of “essentially new forms of content.” Lest we forget, Steve Jobs also sits on the Disney board, so this could be just a friendly tip of the hat by Iger. Either way, we’re curious to see what new content Disney might scratch up, as well as to find out who’s right in this newfound binary question: keyboard-equipped netbooks or longevous, ultrathin tablets — what say you?

Bill Gates thinks the iPad needs a keyboard, Disney CEO loves it as it is originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Opera’s browser is already on many devices — phones, computers, and even Nintendo’s Wii. But there’s one key device missing: Apple’s iPhone. At Mobile World Congress, Opera will preview a version of Mini for the iPhone. But why?

I didn’t take a tablet on my recent business trip, and found myself continually wishing I had one with me. Tablets make it easier (and more fun) to jump online and get things done. I believe the iPad is going to be a big success.

Welcome to ‘This day in Engadget’, where we crack open the archives and take a whimsical look back at the memories and moments of our storied past. Please join us on this trip down random access memory lane.

On February 6th, 2007 Apple CEO Steve Jobs published his “Thoughts on Music” letter. iTunes was by then the major player in online distribution, and the iPod had become the widely recognized face of portable music. DRM was controversial and pretty much universally disdained, and Jobs took the opportunity to write a letter pinpointing what he thought were the three options moving forward in the digital music distribution model. Essentially, he felt Apple (and the rest of the music loving world) had three choices: stay the course (DRM intact), move to the company’s FairPlay licensing model, or envision a future which was DRM-free. Jobs made no bones about it: he and Apple hoped to “embrace” the end of DRM (under pressure from the EU, of course). Arguing that DRM hadn’t stopped piracy, he conveniently called for the major labels to license their music to Apple DRM-free. On January 9th of 2009, Apple did announce that some of the music in its iTunes store would be purchasable DRM-free, though it still makes use of FairPlay for apps and video. Jobs will have to continue fighting the good fight, we suppose.

Also on this date:

February 6th, 2009: The Kindle 2 seemed like it might be leaking (it was), Roku moved into private beta with Amazon Video on Demand, and Microsoft denied it was making a phone.

February 6th, 2008: Ford announced it would offer its F-150 with an in-dash computer (amongst other things), a bunch of undersea cables were reportedly cut leaving much of the world with no internet and no Engadget, and the Xbox 360 HD DVD player hit an all-time low price of $130.

February 6th, 2007: Apple asked the FCC to keep its iPhone secrets confidential until the 15th of June, Hasbro recalled nearly a million Easy Bake Ovens to the dismay of little girls everywhere, and Sony Ericsson officially outed its W880 (Ai) Walkman musicphone.

February 6th, 2006: The PSP was officially rumored to be getting both email and GPS, LG outed its F3000 cellphone which went ‘vroom vroom’ whenever you got a text, and Mobile ESPN went live.

February 6th, 2005: The world was a flutter with the news of how to unlock a GSM Treo 650, while signing up for a year of Napster to Go brought with it a free iRiver H10.

February 6th, 2004: Hey, Engadget didn’t exist yet!

This day in Engadget: Steve Jobs calls for an end to DRM originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For your viewing pleasure, we present the latest Apple rumor doing the rounds this Saturday afternoon — namely, GeekBench results for a “new” Core i7 MacBook Pro. According to the results, what you’re looking at above are the numbers for the MacBook Pro 6,1, sporting a nastified Intel Core i7 (dual core, not quad) 620M (Arrandale) percolating along at 2.66GHz. Other curious points here are the 4.8GHz FSB, which sounds a little screwy to us, and a final GeekBench score of 5260, which makes current MBPs clocked at the same speed look like your grandfather with a walker (those ranges hover around 3700-4000 on average). The laptop in question is also allegedly running a fresh version of Snow Leopard (build 10C3067 of 10.6.2), which certainly makes sense if someone is out there benching a new Apple product, though it’s not a number we can verify. Still, if you were using a new Apple product, would you be dumb enough to publicly share this info? Probably not, which of course raises the question that this might just be a hackintosh or some other clever spoof (even if we did see a suggestion of new MBPs on the way recently). In the meantime, you can dream of having your pants burnt off by the above monster, and we’ll let you know if this thing starts looking a little more real.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Is a Core i7-based MacBook Pro strutting its specs in the wild? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

At the introduction of the iPad, Steve Jobs showed a simple slide illustrating one of the burning questions in the industry for many years. On the left was a smartphone. On the right was a laptop. And in the middle was a gap. Apple, like many companies in the PC industry, was seeking to create a product that filled this gap. Indeed, the iPad itself reflects elements of the Apple devices that flank it. Its enclosure resembles the silver metallic enclosure of a MacBook Pro, but inside, it has the ARM processor architecture and operating system of the iPhone.

But the iPad is but the latest in a long line of products and would-be general-purpose devices that seeks to fill this gap, most of them short-lived. Some of the more recent ones include the aborted Palm Foleo, the Sony Mylo, Nokia Internet Tablets, UMPCs, and MIDs. Why are so many companies convinced there is opportunity in these products?

Let’s turn back the clock to 2002, the year Handspring launched its first smartphone, the monochrome 160 x 160-pixel Treo 180. It was the year that Verizon Wireless launched the first 3G network in the U.S. and the year MobileStar declared bankruptcy after deploying public Wi-Fi throughout many Starbucks locations in 2001. In 2002, PC World awarded its World Class Award for ultralight notebooks to the Fujitsu LifeBook P-2000. It was less than three pounds and had a 10.6-inch screen, but was 1.6-inches thick and had a starting price of $1,499. And it couldn’t access Facebook, Hulu, YouTube or Engadget — because they didn’t exist.

Continue reading Switched On: Mined the gap

Switched On: Mined the gap originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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