Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Bill Gates promised frequent updates way back when they were doing the final testing of IE7. Yet somehow, it’s been almost two years before they finally released the beta mode of Internet Explorer 8 just today. Some will hurrah, some will cringe, some won’t care one way or the other. But...it’s out...and along with actually seeming to be an improvement over the previous version...it’s pretty clear that the folks at Microsoft are also using their latest browser as a clever little way to try to take over some Google ground.

I admit, I’m a diehard Firefox user. And when I checked out IE8 beta, I immediately recognized the same thing others seem to be seeing. The Smart Address Bar is very similar to the Awesome Bar in Firefox 3. When you start to type in the address bar, it tries to guess where you want to go, based on where you’ve been before. Although I have to give it to Microsoft, their Smart Bar seems to do the job even a little better. It shows history items, autocomplete suggestions, and your saved Favorites all in lists that you can collapse or expand with just a click. Also, you can delete an address from the Smart Bar with just a click as well, which is really handy for any addresses you may have in there that were typed incorrectly or if you have bookmarks you just don’t use anymore. 

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Once again your printer is out of ink way before you think there is any way it should be. Yet somehow, BOOM. It just refuses to print another page until you replace the cartridge. Well, when Farhad Manjoo’s Brother printer suddenly stopped printing; he started to wonder if his printer wasn’t simply lying to him that it was out of toner just so he would buy more before he actually even needed it. His prints hadn’t been fading at all; his printer just suddenly simply refused to keep going without a new cartridge.

Manjoo decided to look to the ‘Net for a way around this. And he indeed found some answers. He learned that by covering up the sides of his toner cartridge with a piece of electrical tape he could “trick” his printer into thinking it was full. He says the printer was been chugging along just fine ever since...eight months and hundreds of pages down the road...printing out perfect pages. 

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Trying to lure in customers to replace their DVDs or HD DVDs with Blu-rays, Paramount is offering ten bucks per title to do just that. Although Paramount and Dreamwork titles are involved in the offer, it isn’t good for just any Paramount movie.

According to HighDefDigest, the promotion will start with the release of Transformers on Blu-ray coming in just a few days on September 2nd. Hopefully you won’t mind messing up those boxes a bit though, since you need to include the proof-of-purchase tabs from both the DVD and the Blu-ray disk, along with the promotional certificate from inside eligible Blu-ray movies.  You also have to buy your Blu-rays before December 31, 2009 and have your rebate envelope postmarked before January 31, 2010.

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Mozilla Labs announced yesterday the release of the Initial Prototype of the latest project meant to connect the web with language - Ubiquity.  From a quote on their blog, the folks over at Mozilla Labs hope to “find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”

Ok. So, what the heck does that mean? An example of what they are saying their program would be useful for could be this. You just snagged some concert tickets from a radio contest to a show happening tonight. Coolness. Only you haven’t been to this venue before, and neither has the friend that you’re emailing and inviting. Not so cool. Heck...you haven’t even heard of the band. Do you even know if you want to go? Is there anywhere to eat on the way? Now, normally, you’d have to be searching out the address on some mapping site, looking up the band for some info on them, copying all of this into an email (including either links or the map itself as well). Lots of typing, clicking, searching, copying, pasting, right? Well, this is some of what Ubiquity hopes to get rid of.

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In private beta testing mode since January, the England-based ProofHQ has just opened it’s program up to the the public. What makes it so appealing to so many is the obvious allowance for collaboration. ProofHQ makes this simple with the use of several formats on the web. Blogs, social media applications...users are able to comment and give feedback on a project that can be seen by anyone working on it by using embeddable objects.

There is no cost for this new personal version, unless you want to upgrade to a more advanced package that offers more storage.  The free package only allows for five proofs a months (50 megabytes of storage), and the upgrades run anywhere from $29 to $99 a month. However, you can get a feel for it to see what you think by taking advantage of their 14 day free trial offer. It is both PC and Mac compatible. 

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Amazon just announced the acquisition of the start-up book sharing company Shelfari. They are on a roll with literary-related purchases, as just earlier this month, they bought AbeBooks, an online seller of rare and used works.  Now, what makes this Shelfari purchase a tad more interesting is the fact that one of their main competitors is LibraryThing.  And AbeBooks just happens to own 40% of LibraryThing.  Keeping it in the family Amazon.

LibraryThing however, is not seeming to have that much respect for the Shelfari site. Just yesterday they wrote on their site that Shelfari is a “clone” and that it is “..somewhat less intellectual, less featureful”, among other zingers. And there they are practically cousins. 

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Mystery has surrounded the whole HTC Dream G1 launch from T-Mobile since word broke about the Android-powered Dream. There has been speculation running rampant about what the first Android headset is going to look like. Websites had mock-ups showing different views of what people thought it might be. There was even a video. Well, apparently, there have been photos leaked “from a trusted source” of what the G1 is going to look like...and there are a few things people didn’t see coming.

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Believe it or not, I know many die-hard fans of the old Polaroid camera that were sad to see it go. Well, it looks like there just may be some cause for rejoicing if the new survey put out by Polaroid is any indication. They were recently asking for feedback from readers of Amateur Photographer to help design their new digital camera with built in printer.

Not too much is known at this point about the new camera other than the fact that like the Pogo Instant Mobile Printer, it will implement Bluetooth technology and a USB connection to print photos. Polaroid was asking opinions on whether they should include options such as an external battery, a hotshoe for an external flash, and a higher pixel count than their previous version.  One of the other differences between the PoGo Printer and the Polaroid PoGo ProSeries camera (as it is slated to be called) is the fact that the camera’s photos will print out at 4x3 as opposed to 2x3.

It is scheduled to hit the market next year and be marketed mainly to “professional and business users”. There is also going to be a lower-end (ie less expensive as well) ZINK-enabled camera that prints 2x3 inch prints coming out around the same time as well.

Via [Yahoo! Tech]

Supposedly confirmed as of a few days ago, however we are still awaiting official word from Canon on their newest baby, due any day now. Complete specs, (translated from Chinese) are here for the time being. Apparently there had been a big bru-ha-ha when a photo hit the internet apparently taken by the new Canon according to it’s metadata (and the info right on the web page itself), on what many believe to be a Media Temple client page. This being a big oops, since they are a web dev for high profile clients such as Sony, Adobe, ABC and others. The others, in some people’s mind’s, could include Canon. Thus, a page that had Canon photos which was leaked onto the net before it was discovered and subsequently password protected.

The Canon 50D is pictured here with what’s sure to be a kit lens option, the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens. A short list of what is most likely going to be key features is as follows:

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Imagine being able to power your smoke alarm in your house without ever needing to change your batteries. It would get it’s energy simply from the energy and vibrations from everything around it. That is the goal of Texas Instruments. They call it “energy scavenging”, and they say the reality is not that far away.

Employing the inventor of the original microchip Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments, currently the world’s third largest chip maker, is busy trying to break another electronic frontier.  This time by creating a chip that uses an infinitesimally small amount of energy to operate.  They actually did a demonstration showing a clock being run on...get this...grapes. 

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