Pre-paid BlackBerries and plans coming to VZW in the near future?

Live the nomadic life do ya? Venture from place to place without a care in the world, or at the very least, places with spotty cellphone coverage? For some, paying each and every month for cellphone service is still a distasteful idea. Fair enough. Can’t please everyone. That’s why we have pre-paid plans though, so that the wireless world can please almost everyone. The only problem so far has been that pre-paid plans don’t give you too many options in the way of smartphones and data plans. If you can manage to find a “decent” pre-paid option, they’re still overpriced compared to post-paid plans and give you laughable data allowances. Laugh no more as Verizon is working on a solution.

Nothing is quite set in stone yet or 100% confirmed, but word from a few BGR ninjas is that VZW is working on some new additions to their pre-paid offerings that would include BlackBerry devices and data plans. For now, we’re not sure which device or devices would be eligible. As for the price, current rumors point at the $35 mark which isn’t too bad all things considered. Hardware pricing would follow your standard hardware pricing schemes for post-paid, settling nicely into place somewhere in between a normal subsidized price and full retail.

Anyone out there in gadget land feeling like a pre-paid BlackBerry would be right up there alley?

BGR

Nokia unleashes a lighter less feature filled X6

Fancy Nokia’s ‘ol X6 32GB multimedia powerhouse but just couldn’t come to stomach the 450 euro ($637 USD) the device commanded? You’re in luck. Nokia today launched a cheaper albeit stripped down version of the X6. Two of the biggest changes to this little sister/brother phone is lower amount of onboard storage (16GB), down from 32GB, and the removal of Nokia’s “Comes With Music” service and support.

Getting features removed on newer models is always slightly disappointing, though the reduced price should help ease the sting. Still, in a heavily contested mobile market where competitors are besting or exceeding Nokia in regards to specs and features, is this such a wise move? Perhaps you should give the rest of the specs a gander before making any more decisions eh?

• Symbian^1 (S60 5th Edition)

• 3.2 inch (640 x 360 –16:9 — nHD) capacitive screen

• 5 MP camera w/ Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash.

• Tri-band WCDMA: HSDPA (900, 1900, 2100 Mhz) | Quad-band GSM

• WiFi (b/g), Bluetooth 2.0

• Music playback: 25 hours; 3.5 mm Nokia AV connector for audio (headphones) and TV-Out

• Ovi Store and Ovi Maps (with free navigation)

• Available in several colors: black, white, white with pink highlights and white with yellow highlights

So what do you think? Is the reduced feature set worth the reduced cost? Speaking of cost, this “X6 light” of sorts will come in at roughly 350 euros ($490 USD). Still a bit high?

Overclockers reach 8.1999.5MHz with Celeron D347 processor. Self destruction immediately ensues.

Speed. Oh how we love pure, UI boosting speed. Back in the day, hearing of crazy overclocking events was a common thing. Now that most of the goals and awards have been doled out and upper limits reached, the scene has died down considerably. But that doesn’t mean that no one is at least attempting any more. A ballsy overclocker by the name of TiN managed to push his Celeron D 347 up to 8.199.5MHz — just a touch over 8GHz!

To reach such stratospheric numbers, TiN made use of liquid nitrogen. For most, obtaining liquid nitrogen isn’t exactly easy nor is it in plentiful supply. (Read: doing this yourself will cost you). Woes of monetary BS aside, it certainly is sweet to see someone pushing any processor ever closer to that double digit Gigahertz mark even if it lasts for but a second, turning into a charred crisp of silicon shortly thereafter no?

**Just in case you were wondering, TiN’s 8.199.5MHz frequency bests the old world record by a mere 16.8MHz and the chip was highly unstable, self destructing right after the screenshot was taken. See how close this has become.

Pocket-Lint > Hexus

Google Reader now creates something out of nothing — Auto feed creation.

If you’re like me — a gadget freak — chances are you follow at least a couple dozen websites religiously. For me, I love to keep it fresh here so between stories being sent in and searching the vast corners of the web, I’d say I’m making quite a trek with 256 (and growing) feeds in my feed reader. At first, I’d always try to get that unread count down to a nice round goose egg as for some strange reason, it made me feel better as a person. Those self fulfilling days are long gone however. Now I rarely get my unread count below 3-digits as I don’t want to miss anything by carelessly clicking on “mark all read”.

Naturally, a feed reader is important and required as scouring 200+ sites would take far too much time to be of any benefit. So Google Reader it is. The versatility of GR is great. I can import my GR feeds to countless desktop and mobile applications as well as easily access my feed library anywhere else in the world by simply going to Google.com/reader.

Today marks another notch in the belt for el Googs and their little wonder reader as it now features the ability to automatically create feeds from websites that don’t have them. Now, manually doing such things isn’t that hard but does involve extra clicks and steps I simply don’t have time for. It may seem silly but it’s the truth. Dynamic and on-the-fly feed creation is a blessing.

I now ask you the question, how beneficial do you find this new Google Reader feature. But we don’t all use GR for our feed reading. In that case, what floats your boat?

RedFerret

HTC Supersonic leaked…again…?

Another day, another lusted after veiled product, and another set of enticing yet decidedly blurry pictures have once again reconfirmed my assumption that those with high level jobs inside of these tech companies do not own very good cameras/camera phones. The picture of this HTC Supersonic — a 1GHz Snapdrgaon, 4.3″ AMOLED display uberphone — that you see here is just as blurry as the rest of your typical “leaked” shots. Is it really the quality of the camera or simply some photoshop work to keep a small part of the mystery alive and flourishing?

I’ll leave such philosophical thoughts to those with more time and determination for tackling an answer. Me? I just want to look at some unreleased gadgetry. How about you?

Androinica

Have we just seen the Apple Tablet? NOPE! [Fake]

Why hello there beautiful. Is this…could it be…the Apple Tablet we’ve all been lusting and wishing over the last several weeks? It sure does look pretty legit, almost too legit. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is too legit and in fact a fake — a good fake at that.

Don’t believe me? I was a little skeptical myself of the tablet and Macbook’s sheen and shine of the logo. After a brief search online, I not only found others sharing my suspicion (Jeremy from LiveDigitally) but also someone who easily cleared it up and showed how you could tell the image was fake. The first sign as I just touched on is the Apple logo reflection that bounces almost infinitely back and forth between the displays and their reflections.

The second and more clear sign that it’s a fake is shown in the picture above and right which shows the noise profile of the tablet (Posterous). As you can see, everything else is grainy except for the tablet. That my friends is a clear indicator that it was gingerly, very gingerly placed on top of that poor saps MBP. So again, a very good Photoshop debunked.

LIVEDigitally > Posterous

AMD launches all out cheap speed assault.

Those in the market for the latest in gaming prowess, the fastest of the fast, and the most beautiful of graphics don’t usually spend anywhere south of $400-500+ for a processor. But for most users in general, a lower to mid-range processor is more than enough for daily chores. As has been the story for the last several years, AMD’s latest assortment of budget processors won’t beat the pants off of Intel’s latest and greatest, but they will cut the competition in the knees when it comes to cheap speed.

For example, the Pehnom II X2 555 Black Edition is the fastest dual core processor put out by AMD. With a clock speed of 3.2GHz, it certainly isn’t a slouch by stretch of the imagination. Where this and several other lower priced AMD chips excel however is price. The 555 Black Edition just mentioned — $99 out the door. Let’s see you pick up an Intel chip that cheap and fast.

Is it worth it to you?

Engadget > Hot Hardware