Apparently, a press release company accidentally released information about the Sony Ericsson Kurara (now known officially as “Vivaz”) before it was intended to be released. The news was subsequently yanked, but some have got their hands on the information.
The Sony Ericsson Kurara, which now bears an unfortunate official name, Vivaz, is a Symbian S60-based phone, featuring an 8.1 megapixel camera, GPS, 802.11b/g and Bluetooth. The phone uses microSD/microSDHC, seeing that Sony Ericsson has dropped support on Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards. It has a 3.5” 360x640 pixel touchscreen display. As with other Sony Ericsson phones, the camera looks pretty good as it supports HD 720p video recording (and playback, of course), with auto focus, face detection, smile detection and digital zoom. Unfortunately, it comes with an LED flash, rather than a Xenon flash.
It comes in 4 colors, Silver Moon, Cosmic Black, Galaxy Blue and Venus Ruby, and will be released in Q1 of 2010, at around $670 and $750.
The semi-rugged Samsung NB30, which was previously revealed during CES 2010, is now available for sale on Newegg. The Samsung NB30, built for rough usage, features a spill-resistant keyboard and a fingerprint-resistant lid that protects it from minor scratches. It also has a hard drive protection system, designed to protect your hard disk by shutting it off in the event of a fall.
The rest if the specs don’t really stand out among the sea of netbooks currently available on the market. It sports a 10.1” 1024x600 pixel display, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, integrated GMA 3150 graphics, 160GB hard drive and 802.11b/g/n WiFi. It runs on Windows 7 Starter Edition, a lightweight version of Windows 7. Its 6 Cell 4400mAh Lithium Ion battery provides up to 6.5 hours of usage. It’s priced at $369.99 plus $4.99 for shipping.
T-Mobile has just lowered the pricing on two BlackBerry handsets. The models that were graced with lower pricing include the Bold 9700 and Curve 8520. As far as how much lower, the Bold 9700 was lowered from $199.99 down to $129.99 and the Curve 8520 from $129.99 down to $79.99. Not bad for either model, of course, you will still be required to sign a two-year agreement in order to see that price.
FROM GAMERTELL - When an earthquake devastated Haiti, Gaians act to provide support through donations. click through to find out how Gaia Online will match your donations… MORE »
It is still unclear as to whether or not the Windows Mobile 7 and Zune rumors are true, but that did not stop Iyaz Akhtar, Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun.com and myself from trying to make some sense of them today. You can watch the video here, or head on over to Tech Vi where you can see the episode we just wrapped up as well as many others.
Twitter is back up and returning to normal following a service disruption that knocked the site offline for nearly 2 hours earlier this morning. Twitter’s official blog had this to say about the incident:
We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Update (5:18a): We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.
While the outage was inconvenient for some, in all fairness Twitter has been doing quite well since the major DDoS attack that knocked it and several other sites offline back in August. Still no word on what caused the “sudden failure” but it happened just after the news broke that another major earthquake had struck Haiti, leading some to wonder if a large volume of tweets about the event is to blame.
FROM APPLETELL - Since Bill Snyder at PCWorld.com finds it acceptable to tear apart the usefulness of a device that’s still just a rumor, I feel comfortable in refuting his claims with some indefensible beliefs of my own. MORE »
In yet another display of censorship, China has announced it will begin scanning all text messages. The messages will automatically be scanned for keywords provided by the police. Any messages flagged and found to contain the keywords will be deemed "unhealthy" and the government has ordered cell providers to cut off service to the senders.
The government claims it is doing this as part of its efforts to protect citizens from pornography. It has already shut down hundreds of sites and issued threats of punishment to Google, ordering it to remove all traces of porn from search results or face stiff consequences.
China is becoming infamous for its increasing efforts to control its citizens' Internet access. Late last year it angered computer makers when it decreed that all computers sold in that country have special government approved filtering software installed. The software was programmed to block certain sites, and while the government claimed they were all porn sites, many were skeptical.
Really makes you glad you live in a free country, doesn't it?
We saw Verizon announce the increased ETF fees for “advanced” devices back in November and since then that has not only gone into effect, but also taken in question by the FCC. Unfortunately, that $350 ETF is still in effect, but in a slight bit of good news, Verizon has removed ten phones from that “advanced device” list. That could mean good news for owners of select feature phones to include the Motorola Krace and Samsung Rogue who have a contract and still need to cancel. Still, if you are using a smartphone such as a BlackBerry, Palm or something Android flavored you will remain stuck with the $350 ETF.
The day is finally here when you can spend more on media than on the device using the media. Panasonic Japan announced two new SDXC cards: a 48GB and a 64GB. The cards will be available February 19, presumably in Japan for $550 for the 48GB and $700 for the 64GB.
Toshiba announced the world’s first 64GB back in August but has only shipped samples so far. Production is expected in mass scale this spring. It appears Panasonic will get here first and claim the crown. The Panasonic cards write at 22MB/sec while the Toshiba’s were listed at 35MB/sec.
At CES this year, most manufacturers offered high-end cameras that could support these massive SD cards. According to Panasonic, the 48GB can store 6 hours and 20 minutes of full HD video, on the 64GB that number jumps to 8 hours and 30 minutes. For images at 4,000x3,000 resolution, the 48GB can hold 6,890 images while the 64GB can hold 9330 images. Crazy.
As like the gallery that I posted yesterday, this latest, which covers the Cignias NAO Symphony wireless music station is still getting the finishing touches in terms of a review. That said, check out some images of the device. And just to serve as a little teaser—this was a really cool gadget, and the wireless functionality made it really nice to use.
Asus and Boingo have recently announced a partnership that will mean select Eee PC netbooks will soon come pre-installed with Boingo Wireless software.
“Boingo Wireless, the global leader in Wi-Fi, today announced that ASUS Eee PC netbooks will be pre-loaded with Boingo software, allowing ASUS users to easily locate and access more than 125,000 Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide.”
The Eee models will include the Eee PC 1005PE, 1008P, and 1201IN. And in addition to the software coming pre-installed those users will also be able to take advantage of special 50% savings on the first three months of a Boingo Unlimited account or the first month of a Boingo Global account.
Twitter users hoping to get their fix over breakfast discovered the site was down-and as of 7:15am Eastern. Anyone trying to access the site gets what many users dub “the Fail Whale” a page announcing “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” All third party apps using the Twitter API seem to be down as well. I tried Tweetdeck on my desktop and UberTwitter on my BlackBerry and both failed to connect. It’s not clear what the problem is and since Twitter HQ is located on the West Coast, where it is still the middle of the night, it may be awhile before anyone knows. Some are speculating it might be another DDoS attack like the one that brought the site down a few months ago, courtesy of a group upset with a Georgian blogger and his outspoken views about the country’s conflicts with Russia. Stay tuned to Gadgetell for the latest!
T-Mobile has just lowered the pricing on two BlackBerry handsets. The models that were graced with lower pricing include the Bold 9700 and Curve 8520. As far as how much lower, the Bold 9700 was lowered from $199.99 down to $129.99 and the Curve 8520 from $129.99 down to $79.99. Not bad for either model, of course, you will still be required to sign a two-year agreement in order to see that price.
Twitter is back up and returning to normal following a service disruption that knocked the site offline for nearly 2 hours earlier this morning. Twitter’s official blog had this to say about the incident: 
In yet another display of censorship, China has announced it will begin scanning all text messages. The messages will automatically be scanned for keywords provided by the police. Any messages flagged and found to contain the keywords will be deemed "unhealthy" and the government has ordered cell providers to cut off service to the senders. 
We saw Verizon announce the increased ETF fees for “advanced” devices 
Asus and Boingo have recently announced a partnership that will mean select Eee PC netbooks will soon come pre-installed with Boingo Wireless software. 
Twitter users hoping to get their fix over breakfast discovered the site was down-and as of 7:15am Eastern. Anyone trying to access the site gets what many users dub “the Fail Whale” a page announcing “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” All third party apps using the Twitter API seem to be down as well. I tried Tweetdeck on my desktop and UberTwitter on my BlackBerry and both failed to connect. It’s not clear what the problem is and since Twitter HQ is located on the West Coast, where it is still the middle of the night, it may be awhile before anyone knows. Some are speculating it might be another DDoS attack like the one that brought the site down a few months ago, courtesy of a group upset with a Georgian blogger and his outspoken views about the country’s conflicts with Russia. Stay tuned to Gadgetell for the latest!
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