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HTC Desire HD unboxed: photos and video!
Samsung Galaxy Tab: official price and pre-orders open at Carphone Warehouse
Pleo Reborn: the digital dino is back and on sale
Nokia Digital Radio Headset: DAB on your smartphone!
White iPhone 4: antenna redesign revealed?
The Social Network: how to make twins from two completely different actors
Duke Nukem 3D Unreal update incoming
BlackBerry Bold 9780 appears on RIM website
iPhone 4 space explorer: see the video!
Nokia C7 pre-orders open

HTC Desire HD unboxed: photos and video!

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 09:20 AM PDT

The HTC Desire HD is here, not to be forgotten in the wave of HTC Windows Phone 7 handsets about to go on sale. We’ve been waiting for a phone of this size with Android on board from the company for a full year now, ever since we first clapped eyes on the Windows Mobile blighted HTC HD2. It’s arrived in the UK at last, and we’ve got a review coming up. In the meantime check it out here in our gallery, and our unboxing video.

There’s no doubting the HTC Desire HD’s beauty: as we said at launch, it’s one helluva slice of smartphone goodness. It’s super speedy, but we’ve had plenty of readers questioning whether the enclosed 1230mAh battery on the HTC Desire HD is going to be up to the challenge – especially since the Desire’ major weakpoint was its longevity away from the mains and in your pocket.

Check out the best HTC Desire HD deals now

We’ll have an answer for you soon enough of course – our HTC Desire HD review is coming as soon as we can. In the meantime check out the photos and video right here, and let us know what you want to know about it. Stay tuned to the homepage, and be sure to click through to the end for some bonus comparison shots with the HTC HD7.

Out October | £varies | HTC

Samsung Galaxy Tab: official price and pre-orders open at Carphone Warehouse

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 08:52 AM PDT

There’s another price point in for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, as Carphone Warehouse announces its prices online, and this time it looks solid. The Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available unlocked through the Carphone Warehouse for £530 as a standalone unit, or £500 with a £10 per month 30-day rolling contract with TalkMobile.

UPDATE: Samsung has refused to comment on the pricing, but Carphone Warehouse has assured us it is an official price, and it will “absolutely not” be changing.

That £10 will get you 1GB of data usage on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and Carphone Warehouse is currently offering the first month free. The Carphone Warehouse says this price won’t change, and so this looks like it could be the first official price for the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The Carphone Warehouse site announces a launch date of 1 November, and pre-orders are open now. We’re chasing Samsung for confirmation on this price (it has never commented on previous prices), and will update as soon as possible.

Out 1 Nov | from £500 | Carphone Warehouse

Want one, or is this still too pricey? Drop us a line in the comments!

[via Know Your Mobile]

Pleo Reborn: the digital dino is back and on sale

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 08:00 AM PDT

The original Pleo was made extinct not by an ice age but by a financial tsunami at its creators. But now Pleo is back in the form of Pleo Reborn (aka Pleo RB for short). The digital dino is not on sale here yet but it seems the Hong Kong parent company is already selling Pleo Reborn to happy robot fans in Asia…

Pleo Reborn comes packing a battery with enough juice for two hours of pottering around, RFID built in for sensing and smelling accessories and a new bunch of sensors – four additional touch sensors, a temperature sensor, a gravity sensor and an internal clock so it knows what time of day it is – super-charged servo motors and basic voice recognition. Basically it’s the iPhone 4 with a cute face and some limbs.

Limited quantities of Pleo Reborn are reportedly hitting US shelves later this month but we'd be willing to be there's a factory somewhere straining with effort to get enough out for Christmas.

Let us know: does Pleo Reborn look like the kind of virtual pet you'd splash out real cash for? Or are you dreaming of the return of AIBO?

Out TBC | £TBC | Pleo (via Engadget)

Nokia Digital Radio Headset: DAB on your smartphone!

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 07:58 AM PDT

Finally, someone has hooked up smartphones with DAB radio. Nokia has announced its Nokia Digital Radio Headset today, which is compatible with Symbian 3 Nokia smartphones. That means that it will work with the Nokia N8, the Nokia C7, E6 and C6. The downside is that the headset will set you back about the same amount as a low end digital radio.

The Nokia Digital Radio Headset will be available from the Nokia online shop, and costs £45. The headset has an integrated mic and a dongle that controls music playback and phone functions. You can also hook the Nokia Digital Radio Headset up to your car.

Out 22 October | £45 | Nokia

Want one? Drop us a line in the comments and tell us how long you’ve been waiting for DAB functionality on your smartphone!

White iPhone 4: antenna redesign revealed?

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 07:32 AM PDT

A white iPhone 4 spotted in New York by Pocket-Lint recently offered more than just answers to Apple's manufacturing woes (it is, as was suspected, a problem with manufacturing the white phone on a large scale). It also appears to show a hardware redesign for the iPhone 4 antenna.

The image above shows that along the edge of the iPhone 4 the black line which is on the current iPhone 4 that marks the antenna, has been changed and moved to just above the micro SIM slot. Is this a hardware fix for the death grip antennagate woes iPhone 4 owners encountered?

It could be, especially since the gentleman in the picture does not have a bumper or case on his iPhone 4, although this could equally be because he just doesn’t want one, and has no problem with the way he holds his iPhone 4.

However, if this really is indicating that an iPhone 4 antenna redesign is on the way, it does seem that the iPhone software fix wasn't a real solution to antennagate, was it?

What do you think? Will Apple be rolling out a new version of the iPhone 4 with new antenna hardware?

[via Pocket-Lint]

The Social Network: how to make twins from two completely different actors

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 06:59 AM PDT

The Social Network, the film about the rise and rise of Mark Zuckerberg, also tracks his relationship (or lack of) with the Winklevoss twins, the rowing twins of Harvard who claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea, which resulted in a $65 million settlement. Watching The Social Network, the pair look like twins. Identical twins, but not carbon copies. Skip to the credits, and there's two different actors named. So how did they do it?

Quite unbelievably, the Winklevoss twins are different actors, Josh Pence and Armie Hammer, who don't look very much like twins at all. After searching for a suitable set of twins, and failing to find them, The Social Network director David Fincher turned to digital means.

To turn two different actors into one set of twins, The Social Network filmed every Winklevoss scene twice. Josh Pense plays the body of the twins, and Armie Hammer plays the face. Each scene with the Winklevoss twins was filmed with roles switched, then the face of Hammer was digitally grafted onto the body of Pense, and voila, you've got a perfect pair of rosy cheeked, blonde haired blue-eyed strapping rowers.

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If you've seen The Social Network you won’t have even realised that the pair are not a bona fide set of twins, or that there's any digital manipulation gone on at all, it's completely flawless. Poor Archie Pense though – since you don’t see his face at any point in the film, he misses out on his own photo gallery on The Social Network website, whereas Archie Hammer, the face, gets a slideshow. Props to Steve Rose at The Guardian for digging this up.

Have you seen The Social Network? Did you notice any digital manipulation? Drop us a line in the comments!

[via The Guardian]

Duke Nukem 3D Unreal update incoming

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 06:22 AM PDT

So Duke Nukem Forever has finally had its release date changed from god-knows-when to something more definite and if you're still jonesing for some alien stomping action there's even more good news. A fan-made, Unreal 3 engine-powered update of Duke Nukem 3D has been officially sanctioned and is bouncing its way towards your PC…

Fredrick "Fresch" Schreiber is the fan behind the Duke Nukem 3D refresh. He says: "Duke Nukem 3D was the first multiplayer FPS experience I had…when I was a kid, I was a huge Schwarzenegger and Stallone fan and Duke was the Schwarzenegger of gaming." Schreiber spent his childhood running up huge phone bills playing Duke Nukem 3D multiplayer.

Schreiber is remaking Duke Nukem 3D using Unreal Engine 3 and he's got official permission to do it. He won't make any cash out of his game but he's got a non-commercial license to use the characters and levels. Kudos to Scott Miller at 3D Realms, Take Two and Gearbox. We can't wait to see what Schreiber manages to make with the marriage of Duke Nukem 3D and the power of the Unreal 3 engine.

Hit the comments to let us know what you think of the Duke Nukem 3D rebirth and what classic games you'd like to see given an Unreal makeover…

Due tbc | £free | Gearbox

BlackBerry Bold 9780 appears on RIM website

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 06:15 AM PDT

The as yet unofficial BlackBerry Bold 9780 we discovered would be coming to T-Mobile and Vodafone in the UK has been confirmed again today, as references to the BlackBerry Bold 9780 have appeared on the RIM website, hidden in amongst product support pages.

Last week we spotted that the BlackBerry Bold 9780 would be arriving in the UK on T-Mobile, which was later confirmed by shots of the BlackBerry bold 9780 in marketing material for T-Mobile. The leaflet showed the T-Mobile Christmas offering, and the BlackBerry Bold 9780 was included, despite BlackBerry having not acknowledged the existence of the smartphone yet.

Continuing on from the T-Mobile spot, we then spotted a holding page for the BlackBerry Bold 9780 on Vodafone. A Vodafone spokesperson said: “This is a generic message displayed to customers searching for specific devices on our site. Where we can see people are looking for details of the same particular device, regardless of its status, we adopt this approach,” and RIM declined to comment.

What do you think? Should RIM just stop faffing around and announce the device, or are they playing cat and mouse with the tech press on purpose?

[via Boy Genius Report]

iPhone 4 space explorer: see the video!

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 06:05 AM PDT

Worry about dropping your iPhone 4 in the street? Luke Geissbuhler and his son (aka the Brooklyn Space Program) launched his into space with an HD video camera to snatch some absolutely stunning pictures of Earth from outside the atmosphere. What's more, the iPhone 4 returned to terra firma just fine. Click through to see the iPhone space project caught on video…

Geissbuhler and son packed up the iPhone 4 and the HD video camera into a package attached to a weather balloon. After launching from Newburgh, New York, it climbed up to 19 miles. The weather balloon then burst and the package floating back to the ground on a parachute.

The iPhone 4 GPS allowed the Brooklyn Space Program to track their iPhone 4 space explorer on its flight and they found it 30 miles away in a tree after it landed. We think the Geissbuhlers are just a little bit brilliant. If you like the video showing their iPhone 4’s adventure, check out their site where they're raising cash for another flight.

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Out now | £free | Brooklyn Space Program (via NY Mag)

Nokia C7 pre-orders open

Posted: 18 Oct 2010 05:25 AM PDT

Nokia has announced that its Symbian ^3 smartphone, the Nokia C7 will be shipping to the UK from next week, after earlier Nokia C7 announcements didn’t quite come good. Pre-orders can be placed online at the Nokia Shop now.

The C7 is a super slim smartphone edged in chrome, and along with Symbian ^3, it’s also packing a 3.5″ AMOLED screen and 8MP camera.

Check out our hands on photos of the Nokia C7 here!

The Nokia C7 is available for order in the Nokia Online Shop from £389 SIM free, or from £25 per month on contract. It will be shipping a week today on Monday 25 October, and will be available at The Carphone Warehouse, O2, Phones4u, Three Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone, and T-Mobile. An exclusive black edition will be available from 1 November.

Want one? Drop us a line in the comments!

Made for Life

Tuesday, 19 October 2010

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