Apple's first-ever streaming live concert airs tonight for the iPhone, featuring British electronica group Underworld. Apple's keeping it a bit quiet, presumably to not destroy AT&T's feeble servers, but we've never been good at keeping secrets.
The free show starts now, at 9PM PST (midnight EST), and can be found either here or here. It'll be broadcast with Apple's own HTTP streaming protocol, which is designed to be able to handle the crush of tons of viewers all at once. It's a pretty exciting development and we'll definitely check in for a minute to see how well the whole process works. [First Streaming Site, Second Streaming Site via New Teevee]
One of Boy Genius Report's "most trusted Best Buy moles" snapped a shot of Best Buy's plans for August 23rd. Looks like it'll be a big day in the cellphone world, with a number of anticipated featurephones hitting the shelves.
Mostly new Verizon and AT&T featurephone offerings, Best Buy will also have a new shipment of BlackBerry Tours and the Samsung Reclaim, both for Sprint. Check out the list below.
* Samsung Gravity 2 (berry) - T-Mobile * Samsung Solstice - AT&T * LG Xenon (red) - AT&T * Global AirCard (G2) - Verizon * Samsung Rogue - Verizon * LG Chocolate Touch - Verizon * Samsung u450 Intensity - Verizon * Samsung Omnia 2 - Verizon * BlackBerry Tour - (new shipment, Sprint)
Don't get too excited, the Chocolate Touch isn't the weirdo LG BL40 we saw earlier, but some other touchscreen Chocolate entry. But this is a nice development, since we were lacking release dates on several of these phones (including the AMOLED-packing Samsung Omnia 2) and this leak answers those questions. [Boy Genius Report]
We're big beer fans here at Giz, and watch with excitement any new technological developments in the beer world. So we're pleased to show you the Portable Tap Dispenser, a backpack with a dispensing tap for your brew of choice.
The Portable Tap Dispenser also has a cupholder so you can more fully cement your reputation as the Beer God of the Party. We're not sure exactly what the bag's capacity is, but it looks plenty big enough to get you a cheer when you walk into a get-together. It's available now for about $35. [Fun Ideas via Crunchgear]
It's a competitive category, trust me. We've seen some pretty ridiculous abuses of packaging and shipping in our day. But this one's great, especially since the box is upside-down and sort of crushed-looking. Congratulations to the winner loser. [Geekologie]
Cellpassion found the UA Profile (kind of a spec list for phones) for the upcoming HTC Fiesta, an Android-based smartphone we know very little about. But an internal link indicates that this could very well be AT&T's first Android phone.
There are a couple interesting tidbits here: The phone is slated to have a "numeric keypad," which we'd think would mean it's not a QWERTY. The screen size is listed as 240x320, or QVGA, and of course it's going to be aping the name of that most evocative and successful of Ford cars, the Fiesta. No hint as to date, price, or, well, much of anything, yet, but we're excited about the possibility of more Android devices on more carriers. [Cellpassion]
With all the talk about augmented reality and 3D lately, it's only natural that the advertising folks jump the bandwagon. While among the first to take advantage of this tech, Best Buy's advertising team really missed the point.
I'm the sort who gets excited about 3D, augmented reality, and holograph technology really quickly (I still dream of having a holodeck one day), but Best Buy's 3D ad experience left me disappointed.
The principle behind Best Buy in 3D is that you go to the website with the latest Best Buy flyer in hand and point it at your webcam in order to see the advertised gadgets pop out in the on-screen video. That's great in theory, but the latest flyer only has one single laptop with the 3D experience triggering icon on it. Even such a limited selection wouldn't be so bad if it actually worked properly.
As you can see in the video, the Best Buy in 3D website is prone to lagging and inconsistent in how and when it picks up on the 3D icon. Sometimes it would allow me to rotate the laptop and other times the same motion would cause it to close and disappear back into the flyer. Since the idea is to have multiple advertised gadgets with similar trigger icons, I tried out holding two flyers up to see what happens. Apparently this confused the site and resulted in a funky back-and-forth jump between the two laptops. Could anyone actually aim a flyer well enough to select the correct icon if something like this happens? For that matter, wouldn't attempting to rotate a gadget result in another being selected? Even if you manage to select the gadget you want, what's the point? Seeing it in 3D with funky sliding effects doesn't give you any new information such as comparable size.
Despite all my whining and moaning about Best Buy in 3D, it actually has the potential to create a whole new user experience when it comes to online shopping. If instead of a flyer filled with trigger icons that might conflict with each other the user was given a card-sized doodad to use as a tracking point, things might be different. The user could select which gadget he or she wants to play around with through the website and then use that doodad to manipulate the 3D image. Along with that the 3D images should be life-size and without the weird pop-out effects. Add a slightly more stable interface and ta da! No more fretting about whether that new laptop will make you look fat or if that TV would be too big for the wall.
Check out the Best Buy in 3D website and see if you can make it do something fun or funky. You can capture the results with an application like Camtasia and upload the results to the comments.
From the wilds of the Indonesian jungle message boards come these new shots of a mysterious Nokia tablet (or MID, or large phone) with a sliding QWERTY, labeled RX-5.
The RX-5 is packing a 5MP Carl Zeiss camera, a full QWERTY in the style of the N97 or Sony's XPERIA series, and a bunch of other interesting features:
* Screen resolution of 800 by 480 pixels.
* Support for both chambers. * Support for both Chambers. The most advanced auto could count, flash, and a resolution of 2608 by 1966 pixels, about 5 megapixels The most advanced auto could count, flash, and a resolution of 2608 by 1966 pixels, about 5 megapixels
* FM transmitter and receiver * FM transmitter and receiver
* Accelerometer * Accelerometer
* WiFi b and g standards under * WiFi b and g standards under
* Internal Memory 128 megabytes DDR manufactured by Samsung * Internal Memory 128 megabytes DDR manufactured by Samsung
* Keyboard is similar to the N810, with a few extra keys * Keyboard is similar to the N810, with a few extra keys
* Chipset OMAP3 ARM Texas Instruments, with support for frequency scaling * Chipset OMAP3 ARM Texas Instruments, with support for frequency scaling
* Linux Operating System based on Maema 5 * Linux Operating System based on Maema 5
Looks interesting, but we're not sure it'll help drag Nokia out of their design rut. Frankly, we'd be a lot more excited about a revamped Symbian than another new slider, but we'll take what we can get. [Kaskus Forums via Engadget]
One of Boy Genius Report's "pretty reliable" sources hinted at a few of the new features to be found in the upcoming release of Apple iTunes 9. We're not sure we believe them, but let's take a look.
The biggest new feature would have to be the addition of Blu-Ray support, supposedly to go along with the Blu-Ray integration in upcoming iMacs. We're decided skeptics on a Blu-Ray/Apple union, because it doesn't really make a lot of sense for Apple's business model. Apple's making boatloads of cash from digital media, and supporting a physical format that they don't make a penny from just doesn't feel like a smart move. Plus, we've been hearing this damn rumorforyears.
More plausible is the ability to rearrange and move iPhone apps with iTunes 9, which is the kind of feature Apple should have had for years. Aside from that, there's some typical rumbling about the integration of Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm—we wouldn't rule them out, but we're also not particularly excited about it. How about a "Play Next" or on-the-go playlist feature, like WinAmp, Mediamonkey and others have had for years? iTunes 9 is expected to debut around September, with the intro of new iPods. [Boy Genius Report]
My dear friend Zac Bir had a great idea: To photograph his son Alexander every single day since he was born, creating this beautiful animated one-year calendar. Watching him grow so happy makes me happy too. Watch for special days.
Floridian Keith Griffin most certainly didn't download over a thousand images containing child pornography. No siree. It must've been his dear puddy-tat who downloaded pictures of those oh-so-illegal birds.
According to a sheriff's report Friday, Griffin told investigators his cat jumped on the keyboard while he was downloading music. He said he had left the room and found "strange things" on his computer when he returned.
Must be quite a fast connection if the cat managed to download so much porn during Griffin's brief absence. All skepticism aside though, I seriously feel bad for that cat. With Griffin's computer being taken away because of the investigation, how the heck is that pussy supposed to download some pussy now? [Sun-Times]
Justin Quinnell left his homemade pinhole camera continuously exposed for a whopping six months to capture this incredible photo of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church in the UK.
Those individual lines are images of the sun trailing across the sky: The lowest one is the winter solstice, captured on December 22nd, and the highest one is the summer solstice, which took place on June 20th. Quinnell, a professional pinhole photographer (he consulted and shot The Brothers Bloom as well) has done this kind of very long-term exposure before, including another six-month shot of his hometown of Bristol, but it's not the easiest project to undertake:
Most of the cameras survived 6 months of wind, rain, hail (and being thrown in the bin!). Several were blank; one was full of water, (the emulsion on the photographic material having floated off.) and one, still exposing, currently sits inaccessibly under 10 foot of bramble, waiting forever to be recovered.
It's pretty amazing stuff. There's nothing like a six-month-long exposure to make your camera's panoramic mode seem like child's play. [Pinhole Photography]
It's a competitive category, trust me. We've seen some pretty 
Cellpassion found the UA Profile (kind of a spec list for phones) for the upcoming HTC Fiesta, an Android-based smartphone 
One of Boy Genius Report's "pretty reliable" sources 
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