We’ve already seen the BlackBerry Torch 2 in photos courtesy of Mr. Blurrycam, but a little birdie from Negri Electronics was kind enough to send over a pre-release device for us to get under our own glass for a little photo shoot. Though it has a virtually identical form factor to the original, the Torch 2 bumps the specs in almost every department from the camera to the RAM. Oh, and it’s running the next-gen BB OS 7 — which is really OS 6.1, but we’ll go with it for now. Read on past the break for a full preview of this yet-to-be-announced slider, and some glorious HD video if the beautious shots aren’t enough to whet your BBM-hungry appetites.

Continue reading BlackBerry Torch 2 preview! (video)

BlackBerry Torch 2 preview! (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today is the day in BlackBerry land. The wait for a dual-core device with an up-to-date operating system and that stylized BB logo is now over, and a vast array of stores in the US and Canada are now ready to sell you your PlayBook. Whether you’ll actually want to buy one is less clear-cut, however, as basic productivity apps like native email and calendar aren’t yet available, Android app compatibility hasn’t yet been rolled out, and the PlayBook has an unfavorable dependency on having a BlackBerry smartphone nearby in order to be the best tablet it can be. Still, if you believe in RIM’s ability to overcome those early software hurdles, the PlayBook’s ready for ownership in exchange for 0 for the 16GB model, 0 for the 32GB version, or 0 for the 64GB-equipped top option (prices are the same in both US and Canadian dollars).

BlackBerry PlayBook now on sale in the US and Canada, starting at 0 with 16GB of storage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 02:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Japan gave us one creepy robot over the weekend, but the country of kawaii hasn’t forgotten about its roots. Case in point: A new robo bear, designed by Fujitsu and especially geared towards the elderly. The yet-to-be-named robot, which follows a line of other advanced robot bears from Japan, can even snore. Isn’t that adorable?

The robo teddy boasts a total of 300 different patterns of behavior, from waving its paws, sleeping to giggling (yes, it’s a giggling bear). It reacts to human presence through motion sensors in its head and limbs and a mini camera in its nose.

Fujitsu aims at marketing the robo bear to nursing homes and schools. The robot competes with a number of other cuddly animals made by Japanese companies, for example robo seal Paro.

Via AFP BB NEWS [JP] / Picture Credit: AFP/Yoshikazu TSUNO

It’s absolutely laudable that these guys are doing what they’re doing. Outside of Western Europe, CE manufacturers tend to ignore the rest of the world, focusing on English-speaking countries to break all of their goodies. That Nepal is as dedicated to nerdity as we are is fun to see.

Note that instead of bright lights the Sony booth actually used big dishes made of aluminum foil to focus light on the booth.

Warning: The little animals curse a little.

This cute little video is literally what we go through on a daily basis with PR people. It basically recounts our daily conversations with strangers that go something like this:

PR Person: “We have big news! But you guys don’t sign embargoes.”
Me: “Fine, we’ll sign an embargo.”
PR Person: “Sign this in duplicate and fax a copy to Nepal then Fedex a copy to our CEO.”
Me: “Done. What is it.”
PR Person: “It’s a new sandwich. With bacon!”

Steve O’Hear created this Howl-esque video showing the Catch-22 of embargoes and how PR companies basically use embargoes to put up a velvet rope in front of a mound of manure. It is so true to life I have goose bumps. If you wonder why we get so worked up all the time about this topic, it’s because of exchanges like these.

via BB

Generally speaking, the iPad’s goal is not to replace your netbook, assuming you own and love one. It’s not about replacing your Kindle either, assuming you cashed in for that as well. We have reviewed plenty of both, and know there’s plenty to like. If you derive pleasure out of using either, then Apple might have a hard time convincing you to switch to the iPad. But for the millions of people who aren’t on either bandwagon, yet have the money and interest in a “third” device between the phone and the computer, the iPad will have greater appeal.

250 Million iPods Earlier…

When the first iPod came out, its goal was not to grab the customers who Creative and Archos were fighting over, with their dueling 6GB “jukeboxes.” It was to grab everyone else. I remember listening to arguments about why Archos had a better device than Creative or even Apple. Lot of good that early-adopter love got them in the long run. The pocket media player market exploded, with Apple eating over half the pie consistently for almost a decade.

When the iPhone came out, BlackBerry users were like, “No flippin’ way.” And guess what, those people still buy BlackBerries. (And why shouldn’t they? Today’s BlackBerry is still great, and hardly distinguishable from the BB of 2007.) The point is, the iPhone wasn’t designed to win the hearts and minds of people who already knew their way around a smartphone. It came to convince people walking around with Samsung and LG flip phones that there was more to life. And it worked.

iPhones now account for more than half of AT&T’s phone sales. You can bet that WinMo, Palm and BB combined weren’t doing that kind of share pre-iPhone. Globally, the smartphone business grew from a niche thing for people in suits to being a 180-million unit per year business, says Gartner, eclipsing the entire notebook business—about 20% of which, I might add, are netbooks. The iPhone isn’t the sole driver of this growth, of course, but its popularity has opened many new doors for the category. Just ask anyone in the business of developing/marketing/selling Droids or Palm Pres.

You could say, “Those were Apple’s successes, what about their failures?” In the second age of Steve Jobs, there aren’t a whole lot. Apple TV is the standout—quite possibly because Apple discovered, after releasing the product, that there wasn’t a big enough market for it, or any of its competitors. Apple TV may be crowded out by connected Blu-ray players, home-theater PCs and HD video players, but Apple TV’s niche is, to this day, almost frustratingly unique.

So how do you know if a market exists? You ask the “other” Steve, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

It’s Business Time

There’s a famous Ballmerism, one he’s even said to me, that goes something like, “A business isn’t worth entering unless the sales potential is 50 million units or more.” 50 million. That’s why Ballmer is happy to go into the portable media player business and the game console business, but laughs about ebook readers. Microsoft may not sell 50 million Zunes, but it’s worth being a contender.

You can bet Apple thinks this way. You can easily argue that, despite its sheen of innovation, Apple is far more conservative than Microsoft. Apple TV is a bit of an anomaly, but with no major hardware refreshes and a few small-minded software updates, you can hardly accuse Apple of throwing good money after bad. Presumably Apple TV was a learning experience for Jobs & Co., one they’re not likely to repeat.

With that in mind, let’s look at these popular in between sized devices, particularly at netbooks and ebook readers.

Like Notebooks, Only Littler

Netbooks are cooking, but it’s well known they’re cooking because notebooks are not. A netbook was originally conceived as something miraculously small and simple, running Linux with a warm fuzzy interface that dear old gran could use to bone up on pinochle before Friday’s showdown with the Rosenfelds. But instead of growing outward to this new audience (always with the grandmothers, it seems), it grew inward, cannibalizing real PC sales.

The Linux fell away, mostly because it was ill-conceived, and these simply became tiny, cheap, limited-function Windows PCs. They may have been a 40-million-unit business last year, according to DisplaySearch, but they only got cheaper, and the rest of the business was so depressed nobody was happy. (And just ask Ballmer how much he makes on those XP licenses, or even the “low-powered OS” that is Windows 7 Starter.)

Point is, nerds may love their netbooks, but the market that the netbook originally set out to reach is too far away, running farther away and screaming louder with every blog post about what chipset and graphics processor a netbook is rumored to have, or whether or not it is, indeed, a netbook at all. Clearly the audience is cheap geeks, and while that may be a good market to be in (just read Giz comments), it’s definitively not Steve Jobs’ market.

Easy on the Eyes

Now, about that Kindle. Best ebook reader out there. Every time we say that, we say it with a wink. We totally respect the Kindle (and I for one have hopes for Nook once it pulls itself out of the firmware mess it’s in), but we think e-ink is a limited medium.

Its functionality is ideal for a very specific task—simulating printed words on paper—and for that I have always sung its praise. The Kindle is ideal for delivering and serving up those kinds of books, and as a voracious reader of those kinds of books, I am grateful for its existence. But there are other kinds of books of which I am a consumer: Cookbooks, children’s books and comic books. (Notice, they all end in “book.”) The Kindle can’t do any of those categories well at all, because they are highly graphical. E-ink’s slow-refreshing, difficult-to-resize grayscale images are pretty much hideous. No big deal for the compleat Dickens, but too feeble to take on my dog-eared, saffron-stained Best-Ever Curry Cookbook.

So, e-ink’s known weaknesses aside, let’s talk again about Ballmer’s favorite number, 50 million. Guess how many Kindles are estimated to have been sold ever since the very first one launched? 2.5 million. Nobody knows for sure because Amazon won’t release the actual figures. Guess how many ebook readers are supposedly going to sell this year, according to Forrester? Roughly 6 million. In a year. Compare that to 21 million iPods sold last quarter, along with 9 million iPhones.

I am not suggesting that the iPod or iPhone is a worthwhile replacement for reading, but I am saying that, for better or worse, there are probably at least 2.5 million iPod or iPhone users who read books on those devices.

Are you starting to see the larger picture here? I am not trying to convince you to buy an Apple iPad, I am trying to explain to you why you probably will anyway. As the Kindle fights just to differentiate itself while drowning in a milk-white e-ink sea of God-awful knockoffs, you’ll see that color screen shining in the distance.

Sure the iPad may not be as easy on the eyes as a Kindle. But you will be able to read in bed without an additional light source. You will be able to read things online without banging your head against a wall to get to the right page. And, once the publishers get their acts together, you will be able to enjoy comics, cookbooks, and children’s books, with colorful images. Even before you set them into motion, dancing around the screen, they’ll look way better than they would on e-ink. (I haven’t even mentioned magazines, but once that biz figures out what to do with this thing, they will make it work, because they need color screens, preferably touchscreens.)

Tide Rollin’ In

So we have this new device, carefully planned by a company with a unique ability to reach new markets. And we have two types of products that have effectively failed to reach those markets. And you’re going to bet on the failures? The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple’s caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don’t get them get iPod Touches.

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don’t read our rants. They can’t even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That’s a future iPad user if I ever saw one.

Jobs doesn’t care about the netbook business, or the ebook business. He’s just aiming for the same people they were aiming at. The difference is, he’s going to reach them. And the fight will be with whoever enters into the tablet business with him. Paging Mr. Ballmer…

PS – If I’ve gotten to the end of this lengthy piece without telling you much about the iPad at all, it’s because other Giz staffers have already done such a handsome job of that already. If you missed out, here are the best four links to get you up to speed:

• Apple iPad: Everything You Need To Know

• Apple iPad First Hands On

• Apple iPad Just Tried to Assassinate Laptops

• 8 Things That Suck About Apple iPad

Don’t consider this an endorsement for smoking, but this cigarette shaped butane lighter from DealExtreme is pretty cool. It appears to be the exact same size and shape as a regular cigarette, but features a flip top revealing a tiny flint wheel, and it can be refilled with a standard can of butane gas. And it’s just $1.50.

[ Cigarette-shaped Butane Lighter ] VIA [ BB Gadgets ]

By Chris Scott Barr

I miss playing my old NES games sometimes. I’ve still got a drawer full of gems like Zelda, Micro Machines, Metroid and Contra. I’ve been tempted to pony up the cash for one of those devices that’ll play both SNES and NES games, but here is another to vie for my hard-earned cash.

The Retro Mini X Handheld NES System not only lets you play your old NES games, but it lets you do it on the go. Just pop in 4xAA batteries and you’re good to go with a 2.5-inch screen. You’ll also get a couple of wireless controllers that look strangely like those of an SNES. The X and Y buttons are labeled AA and BB, so I’m guessing that’s your turbo fire or something. There’s also a zapper, but you’ll need to hook the system up to an old CRT monitor if you want to use it. An power adapter is included for those times that you want to hook it up to a big TV and re-live the glory days of console gaming. $50 and this awesome retro handheld can be yours.

[ ThinkGeek ] VIA [ UberGizmo ]

The little light-switch enclosure contains a camera flash battery, some circuit hackery, and the few parts necessary to accelerate a BB to paper-penetrating speed. Want to make your own? Assuming you know how to make a basic coil gun, here are parts used. Go forth and coil.

[via Make]

▪ CDMA 1xRTT/EVDO Rev. A
▪ Quad-band GSM/EDGE
▪ Single-band UMTS/HSDPA (2100MHz only)
▪ Wi-Fi b,g
▪ 3.2 megapixel camera
▪ 360×480 resolution capacitive screen
▪ OS 5.0

There is also talk of a 3G Storm for AT&T and Rogers.

via Gizza