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ASUS’ stylish Designo MS monitors might not be quite on the same diet as the world’s thinnest LCDs, but they’re plenty svelte enough to collect glances of envious admiration. Suffering from a rather severe case of techno-lust, the Electric Pig crew got to handle a 23.6-inch sample and couldn’t stop talking about the sex appeal of the exterior — they were even big fans of the circular stand on the back of the display, which we suspect will have as many supporters as detractors. In spite of packing a full 1920 x 1080 resolution, the MS246 failed to impress with the quality of its output, but then if it was as gorgeous on the inside it’d have an Apple sticker on the front. Right? We kid, honestly. Calm down with a gallery of images at the read link.

Filed under: Displays

ASUS Designo MS gets handled, gushed over originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You asked, questioned and implored — why, with all these underpowered touchscreen all-in-ones prowling our lands, can we not get a decent standalone touchscreen monitor? Well, somebody somewhere listened, and somebody else, presumably elsewhere, leaked. Presenting the entirely unofficial, but all the same real, Dell SX2210T: a 1920 x 1080 21.5-inch panel that has HDMI and DVI inputs alongside an integrated 2 megapixel webcam and microphone for your Skyping convenience. If its 1,000:1 contrast ratio and 2ms grey-to-grey response time sound familiar, it’s because the non-touch sensitive SX2210 has been available for a while already. From the support documentation we’re looking at, you’ll need to hook up an extra USB connection for the touch interface, which doesnt appear to be multitouch, but we can always hope for a miraculous firmware update down the line, right?

Update: More info has surfaced on this monitor, which can now be purchased for $469 from Dell’s online store, and will come with multtitouch panning and zooming when attached to a Windows 7 machine.

[Thanks, Bruce and dennispg]

Filed under: Displays

Dell SX2210T adds touchscreen functionality to 1080p panel (Update: multitouch!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been far, far too long (read: four months) since we’ve heard a peep from the gentle souls over at Pixel Qi, but it looks like the long, heart-wrenching wait for the hybrid display that’s bound to revolutionize Western civilization is nearing an end. According to the startup’s CEO herself, Mary Lou Jepsen, the primetime-ready 3Qi display should make its glorious debut on an undisclosed tablet to be announced next month. For those out of the loop, this transflective display contains both e-ink and LCD properties, one for outdoor reading scenarios and the other for multimedia viewing. The amazing part is that toggling between the two is as simple as flipping a switch, which obviously means great things for battery life on whatever device it’s shoved into. We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for more, but do us a favor and cross your fingers for good luck. Toes too, por favor.

[Thanks, Tom]

Filed under: Displays

Pixel Qi e-ink / LCD hybrid display to debut on tablet next month? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While penning our Zune HD review, we were initially quite baffled by our inability to do much of anything with it after installing Microsoft’s newest firmware update. Our concern had been properly kiboshed by assurances from the company that we’d gotten a fluke unit… and by the properly working replacement we received to finish the review with. Now, however, it seems as if we weren’t alone in our glass cage of emotion, with gaggles of irate Zune HD users emerging from the woodwork in order to express their disappointment online. Hop on past the break for a video of the issues we were having, and if you’re seeing something eerily similar on your own device, drop a vote / comment below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Poll: Has your Zune HD screen been unresponsive?

Filed under: Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Poll: Has your Zune HD screen been unresponsive? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flickr has long had a way to note other users’ pictures that you think are worth saving. But the “Add To Faves” function is rather single serving, and not very social like the rest of Flickr. Today, the service is launching a new feature called “Galleries” to expand your interaction with others’ photos.

Basically, Galleries allow you to curate up to 18 photos from anywhere on Flickr into your own hand-made gallery. Previously, if you wanted to make a group of pictures surround something, you could only do it with your own. With Galleries, if you wanted to make a collection of the 18 best pictures taken at TechCrunch50, for example, you can easily do that, no matter who took the picture.

The top portion of these Galleries are the thumbnails and below each of them is the large-sized versions of the pictures in a stream. Clicking on any of the thumbnails jumps you down to the portion of the page where that particular picture resides. Here’s a particularly artsy one for you.

To add a picture to a gallery, just click the “Add to gallery” link in a picture’s menu bar.

[photo: flickr/marshall astor]

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Though it already broke cover at IFA out in Germany a few days ago, LG’s just sealed the deal on its very first Android phone — the GW620 landscape QWERTY slider. Interestingly, the “Etna” name seen at IFA is missing from the official press release, but otherwise, the 3-inch touchscreen mentioned lines up nicely with what we’d previously known. Camera specs aren’t mentioned here, but as far as we know, it’s going to clock in at 5 megapixels and the phone looks to be loaded with a very bone-stock Android build sans LG-specific enhancements like an S-Class port. Interestingly, the GW620 flies in the face of LG’s super-cozy relationship with Microsoft and its commitment to concentrate on WinMo in its smartphone line, but you can tell that the company’s wording in the release is very carefully-chosen: the phone is geared at “making the smartphone experience more accessible for typical users” and “young professionals who demand a full QWERTY keypad,” which we guess makes WinMo a more business-savvy platform in LG’s eyes. We think we’re comfortable with that characterization — for now, anyway. Look for the GW620 to start showing up in “select European markets” in the fourth quarter of the year.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

LG officially announces GW620, its first Android phone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter Search is great, but you have to be on Twitter’s site or one of the third-party apps to use it. This requires an active approach; you must enter terms and load or reload the results to get what you want. That’s why Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great, it would ping you every time a keyword you were searching for came up. Unfortunately, as growth exploded, Twitter had to axe the feature. But third parties have slowly been bringing it back. And a new one offers a pretty nice way of doing it.

Exclaim Track is a very simple service. It’s Twitter track over IM. Right now, it works with Google Talk (via Jabber), and all you have to do is follow exclaimtrack@appspot.com. Once that name is on your contact list, simply IM it with “track <keyword>” and it will IM you all Twitter mentions of the term you put in.

But here’s why Exclaim Track is really great: It’s so simple to both track and un-track items. For example, today is the Michigan/Notre Dame football game. I can’t watch it because I’m stuck at the office doing work for TechCrunch50 (hope to see you there Monday and Tuesday). I want to know what people are saying about the game, but don’t want to keep reloading Twitter Search, so instead I set up an Exclaim Track query, and now I’m getting pinged every time something comes up. After the game is over, I won’t care about the search anymore, so I simply type “remove <keyword>” and it’s gone.

You can also easily turn notifications on or off simply by IMing “on” or “off” to the Exlcaim Track IM account. That’s great if you want to mute notifications, but don’t necessarily want to remove a term. Also, you can search multiple terms at the same time, so removing all of them to quite the service might be a pain, without the “off” command.

Exclaim Track is a part of Excla.im, a service which allows you to update your Twitter status via IM. The developer, Harper Reed, set up this new tracking feature using the Pubsubhubbub real-time pinging service and Superfeedr, which does real-time feed parsing. He simply used Google’s App Engine for the messaging and hosting aspects, so the service actually costs him nothing to run.

One small downside to Exclaim Track is that when you first start tracking a keyword, it will find most of the recent mentions of the term that are available in Twitter Search. This means you’ll get a punch of non-real-time information. But once this runs through (usually just seconds or minutes), you’ll start to see new results pop-up in near real time. “Near” is an important thing to note, it’s not quite real time, but it’s usually pretty close, usually under a minute of the mention on Twitter.

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There’s been a big brouhaha over comments Steve Jobs made to NYT’s David Pogue in an interview following Apple’s event on Wednesday. Basically, most people are interpreting what Jobs said about eBook readers to mean that Apple plans to completely stay away from the market. But that’s not actually what Jobs said at all.

How do we know? Because before Pogue re-wrote his interview, he posted the transcription of the Q&A, which still resides in Google’s cache. Here’s the relevant part:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

Translation: We’re making a tablet, and eBooks will be a part of those.

Jobs isn’t saying Apple isn’t interested in eBooks, he’s saying that Apple isn’t interested in making a stand-alone eBook reader. And they shouldn’t be. While the devices will exist for a while, eventually the thought that this won’t be a functionality wrapped into other devices is silly. Why carry around multiple devices when you can carry around one? That’s kind of Apple’s thing, isn’t it?

Basically, a lot of people are wrongly translating Jobs’ thoughts about eBook readers as eBooks themselves. eBooks are a huge portion of the App Store, why wouldn’t Apple want to expand their support of them? They do, and they are. It’s just going to be on their tablet device or their other devices, not some stand-alone reader.

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What do you do when you’re sitting on a nearly endless torrent of finely-focused content and a few million bucks in venture capital? You go mobile.

That’s exactly what Glam Media, the distributed media network behind the womens lifestyle site Glam.com and its male-oriented counterpart Brash.com, is about to do. As one of the fastest growing sites on the web, its taken a bit longer for them to take on the mobile front than we would have guessed – but their quest to conquer portables begins tomorrow.

We’ll caution you — this could all just be one big misunderstanding (or a case of the fat fingered admin), but Motorola’s newly launched CLIQ is currently listed for $0.00 on contract over at T-Mobile (and $399.99 with no strings attached). Available in both Winter White and Midnight Titanium, the outfit’s first-ever Android phone can’t actually be added to one’s cart (trust us, we tried… repeatedly), but if these figures are right, we can surely say that the barrier to entry on higher-end smartphones will soon be demolished. Giddy yet?

Update: Aw, seems like someone on the other end already caught wind of the slip-up and yanked it. So, can we take that as confirmation?

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola CLIQ listed for free on contract at T-Mobile, $400 straight-up originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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