CrunchGear |  |
- Daily Crunch: On Off
- Sony Announces €99 PSP For European Cheapskates
- Sony Slashes $50 Off The PS3, Drops The Base Model To $250
- Foursquare And Skype Coming To Playstation Vita
- The Problem With Partners: Fake VisualHub Update Aims To Make Bank On Unsupported Software
- German Court Suspends Galaxy Tab Injunction In The Apple-Samsung Case
- DIY Device Mutes Your TV When Someone You Don’t Like Is Mentioned
- The CKIE Duet Has 8GB Of Storage Built-In
- Two Minutes Of Glorious Battlefield 3 Game Footage
- Samsung Feigned Surprise Over Apple’s EU Injunction
- HP Looking To Appliances, Autos To Grow And Save webOS
- The HTC Puccini Tab Nears Release, But Is There Room For Yet Another Honeycomb Tab?
| Posted: 17 Aug 2011 01:00 AM PDT  Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories:
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| Sony Announces €99 PSP For European Cheapskates Posted: 16 Aug 2011 01:09 PM PDT  Instead of giving us any more concrete details on when the Playstation Vita will see the light of day, Sony announced the availability of a new PSP model called the E-1000 at their Gamescom press conference today. With it’s €99 price tag, Sony’s clearly gunning for the budget gamers, albeit only ones that live in Europe: while the E-1000 is poised to launch this fall in the EU, there’s no word that the bargain-priced portable will make its way anywhere else. The E-1000 takes most of its design cues from older model PSPs, and with that comes the inclusion of a UMD drive. The design is actually pretty dang slick, with its matte black finish, but Sony had to cut corners somewhere. First thing on Sony’s chopping block is the WiFI radio; impulse Playstation Store downloaders will have to resort to transferring purchases from a PC using Sony’s Media Go software. For those without an old PSP game library to fall back on, Sony has also announced the launch of a discounted line of UMD-based games. Games like Invizimals: The Lost Tribe, EyePet Adventures, and FIFA 12 are expected to launch along side the E-1000, but hopefully some… better… titles get the UMD treatment soon. Titles are priced to move at €9.99 a piece, but methinks cheapskate gamers may have better luck digging for games in the bargain bin.
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| Sony Slashes $50 Off The PS3, Drops The Base Model To $250 Posted: 16 Aug 2011 12:41 PM PDT  Watch out! Price cuts all around! Following the 3DS price drop, Sony just cut a cool $50 off the PS3, dropping the 160GB model to $250 down from $300. The 320GB model is also a little lower now with a $299 price tag. This puts the PS3 in a slightly better position ahead of the oh-so-important holiday season. The Wii is currently priced at $150 and comes bundled with Mario Kart. The base model Xbox sells for $200 or $300 with Kinect. The PS3 suddenly looks a lot more attractive. Unfortunately the price drop love doesn’t apply to European gamers. Sure, the price dropped there too, but only to €249, which works out to $359 USD. It’s a similar but not as harsh story in Japan where the system drops to 24,980 Yen or $325 USD. Sony has struggled behind Microsoft for sometime. The Xbox 360 is on a seven month streak of being the best-selling console month-over-month. The Kinect re-energized the user base last year and the effect still seems to be holding true. Because of this dominance, Microsoft might not respond in kind and follow with a 360 price drop.
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| Foursquare And Skype Coming To Playstation Vita Posted: 16 Aug 2011 12:22 PM PDT  During a press conference at the Gamescom gaming conference in Cologne, Sony announced a few new features for their new handheld console, the Vita (watch our hands-on at E3 here). Among them were support for Foursquare and Skype. The references were made while talking about the 3G capabilities of the $300 model, but it wasn’t implied that a 3G connection would be required. More powerful than most phones and sporting a large, bright touchscreen and dual cameras, the Vita should be able to handle these services perfectly well. There was no demonstration and no screenshots, though, so the UI is still a mystery. It’s also unclear whether it will integrate with the Vita’s other, more system-wide social tools. Sony has a system-wide voice chat and friends list, and Twitter is already integrated to some extent, but these new services may also reach into games. Becoming the mayor of an in-game location could become a new source of points for check-in addicts. In addition to these announcements, it was confirmed that all Vita games will be downloadable. It’s reassuring in a way, but it seems likely that users are going to run out of space, considering these are true AAA games, likely clocking in at a few gigs each — and solid-state storage fast enough to load assets isn’t cheap. But an unconditional promise of downloadability is a smart one to make, it’s very “next-gen.” The Vita will be hitting the US market some time in early 2012, though it may be possible to import one from Japan for the holidays — if you’re filthy rich. Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free,... Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message....
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| The Problem With Partners: Fake VisualHub Update Aims To Make Bank On Unsupported Software Posted: 16 Aug 2011 11:57 AM PDT  Tyler Loch is the creator of VisualHub, one of the best (and funniest) video converters for OS X. He shut down development a few years ago and left the app to linger and then shut it down completely, forcing folks to scour the Internet for copies. A few OS X versions came and went and the program still worked but a Lion killed the app for users fairly completely. I’m a former VisualHub customer and must have bought it through Tyler’s reseller, Kagi, when it was still available. Today I received an email informing me that I could update VisualHub to work with Lion for a mere $5. Excited that the app was supported again, I soon discovered that Tyler was not part of this update and that Kagi had essentially spammed the VisualHub list in order to wring a little more cash out of the product. Here’s Tyler’s side of the story:
First, you can get the Lion update here for free and second this is probably the most egregious example blackmailware I’ve seen in a long while. vHub Update is, in short, a simple installer built around Tyler’s fix. In a note to Lon Seidman, Kagi’s CEO Kee Nethery blamed Tyler for “walking away from the business” and said his customers were confused by his onerous update requirements. Writes TUAW:
There is also some doubt that the app is a Kagi product. A quick look-up shows that the updater’s “website” (vhub.biz) is assigned to Kee Nethery. We can clearly presume that Kagi would be happy to repackage and sell almost anything at this point, including OS X updates. It’s an open market, folks, and, if you’re Kagi, you know that there’s a sucker born every minute.
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| German Court Suspends Galaxy Tab Injunction In The Apple-Samsung Case Posted: 16 Aug 2011 10:58 AM PDT  Hope you've got some popcorn and a German law book at the ready because this back-and-forth between Apple and Samsung only gets better and better. Today, the preliminary injunction banning Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the EU has been partially lifted. Now before you jump to the same conclusions I did, let me say that this suspension has nothing to do with the false evidence discovered yesterday within Apple's complaint. At least, that's not the reason the Dusseldorf regional court gave for the lift. Instead, a court spokesman said that questions arose over whether or not a German court has the right to ban a company based in South Korea from selling its product throughout the European Union, reports the Wall Street Journal. The injunction suspension is only in effect until the August 25 appeal hearing, during which Samsung will present its argument to reverse the original ruling. Unfortunately, things won't change much for German customers — the ban is still underway within Germany. The rest of Europe will be able to grab a GalTab as long as it comes through the Korean parent company, but Samsung's German unit will still be banned from selling the device throughout the EU. According to FOSS Patents, patent infringement cases must be handled by each individual European nation, whereas there are intellectual property rights and trademarks that can be issued by an agency of the European Union. Those IP rights can then be enforced across the entirety of the EU, as is the case with Apple. Apple's original complaint was based on its own intellectual property right, Community Design 003781832, which you can find after the break. The German court system tends to lean more on the side of the right holder than the alleged infringer, so Apple already knew it had a pretty good chance of winning the injunction. Because its complaint was based on an IP right granted by an EU agency (rather than a patent issued by a national patent office), Apple also knew that the injunction would reach beyond Germany to the whole of the EU. In fact, the company only excluded the Netherlands because it has an even broader case to present there in mid-September. Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...
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| DIY Device Mutes Your TV When Someone You Don’t Like Is Mentioned Posted: 16 Aug 2011 10:56 AM PDT  Matt Richardson created a wild Arduino system that mutes a TV whenever a name or other keyword is broadcast on TV. It uses the closed caption track and an IR blaster to grab what’s currently playing and then mute the TV for 30 seconds – or more – depending on the current topic. The project uses the Video Experimenter Shield, Lady Ada’s IR tutorial, and some basic code to scan the captions for keywords. The best thing is that the product actually works quite well, muting the TV as soon as Kim Kardashian is mentioned, even in passing. It may make for an excellent election-year project for folks who may or may not be sick of certain politicians.
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| The CKIE Duet Has 8GB Of Storage Built-In Posted: 16 Aug 2011 10:42 AM PDT  As a supporter of the vibratory arts, I find the CKIE Duet to be a fairly unique self-pleasuring device. To be clear, it’s not available for sale yet and instead is being sold using a sort of Kickstarter-esque donation system. $75 gets you a “quiet, USB rechargeable, waterproof, multi-speed vibe” while $125 scores you – and I’m not making this up – a model with 8GB onboard storage. That’s right: the CKIE (pronounced “Seeky”) is a dual-armed, compact vibratory accouterment designed for the lady who, while performing a bit of the old Rascal Flatts, may need immediate access to 8GB of non-volatile flash storage. What can you place on your Duet? How about TPS reports, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets? Or what about your burgeoning novel or client documents! All I know is that you definitely won’t hand your memory off to anyone at work and forget about it. The Duet is made by Crave, a small San Francisco company led by Ti Chang and Michael Topolovac. The Duet will sell for $139 retail while the 8GB model will sell for $189. A $150 model includes 8GB and 24-karat gold highlights. There’s a 16GB model but I’m not even going to go there. It is apparently waterproof and made of “body-safe” silicone and – this is important – it’s “virtually silent.” It includes a leather pouch for storage and lasts for four hours on one charge.
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| Two Minutes Of Glorious Battlefield 3 Game Footage Posted: 16 Aug 2011 10:22 AM PDT  Battlefield 3 just got a bit more real. Jets! Robots! 64-player multiplayer! I can’t wait. John Biggs on the other hand is an old man. As seen in the TechCrunch staff chatroom,
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| Samsung Feigned Surprise Over Apple’s EU Injunction Posted: 16 Aug 2011 09:13 AM PDT  Samsung's pants are officially ablaze as reports have surfaced that Samsung did know about Apple's injunction complaint and had even filed a "Schutzschrift." In English, that's a protective pleading, and it was filed almost a week before Apple filed its injunction on August 4. Yet, I seem to recall Samsung saying "The request for injunction was filed with no notice to Samsung, and the order was issued without any hearing or presentation of evidence from Samsung." Hmmm. So either Samsung's legal team is prescient or Samsung's PR team fibbed it up. My money's on the latter. It's true that Samsung wasn't put on official notice and that there was no hearing in which Samsung could defend itself, but the company implied that it was completely blind-sided by the injunction, when in reality it had been working to pre-emptively stop the injunction almost a week in advance. FOSS Patents blogger and German IP expert Florian Mueller, who also reported on the story, sums up the deception perfectly: "This kind of communication strategy on Samsung's part is old-school spin doctoring and only serves to strengthen my impression that Samsung is in a legally weak position against Apple. If Samsung wants to inspire confidence, it has to understand that half the truth is sometimes tantamount to a whole lie." Within its "Schutzschrift" filed on July 29, Samsung argued that there wasn't a sense of urgency that warranted a preliminary injunction. The problem with that argument is that there is no greater period of urgency than when a possibly patent infringing product is about to launch. The second argument made within Samsung's plea was that the company was in the process of "preparing" a petition to have Apple's Community design invalidated. The court in Dusseldorf made its decision to ban the GalTab with Samsung's protective pleading in mind, which means that Samsung will need to think up some new arguments for its appeal on August 25. Obviously the points made in its pre-emptive plea did nothing to sway the court's decision. Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...
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| HP Looking To Appliances, Autos To Grow And Save webOS Posted: 16 Aug 2011 08:14 AM PDT  HP stated from the start that it planned on putting webOS in more than just smartphones and tablets. It foresaw a time when webOS would run printers, netbooks, and the world! Well, the time has come. HP is looking to grow the webOS base and expand into the world of major appliances and automotive. HP invested $1.2 billion into Palm last year and from an outsider’s standpoint, it’s hard to view that as a wise investment even when considering the 1,500 patents that were part of the deal. The chief product, the webOS TouchPad, is floundering in the marketplace. Spotting a webOS smartphones in the wild is akin to seeing MG using a Xoom. WebOS is a fine operating system, but consumers just haven’t latched on for various reasons. HP is now looking outside the traditional CE realm for help. Part of the OS’s downfall is that the products do not have any dev or 3rd party support. Smartphones must have a solid set of native apps, which webOS has, but it then must have an even more robust ecosystem of 3rd party apps. That’s what makes iOS so popular: Apple handles the mundane tasks normally associated with a phone while it outsources all the fun and innovative stuff to App Store devs. Without this sort of support, backed with word-of-mouth marketing, an awesome OS such as webOS doesn’t have a chance. And so HP is looking to put webOS in unconventional products. WSJ states it’s looking to the automotive and appliance sectors for a bit help. The thought, which is smart, is to licence their webOS system to companies without their own touch interface. The hope, which is wrong, that one day your washing machine, stove, or even car infotainment system will run on webOS. Of course Android is there, lurking in the corner, but recent patent litigation and licensing battles makes it look like the dirty alternative. Unfortunately for HP, as the WSJ lays out, the appliance world won’t likely adopt a touchscreen interface. Washing machines and such have a lot longer life cycle than a smartphone. What’s hot today, won’t be hot in ten years, let alone five. Appliances are built for reliability, not apps. HP might have a little more luck in the automotive sector. Microsoft is currently a big player with Microsoft Auto the backbone for many automotive systems like Ford Sync. In-car infotainment systems are ripe for disruption. Only a few are actually worth their cost. This is the right path for HP and webOS, though. The company needs to grow the webOS brand and exploring other spaces might be a rough, but a smart course. You can bet that HP is not going to let the $1 billion investment die without a fight. The TouchPad is just the beginning. WebOS is here to stay — even if no one is buying the products. Palm, Inc. was a leading mobile products company, creating instinctive yet powerful mobile products that enabled people to better manage their lives on the go. The company's products for...
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| The HTC Puccini Tab Nears Release, But Is There Room For Yet Another Honeycomb Tab? Posted: 16 Aug 2011 05:31 AM PDT  HTC is prepping its first Honeycomb tab for release. Previous rumors placed the Puccini hitting the shelves sometime at the end of August or early September. That seems slightly more likely according a new report that states “late Q3 or early Q4.” But the question remains, does the market need another Honeycomb tablet, even one as powerful as the Puccini, when Ice Cream Sandwich is right around the corner? Tablets do not seem to be a priority at HTC and for good reason: no one is buying Android tablets. Earlier this year, the company launched its first tablet, the Android 2.2 HTC Flyer, when other companies where launching Honeycomb tabs. The Flyer is a fun piece, a $499 7-inch Android 2.x tablet with optional $80 stylus. The high price and cheap component list seemed to state that the Flyer is a high-margin, low-volume product for HTC, one likely designed to test the water without forcing HTC to dive headfirst. The Puccini might be more of the same. The Puccini isn’t official yet, nor has HTC teased any info about the tablet. However, several leaks state that the 10-incher is packing a 1.5GHz CPU and of a Snapdragon dual-core pedigree. It’s to have 2GB of RAM, active digitizer stylus, dual cams including a rear-facing 8MP camera, and, if other rumors are to be believed, an AT&T LTE radio. Chances are it will follow the “me too” pricing scheme and hit the market at $499 to compete with the iPad. It’s just too bad that the iPad isn’t the Puccini’s competition but rather other Honeycomb tabs and soon, Ice Cream Sandwich tablets. Honeycomb is a world of ruined fairy tales right now. The stock OS and apps are fine, but there are just a handful of usable apps even now, six months after the OS launched. Ice Cream Sandwich promises to right this wrong by being a unified Android experience for the end-user and developer. And so, it’s rather curious why HTC is pushing its first Android 3.x tab to retail at the end of Honeycomb’s life cycle. The OS is reportedly scheduled to launch in Q4 of 2011, or rather, just after the Puccini hits the market. The only likely conclusion to this aforementioned quandary is that, yes, tablets are not a priority for HTC. Market timing and placement is a paramount to a product’s success and the Puccini is going to be set up to fail. HTC Corp, (TAIEX: 2498) produces smartphones running the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems for themselves and as an OEM to other manufacturers. Since launching its own brand in... Company: ANDROID Website: http://www.android.com In July 2005, Google acquired Android, a small startup company based in Palo Alto, CA. Android’s co-founders who went to work at Google included Andy Rubin (co-founder of...
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