Forget chocolates, Samsung offers pink NC10 for Valentine gifting

If a pink MSI Wind isn’t the way to your significant other’s heart, Samsung has an alternative for you in the form of a rose-colored NC10. The similarly-spec’d 10.2-inch netbook sports a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, and Windows XP Home. Additionally, it’s got a suspiciously-long 7-hour battery life and anti-germ keyboard. UK retailer dabs has it listed for £316 ($434) with VAT and a February 9 release date. Let’s just hope she doesn’t lament the color choice come March.

[Via Portable Monkey]

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Read - Dabs product page

Filed under: Laptops

Forget chocolates, Samsung offers pink NC10 for Valentine gifting originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What You Can Expect from Windows Mobile 6.5 Next Month [Windows Mobile 6.5]

Andrew Lees, Microsoft’s dude in charge of cellphone software told the NY Times in so many words what you can expect from Windows Mobile 6.5 at Mobile World Congress next month. Some’s good, some’s clueless.

What we’re expecting to see next month is Windows Mobile 6.5, with a new UI, and the debut of Microsoft’s cloud syncing services, codenamed SkyBox. Lees obliquely confirmed a lot of that, and says they get that people want to do more with their phones than extend their soul-killing jobs past the eroding boundaries between work and home: “We want also to do human things like photos, music, communications, IM, texting and social networking.”

He talks in the abstract, but this seems like an example of what SkyBox will do on a Windows Mobile phone: “When you take a picture it should automagically arrive on your PC and be in the cloud. I should be able to fix the red eye on the PC and have it automagically go back and fix the red eye everywhere else.” Most of the sync services are going to be free (take that, MobileMe) but some you’ll have to pay for: “I don’t think anyone is going to make money on synchronizing data,” says Lees. “It is simply what people will come to expect.”

Microsoft clearly gets it, in those few respects—syncing data should be part of the package, and people want to do all kinds of entertainment stuff with their phone easily. So the fact that their strategy to make money is to keep making a profit by charging hardware makers a license fee for Windows seems slightly anachronistic, given the current mobile environment. His response to why companies (and people) will pick Windows Mobile over the very free Android just sounds remarkably out of touch:

“They are going to look around at what their options are and say ‘Is open source going to do all the things I need to do to compete with Windows Mobile?’” he said. “Is it going to create the social experience, the e-mail experience and all the other experiences people want?”

As a matter of fact, Android does all of those things remarkably well. But maybe Windows Mobile will blow our skirts up anyway next month. I hope. Zunephone! [Bits]

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Do You Work at Circuit City? [Circuit City]

If you work at Circuit City, I’m interested in hearing your stories on what it’s like to work at the store during its final days. Drop me a line.

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‘Generic Escape Capsule’ May Be the Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Seen [Isolation]

Sometimes, when life’s getting you down, you just need to hole yourself up in a modified wardrobe, sitting on a chair with a hole cut in the seat for you to poop through.

The wardrobe, designed by Australian artist Adam Norton, features everything you need to live, from the aforementioned toilet chair to a cooking setup, bookshelf and even a periscope to see if anyone from the outside world is coming to get you.

I’m just going to keep telling myself that this is just an art project and that no one would actually hide in it for an extended period of time. I just have to.

[Treehugger via Make]

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Apple records another record quarter — $1.61B profit
Apple just announced its quarterly results, and it looks the brutal economy isn’t bruising the fruit at all — the company posted a record $1.61B profit on $10.17B in revenue. Adjusted to reflect the subscription accounting Apple uses for the iPhone and Apple TV, that’s $2.3B of income on $11.8B of revenue. Sales were all strong — Macs were up nine percent to 2.5M sold, iPods up three percent to 22.7M sold, and iPhones were up 88 percent to 4.3M sold. If you’re keeping track, that means Apple’s now sold well over 10M iPhone 3Gs on top of beating its goal of 10M total iPhones in 2008, which is pretty tremendous. Acting CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer are taking questions from analysts now, we’ll let you know if anything interesting happens — as you’d expect, the first question was “How’s Steve?” and it got basically a non-answer.

2:18PM - After rattling off Apple’s core goals and beliefs, Tim Cook said that “regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.” Neither him or Peter would speak to succession plans or comment on Steve’s health.

Continue reading Apple records another record quarter — $1.61B profit

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops

Apple records another record quarter — $1.61B profit originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To the Chagrin of Rich Geeks Everywhere, Russians Killing Space Tourism Program [Space Tourism]

Richard Garriot and other well-to-do nerds will no longer be able to play spaceman, now that Russia’s canceling its astrotourism program to make way for three real astronauts at the International Space Station.

Russian Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters that ex-Microsoft man Charles Simonyi will be the last private space passenger. He’ll be blasting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in March.

He said they were canceling the lucrative tourism program in order to expand the space station crew to six. That way Canadian, European and Japanese astronauts can finally live aboard the project their countries helped create. Scientific research will also be boosted from an average of 10 hours a week to 35.

Luckily, even if the Russians won’t do it anymore, private enterprises are ramping up to make sure rich people will always get to live out their childhood dreams. Anyone care for a spin on Virgin Galactic? [MSNBC via Slashdot]

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Tweet-a-Watt, Because It’s OK To Brag About Energy Efficiency [Smug Alert]

Phil at Make has developed a mod for the Kill-A-Watt power meter: Tweet-a-Watt transmits your daily power usage to Twitter via PC, so friends and strangers will know you’re a smug, super-green SOB.

The Kill-A-Watt is already one of my favorite toys, capable of telling me just how much of a juice hog the Pioneer first-gen Kuro plasma is when compared to any LCD anywhere ever (about twice), or the PS3 is when compared to a standard Blu-ray player (10X or more).

What our buddy Phil Torrone and Limor Fried of Adafruit have done as an entry in Core77’s Greener Gadgets competition is made it useful as a tracker, or maybe a bragger.

When it gets a reading of your daily KWH usage, it blasts it via Xbee wireless transmitter to a PC “or internet-connected microcontroller, like an Arduino.” (I did mention Phil Torrone came up with this, didn’t I?) From there, it’s just an easy hop from your Twitter account.

Why tweet your damn KWH? Here’s what Phil says:

We feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH - by sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers.

So like, “Na na na-na na—my carbon output makes your carbon output look like a Chinese toy factory’s carbon output!” [Make via CrunchGear]

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