CrunchGear |  |
- Daily Crunch: From Beyond the Grave Edition
- Climbers Can Now Make 3G Calls From Mount Everest
- Half Of IT People Polled Plan To Stick With XP After It Expires
- Review: T-Mobile G2
- Canon Applies For Patent On New 24-70 F/2.8L Lens
- CherryPad Review Is Less Than Enthusiastic
- Notion Ink: Adam Gets 6-20 Hours Of Battery Life
- SteelSeries’ 30 Percent Off Halloween Sale; Pay For Your Gear At 7-Eleven Stores With PayNearMe
- The ZAGG invisibleSHIELD Swears To Protect And Defend Your New MacBook Air
- New Flexible AMOLED Screen Is A Tenth Of A Millimeter Thick
- Nice Boots: Cristiano Ronaldo’s CR Mercurial Vapor SuperFly II Have Dynamically Adjusting Studs
- Good Old Games Is Having A Good Old Halloween Sale
- iRiver’s Cover Story E-Reader Shows Up At FCC
- iPazzPort: A Tiny Keyboard and Touchpad For Your Pleasure
- SOCOM Coming To Android, And I Ain’t Talking About The Game
- Decline In DVD Sales & Rampant Piracy Force Indie Wrestling To Internet Pay-Per-View
- Latest iPhone 4 Clone Looks Close To The Real Thing
- London Underground To Get Wi-Fi To Prep For 2012 Olympics
- Coming Soon: 900GB Torrent Of (Mostly) Every Geocities Web Site Ever
- Amid Android Competiton, Microsoft Charges Rights Fees For Taiwanese Manufacturers
| Daily Crunch: From Beyond the Grave Edition Posted: 30 Oct 2010 12:00 AM PDT
Coming Soon: 900GB Torrent Of (Mostly) Every Geocities Web Site Ever
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| Climbers Can Now Make 3G Calls From Mount Everest Posted: 29 Oct 2010 05:41 PM PDT
Before the 3G install, hikers could only make voice calls. Sadly, the iPhone 4 still won’t support Facetime over 3G, even from near the cusp of space.
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| Half Of IT People Polled Plan To Stick With XP After It Expires Posted: 29 Oct 2010 05:30 PM PDT
The study, by Dimensional Research, polled 950 IT professionals, and about half said they’d upgrade by April 2014 (XP’s expiration date), the other half said they’ll stand by their OS. The only trouble with all that is that once XP stops being supported, it’ll start being vulnerable. Security holes discovered in the final patches will remain unaddressed, though I imagine that a non-Microsoft unofficial support community will arise in their absence. For internal networks, though, or other less-exposed situations, XP will likely stay viable for as long as its file system and basic underpinnings are still supported by newer OSes. Who knows how long that will be, but I don’t think XP will be disappearing from the world any time soon. More info from the study can be found over at Computer World.
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| Posted: 29 Oct 2010 04:31 PM PDT
Read on for our full review of Google’s latest flagship handset.
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| Canon Applies For Patent On New 24-70 F/2.8L Lens Posted: 29 Oct 2010 04:00 PM PDT
The source quotes some dimensions that appear to put the new lens at a much larger size than the existing one, a move I think is unlikely, so let’s take this with a grain of salt. The new lens appears to have the same number of elements, but fewer groups, which could improve optical qualities. Beyond that I’m not sure. Hopefully we’ll find out more soon. Of course, I can’t afford this thing anyway; it’d likely debut above the 24-70′s present price, so somewhere around $1500, perhaps? [via Canon Rumors]
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| CherryPad Review Is Less Than Enthusiastic Posted: 29 Oct 2010 03:30 PM PDT
That hasn’t stopped people from ordering this thing, because hey, it’s light, it’s cheap, and it does the basic Android stuff. But it sounds like if you want a quality Android experience, at the moment it’s far more practical to spend just a little more and avoid the troubles that accompany cost-cutting measures.
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| Notion Ink: Adam Gets 6-20 Hours Of Battery Life Posted: 29 Oct 2010 03:00 PM PDT
Their testing showed the battery floor to be around six hours — and that’s constantly playing 1080p video or streaming YouTube HD stuff. 15-20 hours appears to be the maximum, however, when you have a bit more variety in your activities: browsing, reading e-books, playing Bejeweled, etc. This definitely places the Adam in the elite class of battery life, up there with the iPad and new MacBook Air. The Pixel Qi screen takes the credit for a lot of that, I’m thinking, but it’s still an impressive feat. I’m really looking forward to trying one of these guys out, if they ever do come out, that is.
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| SteelSeries’ 30 Percent Off Halloween Sale; Pay For Your Gear At 7-Eleven Stores With PayNearMe Posted: 29 Oct 2010 02:30 PM PDT
Two bits of SteelSeries news for you. One, they, just like pretty much everyone else, are having a Halloween sale right now. You can get 30 percent off the Siberia V2 Black headset, Xai mouse, and Shift keyboard when you use the code SPOOKY31. Item two. SteelSeries has hooked up with PayNearMe to give you another option to pay for your gaming gear. Using the PayNearMe option, you select select and buy your item(s) on the SteelSeries Web site, like always, but then you actually pay for your stuff at your local 7-Eleven store. So, if, for whatever reason, you don’t like giving your credit card information over the Internet, you can still shop online, but then actually hand over cash or plastic to a real live human being. And that’s about it, yes.
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| The ZAGG invisibleSHIELD Swears To Protect And Defend Your New MacBook Air Posted: 29 Oct 2010 02:00 PM PDT
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| New Flexible AMOLED Screen Is A Tenth Of A Millimeter Thick Posted: 29 Oct 2010 01:40 PM PDT
Who knows, that last 0.2mm could be the difference that makes a breakthrough device possible. Hopefully not literally breakthrough, though. The technical advances that made this possible took its inspiration from Taiwanese crepes, of all things: ITRI included a sort of non-stick layer that allows… man, I don’t even know. Now I just want a crepe. [via TG Daily]
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| Nice Boots: Cristiano Ronaldo’s CR Mercurial Vapor SuperFly II Have Dynamically Adjusting Studs Posted: 29 Oct 2010 01:20 PM PDT
Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, the current top scorer in Spain’s La Liga, is a very fancy man. This much we know. But what I didn’t know till just a little while ago was how fancy he was. Nike has designed a new boot, the CR Mercurial Vapor SuperFly II (quite the mouthful, yes) specifically for him. The last time Nike did that for a player was when Ronaldinho was good. (Incidentally, Ronaldinho was just called up to the Brazil squad.) He’ll debut the boots in the Madrid derby (against Atlético, of course) on November 7. The boots… well, they’re certainly unique-looking. A recent poll on as.com, one of the two big Madrid-based sports newspapers, shows that only 35 percent of respondents were keen on the pattern. The leopard skin is a bold choice, yes, but the print doesn’t necessarily concern us here. We’re not the fashion police. "Nice boots," says Cristiano. Clearly he likes ‘em. No, what does concern us is the use of something called Nike Sense adaptive traction system, a technology that dynamically expands and retracts the studs on the bottom of the boot. So, depending on whether Cristiano is sprinting at full speed down the touchline, or if he’s waiting in mid-field for a pass, you know, the studs will react in kind. Different scenarios requires different tractions. The boot also uses Nike’s Flywire, a carbon chassis of sorts that, among other things, keeps the foot closer to the ground as Cristiano is running about. And here’s a video that describes, in greater detail, exactly what’s going on with the boots. So, come November 7 be sure to look closely at Cristiano’s boots. You’ll be like, "Oh, yeah, those are the boots I read on CG that day." Which is all you can ask for, really. The boot will be available to the public at large on November 15. And, uh, I think one of the 8 million scripts our site runs may be fiddling with the ability of the videos to load, so you may have to ctrl-r a few times to get them working.
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| Good Old Games Is Having A Good Old Halloween Sale Posted: 29 Oct 2010 01:00 PM PDT
Just in case you need another reason to forgo this weekend’s festivities, gog has a bunch of games on sale in the name of Halloween. There are some classics on sale and just like the Steam sale, the selection is sort of limited to just limited to zombie/scary/dark games. That’s probably fine with some of you Internet creeps though.
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| iRiver’s Cover Story E-Reader Shows Up At FCC Posted: 29 Oct 2010 12:30 PM PDT
They never can seem to make them popular stateside, though. People here like the “total package,” i.e. the Kindle with built-in store, or a multi-purpose tablet like the Nook Color. Something that, like many iRiver products, is capable of doing many things but doesn’t hold your hand, isn’t destined to be a hit. At around $200, it’s a little expensive, but not unrealistically so. That said, it looks like a nice little gadget; depending, of course, on the resolution, generation, and responsiveness of the 6″ touch display. It’s not clear whether it’s the newer Pearl e-ink displays, but I think it is — iRiver doesn’t strike me as a cut-rate sort of manufacturer. I don’t know what to make of the orientation, though. The logo is upright, but I don’t think they’d put the controls at the top like that. We’ll have to wait and see it in action.
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| iPazzPort: A Tiny Keyboard and Touchpad For Your Pleasure Posted: 29 Oct 2010 12:12 PM PDT
Want to control your devices from afar with something that looks like a mini-Blackberry? Want it to have a crazy name like iPazzPort? Man, today is lucky Friday because that’s what this thing is. Ready to have your mind blown? This thing also has a laser pointer! Want to pay only $43? Click on, McDuff!
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| SOCOM Coming To Android, And I Ain’t Talking About The Game Posted: 29 Oct 2010 12:00 PM PDT
Android has been suggested as the platform of choice (along with some legacy Windows systems) for the next generation of the Tactical Situational Awareness Application Suite, or TactSA. It’s the toolset that every special ops guy will have available, and will run everything from the map app to file sharing and chat to the whiteboard app they’ll be using instead of… well, a real whiteboard, I suppose. As Wired points out, the open source nature of Android is helpful, too, since the military employs many skilled developers. The final version of the TactSA may look nothing like stock Android (in fact, that’d be pretty weird), but Android as a base is a great place to start for a multi-platform communications tool. I wonder if the military will get early access to Gingerbread?
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| Decline In DVD Sales & Rampant Piracy Force Indie Wrestling To Internet Pay-Per-View Posted: 29 Oct 2010 11:45 AM PDT The move to all-digital distribution is already well under way, and it poses a problem for businesses that have based themselves around the sale of shiny plastic discs. That, combined with the rampant piracy of these discs when they’re released has particularly hurt independent pro-wrestling organizations (to pick something out of thin air). Gabe Sapolsky, vice-president of Dragon Gate USA, owner of Evolve, and former head booker of Ring of Honor, was recently interviewed on Figure Four Daily, a podcast dedicated to pro-wrestling and MMA news, and said that the only way these companies will survive is if a new technology, Internet Pay-Per-View, becomes viable. A little background. Companies like Dragon Gate USA and Evolve survive almost entirely on DVD sales. If the DVDs don’t sell, then the companies, frankly, run the risk of going out of business. For a little while there, say from 2004 to 2006 or 2007, everything was smooth as you like. But then a few things happened. One, as broadband speeds increased, it became significantly easier to pirate the DVDs on specialist Web sites, sites usually dedicated to sports, MMA, pro-wrestling, etc. If too many people pirate these shows, then how can the companies survive? Piracy may not exactly put the likes Taylor Swift or Katy Perry in the poor house, but for smaller organizations, yeah, it hurts. Illegal streams are another problem that these guys have to deal with. UFC sues people all the time for providing streams, but it’s fair to say UFC has far more resources to litigate this type of thing than Dragon Gate USA or Evolve. Two, DVD sales just aren’t what they used to be. Remember how massive the DVD section in Best Buy was in the early 2000s? It was like walking into the library at Alexandria. Now? Ha! You’re lucky to find last season of The Office in there. The decline in sales could be explained a few different ways. You could look at the growth of services like Netflix that instantly stream plenty of stuff to your TV. Google TV hopes to make streaming all the more easy. There was also a study a few weeks ago that said, because there’s so many entertainment options out there—Netflix, iTunes, Steam, Facebook games, etc.—that people simply spend less time in front of their TV than they used to. It’s a problem facing the whole entertainment industry, trying to figure out how to get people to pay any sort of attention to what they’re selling. The next great hope, Sapolsky said in the interview, is Internet Pay-Pew-View, or iPPV. The big iPPV provider right now is GoFightLive.tv, which hosts various combat sport shows. There’s pro-wrestling (in fact, Dragon Gate USA’s first iPPV occurs tonight at 8pm ET), mixed martial arts, boxing, judo, etc. Prices are much cheaper than traditional Pay-Per-View. A UFC event in high-definition costs $55 on DirecTV (I love how UFC charges an additional $10 for the HD feed!), and while GoFightLive.tv isn’t exactly high-definition it’s only $15 for the Dragon Gate USA iPPV. It’s also available all over the world; there’s no territorial restrictions. You’re free, of course, to hook your computer to your TV if your computer monitor is on the small side. "Frankly, we need this iPPV money," said Sapolsky. "This needs to become a money-generator for us. DVD sales, that whole market, is not what it used to be… The economy’s really hurt live ticket sales, so that’s been tough. This live iPPV is the way of the future," he added. Sapolsky explained the grander theory behind the Dragon Gate USA iPPV on Paul Heyman‘s Web site, the Heyman Hustle. So we’re looking at a situation where a relatively new technology, Internet Pay-Per-View, has become vital to the success of an entire industry. Wouldn’t be the first time.
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| Latest iPhone 4 Clone Looks Close To The Real Thing Posted: 29 Oct 2010 09:32 AM PDT
While there are a lot of iPhone 4 clones coming out of China, few are even close to the real thing. Here’s another that comes close to Jonathan Ive’s design. See if you can spot the differences in the video. Stats
[from nowhereelse]
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| London Underground To Get Wi-Fi To Prep For 2012 Olympics Posted: 29 Oct 2010 09:00 AM PDT The London Underground, commonly known as the Tube, will be getting Wi-Fi. There will be a six-month trial period beginning on November 1 at the Charing Cross station. Why, all of a sudden, is the Tube getting Wi-Fi? It’s BT’s move to try to get mobile phones working underground. On the surface that sounds awful, I imagine most people will merely use it browse the Web or send text messages or whatever. Besides, who uses their phone as a phone anymore? Certainly not young people. Wi-Fi access will be free to all BT customers. The overall hope is to make London something of a Wi-Fi hotspot in time for the 2012 Olympics. 2012 Olympics! Jeez!
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| Coming Soon: 900GB Torrent Of (Mostly) Every Geocities Web Site Ever Posted: 29 Oct 2010 08:31 AM PDT
"[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be 'fads' any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There's history here. Real, honest, true history." And thus did the Archive Team set out to save the entirety of Geocities. The team, which has been working for past year on downloading old Geocities Web sites, is in the process of putting together a torrent that will contain the entire Geocities archive. Well, "entire." The team tried its best to save what it could, but Yahoo, which bought Geocities in 1999, certainly didn’t make it easy on the team. Pre-Yahoo Web sites were particularly difficult to track down. The torrent will be huge, estimated to come in around 900GB. But considering how cheap hard drives are, I’d be shocked if more than a few Internet history buffs don’t download the entire archive. What should happen is that someone upload the archive to Usenet. Can’t get any more rock-solid than that. It’s probably a little more stable than a public torrent, too. Above, of course, is how CrunchGear would look if it were created by a teen, possibly me, in the Geocities era.
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| Amid Android Competiton, Microsoft Charges Rights Fees For Taiwanese Manufacturers Posted: 29 Oct 2010 07:45 AM PDT Well this is peculiar. It looks as if Microsoft has tried, in effect, to use some of its influence to prevent Asus and Acer from creating Android- and/or Chrome OS-based devices. It’s doing so by tacking on royalty fees for Taiwan-based manufacturers (such as Asus and Acer) in order to use some of their patents relating to e-mail and multimedia. HTC, the other big Taiwan manufacturer, has agreed to the new licensing regime. Digitimes suggests that Microsoft is doing so in order to prevent, or at least make that much more difficult, Asus and Acer from releasing devices that run alternative operating systems. It’s not as if Asus and Acer only create products for the local market, right? So imposing, all of a sudden, a new patent licensing fee ties the hands of Asus and Acer. Sources told Digitimes that the licensing fees total around $10-$15 per handset. And when you’re shipping many, many of these handsets those $10-$15 quickly add up. What could be more exciting than high-level business feuds?
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You know the ultimate test of mans survival is becoming a tourist trap when you can make a 3G video call from its lofty summit. Nepalese firm Ncell has installed 3G towers on the top of Mount Everest, allowing those so inclined to whip out the old iPhone and make a few calls from the top. The coverage, which ends at the summit but is situated at 17,000 meters (ten miles) in the air, allows for regular phone and video connectivity with the outside world.
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