Peek’s recent TwitterPeek may not have met with the glowing reviews the company might have hoped for, but the original email-centric Peek (and newer Peek Pronto) are still decent examples of how a single-purpose gadget can suit a lot of people. Now, to celebrate Cyber Wednesday (and yes, we know it’s usually Cyber Monday), Peek have slashed subscription costs: what yesterday (and on Thursday) will cost you $19.99 per month will now be just $9.99.
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Having hitherto only been available as part of a game bundle, Activision have now made the DJ Hero controller available as a standalone peripheral. Priced at $69.99 and available for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, the controller has a rotating deck platter, an effects dial, crossfader and three dual-color stream buttons.
When it came to bugs and glitches, our experience with the HTC HD2 was generally uninterrupted; a few on-screen keyboard slow-downs were pretty much all we observed. Still, other users have reported more significant issues, and so HTC have pushed out a new firmware version for the smartphone, build 1.48 WWE, which attempts to address the problems. Xmoo – who happens to have two HD2’s – put together a quick comparison video highlighting the improvements.
Video comparison after the cut
Having teased us with the promise of availability of their SHOWWX laser pico-projector back in October, Microvision have now revealed that Vodafone Spain will be the carrier offering the portable projector. The SHOWWX is on sale now for €289 ($436) excluding tax, or for a reduced amount if you have points under the carrier’s loyalty program, and it will be marketed alongside the Nokia N97 mini.
Nokia’s intentions toward Maemo and how the new, open-source platform fits in with their existing S60 smartphone OS have kept the rumor-mongers going for months now. Only last week, SlashGear columnist Avi Greengart asked whether the Finns should junk S60 in favor of Maemo; according to this slide from Nokia’s Capital Markets Day, the prognosis is actually worse for S40.
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We can remember a time when parents were driven to horrible tears in the vain hope of finding a store with a Nintendo Wii in stock; now the company is apparently slashing production of the console after its recent dreary financial performance. According to Nikkei (subscription required), Nintendo has informed two Japanese suppliers that it intends to reduce the Wii production, a move that has apparently had an extreme impact on those suppliers' own profits.
The iPhone 3GS’ 3-megapixel camera is hardly a threat to RED, but modders can’t stop trying to tweak it into doing things Apple never intended. An excellent example of that deviant art is Bhautik Joshi’s Phone-O-Scope SLR lens mod, basically an optical coupler that allows you to mount an SLR lens onto the iPhone.
Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 conference was a chance to dream happily about the future of mobile devices, today the company has put its stats where its mouth is. It’s Capital Markets Day for the Finns, and while there’s plenty of talk of targeting average selling price erosion and flat market share in 2010, the most interesting stuff for the geeks among us are its aims for smartphones. Key among those is re-engineering the Symbian UI and delivering what Nokia describe as two “major product milestones”, midway through and then at the end of 2010.
Repurposing an iPhone or iPod touch as a remote control isn’t a new idea – Sonos have one of the more impressive implementations we’ve played with – but if you don’t want device-specific control and would prefer a universal remote, ThinkFlood have one such option. Coming out of private beta and going on general sale this week, the ThinkFlood RedEye looks like an iPhone dock but squeezes in a WiFi adapter and IR blaster. An app installs on your iPhone (or iPod touch), the phone connects via WiFi to the dock, and you can mimic any IR remote.
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Barnes and Noble don't seem to need any assistance from Spring Design in holding up their nook ebook reader from hitting the market, but the latter's hope for an official injunction while their allegations of "misappropriated trade secrets" are worked out through the courts has been denied. While the court documents agree that there is a "genuine dispute" about whether B&N used Spring Design's ideas or came up with the nook themselves, they're not willing to stop the dual-display ebook reader from going on sale while they figure it out.
SlashGear Japan
