Microsoft’s Xbox 360 certainly has the media capabilities to earn itself a place underneath your HDTV or in your A/V rack, but the curvy casing doesn’t exactly blend in with other such equipment. Swedish modders Industri Repro have taken that into their own hands, crafting a custom aluminum replacement chassis called the XBEE (XB Elegant Edition) that’s the width of a regular DVD player. They’ve also stuffed some extra cooling in there, to hopefully avoid the infamous red-ring-of-death.
Recently I asked, if a DROID could take on the Death Star? Now, Motorola and Verizon, along with some help from Google launched DROID. I’ve spent the day with a device and here’s what I think so far. First, Verizon was clear that DROID is going to be a family of devices running Android, Motorola’s device will be the only one called DROID, others will be known as the DROID-XXX. DROID is the first Android 2.0 device and the Google branding points to the fact that this is stock Android. And I do mean stock Android: there are zero Verizon services on this device (with the exception of a non-branded visual voicemail app). No VCast. No nothing. One wonders if Verizon were willing to go to this length a few years ago, would the iPhone have landed on Verizon? Android 2.0 is a great update and finally is starting to feel complete. Compared to V1 Android running HTC Sense, it’s a mixed bag. HTC’s UI is lightyears ahead of stock Android in my opinion but the DROID performs so much better than any Android V1 phone I’ve used and is nearly feature complete that it’s hard to recommend a V1x device at this point.
It seems the rift between Google and Apple is growing; after the latter made moves to supply its own mapping technologies for the iPhone and iPod touch, Google now looks set to kick off its own music service to rival iTunes. According to TechCrunch’s sources, the so-called Google Audio service will launch on October 28th, and offer US users both access to streaming media together with purchase/download links.
We’re just a few weeks away from the formal launch of Windows 7 and I’ve been using the final build for some time now. It’s very nice and I’m sure most of you have seen it, used it or read about it to death. What I want to talk about over the next few weeks is various parts of Windows 7. One of the most intriguing parts of the new OS that Microsoft has talked about for some time has been the integration of touch features. While vendors such as HP have done their own touch implementations in the past (HP has gone as far as to offer their own touch-based SDK for developers) this is the first time since Microsoft unveiled their touch platform offering, Surface, that we’ve seen the OS vendor incorporate true finger-touch features directly into the OS.
It’s hard to believe it is October already and the leaves are already falling off the trees. Another week come and gone and today I am back with another week in review for your perusal. We found out early this week that the Palm Pre is still headed to Verizon according to an insider. The alleged insider didn’t give any word on when exactly this may happen.
Did’t I just finish writing a week in review? That time again already? Ok, so here we go! Asus’ Eee netbook roadmap leaked this week showing us some of the new machines Asus has up its sleeves and tipping us off on the netbooks already on the market that will be going extinct soon. SanDisk got all official and stuff with a new low-end MP3 player called the Sansa Clip+. The thing gains a microSD card slot to accommodate that big bag of fail known as slotMusic.
A few weeks back, we told you that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was seeing some really bad numbers, regarding return rates and that enfuriating Red Ring of Dead (RRoD) problem. Fear not though, as it looks like we’re starting to see some definite improvement on that latter part, at least according to the largest independent warranty provider in America. We don’t know about you, but we’re always excited when technology stops breaking, especially when it’s something like the Xbox 360.
Another week has come and gone leaving us with memories and a hoard of cool stories to throw your way for weekend reading in case you missed them over the week. An Asus 900HA netbook was hacked into a touchscreen slate on Monday and we really liked it. DIY gear is so cool, especially when it turns out this good. Monday also brought some details on the Blackberry Storm 2 piezo touchscreen tech. We really hope its better than the original Storm.
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Location-Based Services (LBS) is huge right now, and while there's already phones out there that take advantage of this service via weather and the like, it looks like Apple has plans to up the ante, so to speak. Phones like the HTC Hero for example, have a weather widget that is always on, and when you change cities, the widget reflects that in real-time. However, Apple wants a handful of applications/icons to reflect this, and to be honest, if Apple can get it to work, it would be pretty fantastic.
With the veracity of his information seemingly corroborated by accurately tipping the Sony PS3 Slim back in June now that the skinny console has been made official, tipster Super_Secret’s next prediction – regarding Sony’s portable gaming line – is now under the microscope. In June the anonymous source suggested that rather than phasing out UMD-based PSP models, Sony were instead preparing to replace the current PSP-3000 with a new PSP-4000.
SlashGear Japan
