This 2.1-pound netbook approaches more of a sweet spot in terms of pricing: The Linux version is $329, while the XP model is only $20 more. Acer includes a lite build of Linpus Linux, which I found to be great for quick, out-of-the-box computing, but most people would be better served with the XP edition. The incremental extra price also includes twice the memory (1 GB vs. 512 MB) and a faster 120 GB hard drive instead of the slower 8 GB of flash memory.

It’s pretty, too:

Boing Boing Gadgets’ John Brownlee discovers the coolest $99 watch ever! The Casio G8100A-5 invokes a retro-futuristic aesthetic that Brownlee likens to Star Wars. Others are noticing a steampunk look and feel. Whatever the design influence, it’s a nice looking watch — and I really want one.

The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.
T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

The high-end phone is expected to match many of the capabilities of Apple’s iPhone and other so-called smartphones that run software from Palm, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia to access the Internet and perform computerlike functions.

The HTC phone, which many gadget sites are calling the “dream,” will have a touch screen, like the iPhone. But the screen also slides out to expose a full five-row keyboard. A video of the phone has been posted recently on YouTube. A person who has seen the HTC device said it matched the one in the video.

The design is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it’s still a sleek, modern and stylish design with decent technical specs.

Coverage:

• SlashGear
• Crave
• Pocket PC Thoughts
• BrightHand
• WMExperts

The Treo Pro won’t have a revolutionary impact on phones or their users, but it looks like a step in the right direction for the one-time king of smart phones.

Chaos Manor was a monthly column in the print edition of Byte magazine back in the 80′s and 90′s, and the main reason I bought the magazine each month.  Now it’s online and free — although Dr. Pournelle welcomes paid subscribers.

You can get similar functionality, including keyboard shortcuts and two-pane navigating, with the free Windows program Free Commander.

I’ve replaced the “My Computer” link on my desktop with a Free Commander shortcut. The program also allows easy access to network drives and ftp sites, and even integrates file zipping and unzipping.

Download Free Commander

Mine, circa 1988, had a ‘composite’ color monitor that I could toggle to black and white to make 80 column text more readable. Sweet.

The guys at the MIT summit got the idea for a $12 computer from cheap “TV Computers” available in India for under $15. That product, as is, would probably sell well in the U.S. as a kid’s toy and hacker’s play thing. Of course, most of the built in games would have to go — or be licensed.

UPDATE: The technology in the TV Computer is actually based on the Nintendo NES rather than the Apple II.  There’s still the potential there for lots of old-school fun — I wish there was a US source for these devices.

If you buy a lot of content from the Zune marketplace, this may be good news.  For everyone else that’s rocking out to DRM-free MP3s, it’s irrelevant.  My son’s Samsung Beat and my daughter’s T-Mobile SDA play MP3 files just fine — as do most newer handsets.  And with plenty of online outlets for cheap unencumbered MP3 files, the Zune desktop software becomes just another program to load music onto your device.  In that role, it’s sorely lacking; the Zune software is bloated and without any compelling features.  I would much rather use Windows Media Player, or anything else, to load my 30gb Zune. And I really like being able to drag and drop music onto devices, something neither the Zune nor the iPod allow.

The latest victim is the Jointech J-Pro JL7100, which may eventually be available at just $99. At that price, the specs don’t matter much, but the JL7100 rocks WinCE 5.0, a 400mhz processor, a 7-inch 800 x 480 display, 64MB of internal storage, 64MB of RAM, 4 hour battery, VGA out and three USB ports. No mention of WiFi, which is sort of important.

Assuming the price stays at $99 and wireless is available, even as a cheap option (usb dongle, maybe?), this would be a compelling device. Add an 8GB USB drive for storage, a decent browser, and some productivity apps, and you’re in business for not much more than a c note. And the Linux hackers would love this thing.

By the way, Windows CE clamshells were somewhat popular back in the late 90′s — in fact, the J-Pro reminds me a lot of the somewhat larger IBM Z50 I had back in 1999:

On the Web: Roku Netflix Player

Crave reports that the Studio Hybrid will go for $699 with a monitor, and $499 without.

Video teaser courtesy of Dell:

A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth. These panels would collect far more energy than land-based units, which are hampered by weather, low angles of the sun in northern climes and, of course, the darkness of night.

Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now.

That’s from an Op Ed by Glenn Smith, a “former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.”  The idea of solar power from space dates back at least to the late 1960′s.

One version of the Moblin User Interface:

Ars Technica has more info on OpenTech.

The WiFi driver was my main concern — If you can get online, you can usually find any other drivers needed. However, I went ahead and backed up all my non-Microsoft hardware drivers — even the driver for my never-used soft modem.

The backed up drivers are kept on a separate partition on my hard drive, in a folder synced to Microsoft’s Live Mesh service. The drivers will not only be stored in the cloud, but also on the other PC I synchronize my Mesh folders with. (For more about Live Mesh, check out Surflizard.)

Reinstalling Windows is never fun, but Double Driver can help make it a little less painful. Recommended.

ASUS seems to have confused “innovation” and “repetition”, since they’re apparently committed to churning out every possible combination of Eee PC possible. Latest to clog up comparison charts is the 1000HD, the dreary offspring of the existing 1000H and 904 models.

I would warn Asus about diluting the valuable EEE brand and confusing consumers, but that ship has sailed. Even so, the Asus lineup features some very nice machinery.

1000HD Specs:

The owner of Esquire said Tuesday that it plans to publish the magazine’s October issue using so-called electronic ink to mark the publication’s 75th anniversary.

Hearst said the issue will feature a cover across which various words and images will scroll ” news-ticker style — thanks to technology developed by Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink.

Print publishing is a content distribution medium on the decline, but this technology could certainly postpone the inevitable.  How long Kindle and kin can be held at bay remains to be seen, but I do think I’ll be buying the October Esquire.

We’ve been hearing about additional perks coming to Amazon Prime members for some time, and here it is: the Netflix-style Instant Video service launched on Feb. 22, and gives Amazon Prime members unlimited, commercial-free access to 5,000 (for now) movies and TV shows, at no extra cost.

Unfortunately, members who got Amazon Prime free through the Amazon Mom or Amazon Student offers will need to ‘upgrade’ to a paid membership.

Continue reading on Examiner.com

The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud.

“I’m talking strictly storage memory here,” said our source.

The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com, a streaming service that Apple bought last spring and then shut down.

Presumably, watching movies and playing games outside of a wi-fi or data coverage area will not be possible. Sounds like a big step backwards. If the main consideration is cost, competitors are able to offer Android smart phones that are significantly cheaper than the iPhone, complete with ‘real’ storage – expandable in many cases with Micro-SD cards (something apple has refused to offer on any iPod or iPhone, ever.).

According to publisher Activision, which will close its music game division and cease development of existing Guitar Hero titles, they’re ending the series in order to refocus efforts online.

“Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011,” the company said in its most recent financial statement. “These decisions are based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company currently has to create the world’s best interactive entertainment experiences.”

…the HP Touchpad has a 9.7-inch screen very reminiscent of Apple’s tablet. The device runs on an updated WebOS 2.1 and has a resolution of 1024 x 768. It weighs 1.5 pounds and is 13.7mm thick. Under the hood is a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor with a choice between 16GB and 32GB of internal storage.

In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of the total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to 20 percent, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.

Good trend. I’m trying to convince my daughter to take my old Nook, but so far she prefers dead tree books.

The company is stepping up hiring as it pushes deeper into mobile services, display advertising and Internet applications. Google also faces steeper competition from Silicon Valley rivals Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. for users and engineering talent. The company aims to hire more workers in 2011 than any year in its history, exceeding its 2007 record.

More from Bloomberg

IANA’s primary address pool was exhausted on February 3, 2011 when the last 5 blocks were allocated to the 5 RIRs. Several RIRs are expected to run out of IPv4 addresses before the end of 2011; once the first RIR has run out, the end-to-end routable IPv4 Internet will be officially obsolete.

IPv6 deployment has been slow, but will be ready to meet future addressing needs.

Flickr accidentally deleted a member’s account–comments, favorites, and thousands of photos–but now has given the photographer a 25-year Pro-level subscription and all his photos back.

And more importantly for others who fear the same might happen to them, Flickr is working to update its system to prevent such a mistake from happening again and to make such draconian moves easier to reverse.

Read more at CNET.

As the Mubarak government turned Egypt into Gypt (everything “e” was cut off), Twitter quickly joined hands with SayNow (a Google company, yes,) to work around the ban and created @speak2tweet. This amazing new “channel,” created for the people of Egypt, is a game changer. It allows for anyone with access to a telephone line to leave a voice message –- which is instantly converted to a tweet.

[via AdAge]

A controversial CRTC decision that effectively imposed usage-based Internet billing on small service providers will be reversed, the Toronto Star has learned.

“The CRTC should be under no illusion — the Prime Minister and minister of Industry will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself,” a senior Conservative government official said Wednesday.

“If they don’t reconsider we will reverse their decision.”

Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell e-books within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system. Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books from the Sony Reader Store.

This move could have a big impact on what content is available on the iPad and iPhone, and what it ends up costing. If Amazon has to pay Apple 30% of the price of a book just because it was bought within the iPad Kindle app, that leaves a lot less money for the retailer, publisher and author to divide up. No such revenue sharing requirements exist on Android and other competing platforms.

[New York Times]

The once popular social media site now struggles in the shadow of the Facebook juggernaut. News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Almost half of MySpace’s employees got pink slips last month.

More from Google News

Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011

Facebook has taken down the page — but TechCrunch has a screenshot.

The $15 plan will get you 200 megabytes of data, which AT&T claims is enough to “send/receive 1,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video”. That sounds optimistic to me, but this plan in particular will be a good option for parents who have kids clamoring for an iPhone. And for many users, free WiFi isn’t usually far away.

The new $25 plan will get you 2 gigabytes, which is far more data than most iPhone users currently use – but power users may find themselves bumping up against the limit.

AT&T says you can keep your current unlimited plan, or you can switch to one of the new cheaper plans without extending your contract.

AT&T press release

WarGames
1983 – After cracking the security of an Air Force supercomputer, young hacker David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) moves his piece in a seemingly innocent video game and accidentally tells the computer to start preparing a preemptive nuclear strike.

Housesitter
1992 – After building his dream house, architect Newton Davis (Steve Martin) proposes marriage to his girlfriend (Dana Delany), only to be summarily rejected. He seeks solace in a one-night stand with a waitress (Goldie Hawn), never imagining that a woman he slept with once would end up posing as his wife

Modern Problems
1981 – A jealous air traffic controller (Chevy Chase) is imbued with some wacky telekinetic powers after a collision with a nuclear-waste truck. This one didn’t age so well.

Feds
1988 – Gritty ex-Marine Ellie De Witt (Rebecca De Mornay) and cerebral Janis Zuckerman (Mary Gross) set out to become hard-nosed FBI agents in this satiric comedy (also starring Ken Marshall and Fred Dalton Thompson).

Wise Guys
1986 – When petty crooks Harry Valentini (Danny DeVito) and Moe Dickstein (Joe Piscopo) “borrow” a large sum of cash from a Mafia boss (Dan Hedaya), they head to the track to multiply their stolen gains. But when their bets go belly-up, they’re at the mercy of hit men hired to make them pay.

Armed and Dangerous
1986 – A slapstick comedy about two down-and-out men, ex-cop Frank Dooley (John Candy) and disbarred lawyer Norman Kane (Eugene Levy), who try their bungling hands at private security. Co-starring the adorable Meg Ryan.

Innerspace
1987 – A hell-raising Navy test pilot (Dennis Quaid) is miniaturized for a top-secret exploratory journey inside a laboratory rabbit — but is instead injected into the body of a high-strung nebbish (Martin Short) who works as a supermarket clerk. Also Co-starring the still-adorable Meg Ryan.

Free Online Flash Games

Details at Wired.

The screen resolution is lower than the Apple iPad, and there’s no word yet on performance. However, for $200 it would have to have some pretty major flaws to keep me from buying one.

No word yet on when the Pandigital Novel will be available.

The TextOnPhone Android application doesn’t support bookmarks, but it does a good job of remembering your place — even if you close and then re-open a book.

It would be nice if TextOnPhone could open text files stored on the phone’s SD card, or if I could at least figure out how to get large books uploaded, but it will do until a more full-featured application shows up.

UPDATE: Uploading books to TextOnPhone seems to be working fine now via the Facebook app. Go to the TextOnPhone web site to install the app to your Facebook account, and have fun uploading your books. The G1 application itself has also been updated — books are now downloaded to the G1′s storage card instead of to the device’s storage (only five books can be saved to storage at a time). And books can now be read online, without downloading first (like on the iPhone).

Finally, books can even be read on your desktop pc, via the Facebook app. The TexOnPhone developers are definitely on the ball, and this is easily the best (and most improved) G1 ebook application — not to mention my favorite G1 app of all. Thanks guys…I can finally stop carrying around my old Treo 650 just to read ebooks on!

There are still bugs, to be sure. Find Text doesn’t work yet, and each orientation change causes the book to re-load and start at the beginning (open the keyboard while reading, and lose your place!). And I haven’t discovered a way to set bookmarks yet, which is important. But this is a key application for me, and I’m glad it’s available. Hopefully, active development will continue and improvements will come quickly.

FBReaderJ 0.2.1 is not in the official Android marketplace yet, but the Android package can be downloaded here (you’ll need to enable “Unknown Sources” in the Settings > Application menu on your G1 first).

Thanks to FBReaderJ, I’m now closer to retiring my Treo 650 for good and just carrying the awesome G1.

FROM THE COMMENTS:
“what did you use to convert the LIT books to FB2?”

I use a free Windows program called ABC Amber Lit Converter. It does the job, converting Lit titles to a variety of other ebook and document formats. Very nice.

UPDATE: The Google Chrome browser is available for download.

Movie: We saw The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor this weekend, and it was an entertaining adventure flick enjoyed by all. The plot and structure didn’t deviate much from the previous two installments, despite being set in China instead of Egypt. Beyond that, the cgi was better and the battle scenes were crazy good. We re-watched the first two films after seeing this movie, and my daughter insisted that the latest was the best.