Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide ! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today’s bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season. You tech savvy lot may think PMPs are a dying breed, but funnily enough, the market’s still going strong with a handful of products. There are certainly some benefits from using a dedicated media device alongside your phone: more battery juice, greater range of supported file formats, better audio quality, more form factors to choose from, etc. Perhaps our list of gift recommendations will be more convincing — check it out after the break. Continue reading Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: PMPs Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: PMPs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Sprint phasing out Nextel’s iDEN network, selects vendors for $5b network upgrade project
December 6, 2010 No Comment
Looks like the Motorola i1 Android set ( not pictured above) will stand as the highest-end Nextel phone ever — Sprint just announced that it’s phasing out the iDEN network sometime in 2013 as it begins a new four to five billion dollar network enhancement project called “Network Vision.” We’ve expected this for a while — the Sprint / Nextel merger has been beset by subscriber losses and rumors of a breakup for years now — but this is the first time we’ve gotten a date. Sprint’s rolling out push-to-talk on its own network to support its 10.6 million Nextel customers, but we don’t have a schedule for that yet. Sprint’s also announcing vendors for Network Vision: Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung, and Ericsson will each handle a region and be tasked with expanding and fortifying Sprint’s existing 1900MHz 3G network while buying 800MHz, 1900MHz, and 2.5GHz spectrum for future use. Interestingly, Sprint’s definitely hedging its WiMAX bets a little — it can upgrade its new gear to LTE with swapping in a baseband card and issuing a software patch, which certainly gives the company some 4G flexibility should Clearwire not pull things together . We’ll see what happens — the underdog’s making some moves. Sprint phasing out Nextel’s iDEN network, selects vendors for $5b network upgrade project originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Art Rant: The Washington Post Rails Against ‘Small-Minded Intolerance’ of Cantor, Boehner
December 6, 2010 No Comment
Liberal newspapers may claim that taxpayer-funded art galleries should take “public sensitivities” into account, but in reality, they don’t want members of Congress actually representing the insulted public by speaking out against anti-Christian exhibits. Friday’s Washington Post led their editorial page with the headline “The censors arrive: Do Republicans really want to ride into power with a burst of small-minded intolerance? ” That’s funny: Christians might find the “small-minded intolerance” coming from artists who think that modern-day Christianity is an oppressive, Jesus-betraying force – as represented by ants crawling all over Jesus on a crucifix. Here’s the key passage: Public sensibilities must be taken into account when taxpayer funds are in play, but the use of public dollars does not give lawmakers the right to micromanage or censor displays. Nor should the occasional dust-up be justification for threatened retribution against these valuable national assets. We hope Mr. Cantor's threats prompt many additional Washingtonians to visit the exhibit and judge for themselves. read more
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Siren sounds near southern city of Ashkelon, followed by explosion; no injuries or damage reported
Continue reading …Photo via KQED video While they might look like flocked Christmas trees, these albino redwoods are anything but. The very rare “ghost trees” lack chlorophyll, the necessary chemical that makes plants green and helps them convert sunlight to food. So, the trees feed off energy from a host redwood. There are as few as perhaps 25 albino redwoods around the world, and eight in the Henry Cowell Redwood State Park in Northern California. Check out a video from KQED explaining how these albino trees function. … Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Christina Aguilera and her ‘Burlesque’ co-star Cam Gigandet talk about the singer’s dance skills at a press conference for the film in Japan. (Dec.6)
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A pair of suicide bombers disguised as policemen killed 50 people Monday when they attacked a government compound in northwestern Pakistan where tribal elders were meeting to discuss the formation of an anti-Taliban militia, officials said. (Dec. 6)
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Flu season is here, and so far Georgia is the state hit the hardest by this year’s influenza virus, according to the CDC.
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Image credit Mark Craemer That is the headline of a powerful article in the Globe and Mail where they write that there is 25 Trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Seven million people have died in the fight to control that wealth over the last twelve years. We all contribute to the tragedy every time we buy an electronic product: they contain tantalum that comes from the mineral Coltan (shor… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Researchers are a step closer to developing new treatments that are tailored to the individual needs of people with Asperger’s syndrome and other types of autism.
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