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Whittling might have been a hoax and Blackberry massages just a ruse, but the Awethumb is all too real — and all too freaking amazing. Yeah, we’re not at all sure that these $8 plastic thumbguards — available in your choice of colors! — will actually protect you from repetitive stress or even make typing easier, but all the dudes and dudettes on the El train will know you mean business when you slip ‘em on. As an added bonus, lack of compatibility with the iPhone will allow you to express your disdain for touchscreens in a satisfyingly dramatic way — if you can’t rock it with an Awethumb, you’re not rockin’. Ah, to be young and ensheathed in plastic thumb protectors. Frankly astounding video after the break.

Continue reading Awethumb is amaathing!

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Awethumb is amaathing! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI, the Taiwanese makers of the popular Wind netbook, is hoping to create a new category for low-powered, inexpensive computers called "nettops." 

Dubbed the Wind Neton, MSI’s nettop is an all-in-one desktop, meaning the computer’s guts (i.e., CPU, hard drive and memory) are crammed into its display — similar to Apple’s iMac. The main difference is that the nettops are running the low-powered Atom processors designed for mobile devices, meaning they’re streamlined for web browsing and basic computing tasks.

The Neton prices will range from $400 to $800 depending on the screen size you choose (15.6, 18.5 or 22 inches). There will also be touchscreen options, according to Engadget China. No details on a ship date yet.

MSI All-in-one nettop look at a prerelease [Engadget China via Boing Boing]

Photo: Engadget

You can almost imagine the Vudu executives huddling together after taking a look around the CEDIA A/V installer conference two months ago: 

"You mean we can charge way more money for a giant box of HD content, under the bogus pretext of the ‘highest quality standard’ promised by the custom installer market? Really? And we can do this when the sensible thing to do in this economy is to market the regular Vudu box for $200? Ok, let’s do it. Let’s go to Bubba Gump‘s to celebrate.”

Vudu’s new $1,300 HD HL2 box comes packed with a terabyte-sized drive for storing about 500 1080p HD movies and it will only be available for custom jobs. You’ll be available to choose from about 10,000 titles, or about the same amount of the downloadable (and lower quality) movies from Netflix. It’s also the same amount of movies available to you in the cheaper Vudu versions.

Among the features the box receives through this A/V installer focus is dedicated IP and IR control for a smooth cohesiveness with high-end systems. 

We love the Vudu service and its high-quality HDX video (software-upgraded to near-Blu-ray quality), but this box is too expensive. Leave it for the owners of fancy super-condos in Manhattan, and buy the older version instead.

See also:

Review: Vudu (Best of Test)

We just got our hands on Alienware’s latest laptop, the 17-inch M17. It’s an offshoot of the popular Area-51 M17X, which impressed us earlier this year with its twin Nvidia GeForce 9800 GPUs and striking new design.

The new M17 (minus the “x”) system trades Nvidia graphics for …

Later this week Valve Software, makers of the popular Half Life series, and the Steam software distribution system are releasing the first version of the Steam Cloud service in the demo for the upcoming cross-platform title Left 4 Dead. The service will keeps things like game saves, mouse and keyboard …

Originally posted at Webware

Filed under: Gaming

The PSP has proven to be quite the popular system among hackers and modders of all sorts, but it looks like Sony has turned the tables a bit with its latest PSP-3000 model (otherwise known as the PSP Brite), which has so far put up a stiff resistance against folks’ attempts to put it to some decidedly unofficial uses. Among other things, the PSP-3000 has apparently completely shut shutting down the popular Pandora battery hack, and it’s even managed to stifle new attempts by heavyweight modders like Dark Alex to crack it open. One modder, known only as Royginald, even went so far as to swap the PSP-3000′s CPU out in favor of one from a PSP-2000, only to discover far too late that the 3000′s new interlaced video made the entire setup quite useless. Maybe that’s one of the “features” Sony was talking about?

[Via PSP Fanboy]

PSP-3000 proving to be difficult for hackers to crack originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/10/topstoriesemail.png” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”494″ height=”791″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /br Tired of checking the web site or your feed reader to make sure you don’t miss the best stuff from Lifehacker? Make our popular posts magically appear in your email inbox: sign up for our top stories weekly email on the sidebar of this page to hook it up. As always, we’ll treat your address with the utmost respectmdash;no spam, just good posts./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/10/custom_1225047194036_Picture_75_01.png” width=”494″ height=”145″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /Matching up with what was a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5064349/hp-planning-touchscreen-laptops-new-netbooks-and-a-touch-phone-like-now”hinted a few weeks back/a, HP’s 10-inch companion to the popular 8.9-inch a href=”http://gizmodo.com/384031/lightning-review-hp-2133-mini+note”Mini-Note 2133/a has appeared on a href=”http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/home.do”HP’s online shop/a. The link is not yet live, so the only details we have are the $399 starting price, along with size and weight and that it’s ditching the 2133′s metal for black plastic. [a href="http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/home.do"HP/a via a href="http://thetechnicist.typepad.com/the_technicist/2008/10/hp-mini-1000-shows-up-on-hpshoppingcom.html"Technicist/a - emThanks, Vivek/em!]/p br style=”clear: both;”/
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a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=XdP3M”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=XdP3M” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=mC3jM”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=mC3jM” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=uxjRm”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=uxjRm” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Mww6m”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=Mww6m” border=”0″/img/a
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/26novel.xlarge1.jpg” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”600″ height=”350″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /Every office has a pompous windbag or ten that monopolizes meeting time with their constant interruptions. And while making fun of those idiots after the fact is a staple of office life, the sad truth is that thousands of hours are lost to these interruptions, and efficiency suffers because of them. Lucky for office life, the brainpower at MIT is hard at work on a series of devices and badges that implement “reality mining” to eliminate these blowhards forever. And no, this has nothing to do with military lasers./p pThe technology is the brainchild of MIT’s Alex Pentland, who has invented a series of cell phone-sized gadgets to listen to people as the talk in meetings. These devices then study various communication signals “beneath the words” to help users better understand their speaking habits, and perhaps curb obnoxious behavior in the future./p pThe devices are currently deployed in local banks and universities, housed inside special smart phones (crap, is that a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5061705/smartphone-is-a-dumb-word-we-need-a-new-name”supposed to be emcom/em now?/a) and badges. Participants wear or use the devices from several days to several months. When people wearing the devices speak, sensors collect data on their timing, enthusiasm and energy, and variations in their speech. Even a person’s gestures are recorded, so it’s kind of like what the NSA does, but on a voluntary basis./p pPreviously, researchers would gather this data by hand, with forms and surveys. The process was tedious, inefficient and flawed, due to the fact that human beings, by their nature, “have a lot of bias when they recall their behavior,” said Anmol Madan, a graduate student of Dr. Pentland./p pNot cold, hard technology though, which is not only more efficient in logging conversation data, it’s also exponentially more accurate too./p pUltimately, Pentland envisions his tech leading to “smart” phone services that ID family members and put those calls though, but sends everything else to voicemail. [a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/business/26novelties.html"New York Times/a]/p br style=”clear: both;”/
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