As if not to add insult to injury for Sprint buyers of the Pixi, Sprint slapped the price of the WiFi-less phone down to a mere $49 after a $100 mail in rebate and a two year contract. The Pixi originally appeared for $100 with a two year contract months after the Pre debuted. The Pre, not the Pixi, also supports 3D gaming and Flash now, making a huge gap between the phones even bigger (and the choice for the consumers even more obvious).
At The Engadget Show, Aaron Woodman, director of consumer experiences for Microsoft’s mobile division, shocked the world by pulling out a LG prototype phone running Windows Phone 7 Series. You can view all the pictures of the phone here.
There’s not much for specs, but it is a trifle bit thicker than an iPhone or Nexus One, has six hardware buttons, a slide out QWERTY keyboard, and a 5MP camera. He wouldn’t confirm it had any Mac support, but he didn’t toss it to the curb. At least now we have an idea for the future of Windows Mobile hardware.
Update: There’s also a short snippet of it being on the Engadget Show. See below.
The time: 1987. Steve Jobs sees a beach ball lying around during NeXT’s annual company retreat, and he notices something about it that he would remember to this very day, along with millions of Mac users all over the world.
I wonder what it is… (More pictures after the break.)
Another unknown HTC phone cleared the FCC today, supposedly headed to Verizon with CDMA bands and a model number PB99100. While no one has any proof that this is the Nexus One, the fact that the Nexus One with GSM bands had a model number of PB99300 might mean you can pick up this phone at a Verzion store near you come springtime, but there’s been no word or official confirmation from the guys at Google, HTC, or Verizon.
Update: Neowin reports that a Google employee has told them that Google will host a press conference during the first day of the CTIA wireless conference (March 23), where they will introduce the CDMA Nexus One.
8 bit lovers and Apple fanboys can finally rejoice today, now that the Digital Music Synthesizer is now available for the Apple II. The device is a wavetable synthesizer designed solely for live performances and comes with ten voices including trumpet, bass, square wave, sine wave, and sawtooth wave. Not only that, but sequences can be recorded for later, and there’s no monitor required. The synthesizer also supports Apple IIe, IIc, IIgs, and IIc+ models, and is available for $20, a reasonable price for something that does so much (not that we’re endorsing it – we don’t have an Apple II).
Google launched a social networking tool today, taking on the same market as Twitter, called Buzz. Google Buzz can be described social networking service also integrating your other social network updates into its own wing, built right into Gmail and the entire Google ecosystem.
Buzz has four notable features, including:
A friend list created automatically based on the people you email the most often from Gmail.
Other social networks and media sharing sites, such as Flickr, Twitter, and Picasa are combined with file sharing for status updates.
Private or public sharing (equivalent of Twitter and email, respectively).
A recommended buzz, similar to when you see tweets retweeted by your followers on Twitter.
One thing not left out were cellphones. Buzz is also designed to work with the iPhone and Android browsers, so you can “buzz on the go”. Buzz can also change your stream to places around you like restaurants, businesses, among others using your current locations, which you can manually update (with location-aware disabled iPhones) or find automatically.
Google Buzz will slowly roll out to Gmail users, so don’t expect to use it right away.
Super Bowl XLIV just came to an end with an impressive victory for the Saints against the Colts – something which I didn’t want. Regardless of the game itself, the much anticipated advertisements of the Super Bowl didn’t deliver this year. The tech advertisements were few, being only for the Motorola DEVOUR, GoDaddy, Intel, Google, and Vizio. Most of the other advertises were for beer, chips, or some other random stuff (shoes?).
Over at Geekbench, an interesting benchmark recently popped up for an unreleased MacBook Pro (model 6,1) running a dual core Core i7 humming along at 2.66Ghz. Interesting? So is the operating system, which isn’t the current build of Snow Leopard, 10C540. Other results worthy enough to mention are that it’s running 4GB RAM and a final score of 5260, which makes current generation MacBook Pros seem like slugs – ranging in scores from 3500 to 4200 on the Geekbench tests. But are these authentic?
Considering that the security over at the Apple campus is so tight, we doubt that these are genuine results, and could’ve been done with some intricate hackintosh or that someone would’ve been dumb enough to post their results online for the whole world to see. But until they’re released, you can dream into the stars with Apple rumors, no?
Something made Eric Schmidt go excited today on Twitter, encouraging his followers to watch the third quarter Super Bowl ads tomorrow. He had this to say in his tweet:
Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)
Why? Either his in love with the Doritos spot, or Google has an ad to air. We’ll assume the latter since John Battelle has received word from “a reliable source” that Google will air the Search Stories ad named Pairsian Love during the Super Bowl’s 3rd quarter ad break.
Verizon announced the Motorola DEVOUR, the Droid’s little brother, today with a press statement. The DEVOUR is essentially a lighter Droid and being Verizon’s first Android phone with Motoblur. Other delicious specs include Bluetooth, 8GB microSD card preinstalled, a 3.1″ capacitive touch screen. There is no mention of multi-touch, since it only runs Android 1.6 for the time being. Look for the phone to drop in an Verizon store near you in March.
