Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

In most places across the world, at any given time of day, you can walk up to any random person and be sure that he/she owns a Nokia. Then when you ask that person why he/she owns a Nokia, you’ll be given an anecdote about its user-friendly interface, nice styling, satisfactory performance, etc. And it shouldn’t surprise you, because those are the reasons why Nokia skyrocketed in the mobile phone making game.

Another thing that’s not surprising is Nokia’s apparent low profile in the North American handset market, mainly because it just would not succumb to the carriers’s requests to modify their phones in order to match some “specific criteria.” This will soon change, however, as Nokia finally decides to change it’s tactics in order to recover their stronghold on the US market.

“We are literally repositioning our entire approach to the US,” says Mark Louison, the company’s North America chief. And they had better do it soon. Unless they want to keep seeing underdog Motorola beating them at their own game.

Read [Business Week]

The Government Accountability Office recently sent out a report that there are stolen US military items currently being sold on Craigslist and eBay. However, there is no clue as to where these items came from or who is selling them. This comes after government investigators posed as buyers who successfully purchased prohibited items such as night vision goggles, army combat uniforms, special enhanced body armor vests and two F-14 fighter jet components. Investigators fear that these items, if sold to non-military personnel or civilians, could be used directly against the US troops and their allies.

Important discussions have arisen since such items were posted for sale. At present, eBay and Craigslist do not follow any official state rules as to selling prohibited items but are still trying to keep such off the site. Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craiglist even told the House National Security and Foreign Affairs subcommittee that the rules on what cannot and can be sold on the website are somewhat confusing. 

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It was just a few weeks ago that finally saw the HTC Shift officially land here in the US and now we learn of a second version. The latest addition will be a Sprint-branded offering and come with built-in EV-DO support. Overall the specs will remain the same as the ‘standard’ Shift, which features a 7-inch touchscreen display, a full QWERTY keyboard, 800 Mhz processor, 1GB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0. The EV-DO Sprint, well actually the “HTC HTCX9000 Shift CDMA” version will retail for $1500, and is already available for pre-order on Amazon.

Via [jkOnTheRun]

It seemed like forever before HTC released the Shift, and then it was initially only available in Europe, leaving all of here in the US to sit back, drool and continue to hope and wait. Well good news for anyone that was holding their breath on this one, that wait is now over and the Shift is officially available here in the US.

The features remain the same and include a 7-inch touchscreen display, a full QWERTY keyboard, 800 Mhz processor, 1GB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE along with HSDPA/UMTS.

Sadly the same factor that limits the desire for owning the Shift in Europe will be the same for potential US customers, the price is more than a lot of standard laptops. The HTC Shift will retail for a little more than $1600.

Via [Gizmodo]

After the recent bad news regarding Intel for the OLPC project it is good to see that they have set up offices in the US and are looking to expand through state governments and get the XO laptop into the hands of the poorest kids in the US.

The XO laptop costs $188 which is almost double the initial target of $100, and with $10,000 spent per annum on each primary school child in the US compared to $20 in Bangladesh it is likely that the project is looking to boost sales of the XO in the US to help support the sales in the poorer nations, but as the poorest kids in the US benefit at the same time it seems like a win-win situation to me.

Via [BBC]