I would personally prefer a cheaper TV without a built-in PC or blu-ray player, but it’s still really interesting to see all these new machines hitting the market in a rapid pace. The Allio PCTV comes with a built-in home theater PC including a blu-ray drive. The flagship model is $2799…

Allio 42-inch HDTV with PC and Blu-ray Player [hothardware.com]

If you can stomach more than 30 seconds of it, here's Snoop Dogg on Martha Stewart making cognac mashed potatoes. Here's part 2, in which Snoop and Martha compare posses -- bodyguards in Snoop's case and personal assistants for Martha. One of commenters on YouTube correctly notes that Stewart has spent more time in jail than Snoop.

• This week's LBP download haul - Sack-in-the-Box and LocoRoco Costumes
  

Presidential candidate Barack Obama reached out to the smart mobs in new and effective ways that contributed significantly to his victory. It seems inevitable that the crowd will now be eager to direct its wisdom into his administration. Here is a pioneering project in that venue: BigDialog: Ask the President-Elect is a post-election method to keep the public participating in the governing by the new President. In a techPresident post — White House 2.0: The Public is Knocking on the Door – Micah Sifry sketches the project. Here are some basics for harnessing of this here comes everybody method:

[The projects] seek to crowd-source the process of putting pressing questions before the President-elect and identifying the top priorities of the public. . . .

The site builds on our experience during the primaries with 10Questions.com and is designed to take video and text questions for the President-elect and then enable users to vote the best questions to the top. If we manage to get the President-elect to respond, users will then get the opportunity to rate his responsiveness.

¡Café binario! Deseamos invitarles a la Jornada de CAVEDATOS Telecom y Movilidad, Bitácora de Desarrollo

La Cámara Venezolana de Empresas de Tecnologías de la Información, CAVEDATOS, se complace en invitarle a la Jornada Telecom y Movilidad, Bitácora de Desarrollo, donde voceros del sector privado y público, así como un invitado internacional compartirán ideas y novedades de estas importantes áreas de actividad económica.

Se anexa el programa del evento.

Fecha: MIERCOLES 19 de Noviembre, 2008

Hora: 8 a.m. ? 7 p.m. seguido por el Cocktail de Cierre

Lugar: Hotel Pestana, Av.Principal de Santa Eduvigis, frente al Excelsior Gama

PROGRAMA

8:00 ? 8:25 a.m.
Palabras de apertura. Socorro Hernández, Ministra del Poder Popular para las Telecomunicaciones y la Informática y Presidenta de CANTV

8:30 - 9:25 a.m. Conferencia Magistral: Tecnología Móvil y su Impacto en Transporte y Logística (en inglés con traducción simultánea). Kevin Moore, Director de Mercadeo de Soluciones Industriales de Intermec Technologies, invitado internacional, cortesía de InterSouth

10:15 - 10:35 a.m. ? Receso

10:40-11:20 a.m. - Avances y perspectivas de la nueva CANTV. Franco Silva, Vicepresidente Ejecutivo de CANTV

11:25 - 12:10 p.m.

Salón 1
Construyendo redes convergentes de nueva generación de alta calidad, en proveedores de servicio. Aisha Sanes, Ingeniera de Sistemas de Cisco
Salón 2
-Soluciones móviles, una estrategia verde. Magdalena de Luca, Presidenta de Corporación Sybven
- El Mundo móvil: el 7mo medio de comunicación.. Froilán Fernández, El Nacional y Enbytes.com

12:15 - 1:55 p.m. ? Almuerzo libre

2:00 - 2:40 p.m.

Salón 1
Movilidad a su máxima expresión. Alejandro García, Gerente de marca Lenovo.
Salón 2
VII Censo Agrícola Nacional: Caso de éxito de Tecnología Móvil. Jorge Román, Director de Informática del Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Agricultura y Tierras

2:45 ? 3:30 p.m.
Salón 1
Satélite Simón Bolívar. Carlos Brito, Gerente de Plataforma y Comunicaciones Satelitales de CANTV.
Salón 2
Foro Mobile Monday: El celular como medio de pago. Principales aspectos para una implementación exitosa de Comercio Móvil.

3:35 - 4:15 p.m.
Salón 1
Cómo ser altamente productivo administrando costos de manera eficiente… Gestión del gasto telefónico. Angélica Vivas Contreras, Gerente de la unidad de negocios de Gestión de Ahorro de OpenCrom.
Salón 2 - Conferencia HP

4:20 - 4:45 p.m. Receso

4:50 - 5:30 p.m.

Salón 1
Impacto de la CANTV en lo económico y Social: una mirada al esquema de compras y al fortalecimiento del desarrollo y producción interna desde la óptica de la estatal. Representante de CANTV

Salón 2
La tecnología en los consumidores de bajos ingresos. Carlos Jiménez, Director de Tendencias Digitales

5:35 ? 6:45 p.m. Panel de Cierre
Tema Panel de Cierre: Comunicando a las Mayorías, el reto de acercar las Telecom a todos.

Panelistas: Franco Silva, Vicepresidente de CANTV; José María de Viana, Asesor de la Presidencia Digitel; Augusto Moronta, V.P. de Planificación Estratégica y Regulatorio de Movistar; Eduardo Stigol, Presidente de Inter; Alberto Scharffernorth, Presidente de CASETEL; Carlos Garcerán, Director de InterSouth; Juan Carlos López, Gerente General de Cisco; María Elena Fernández, Presidenta del Instituto de Ingeniería/ Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología; Judith Gil, Presidenta de IDC Venezuela y Pedro Pablo Ojanguren, Presidente de CAVEDATOS.

Moderadores: William Peña, InsideTelecom y Tal Cual y Peter Cernik, VP Ejecutivo de CAVEDATOS

7:00 ? 10:00 p.m. ? Cocktail de cierre

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Think of Newber as sort of a location-aware GrandCentral call directing service that lives on your iPhone and can forward calls automatically to whatever landline is closest to your location. Other features, like being able to swap phones in the middle of a conversation, making and receiving calls from a "Newber" number and automatically sending all incoming calls to voicemail are super neat, but it's missing a few features that the older and free-er GrandCentral service provides.

The call redirection worked great in our tests. You can manually set calls to route to either your iPhone or your "local" landline, which is programmed via location detection and can automatically switch when you get to a certain place, like home or work. Outgoing calls from your Newber number are shown as your Newber number, which is fantastic for hiding your real number from business contacts or people you don't quite trust. What's not cool, unfortunately, is Newber doesn't have access to your favorites list, so you'll have to re-add your favorites from your contacts list (which it does have access to).

Compared to GrandCentral, Newber is still missing features like being able to ring multiple phones simultaneously, listening in on voicemail as it's being recorded, and having people announce their names before you pick up (or deny) the call.

The biggest difference between the two is that Newber costs $5 a month and 2 cents a minute, whereas GrandCentral is free. Is being able to route your calls to your landline automatically worth what's essentially long distance rates? Tough to say. But they're still in beta, and it may be possible that they'll tweak prices a bit before launching fullscale. [Newber via Chip Chick]

We have given you some fair news on Microsoft?s New Xbox Experience already but a very useful article over at Gizmodo points out 10 things that you should know about NXE.

The first thing they are keen to point out is that installation time for these new look features will be fairly quick. They say average install time is around 5-10 minutes, during which your dashboard will undergo a complete makeover.

All the user menus will look better, and Gizmodo reports that the machine will perform better as a result of the update. With their quick look at the Netflix feature, they say it ?performs great? and the ability to stream movies is very convenient and easy to use.

You can check out the whole list below if you?re interested. They also have some screenshots showing some of the new menus and features.

Source: Read

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

LG Incite for AT&T, now with more official originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Of those things I look for is actually the school holidays where block buster movies will be up for my viewing galore and me try to lavish my taste buds for cartoons. What you expect, I’m a Peter Pan. Men are just big boys with their toys. Never grew up.

Of which, this caught my eye: Madagascar, where Chris Rock and Sasha Bohen (Ali G) starred in them with a load full of character. But then, one thing though stuck to my mind, my little girl, Athira , is more colorful and ever damaged the DVD player just for her MADAGASCAR Movie. It’s time to MOVE IT.

Oh ya..tell that to my sister and mom and dad which she really took a piss at em Nan and Gramps mainly because she will dance like she’s on a tranz and sing to the We Gonna Move It Move It, jingle. Or mostly because she hogs the telly away from her Gramp which is a couch potato cum couch warcraft and command and conquer couch.

Well, I am missing her annoying the heck of me..with her silly antics and hopefully her mom will let her have a stint at the cinema so she can have a memorable time for her forth birthday.

Happy birthday darling. Oh ya..you did try to squeeze yourself out on the 19th, but decided otherwise. Typical child of mine.

Love you both

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Nokia E71 finally coming to AT&T as E71x originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

T-Mobile may not have an official Visual Voicemail service for customers, but PhoneFusion plans to change that—for the Google G1, at least. The app, which was previewed today at the Under The Radar Mobility Conference, is currently available on the Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry platforms, and works in a similar fashion as the VV apps on the iPhone and Instinct; the name, number, date and time for each of the messages in your inbox appears on the screen as a list of entries. As far as Android specific details go, there's not much info on the app except that it will appear in the Android Marketplace by the end of the year. [NewsBlaze via IntoMobile]

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc and South Korean partner KTF Co will jointly develop a smartphone using Google Inc software for launch next year, the Nikkei business daily reported on Wednesday.

Telcos do this all the time but by George, what a whopping drop for the iPhone! The 8GB iPhone is currently experiencing a huge price cut to $99.00 from Orange just in time for the holidays. This is way below the suggested retail price of the phone leaving a lot of subsidizing going for Orange. Moves like this usually cater to the initial appetite for gadget lust without consumers realizing how “trapped” they are in their post paid cellular plans for the next so and so months.

[Photo c/o Apple Insider]

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Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:
Why Microsoft Should Bid Again — and Yahoo Should Accept  —  Now that Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has finally stepped aside, removing what many saw as one of the main barriers to bringing the two companies together, Microsoft should re-ignite acquisition talks with the company.