Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Surveys like this are always very interesting as they show the real truths behind the reliability of products, not just the output of the company’s marketing department.  In this case, SquareTrade, a research group, have taken it open themselves to tackle smart phones and to see their reliability (or lack thereof, as the case may be) over the first year of purchase.  And what better to use than 15,000 handsets consisting of BlackBerrys, iPhones and Treos.

As my not-so-inconspicuous title suggests, the Treo performed poorly, in fact, surprisingly poorly!  After one year 5.6% of all iPhones malfunctioned, followed by a sizable jump to 12% for the BlackBerry and a massive 16% of Treos.  This is incredibly worrying if you have just a bought a Treo, but comforting if you have selected the iPhone!

Read the full details after the break.

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One of the hottest gadgets that many people are buying are GPSs.  For the past few years, they are always up there in top industry sales yearly.  Many new cars support built-in GPSs, but many people would rather purchase standalone units.  However, there are many other alternatives to built-in GPSs or standalone units, which I will explore in a moment, but first, let’s take a look at how we got to where we are now.

Keep reading and find out all of your options when it comes to navigating anywhere.

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Sections: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Gadgets / Other, GPS/Navigation, Transportation, Originals, Web, Websites, Features, Buying Guide

Finishing up it’s two-day convention in San Fransisco yesterday, YPulse National Mashup is a yearly event that brings together youth media and marketing professionals from brands, agencies, and the non-profit sector to share practices for reaching today’s totally wired youth. And this year’s findings were a rather obvious one for anyone walking around any school, mall, or other teen gathering place. Teens are becoming more and more mobile and cell companies, advertisers, and other media companies plan to be sure to capitalize on this.

And capitalize on it they will indeed be able to.  It’s estimated that teens wield a whopping $200 billion annually in discretionary spending. Yep, you read that correctly, and it wasn’t a typo. Two-hundred BILLION. Today’s kids must be charging much more for lawn-mowing services than back in the day, or else get one heck of an allowance.

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Sections: Communications, Mobile, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Miscellaneous, Web

Widely used in devices like the iPhone, mini notebooks, digital cameras, Flash-based SSD hard disk drives and more, flash memory chips usually have a lifetime of about ten years. This is even being optimistic. When you are using applications that need a lot of repeat writing and rewriting however, this can cause the cells to wear out even faster, and you can find your flash device useless in only a couple of years. So, a flash memory chip that is purported to work for up to a century? Literally unheard of. But that is just what Japanese scientists say they have developed. Scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo also claim that the new chips work at a lower voltage than conventional chips.

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