Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

If there’s anything I’ve learned about Apple, in all these years of reading, and just recently, writing about them, it’s that you don’t mess with them. Ever. That’s a lesson a lot of would-be Apple product burglars would do good in learning, lest they want to be the ones pictured and talked about in this article here. The two men you see here are the burglars that we reported about previously, responsible for stealing flat-screen TVs, computer games, iPods, DVDs, a box of liquor and even a set of car rims from an apartment shared by three roommates. The one on top is Edmon Shahikian, while the one on the bottom is Ian Frias. They were apprehended shortly after the owner of one of their stolen wares, a Mac laptop, used the Back To My Mac feature to photograph them and show their photos to the police. I wonder when anyone will be able to do that with their Windows lappies.

Read [NY Times]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

The GBDisk RS1 series of Serial ATA (SATA)-compatible industrial silicon disks is the latest addition to TDK’s roster, which will be made available in June with up to 16GB capacities. High-speed, frequent data writing and maintaining data reliability come first with the GBDisk RS1 series. And because of that, it features single level cell (SLC) NAND Flash memory, and GBDriver RS1 SATA controllers for use in NAND Flash memory controller ICs.

It also offers complete power interruption tolerance, error correction, distributed data writing, and bad block management. Basically, these are new types of hard disks, coming in at the same size as current generation HDD’s (2.5-inches) that should offer fast start up, stringent shock resistance, and low power consumption. It’s been reported to be already Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)-certified, and now if only they could bump up the storage a bit more than 16GB’s, then we’d all be happy. Or at least, those who need to use hard disks in industrial equipment.

As of now, pricing is unknown, but as earlier mentioned, production will start in June 2008.

Via [Tech On]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

If you think your laptop bag has enough room in it for a gadget that will give you more USB ports than you’ll ever need, then you’ll be glad to set your sights upon Elecom’s newest little number. It’s a small USB hub that offers not three, not five, but a total of seven free USB ports for you to connect your other gadgets simultaneously. It measures only 23x144x23mm, and weighs 66g. Other than an external hard drive, iPod and digicam, I don’t know what else you’d want to plug in it. But if you want to get a feel of its 480Mbps transfer rate, then by all means, feel free.

Via [Akihabara News]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

As if we have not yet seen enough of all these new touchscreen phones that have been jumping out of the woodwork lately, here comes yet another, featuring the same old touchscreen, and almost the same specifications as well. Although this time, it could have one thing that separates it from the myriad of other touchscreen phones out there - herculean battery life. That’s because this new touchscreen phone falls under the Philips Xenium brand, which, in case you don’t know, has a reputation for churning out gadgets with incredibly long-lasting batteries. And knowing that this same company completed its very own touchscreen phone (Philips Xenium 9@9v) a couple of months back, this new rumor becomes quite believable. But until the day that we see it get official, that’s all that it is: a faceless rumor.

Via [Unwired View]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

On the lookout for a new hi-def camcorder? Then you might want to take a look at Samsung’s latest release, dubbed the SC-HMX20 Full HD camcorder. It’s got a 6.4-megapixel CMOS sensor, 10x zoom and also functions as an 8-megapixel still camera, capable of capturing photos in super slow motion at 300 frames per second. As it belongs to Samsung’s HMX20 line, you can expect it to be of top-notch quality.

The Samsung Full HD camcorder also features a 2.7-inch touchscreen LCD so you can easily navigate through the menus and photos, and it accepts SDHC cards through a built-in card slot in addition to the 8GB of internal memory. Just 2.4 seconds is all it takes to activate the camera, and battery life is improved thanks to the use of flash memory. The package will include a cradle with a built-in charging port, USB and of course a TV-out cable so you can view all your photos and videos in high definition glory. It’s a little bit on the heavy side, at 456 grams, but rest assured that the Samsung Full HD camcorder is well worth its weight.

The price? Just 899,000 South Korean Won or about $850 USD for you, my dear.

Read [Samsung]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

An honest and innocent letter sent out as an invitation for application developers has turned out to be the main source of our primary info on two possibly upcoming Palm devices - the Palm Zeppelin and the Skywriter. Nothing about the specs, availability, and pricing of these new phones have been made clear so far, other than the fact that Palm is currently looking for software developers for it. The invitation letter was sent to smartphone blog TamsPPC, who later did a rendering of the Skywriter, which they say could be a Palm 500-style device running on Windows Mobile 6.1. It is also suggested that these new phones might be released by Q3 2008. I know it seems pretty far-fetched but go ahead read a copy of the e-mail for yourself.

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Itching to get your hands on Motorola’s sexy new QWERTY smartphone, the Motorola Q 9c? Well then let this news story be the cure for your itch. Verizon is now offering the Motorola Q 9c in its full QWERTY keypad glory for just $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate. Of course that includes a two-year agreement with Verizon, but hey, you win some, you lose some.

And with this deal, you’re actually winning a lot. Because the features of the Motorola Q 9c should be enough to keep you company for the whole two years of your contract anyway. Here’s a quick rundown of the Moto Q 9c’s features:

• Windows Mobile 6
• 2.4-inch screen
• 1.3-megapixel camera
• 128MB internal memory and support for memory cards up to 32GB
• Stereo Bluetooth
• Pre-installed MS Office mobile suite and Opera Mobile

So if you’re in the mood to acquire a new smartphone, and willing to lose nearly $200 (not to mention a bit of your patience), then go ahead and check out Verizon’s web site for more details.

Via [IntoMobile]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

Well, it was a long time coming, but YouTube has finally made its localized Indian version go live. Now, YouTube users from India are given access to a highly personalized version of the site, featuring content that’s filtered through a so-called “Indian lens.” The live video charts show what videos are being watched by users in India, and the featured videos are now targeted towards an Indian audience. Literally dozens of local partners have also been signed-up by YouTube to provide home-grown content to the users. And they even launched an official Indian YouTube Blog. So if you’re looking for some original South Asian video goodness, head on over to http://in.youtube.com.

Read [YouTube India Blog]

• Black Friday 2009: Apple one-day shopping event details
• Black Friday 2009: Apple announces a special one-day shopping event
• Apple App Store gaming update for the week of November 16 to 22, 2009

A Japan-based designer known as Marimo-san is thinking way out of the box with his latest cellphone concept design, featuring a mechanism that allows for a detachable screen. The screen in this cellphone concept design can be removed so the user can enjoy video calls on the go. And aside from that, the slot for the screen should also accept other add-ons such as a widescreen display and a dual screen video viewer, to name a few, turning the cellphone into a number of new devices at any given time.

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If you’ve been monitoring news in another language like I’ve been doing this morning, you might have also noticed that the homepage of Google’s Translation service has undergone a bit of a makeover. And if you mess around with it a little you’ll find a few new features that haven’t even been announced by Google yet.

In addition to the thirteen languages that Google Translate already supports, it now offers translations for eleven new languages, which are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Swedish. So now you can translate text and web pages in 25 languages, plus there’s a cool new feature that lets you translate something even if you don’t know the language of origin. It’s called Detect Language, and lets you translate text and web pages without asking you for the original language you are trying to translate from. It’s a godsend for people like me who don’t know their Simplified Chinese from the Traditional, and I’m sure a lot of other people are going to like this new feature as well.

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