Technology Nirvana

I'm no techno aficionado. I like bleeps and bloops. Who cares if they're acid house or space jam or whatever? But I can tell you this: "Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat" is amazing. And it's from 1982. More »

We're not quite at the height of Apple frenzy, but looking at the bell curve, we're only a standard deviation or two from its zenith (we imagine the fever pitch will be in tandem with Saturday's iPad launch, if history and human nature tells us anything). Of course, that doesn't stop the rumor mill from amping up production, and so on with the show! First on the docket, remember last month's discovery of multitasking comments in the iPhone SDK 3.2 beta? Well, Apple Insider's apparently got it on word from its network of sources that OS 4.0 will in fact include multitasking, with app switching purportedly done by pressing the double-tapping the home button and selecting the appropriate active app icon. If you ask us, that sounds similar in function to command / tab switching, but the people claiming to be in the know liken it more to Expose for OS X.

Taking a step back to focus on the actual hardware for a moment, iPad in Canada is hearing that local Apple store employees have been told April 24th is a "black out period," meaning no one is allowed to take that day off. That usually coincides with major product launch, and we did hear the international iPad debut would be late April, but Apple's yet to make its non-US plans concrete. It is the last Saturday of the month, however, and perhaps it'll coincide with the other countries as well. As always, none of this is confirmed and shouldn't be taken as gospel in any way, shape, or form. We can't stop you from getting your hopes up, but don't blame us if those dreams get shattered by a sucker punch of reality.

Apple rumor twofer: Expose-like multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0, international iPad launch on April 24th originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Publishers HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have signed a deal with Amazon. The arrangements will allow the publishers to choose prices for Kindle versions of their books and according to HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray have left his company's "digital future [...] more assured today than it was two months ago." [Electronista] More »

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It’s nice that these hard drives should be announced right in the middle of a week of rugged camera reviews. You probably remember LaCie’s Rugged XL series of hard drives — but they’re more rugged and not at all waterproof. These A70s from Silicon-Power are waterproof, pressure-proof, and shockproof. Drop ‘em, take ‘em into the bath, or sit on ‘em all day — go ahead, they love it.

They come in 250, 320, 500, and 640GB varieties and are bus-powered, of course. They have USB 2.0 interfaces only, so don’t expect any crazy FireWire 800 or USB 3.0 speeds. The selling point here is that you can build a house out of them and then drive your car through it without breaking any. Well, it doesn’t say that, but I’d like to think I could.

If you’re wondering what to call that color, the press release has you covered:

The color is somewhere between dark red and tomato red, it is deemed to be the color of 2010 spring / autumn fashion! The mysterious red gives off a misty, varnish and passionate feel.

Excellent.

[via Slashgear]

As part of what is apparently an April Fool's Day Prank over at Google Japan, they've made a pretty impressive drumset keyboard, complete with emoticon keys. More »

Reports of webOS 1.4.1 update now coming in originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mmm… megapixely.

[via PDNPulse, Daily Front Row, Pretty Foods]

Although we were a little more focused on Windows Phone 7 Series when we went to MIX 10, Microsoft's other big announcement at the conference was Internet Explorer 9, which offers HTML5 support and support for GPU acceleration throughout the browsing experience. We saw a few demos of the system in action at MIX, but this video from NVIDIA does a little better job showing how helpful that extra GPU boost can be -- IE9 running on the Ion 2-based Eee PC 1201PN smokes a regular Atom-based netbook across a suite of tests. What that's going to mean for battery life is up in the air, especially since the GPU on an Optimus system like the 1201PN kicks in automatically, but it's pretty cool to see a netbook browsing the web at almost desktop-like speeds. Check the video after the break.

Continue reading IE9 demoed on Ion-based Eee PC with full GPU acceleration

IE9 demoed on Ion-based Eee PC with full GPU acceleration originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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