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T-Mobile’s Project Dark includes option for buying phones in monthly installments?
Dishwasher Robot Ensures Our Future Selves Will Have Zero Personal Responsibility [Robots]
USB PC Prankster: guaranteed to freak out, enrage your cubicle mates
TringMe’s App Lets You Make Calls From Facebook
Mystery HTC Android Phone Appears, Discloses Nothing [Htc]
Origin Data Locker Backs Rugged Looks with AES Hardware Encryption [Hard Drives]
There’s Retail Markup, and Then There’s Canadian Windows 7 [Windows 7]
HP Envy, dv8 Quad, Mini 311, and numerous other Windows 7 machines now available to order
Google Figured Out Where New Zealand Is
Launch48 Startups Present Their Ideas After 48 Hours Of Hacking

T-Mobile’s Project Dark includes option for buying phones in monthly installments?

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 02:59 PM PDT

Still no confirmation on any all-you-can-eat data plans, but Boy Genius Report has some convincing screens that seem to reveal some other precepts of T-Mobile’s enigmatic (and purportedly company-saving) Project Dark. Two new plans have emerged, Even More and Even More Plus. The former is the traditional two-year contract, along with options to do data only and get a subsidized phone. Even More Plus doesn’t require a contract, going month-to-monthly instead, and subsequently the phone is full price. However, what’s gonna be interesting to see is the FlexPay option, which allows you to pay for a device in monthly installments instead of upfront, a plan we’ve seen before in markets like Germany and Japan. In the example above, a $400 G1 on the non-contractual Even More Plus plan is divvied out to an initial $170 payment and 19 subsequent installments of $12.10, or $33.33 over three months after the related upfront cost. It’s no game-changer on its own, but it’s certainly an intriguing prospect that’s gonna make some (initially) cash-strapped individuals very happy to be able to walk out with a decent Android device.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile’s Project Dark includes option for buying phones in monthly installments? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dishwasher Robot Ensures Our Future Selves Will Have Zero Personal Responsibility [Robots]

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 02:00 PM PDT

My elaborate plan to take out years worth of repressed childhood dish washing memories on my own children some day has hit a Panasonic robot-sized snafu.

You see, in the future, when we’re flying around in cars and Will Smith is saving us from over-protective robots, the dishes will wash themselves.

Case in point, in the video this robot/video camera contraption has magic hands that grip, wash, dump out and otherwise do all the things I had planned on forcing my kids to do after dinner in the future.

2da3c6c876S7MEvM.jpg Dishwasher Robot Ensures Our Future Selves Will Have Zero Personal Responsibility [Robots] Panasonic is also working on a robot load lifter that converts into a motorized wheelchair, which will be perfect for all those elderly folks in the future who double as deliverymen. [Impress via Engadget]

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Dishwasher Robot Ensures Our Future Selves Will Have Zero Personal Responsibility [Robots]

USB PC Prankster: guaranteed to freak out, enrage your cubicle mates

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 01:33 PM PDT

Oh, brother. As we all know so well, the office can be a draining place. But devices such as these could make even the most burnt-out middle manager excited to clock in. The USB PC Prankster looks like a stock flash drive, but as you can clearly see above, a few toggle switches enable it to become quite the headache. Once plugged in, the unlucky PC that it’s attached to will have its Caps Lock enabled and disabled at random, see garbled text splattered about quarterly reports and be victim to uncontrollable, erratic cursor movements. Thankfully, the drive will never activate the Enter key nor close or save documents, so you can rest assured that it’s all in good fun. Turning your office up on its head costs just

TringMe’s App Lets You Make Calls From Facebook

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 01:30 PM PDT

VoIP startup TringMe has launched a Facebook application that lets users make calls from the social network using its Flash-based web phone for browsers. The app also lets you embed widgets to your profile for your Facebook friends to call or SMS you.

The app has much of the functionality that a regular VoIP app like Skype has. TringMe’s app lets users set up caller-id, send SMS messages from Facebook, lets callers leave voicemails that the users can access and lets you add TringMe widgets to your profile that let friends and visitors call or SMS you from that page, which seems to be the most appealing feature of the app.

And if you have a TringMe account, you can integrate your account with Facebook. Of course, you have to buy credits to use the application, which range from $5 to $100 worth of credits, bought via PayPal. Facebook also has a similar Skype-based app called SkypeMe. that lets you Skype your friends.

TringMe also recently launched a demo of a widget that now allows a user the ability to make a VoIP call from Microsoft Silverlight applications. Silverlight doesn't allow access to a microphone, thus restricting VoIP calls, so TringMe used a backdoor Flash widget to access the microphone.

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TringMe's App Lets You Make Calls From Facebook

Mystery HTC Android Phone Appears, Discloses Nothing [Htc]

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 01:20 PM PDT

An HTC Android phone popped up today, offering few clues—aside from a few hastily snapped pics—about what it’s called, what it does, or what it wants.

Touch sensitive menu keys? Check.

And there’s our pal Android, and a camera of indeterminable mega pixelage. [The Unlockr via BGR]

Mystery HTC Android Phone Appears, Discloses Nothing [Htc]

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Mystery HTC Android Phone Appears, Discloses Nothing [Htc]

Origin Data Locker Backs Rugged Looks with AES Hardware Encryption [Hard Drives]

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 01:00 PM PDT

The Origin Data Locker: For the paranoid geek who lives with his parents in their fortified underground bunker.

Doubt it? Everything from the belongs-on-a-battleship looks to the AES encryption software to the 6-18 digit PIN screams “you will not get the 1TB of porn inside me.”

Even the touchscreen keypad is paranoid, as it changes randomly each time you use it so the spies you think are on your tail can’t memorize the PIN. One touch drive erase means the ~~hentai~~ secrets get scrubbed instantly the moment ~~your parents~~ those spies catch you.

Pricing starts at $488 for the 750GB version and $652 for the 1TB. [Slashgear]

Origin Data Locker Backs Rugged Looks with AES Hardware Encryption [Hard Drives]

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Origin Data Locker Backs Rugged Looks with AES Hardware Encryption [Hard Drives]

There’s Retail Markup, and Then There’s Canadian Windows 7 [Windows 7]

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 12:00 PM PDT

Unless there’s something in the Canadian Windows 7 Ultimate Edition that Microsoft isn’t telling us about, it would appear as though someone at the Dell website may have hit the wrong key or ten.

Thankfully, you can finance for the low low price of $2,726/month. [Thanks, Scott]

Theres Retail Markup, and Then Theres Canadian Windows 7 [Windows 7]

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There’s Retail Markup, and Then There’s Canadian Windows 7 [Windows 7]

HP Envy, dv8 Quad, Mini 311, and numerous other Windows 7 machines now available to order

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 11:59 AM PDT

Since today really needs a good heap of news to somewhat balance out yesterday’s glut, HP has updated its online store to give it an abundance of new and revised Windows 7 machines, including the Envy series (Beats edition and all), Pavilion dm3 with AMD Neo or Intel CULV chips, Core i7-packing dv6t/ dv7t / dv8t Quad editions, and the not-so-netbook CQ61. We’re still not seeing the previously-leaked dm1 ultraportable anywhere, but the Mini 311 and a slightly updated Mini 110 are, with the option to jump from Windows XP to 7 for a cool $50 / $30 respectively. Most everything in the store, desktops and laptops, has been updated to at least include Windows 7 as the standard shipping OS, and while all claim free 2-day shipping, estimated shipping dates begin sometime the week after 7’s Oct 22nd launch — no early chances here, folks. Browse the read links and keep an eye on the shiny red “new” icons (no flashing GIFs, we’re afraid) for the entire revised lineup.

Update: As a number of you have pointed, the Envy product page is a bit, well, sloppy. Typos and missing commas notwithstanding, it seems to biggest laugh is the cost of customization, i.e. $800 more to downgrade from a 500GB HDD to 320GB or 250GB (same price), or $900 more to downgrade from 6GB or 4GB of DDR3 memory. Yeah, it might be best to hold off on that one until HP get the kinks worked out.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Read – Desktop lineup
Read – Laptop lineup
Read – Envy series lineup

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

HP Envy, dv8 Quad, Mini 311, and numerous other Windows 7 machines now available to order originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Figured Out Where New Zealand Is

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 11:44 AM PDT

bca51a1a3aNZ.jpg Google Figured Out Where New Zealand Is Last week we wrote about Google’s odd habit of putting the Google New Zealand web site as the top result for a ton of queries like Google Ireland and Google Egypt (and the commenters found many more).

I wondered how long it would take for them to make the change. If they did it right away it would be too obvious. They’d probably wait until the middle of the weekend to fix it.

Today, in the middle of the weekend, they fixed it. And now we can link to a clip from The Chaser’s War On Everything (which is even better than Flight of the Conchords):

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Google Figured Out Where New Zealand Is

Launch48 Startups Present Their Ideas After 48 Hours Of Hacking

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 11:13 AM PDT

fc3deea2228 logo.png Launch48 Startups Present Their Ideas After 48 Hours Of Hacking The Launch48 event in London this weekend has seen six teams attempt to launch a startup in, you guessed it 48 hours. The event, which was basically created by some UK startup enthusiasts, is different to StartupWeekend in that separate teams come together to each work on their own project rather than one. After frantically coding for the last couple of days, the results were presented tonight at the event, so here they are in order of presentation. I liked Given and Grapeshots. As you can see some were more fully formed than others:

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