Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple exec, godfather of webOS and ex-CEO of Palm, has left HP, reports AllThingsD. The move isn’t too surprising as the writing has been on the wall since he left HP’s Palm unit last summer to move to a lesser role at HP’s Personal Systems Group. More »

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Sparxgear has designed a Fire Piston, and they are using Kickstarter for funding.  Never heard of a fire piston?  Before the days of matches, fires were often started with a fire piston.  A combustible material – cloth, wood, even milkweed down, etc. – is inserted on the end of  the fire piston.  Quick compression of [...]

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Select Microsoft Connect partners — major players like HP — have been given their first taste of Windows 8. According to various sources, the build string currently sits at 7971.0.110324-1900, which is the third milestone build of the successor to Windows 7.

So far, there haven’t been many details revealed about Windows 8. An actual System Restore — which is being referred to as History Vault — has been reported, and the feature will allow users and administrators to completely roll back a system to a previous state. A factory reset option is also said to be included.

We’ve also seen Windows Live integration taking shape on the desktop. It’s believed that you’ll be able to log in to Windows 8 using your Windows Live credentials, not just a traditional offline Windows username and password.

All that’s left now is for a leaked Windows 8 build to show up on a torrent site. Feel free to tip us if you see that happen.

Windows 8 now available to OEMs via Microsoft Connect originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook has announced that its two mobile sites — m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com — have been unified, bringing a simpler mobile experience to Facebook users. And there are a lot of those — a quarter billion, according to Facebook.

Smartphone users won’t be losing any functionality because of the consolidation. If your phone supported the enhacned features offered by touch.facebook.com, the new site will automatically flip the switch when you visit.

Rolling the sites together helps simplify things for Facebook’s developer team. Now changes can be pushed to a single site instead of two separate sites, which makes it easier to ensure that all mobile users receive a nearly identical experience regardless of the device they’re using.

The new Facebook mobile can also check to see if your phone supports geolocation. If it doesn’t, you won’t be seeing much of Facebook Places — which obviously relies heavily on geolocation. Images can also be optimized on the fly to keep page performance from suffering on less powerful devices. You can see the three different versions of the share button below, courtesy our friends at TechCrunch.

Facebook launches unified mobile site, announces 250 million mobile users originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Letting you easily go from the gym (or bed) to work without changing, Betabrand’s drab gray dress pants are actually made from comfortable terry cloth. So you can relive your college days when it was ok to leave the dorm wearing pajamas. More »

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GelaSkins has been quietly selling some funky iPhone skins for a few years now, but they’ve recently made the big jump to hard cases.

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Hawaii! You’re supposed to be the state that us contiguous folks dream about moving to so we can escape the noise and interwaves of computers and Internet. You’re not supposed to be the state that pushes a ridiculous invasion of privacy bill that requires every Internet provider to keep track of every single website every person ever visits. What happened to paradise? More »

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A good mobile application is a fine balance between simplicity and functionality. You’re using it on the go, so you don’t have a lot of time to sit there and fumble with the phone to figure it all out. But you also need it to be powerful enough to let you do whatever it is you’re trying to get done.

Hello Expense is one mobile app that gets it right. It’s an expense tracker that lets you use your Android-powered phone to quickly log the money you spend and then analyze it and see where it all went.

I recently had the chance to use it in a real-life situation – a road trip that took a few days and involved quite a few expenses. Logging each expense took seconds, and at the end of each day I could get a great overview of how much money I spent on each category so far.

Categories and tags are user-configurable; the app also sports its own number pad to make number entry easy, regardless of what keyboard you’re using.

Hello Expense is a simple, reliable expense tracker for Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seth Weintraub from 9to5Mac has a source within Foxconn that claims Apple is readying the iPhone 5 — as it’s apparently being called — for production in time for a summer release. The leak also claims:

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Saying 2011 was a rocky road for Netflix would be an understatement, as it split its DVD and streaming offerings into two businesses, then reneged. They also hiked their prices, only to experience a veritable customer revolt, and CEO Reed Hastings was forced to publicly say that they’d made a huge mistake. Today, Netflix has released its fourth quarter earnings from 2011, and it looks like there’s at least a sliver of good news, as the company beat Wall Street’s forecasts of $0.54 a share and $857 million in revenues, rising instead to $0.73 per share and $876 million in revenues.

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Jailbreaking or rooting your phone is pretty much a nerd birthright at this point. But soon it could once again be deemed illegal, if the acts’ exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act runs out. That’s where you come in. More »

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Version 5.3 of Skype for Windows has just been released, with the main emphasis of the new release being improved call quality, and the quality of video received by mobile Skype users. Presumably one party of the video call must be using Skype for Windows 5.3, though.

Beyond improved call quality, not much has changed. You can now see your friends’ presence icons when contact cards are collapsed, and the topic editing button is now always visible on the conversation header. For a complete list of changes, hit up the Skype Garage blog.

Download Skype 5.3 for Windows

Skype 5.3 for Windows released, improves mobile video call quality originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are obvious stats, bizarre ones, and then the good old informative ones. New data from Google revealed by Ad Age, falls into the latter category. According to Goog’s numbers, more people have a mobile internet-capable device than a PC or laptop in the five key markets it tested (US, UK, Germany, France and Japan). In the US, this figure is nearly 10% more, some 76% against 68%. The numbers were taken in September and October last year, which means any impact Christmas may have had won’t be taken into account. The trend away from featurephones towards smartphones is also drilled home, but that won’t be news to many people ’round these parts. No matter how you connect these days, any savvy netizen will tell you: it’s quality, not quantity that counts anyway.

Stat Alert: More connected phones than computers in key markets, says Google originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to its first-quarter sales figures—to the tune of 37.04 million units—Apple sold 377,900 iPhones every day of the 98-day fiscal quarter. The average number of children born—worldwide—tallied only 371,000 new humans. More »

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It’s a bit easier to comprehend just how vast and empty our solar system really is with a copy of Mishka Henner’s Astronomical, which squeezes a scale model of our sun and planets into a 12-volume 6,000 page tome. More »

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Years of computer use have taught us that the mouse cursor is “above” the windows. It doesn’t push anything around; at least not without you clicking anything.

Balance takes that ingrained bit of knowledge and cancels it out. Suddenly your cursor (a blue dot) is solid – and if it touches the blue block, it pushes it around.

Your job is to use your cursor to nudge the blue block over to the orange block. You will have to push it, lift it and even flip it on its side, and then balance it. It’s a very tricky game – one I wouldn’t recommend tackling with a laptop trackpad.

Still, if you have a mouse and a hankering for a little physics gameplay, this is a cute little game. I like how the blue block never stops smiling, it makes me feel better about the world.

Balance is a challenging mouse-based physics game originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The new year is well underway and there’s plenty to watch, including more Blu-ray discs with accompanying iPad apps like Real Steel and the season premiere of House. While we pause before the Super Bowl our normal football schedule finally comes to an end, with only the Pro Bowl available for viewing by the most diehard fans Sunday night. Look below for the highlights this week, followed after the break by our weekly listing of what to look out for in TV, Blu-ray and videogames.

Touch
Kiefer Sutherland is coming back to broadcast TV after a brief foray into the online realm with Touch, the story of a widower who suddenly discovers his mute 11-year old son is apparently capable of predicting the future. Whatever. We’re not really pulled in by the plot, but when you combine Jack Bauer and Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes (we choose to remember it as a show that only lasted one season), we’ll give it a shot. Also, our international readers should have a shot at viewing this one eventually, since the show is apparently scheduled to debut in over 100 countries starting in March — this week’s episode is a one-off special preview.
(January 25th, Fox, 9PM)

Chuck
The adventures of our favorite Buy More employee come to a close this week with a double episode of Chuck Friday night. After five seasons it’s about time things got wrapped up and we’ll finally see if Chuck and Sarah ride off into the sunset together, or if he ends up back on the couch playing videogames with Morgan. Check out a quick preview trailer embedded after the break, and get your Subway subs, Jefster CDs and other related memorabilia ready.
(January 27th, NBC, 8PM)

NBA
A compressed lockout-shortened schedule means all the stars are playing all the time, and that’s as obvious as ever this week. 2003 draftees LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and Carmelo Anthony will all share the court (pending returns from injury) Friday night on ESPN, while the Lob City Clippers are all over national broadcasts, facing the Lakers Wednesday and the Grizzlies Thursday night.

Continue reading Must See HDTV (January 23rd – 29th)

Must See HDTV (January 23rd – 29th) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EARTHLINK DST SYSTEMS DISCOVER FINANCIAL SERVICES DIODES INORATED DIEBOLD

Just Mobile’s Highway Pro should really come as standard in every car. It’s a small cylindrical widget which plugs in the cigarette lighter socket (are they still called cigarette lighter sockets?) and turns it into a pair of USB charging slots. Regular readers will already know that I think cars should be stripped of all [...]

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Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: Weekend Giveaway: Toshiba 47-inch TL515 Series 3D LED TV Starbucks Merges Their Two iOS Apps, Lets You Gift Your Friends Coffee From Your Phone Warn Friends And Foes With These Nine Aperture Science Test Chamber Labels SocialBicycles Bike Sharing Is Now A Kickstarter Project Ricoh [...]

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Because of its 7-inch display screen, the Dell Streak 7 is probably the smallest tablet computers on the market. Many people may find this a disadvantage, but its size provides it with supreme mobility. Additionally, it has some fantastic specifications such as highly effective processor chip, 4G, and also to top it all off it features a comparatively low cost. How exactly does it compare with other Google android tablet computers out there? Positive points about the Dell Streak 7 [...]

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For today only, the iMore Store has the OverBoard Pro-Sport Waterproof Case for iPhone on sale for only $24.95!. Get them before they’re gone! Get the OverBoard Pro-Sport Waterproof Case for iPhone now!

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Okay, I know what you’re thinking: chocolate on Download Squad? That’s right! That’s because Chocomize is one of the nerdiest ways to get chocolate online: it’s a website where you customize your own bar using a multi-step process.

We’ve covered Chocomize before in our holiday gift guide, so when they reached out to us offering to do a giveaway, we really couldn’t resist.

Chocomize is giving away ten gift certificates, each worth $50, for you to create your own customized chocolate. They sent us some pictures of their recent creations, which you can find in the gallery below.

Regardless of the giveaway, you can use the discount code switched to get 10% off any Chocomize order. The code is valid through April 20th – just in time for Easter!

To participate, simply leave a comment. Fine print is after the jump.

Continue reading Chocomize personalized chocolate: giveaway and discount code

Chocomize personalized chocolate: giveaway and discount code originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So this professor comes up with a new toilet cleaner that works by “eating” the dirt; or so he thinks. That’s how the plot starts for Tasty Planet. You play the role of the toilet cleaner, but you’re not really a toilet cleaner after all — you’re a blob of gray goo that can eat anything that’s smaller than yourself.

As you chomp away, you grow — and as you grow, you can eat bigger and bigger stuff. The first level pits you against microscopic particles; by the time I stopped playing, I got all the way to eating cats and dogs. I know that sounds disturbing, but it’s a really cute game, and there’s no gore or anything like that.

Supposedly you keep growing and growing until you’re able to eat whole planets (hence the name). The challenge factor comes when you realize you can’t touch any critter larger than yourself – you’ll get “bitten” and become smaller. In the beginning you’re so small, that a single touch can kill you. Later on, you’re big enough that touching larger animals doesn’t kill you on the spot, but it does reduce your size. Each level is timed, so if you’re not large enough by the time your clock runs out, you need to start again. As long as you don’t touch the larger animals, you should be fine.

All in all, a fun, addictive little game. It’s available for iOS, too.

Tasty Planet is a fun flash game where you eat everything in sight originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to The New York Times, not the cost of labor, not the cost of components, but rather the speed and flexibility with which Chinese factories can respond to manufacturing demands is reportedly the reason Apple prefers them over their U.S. counterparts.

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Moments ago, Mozilla stripped the release candidate moniker from Firefox 4 Mobile and pronounced it fit for public release. If you have a Nokia N900 phone, or a fairly-modern Android 2.0-or-later device, go ahead and install it from the Market, by using scanning the QR code after the break, or by visiting Firefox.com/m.

Accompanying the release is the launch of Spark, a cute social game that’s designed to fuel the adoption of Firefox 4 Mobile, much like last week’s use of Glow and Twitter Party during Firefox 4 PC’s release.

While the browser still feels a little rough around the edges, it’s definitely worth trying out if you’re still using Android’s stock browser. Its JavaScript performance is significantly better than any other Android browser, and if you use Firefox on your PC, its built-in Sync functionality is awesome.

Over the next few days we’ll have plenty of tips and tricks for Firefox 4 Mobile, and a list of the best add-ons available for the new browser.

Continue reading Firefox 4 Mobile officially released for Android and Maemo devices

Firefox 4 Mobile officially released for Android and Maemo devices originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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