Are you and all of your friends flocking to buy that thing shown above at full retail price? Exactly. Evigroup’s SmartPaddle Pro tablet is now available from €699 (under 0) for the base 10-inch configuration with no GPS, no 3G and a 32GB solid-state hard drive. Additional configurations are available with 1 or 2GB of RAM, and the high-end configuration, which includes 3G and GPS goes for under ,500. The SmartPaddle Pro, with all the trimmings (including head-tracking), retails for around ,530. Other specs include a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, five hour run time, mini-HDMI port and capacitive touchscreen, none of which seem to justify the (still bloated) new price tag. Click past the break for the full video, which is apparently set to an Enya album.

Continue reading Evigroup drops SmartPaddle Pro price to €699, optional head-tracking feature watches you intently

Evigroup drops SmartPaddle Pro price to €699, optional head-tracking feature watches you intently originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dwolla, an alternative payment system built off cash networks, has quietly been on a roll in its first year, hitting  million in daily transactions in July. Two weeks ago, the Des Moines, IA start-up eliminated fees on transactions for less than , another big step in its bid to replace credit cards.

Now the company is celebrating its first year on the market by introducing a new feature called Instant that addresses one of the lingering pain points in the system: the three to five day delay users face when accessing cash. With Instant, users can deposit money and send cash without the existing wait time built into Dwolla. It will cost users a month to access Instant, a charge that can be opted out of at any time if users aren’t actively using the feature. Users can also have Dwolla pay for an item immediately, up to 0, as long as they pay back the cost within a month. There’s a late fee if people don’t bring their remaining instant balance to by the statement date. But the Instant features gives users flexibility to pay for items immediately, like they do with a credit card and yet not incur big charges.

The idea is that Dwolla is trying to eliminate any barriers to people accessing its network. It’s still going with its main selling point: a 25 cents fee for each transaction over . Users can load up a Dwolla balance or connect their account to a bank account. Dwolla still ensures the same type of security by not transferring personal data with each transaction. Dwolla users can pay friends using the system over social networks or pay for goods online or in store.

The Dwolla system is especially attractive to merchants because it caps the amount of fees they pay for transactions. It’s much cheaper than credit card companies, which can take 2-3 percent and 30 cents for each card transaction. This is especially important for businesses that receive larger payments. The feature works online, and will be coming to iOS and Androiddevices soon.

Dwolla CEO Ben Milne

Dwolla still has a ways to go to gain traction and compete with companies like Square, PayPal and the traditional credit card companies. It has about 70,000 users right now, and several thousand merchants using the system. But it’s catching on with business and consumers who approach this next generation approach to payments.

Dwolla CEO Ben Milne told me that the moves are part of an effort to improve the Dwolla architecture, making it faster, easier to use and safe. He said the big opportunity is in being an alternative to ACH payments, which is a trillion market. So far, 89 percent of the transactions are between businesses and consumers with the average transaction more than 0 to 0.

Milne admits the company has a lot to do to get the word out. But he insists being in the midwest has not hurt Dwolla. In fact, being outside of the finance capital of New York or the tech center of San Francisco has allowed it to understand what the average user wants in a new payment system. Now with Instant, Milne hopes Dwolla is at a turning point as it sharpens its message and value proposition for consumers and merchants.

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Federal judge dismisses class-action suit against Sony, ‘Other OS’ feature remains dormant originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Spotify has had little trouble cranking up its subscriber base so far, one feature that has notably been lacking is its radio / auto playlist feature. Today (tied in with an appearance by CEO Daniel Ek at LeWeb 2011) that’s been upgraded, as the freshest preview builds move the Radio section down among the new Spotify Apps, where it now lets you drop in any song from your library for it to automatically create a radio station of similar music around. Subscribers not interested in upgrading yet can find similar functionality tied to Spotify’s library with the EchoFi tool, but this venture represents the service’s debut of an “all-new intelligent recommendation engine” meant to dig the tracks you want out of its millions-deep library. Advertising “unlimited skips” is a clear jab at Pandora, but it’s not immediately clear if you’ll still need a premium paid-up account for truly unlimited listening (well, maybe not). Hit the source link to grab a Radio-enabled preview build and see if some algorithm can defeat even the mightiest Yacht Rock playlist crafted by our own Brian Heater.

Spotify Radio feature turns into an app, offers Pandora-like stations with unlimited skips originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia eked out a decent third quarter based on strong feature phone sales, helping the company beat analyst expectations. Nokia’s revenue fell 13 percent to 8.98 billion euros (US .3 billion) with handset shipments decreasing by 3 percent to 106.6 million units, (89.9 million feature phones and 16.8m smartphones) a more gentle decline than analysts had predicted. It managed a diluted earnings per share of 0.03 euros, beating out analysts expectations of a 0.01 euro loss.

The news has sparked some excitement around Nokia’s stock, which is up on the hopes that the company is managing its transition well and may be turning a corner. But the real challenge awaits as Nokia prepares to unveil its first Windows Phone devices next week at Nokia World, beginning to show how its big bet on Microsoft’s mobile operating system will play out. That’s where Nokia will need to make its stand because it can’t rely on feature phones, which will only become more like smartphones over time.

Smartphone penetration continues to grow and feature phones are increasingly going to be left behind. The average selling price of low-end phones plummeted 20 percent year over year, dropping Nokia’s operating margins to 2.4 percent compared to 11.3 percent a year earlier. The future for Nokia is in smartphones, a market it used to lead with its Symbian devices, which have fallen behind Android and iPhone devices in popularity with many consumers. Nokia’s smartphone sales fell to 16.8 million units in the third quarter, down 38 percent year over year and up just 1 percent sequentially from the second quarter. A lot will rest on what Nokia can conjure up and how interesting it can make its phones, which will be competing against devices from other Windows Phone makers.

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop said Nokia will bring its first WP7 devices to specific countries later this year before a systematic increase in markets and launch partners in 2012. That means that this coming quarter is also not likely to reflect a big showing in WP7 devices, or smartphones overall, unless Nokia creates an absolute home run that can move units in a big way despite a limited roll-out in select countries.

The big test will be next year as it ramps up distribution of Windows Phones. But the pressure is on for Nokia to demonstrate that it made the right bet on Windows Phone and that it has some pretty stunning hardware to show for it. The handsets will need to be markedly better than anything its got in its stable including the N9, a very compelling device that launched with Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo OS. Positive reviews of the N9 have prompted many to wonder why Nokia essentially discarded MeeGo in favor of Windows Phone 7, something Elop will have to answer by showing just how much Nokia can do with Microsoft’s platform.

I still have some reservations about Nokia and Windows Phone. There’s no guarantee that Nokia feature phone and existing smartphone users will automatically move up to a Nokia WP device, just because of the brand name. The two companies will need to bring their A-game and show that any device they collaborate on can stand up to the iPhone 4S, with its new operating system and new Android 4.0-based devices. As we’ve noted, Mango is a big software update that puts Windows Phone in a great position to compete, but some of those improvements are starting to get lost in the frenzy around iOS 5 and Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

The stakes are extremely high for Nokia, which has bet the farm on Windows Phone. All eyes will be on the company next week and it’s got a great shot at showing how far its come in this rocky transition. But it’s going to have to rise to the challenge because the market is only accelerating toward smartphones and Nokia knows it can’t bank on feature phones to bail it out in upcoming quarters.

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Today, AT&T officially announced the dirt-cheap Huawei Impulse 4G, an Android 2.2-running smartphone aimed at those of you clinging to your feature phones. It’s got a price tag with a two-year service agreement, which is as low as a month for 200 megabytes of data. You’ll probably spend more than that on coffee this week, making the Impulse 4G a great entry-level rig for someone who wants a smartphone and doesn’t anticipate quickly becoming a data hog.

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