According to a leaked specifications list, LG has a Prada II handset in the works, and it sounds like it will be packing quite a punch. The details that have been leaked suggest the cellphone will have a 3-inch (400×240) WQVGA touchscreen, 5MP camera, front mounted camera for video calling, Wi-Fi connectivity, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, USB 2.0, Full HTML browser, FM radio, TV-out, microSDHC support and—we just can’t believe it until we see it— a full, slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
LG will be working on all the decent phone features, while Prada will be putting together crap themes, annoying ringtones and other stuff to ensure the handset is just a little rubbish. The LG Prada successor is expected to launch in Q4, 2008. We’re excited. [Eprice via Unwired View]
Oh bum bot. We remember when you were fresh out of the hands of creator Rufus Terrill. Now look at you — featured on the Colbert Report. You may have seen photos of this vagrant-deterring robot before, but you haven’t lived till you’ve seen the hard-hitting, in-depth coverage that Stephen Colbert delivers on it. Take a look at the video after the break to see a defender of America (and bot) on the front lines of battle.
Are you one of those lousy parents that won’t buy a dog for your kids but try to pass off a goldfish as a pet that’s just as good? Well, if you want to help your case that fish are just as fun as an adorable golden retriever, there’s the R2 Fish School. It’ll let you train a goldfish to do such tricks as play basketball and swim around objects in its tank. The excitement never ends, as the ridiculous instructional clip after the jump demonstrates.
Essentially, it looks like this is your basic reward system, with a special food wand making it easier to jam food right in your goldfish’s face when it does something right. Of course, you can’t scratch it behind the ears or take it for walks or go outside and play with it, but a coldhearted parent like you doesn’t care about things like that, do you? [R2 Fish School]
Ready for some honesty? We can think of a good handful of timepieces that we’d buy before we dropped $629.95 on this catastrophe, but for folks with pants too slim and hands too full to carry around a separate cellphone, we suppose it’s a so-so alternative. The EGP-WP98 claims to be the first quad-band GSM watch phone to come with Windows CE 5.0 installed, and while it’s supposed to tout a SIM card slot, water-resistance, a 266MHz CPU and a 1.45-inch display with handwriting recognition (for real?), that little line informing us that specifications are “subject to change without notice” makes us a touch leery. Nevertheless, you can also expect (though you may not get) a 1.3-megapixel camera, WiFi, a T-Flash expansion slot, multimedia player and built-in Bluetooth. According to one particular e-tailer, it’ll be ready to ship on April 25th — whether or not anyone’s fat-fingered enough to push an order through, however, remains to be seen.
Now here’s something we love to see: Tanya Andersen, a 45-year-old single mother, is taking on the RIAA for their sleazy tactics and appears to be winning. After being sued for piracy and having the case dismissed, she decided to go ahead and sue the RIAA for conspiracy. She argues that the way the RIAA snoops around looking for people to sue is in violation of the law, as is the way they try to extort settlements out of people without going to trial. BusinessWeek has a whole profile of Andersen and her battle against the RIAA, and it’s well worth the read. Go check it out; it’s not like you’ve got other stuff to do. [BusinessWeek via CrunchGear]
According to Zune Insider, the Red Zune 80 is starting to show up in retail stores after a stint at Zune Originals. The color must be hot, hot, hot! [Zune Insider]
Just in case you need 500 pixels or more to really determine whether something is sexy or not, MSI has finally put together a sweet pack of press shots that really do the Wind justice. Needless to say, we’d be mighty hesitant to start bangin’ out the 42nd page of our dissertation with grease-covered digits on this beauty. Did someone say high maintenance? Hit the read link for lots more looks.
What do you know? The former OLPC head of software and content did indeed resign at least partially over NickNeg’s growing fondness of Windows XP. In a recent soul-spilling interview with xconomy, Walter Bender made clear that he resigned his post at the non-profit due to the general de-emphasis of “radical projects like Sugar,” the innovative XO user interface which Mr. Bender was unsurprisingly neck-deep in during his stay. Essentially, he felt as if the outfit had stopped trying to “be disruptive” and started “trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers,” hence Walter darting out “to do his own thing.” Needless to say, the lead developer of Sugar isn’t satisfied with seeing his work forgotten, and while details have yet to be worked out, he is looking to “find a new central home for the community of educators and software developers who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.”
Yep, we’re mandating that this one be filed in the rumor folder for now, but according to a report from ThinkPanmure, AT&T Mobility is planning to move up to 7 million femtocells acquired from UK-based ip.access. As the story goes, AT&T inked a contract with the aforesaid firm for up to half a billion dollars in femtocells over five years, and it’s supposedly aiming to sell each to end users for “as little as $100.” As expected, spokespeople for AT&T and ip.access weren’t around / didn’t care to comment on the matter, but a dame from the former did admit that it was “examining the potential benefits of femtocells through lab tests and planned to conduct a trial later this year.” Of course, AT&T wouldn’t be the first US carrier to offer the boxes, but it’s not like Sprint’s $49.99 Airave set any sales records or anything when it launched late last year.
Daryl J. Roy isn’t your average Sprint sales drone. Service doesn’t stop just because you’ve got the receipt and walked out the door. Have you ever checked out Sprint’s picture mail? He wanted to make sure Nicole McElveen did after she purchased some new phones from him. So he sent her a few picture messages, even though she didn’t pay for the service, before really showing off the resolution and clarity of their cameras with full-frontal nude pics of himself. Just to make sure she saw how good the pictures were, he re-sent them three different times.
Now she’s suing Sprint and Daryl for $1 million—her husband, David, adds in the filing that the toll on his wife from the pictures has cost him the “services, companionship, love, affection and consortium of his wife.” Daryl says that’s total BS, they had corresponded over text messages, and she had asked for photos of him and that she actually “expressed her appreciation for receiving such photographs.”
Usually the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but honestly, I don’t want to get anywhere near this thing, much less thrust my consciousness into the center of it. [Dayton Daily News via Crunchgear]