Back from the dead: Motorola “Napoleon” coming to Verizon

In what is most certainly a very botched launch and severe delay since it was originally revealed, the Motorola Napoleon is pretty much a *slightly* revamped Moto Q.  Yawn inducing features include a 2 megapixel QVGA camera, WiFi, and Windows Mobile 6.1.  Sorry folks no new aged high tech WinMo 6.5 here, move along.  Globe trotters should feel at least a little happy as it is debuting as one of Verizon’s world phones meaning there’s a GSM radio inside for jaunts across the pond.  One feature that comes out of now where: average camera, WiFi, WinMo 6.1….BAM finger print reader.  In order to keep your private information out of creepers’ eyes, Motorola has retrofitted a swanky finger print reader into the aging relic in a desperate attempt to grab a few customers back.  While it does look pretty cool appearance wise and the finger print reader is still a rather unique feature, it’s going to take a lot more than WinMo 6.1, some fancy looks, and high tech finger print reader to make me part with my hard earned money.  WinMo campers…are you going to bite?

 
Source: Engadget Mobile, Phone Arena *pic*

AT&T confirms: Quickfire becometh fire!

The mysterious and insanely quick removal of AT&T Quickfires from store shelves the other day got many people wondering what on earth would cause such a reaction.  At first AT&T said nothing leaving the web to speculate as to the cause.  Well that cause is now known, a combination of operator error and just plain uh-oh on AT&T’s part.  Apparently AT&T named the Quickfire all too well as the Quickfire can quickly turn into a fire if the charger is inserted improperly causing the device to overheat, melt, and eventually cause you to have a very bad day.  Big Blue is currently in the process of dispersing texts and emails to all Quickfire users alerting them of the potential dangers of being an idiot and not knowing how to plug in a phone.  Full Email and Text message below:

EMAIL

Please take special care when charging your Quickfire GTX75 mobile phone. There have been a few reports of significant overheating of the phone when the AC Charger adapter is inserted incorrectly and forced into the phone.

The clearly marked, embossed arrow on the AC Charger adapter should always be face-up on the same side as the display screen of the Quickfire when it is inserted into the phone. See the diagram below for proper positioning and insertion of the AC Charger adapter into the phone. You should never force the AC Charger adapter into the phone.

If you have any questions, please call 1-800-801-1101.

Sincerely,

AT&T

TEXT MESSAGE

AT&T Free Msg. Click www.att.com/wapmyaccountqf for an important safety message on how to properly charge your Quickfire.

Source: Mobile Crunch

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music coming to party a day early

In a techie’s life, there’s nothing better than products jumping ahead in the schedule and coming to market early, saving you countless hours of what is almost surely complete torture filled with uncontrollable drooling, shaking episodes, and other unexpected events.  If you are a Nokia fanatic and mobile connoisseur, today is your luckiest of days as flagship Nokia stores will start selling the 5800 XpressMusic at 3:00 TODAY!  So if you’ve been waiting for the miraculous appearance of Nokia’s heavily hyped beauty, it’s best that you head on over to a Nokia store near you and pick one up.  Don’t forget $399 dollar bills so they’ll actually let you leave the store with it…

Source: Boy Genius

When 20GB of RAM just isn’t enough…

With the ever shrinking sizes and increasing sizes of memory chips, storage (especially flash or solid state) is growing in exponentially at a rather rapid pace.  Dell is pushing past other vendors and releasing an updated Studio XPS 435 with a whopping 24GB of RAM!  Also of note is that you can configure up to 4.5TB of storage.  So if you are a heavy, and I mean heavy graphic artist, HD video editor, etc, the studio XPS 435 definitely looks as if it has the right ingredients to be a beast of a machine.  Other handy features are an mp3 player “cradle” scalloped into the top of the case.  Basically it’s a recessed part of the case forming a bowl if you will while including several USB ports and some headphone ports right on the edge of the bowl.  Intel’s i7 chips are the heart of the Studio’s operation coming in clock speeds from 2.66GHz up to 3.2GHz giving you the brute speed you need.  Rounding out the rather eye raising feature set is ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 video card with 1GB of memory making it a decent gaming rig as well.  This little thing is just turning out to be a jack of all trades.  Of course, Blue-ray, Wi-Fi, and Sound Blaster extras are available for purchase for the hi-def freedom roaming cord haters.  Of course everything mentioned above is “optional” and will raise the base price considerably.  Speaking of that, the “base” model will come in at a fairly reasonable $1,500.  If you’re purely interested in that 24GB of RAM, be ready to set down another $1,500 for the privillage.  Faster processor, bigger hard drive, etc will only make matters worse for your wallet.  So if the Studio XPS 435 is making your mouth water you might want to stop by the product page and get to know it a little better.  If you’re a vain person motivated by beauty and looks alone, step inside and give the rig a looksie before getting in too deep.

First six core chips on track so says AMD

The processor core race is one that doesn’t show any signs of letting up anytime soon.  While Intel went the 2, 4, etc route, AMD instead choose to one up make bigger jumps at a time choosing instead a 3, 6, etc route making one ahead of the other at all times.  Do you really need six cores?  For most of the general population, that is a big no.  However being the geeked person that I am, the more cores the better!  Sometime today AMD is reportedly going to announce their Istanbul 6-core processor line that will initially launch for servers.  Intel has the lead currently as they released their 6-core server processors last fall.  AMD is aiming for a 2H of ’09 according to spokesmen Jake Whitman.  For several years now, similar chips from both Intel and AMD have shown Intel to lead the performance category with AMD taking home the crown for cost effectiveness.  Will AMD ever catch up to Intel in terms of raw power?  Or are they destined to be the budget buyers choice?

Source: Cnet

How to get Safari 3 look and feel in Safari beta 4

*Oh look…An Eagle!*

You downloaded Safari beta 4 and have spent a little bit of time tooling around only to become enraged or completely aggravated by Apple’s decision to move the tabs to the top of the address bar (like Google’s Chrome browser).  The fact that you now have to grab a tiny right corner of tabs to move them makes your blood boil.   Or, has the removal of the inline blue progress bar pushed coupled with the right hand addition of a spinning indicator sent you over the edge? Well, I can’t help you with the inline progress bar or the tab moving issue, but I can tell you how to get the tabs back on the bottom of Safari 4 beta. Yes, that’s right.  Not even a day old and people are already *fixing* stuff.  The process is actually dead simple.  Open up terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

Hit return, close terminal and Safari (if it isn’t already), restart Safari, and you should be welcomed with the familiar hanging tabs of Safari of yore.  At least you can enjoy your tabs the way you like them until someone figures out how to bring back the other quibbles that are popping up.

*Update* For the full list of command line commands to revert the progress bar, tool bar, and tabs back to Safari 3 style, as well as some other currently known and unknown commands, check out Pastie.  Or, if you can’t view the link due to some unseen force (corporate IT), step inside.

OWC announces 8x Blu-ray Drives

If you are a high def buff, you no doubt know the agonizing pain you go through every time you go to burn a blue-ray movie.  Because the technology is still in its toddler years, the write speeds still have some maturing to do.  Today we are one step closer to actual fast blue-ray burning thanks to OWC and their newly announced Mercury Pro 8x Blu-ray drives.  The new drives offer up a new frontier in speed as well as a slew of connection options + cables ensuring you don’t have to go out and waste time and money looking for the perfect connector/adapter.  I know we’ve all had to do that before.  Come inside for the low down on this new found Blu-ray speed!