The device that was too big for a phone and too small to be a tablet has finally been put to rest. Dell’s website informs anyone still interested in the now deceased Streak 5 about its departure.

Unfortunately, I can’t find myself to agree with the “It’s been a great ride” part about the message on the website and Dell has itself to blame. Right from the confused form-factor to the outdated software and the high price, the Streak 5 was a recipe for disaster and Dell could have surely done better. Read more »

We haven’t seen a Toughbook walk the halls of this blog for over a year, but what we have here is the newest in Panasonic’s family of super hard-wearing laptops.

The S10 is in fact near enough a clone of the Toughbook S9, but what’s under the hood is where this hard nut differs from its predecessor. Read more »

There are an array of different screen technologies out their vying for superiority in a crowded device world. Of course with displays it’s having the right tool for the job; a low power, high legibility e-ink screen suits the Kindle’s purpose, where as a super high-res, high pixel density HAST LCD would feel right at home on the latest entertainment-centric tab.

Now Sony send another contender into the display-fray, their next generation LCD technology announced under the name, WhiteMagic. Read more »

The Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro stopped by our office today and we have some initial impressions to share, plus an unboxing and hands-on video. The petite messenger is about the same size as its predecessor, but packs a lot more punch.

Standing at just 92 x 53 x 18 mm the Xperia mini pro packs a 3″ HVGA screen, a big improvement over the 2.55″ QVGA of the original. And performance has been improved quite a lot too, thanks to the 1GHz CPU and the 512MB of RAM. Read more »

There’s a saying that goes “there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix”. Luckily for everyone who wanted an HP TouchPad, but missed the one weekend only $100 discount, the discount has been made permanent.

The 9.7″ WebOS tablet used to go for $499.99 and $599.99 for the 16GB and 32GB models respectively, which was rather pricy. All retailers of the TouchPad have since made the offer standard so buyers can enjoy the lower prices now in the long run. Read more »

Samsung just announced a new line of high-speed SSDs that support SATA 3.0 (6Gbps), which will be available in capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. Naturally, they use the 2.5″ form-factor, which is ideally suited for “high-performance OEM notebooks and tablets”.

The new drives will be replacing the old 3Gbps models by the end of the year and will offer nearly twice better performance – 500MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes, compared to the 250MB/s reads and 220MB/s writes of the old drives. Read more »

The HTC Wildfire S has just arrived on the T-Mobile USA shelves. The compact mid-range droid can be yours for free, thanks to an instant $200 discount and a web-only $79.99 discount, which doesn’t apply in brick and mortar stores.

Of course you will have to commit to a new two-year contract with T-Mobile to get the Wildfire S for nothing, but that is to be expected. You can get the phone from T-Mobile’s official site or from Walmart Wireless. Read more »

Sony and LG have finally settled their patent dispute that concerned infringed patents on smartphones, TVs and Blu-ray technology.

The dispute began after a technology sharing agreement expired three years ago and the two companies have exchanged a couple of blows in the US and European courts since then. A complaint was filed by Sony concerning LG smartphones in the US and LG accused Sony of infringing its Blu-ray video technology in the PlayStation 3. LG even got a court injunction in the Netherlands, where PlayStation 3 consoles were seized by customs. Read more »

The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY promised to play PlayStation One games and it does – but only ones you get from the dedicated market. An industrious dev is working on (an unofficial) way to load any PS1 game from an ISO image of its disk and play it in the Xperia PLAY’s own emulator.

It’s still a work in progress, but you can check out this video of an Xperia PLAY running Crash Bandicoot 3 to see how far the develoment has gone. Read more »

Facebook released today a brand new (separate) app, called Facebook Messenger for the iPhone and Android devices. It combines all of your messages into a single app and can be used to text your Facebook buddies via your profile or text message, via your carrier.

Also 9to5Mac have uncovered that the app (both for the iPhone and Android) has a top-secret video component to it, which would mean that the Palo Alto-based company is on route to rub shoulders with Skype (among others) by bringing cross-platform video calls. Read more »

What comes after Mango? Tango. At least that’s the latest rumor regarding Windows Phone 7, which saw its first major update released to manufacturers just a couple of weeks ago.

Tango is reportedly a minor update (like NoDo), which will focus on bringing WP7 to lower-end phones (current minimum requirements for a WP7 handset are rather high). The update may even be all about Nokia, who plan to push Windows Phone prices down. Read more »

Over the past few days riots have broken out across London and even spread to other cities throughout the UK following the death of a 29 year old man shot by police last Thursday. What was initially a peaceful protest designed to question the legitimacy of the man’s shooting soon evolved into a violent riot.

As the days have passed, more and more groups of people, which the news have stated are ‘primarily made up of youths’, have congregated across London to riot, committing acts of vandalism, theft and arson in their wake. Read more »

The iOS 5 beta 5 was released last week and just got its jailbreak via Redsn0w 0.9.8b5. The jailbreak is again only a tethered one (so in case of a reboot you’ll have to plug your iDevice into a computer and load the jailbreak anew) and still doesn’t support iPad 2.

If you’re running an iPhone or iPod Touch with the beta iOS 5 you can install this jailbreak but keep in mind that it’s intended for devs to test so even though it has more features it doesn’t work as well as the current iOS version. Some jailbroken apps and tweeks aren’t supported for one and performance is hardly the smoothest as of yet. Read more »

Intel has been talking about its ultrabooks for a while and now some leaked specs of an Acer-made ultrabook show what they could be like. The Acer Aspire 3951 (catchy name) is a 13.3″ laptop with aluminum body that is just 13mm thick and weighs about 1.4kg.

I’d love to see some official specs on the Aspire 3951 but for now we’ll just have to look at the rumors – a second-generation Intel Core processor (that’s Sandy Bridge) and optional SSD sure sound good. If the 160GB SSD is too small for you, there are 250GB and 500GB HDD options too. Read more »

The names of three upcoming Android smartphones headed to Sprint just got confirmed. Subscribers to the fourth largest US carrier will be getting access to the Samsung Epic 4G Touch, HTC EVO Design 4G and Motorola Admiral.

There’s not much information about the specs of those devices, but it’s pretty safe to say that the Epic 4G Touch will be a Samsung Galaxy S II variant, featuring a slide-out physical QWERTY keyboard. Read more »