Verizon sweetens Samsung Fascinate deal with Buy One Get One Free offer

Yes, that fateful day is upon us, the Samsung Fascinate has made its debut on Verizon's online store pages, and it's arrived with a quite unusual (for a top tier handset) sweetener. When buying one Fascinate, you're given the option to obtain a second one for free. Well, the hardware would be free, you'd need two-year commitments on both phones with a minimum monthly data plan of $29.99 a piece, but it's still the nicest thing Verizon's done for us since it started throwing out free Pixi Pluses with purchases of Palm's webOS handsets. You should also bear in mind your initial outlay here is a quite lofty $400, with two separate $100 mail-in rebates bringing the cost down. So it's free in pecuniary terms, but probably not free of headaches.

Nokia N8 officially for sale last week of September, UK shops October 1st

At last, an official date for Nokia's N8 flagship Symbian^3 handset. This one's been a long time coming, featuring the first of two major Symbian updates meant to bring Nokia's smartphone division in line with the competition. Look for it in the "last week of September" at Nokia's on-line shops for £429 SIM free, or free with £35 per month contract. Otherwise, it'll hit the UK high street shops on October 1st.






Source: Engadget

Facebook Denies Testing Places In The UK – But It Looks Close

Is Facebook testing its location based service Places for imminent rollout in the UK? Notes on Twitter started to surface over the weekend indicating that might be the case. And as you can see from this screengrab from @kierondonoghue on Saturday, it did work for a short time.

However, we’ve checked with Twitter’s official spokespeople and they say “We weren’t testing it this weekend contrary to reports.” And a simple check of the iPhone app reveals that even if some people can access their location via mobile in the UK, most can’t.

So there you go. But, the imminent arrival of Facebook Places in the UK and across the rest of Europe is clearly going to have an interesting impact not least on local location-based startups who already compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, to name the two main US players whose services have migrated to Europe.

Twitter’s People Recommendation Engine Appears To Be Working Like A Charm

It’s been about a month since Twitter turned on its people recommendation engine, a set of algorithms that enables the service to automagically suggest people you don’t currently follow but may find interesting.

Twitter has indicated that these suggestions are based on a variety of factors, including the people you already follow and the people they follow. They are, for now, only visible on Twitter.com and the Find People section.

And based on my experience, the algorithms seem to be doing their job just fine indeed – I have most certainly discovered a lot of new interesting people on Twitter who I wasn’t yet following already, and my own follower count has increased significantly in the past few weeks.

So for fun, I decided to use TwitterCounter to look up the counts for a couple of accounts I follow, to see if this is a general trend of something I’m noticing for my account only.

Source: TechCrunch

Scientists using metallic wastes to generate clean energy

Solar farms are swell and all, but they aren't exactly fit for laboratories or studio apartments. Thanks to new discoveries by gurus at the University of Birmingham, though, we could be on our way to a far more diminutive method of creating clean energy. As the story goes, we could soon be using microbes to transform wastes in metals into energy. The team managed to pinpoint Hydrogenase enzymes and BioPd in their research, which they believe can be used as catalysts for the treatment of persistent pollutants. The overriding goal, however, is to "develop a one-step technology that allows for the conversion of metallic wastes into high value catalysts for green chemistry and clean energy generation," but it's difficult to say at this point how close they are to realizing it. The best news? This is bound to start a new rash of Cash 4 Gold commercials.

Samsung N350 throws LTE and HSPA+ into an intriguing new netbook proposition

Yeah, we thought netbooks were old news too, but if they all start strapping up with the latest in 4G connectivity, we might have to give them another look. The Samsung N350 is just such a machine, with dual-mode LTE and HSPA+ built in. You won't be surprised that almost everything else is par for the affordable laptop market course: a dual-core Atom N550 CPU, that boilerplate 1,024 x 600 resolution on a 10.1-inch matte screen, 250GB of storage, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a multicard reader, and a trifecta of USB ports. The basic wireless options are keeping up with modernity, however, with 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0 on board, both of which are nice to see. The 3-cell battery should last up to 6.7 hours and the whole package is expected to retail for €429 ($553) in Germany this autumn. You can probably expect a rebadge under the Go label for the US and a relatively swift launch over here as well.

Nokia N8 launches September 30, says senior manager

Tapani Kaskinen is Nokia's Senior Comms Manager, so it's fitting that he'd be the first person from the company to communicate a solid release date for its long-awaited N8 handset. The gent in question told Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti that advance orders of the N8 will "begin shipping 30 September." Bear in mind we're chewing through a machine translation here, but that part's pretty unmistakable. It also meshes perfectly with earlier speculation surrounding Nokia purchasing Google AdWords -- that indicated a one-week exclusive starting on September 23rd for Nokia's UK online store, which, if you do the math, again points to a wide release at the end of the month. We asked Nokia about it ourselves and they're remaining mum on the matter, but chances are looking pretty good that October will start with the N8 finally in eager users' hands

iOS 4.1 confirmed for September 8th on Apple's UK website

According to Apple's UK website, iOS 4.1 will hit on Wednesday, September 8th. The US website still displays the non-commital "Coming Soon" message, so we'll have to keep our eyes peeled. We're going to go ahead and guess that all those shiny new iPods will come to retail that day too... but don't hold us to that one. Like we said, it's only a guess.

Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat' enters beta ahead of October 10 release

Ubuntu version 10.10 is about to come out on 10/10/2010 and score a perfect 10 out of 10 with reviewers. Or so the devs hope. The successor to April's Lucid Lynx has this week shrugged off the alpha label and stridden bravely into the world of beta software. GUI modifications are of course apparent, along with performance tweaks promising even faster boot times, but on the whole it doesn't look to be as big a leap as there was between the Lynx and Koala versions. The default photo management program is now Shotwell, replacing F-Spot, and there's an update to the Software Center allowing you to purchase paid-for Linux programs in an App Store-ish sort of way. Nothing's available to buy yet, but the plan is for that feature to go live with the final launch in October. The most intriguing thing about this Meerkat for us just might be the Unity desktop interface, which is now the default for Ubuntu Netbook Edition

Samsung's new Wireless USB chipset enables HD streaming with less power

It's a beautiful combination, really -- lower power consumption, and support for high bandwidth applications. That marriage is evident in Samsung's newest Wireless USB chipset, which was built around Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology and designed to enable high-def streaming between a mobile host device and a tethered device for viewing. According to Sammy, the two-chip solution will be aimed at cameras, camcorders, TVs, PCs, tablets, beam projectors, portable HDDs, Blu-ray players and handsets, and given that it can handle a theoretical high of 480Mbps with an average power consumption of less than 300mW, even the weakest smartphone battery should be able to stream at least a single episode of Family Guy to the tele. Mum's the word on who all will be lining up to adopt this stuff, but since it's slated to hit mass production in Q4, we'd say those details should be worked out right around CES 2011.

As found on Engadget

Play Your Music Wirelessly Anywhere In Your House

No surprise that iHome is first out of the gate with a speaker dock that's compatible with Apple's newly-open AirPlay music streaming system, but unfortunately the teaser page is maddeningly light on details -- all we know is that it'll have a rechargeable battery and be available for the holidays. We're actually pretty stoked for AirPlay gear -- the idea of setting up a quick mix-and-match whole-home audio system that can stream lossless audio straight from iTunes seems awfully hard to resist -- so we're eager to hear more about this thing, as well as the other third-party AirPlay devices like receivers and stereos that were promised yesterday. We'll keep digging for more, so stay tuned.


Source: Engadget

Google Chrome is 2 years Old

Two years. Can you believe it's only been two years since we started browsing the internet faster than a potato can tear through the air? Well, Google can, and it's certainly not been sitting around during that time, improving Chrome's JavaScript performance by a factor of 3, and throwing in a litany of additional features, like tab side-by-side view, themes, auto-translation, and bookmark and preference sync across machines. To celebrate the anniversary, the company's uploaded version numero 6 to its stable channel, which brings a few more GUI optimizations and some bug fixes to the table. Hardware graphics acceleration isn't yet included in the public release, but it too shall be joining the party before long.

Source: Engadget

Google introduces Call from Gmail, free calls to US and Canada

Rumors have been buzzing about since June, but Google just made it official -- the company's baking Google Voice calls right into Gmail today. Like the Google Chat text, voice and video chat integrated into the web-based email client in prior years, full phone calls will also be an option using VoIP technology from the Gizmo5 aquisition. Google's demoing the "Call from Gmail" service for us in San Francisco this morning, and it's looking like it's not free, but fairly cheap -- a product manager just called Paris for $0.02 a minute. Incoming calls pop up as a chat window in Gmail (and ring your Google Voice-equipped phones simultaneously) and you press a "Call phone" button that appears near the top of the Chat window to send an outbound call, at which point a dialer appears where you can copy and paste numbers or tap them in manually. Users can screen incoming calls or send them to voicemail with a single tap.

You'll be able to make calls to US and Canadian landlines completely free of charge, buying prepaid credits using Google Checkout for international landline calling at $0.02 a minute and a good bit more (We saw $0.19 to Spain) for calls to international mobile devices. Google will sell its own credits for the program (via Google Checkout), which should be available in a few weeks, but the Voice in Gmail service goes live today in the US and will begin rolling out to users immediately. Google's only committed to free calls to US and Canadian landlines through the end of the year, as paid international calls are the sole revenue stream here: "Our hope is we'll be able to make enough margin on international calls to keep offering it at that low price," a product manager told us.

Canon EOS 60D: 18 megapixels and 1080p video flexes its articulating screen this September

Just when you thought 16MP was too much

Well, what do we have here? Last we heard about the Canon EOS 60D it was just a twinkle in our articulating screen of a peripheral vision. And now it's official -- my, how times have changed. Here's what we know about the 50D successor (with definite nods to the Rebel T2i's feature set): the 18-megapixel DSLR has a single DIGIC 4 processor and boasts 1080p H.264 video with an in-camera movie editing feature, manual audio level control, a "flexible" (read: articulating) 3-inch LCD screen, an ISO range of 100-6,400 purported to be expandable to 12,800, and support for processing RAW images from within the camera itself. Look for the little photo shooter to hit retail at the end of September for just a dollar under $1,100 body only, or $1,400 with a bundled 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens

HP Completes $1.2 Billion Acquisition Of Palm, Plans webOS Slate PCs And Netbooks

As widely expected following the approval by Palm shareholders, the acquisition of the company by Hewlett-Packard for roughly $1.2 billion has today been announced closed.
The price, as previously announced, is $5.70 per share of Palm common stock, paid in cash.
Once again, HP repeats that it intends to double down on the innovative webOS platform and Palm’s line of smartphone. The company neatly points out that it has also just bought itself a bag of intellectual property.
Under Jon Rubinstein, former Palm chairman and CEO, the Palm global business unit will report to Todd Bradley, EVP of the Personal Systems Group at HP.
The Palm division will be responsible for, and I quote from the press release, webOS software development and webOS based hardware products, from a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks.
I, for one, look very much forward to what comes out of the merger.