It’s here. Google Street View and over the air Podcast downloads from iTunes. Yup, public transit and walking directions too and the ability to share your location via email. Bug fixes, Safari enhancements, the ability to toggle auto-text correction, and plenty more… just like we heard in the pre-rumor run-up. Now get outta here, your iTunes update awaits.

Update: Added some screenshots of the most notable new features after the break. The Street View implementation seems solid though we miss the compass feature found on T-Mobile’s G1. Also, the real-estate saved by moving the Google search field next to the URL field in Mobile Safari is a welcome and obvious change. As to auto-correction, well, that’s personal taste. Tipster Vizcaya also noticed that Apple added a new option to rate an App when you delete it from your phone. You can also view multiple screenshots of applications available in the App Store.

Update 2: The other big update, Podcast downloads, works just as you’d hope and should further promote the spontaneous isolation we all crave. A few shots of that added after the break.

[Thanks Gustavo and badburro]

Continue reading iPhone 2.2 firmware update available now, Google Street View and plenty more

Filed under: Cellphones

iPhone 2.2 firmware update available now, Google Street View and plenty more originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While our minds know that today’s mice, particularly those with lasers, work just fine on virtually any (non-moist) surface, that doesn’t stop our hearts from missing the soft, forgiving feel of our home mousing surface while on the road. That’s partly why the traveler-friendly Roll-up Mouse Pad caught our eye. Sure, just about any pad can be made into a tube and stuffed into a carry-on, but if you pack this one you’ll also get a 4-port USB hub and dual, side-firing speakers out of the deal. Sure, the build quality may be sub-par (check the jagged plastic after the break), but for $22 this could make that hotel suite a little bit more inviting for you and that special peripheral you’ll be cradling all night.

Continue reading Roll-up mouse pad encloses a hub, speakers, and our hearts

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Roll-up mouse pad encloses a hub, speakers, and our hearts originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The most anticipated BlackBerry of the year (sorry, Bold) is just a day away from release on Verizon — and naturally, we’ve got the full rundown. Want to know if this is the phone for you? Click the pic or the link below to get the scoop!

Continue on to read the full BlackBerry Storm review

Filed under: Cellphones

In case you missed our BlackBerry Storm review… originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s just nothing like the holiday season, folks. That warm, fuzzy feeling you get when spending your last dollar on a gift for someone you aren’t even that fond of — really, what else can compare? On second thought, maybe this can. Microsoft has just announced that, beginning today, Zune Pass users will be able to select ten tracks per month to keep forever (and ever, and ever), and the $14.99 monthly subscription rate isn’t headed up. Agreements have been miraculously nailed down between Microsoft and EMI Music, Sony BMG Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, not to mention a number of independent distributors. We must say, we certainly appreciate the gesture here, but is it enough to make fencesitters buy in? What say you?

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Microsoft revamps Zune Pass: keep ten tracks per month forever and ever originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just hours before the Xbox 360’s newest dashboard update hits tomorrow morning (10:00 a.m. GMT), our friends at Joystiq noticed the list of movies available for Netflix Watch Instantly streaming has suddenly dropped. The culprit? Sony Pictures Home Entertainment subsidiary Columbia Pictures, flicking previously available titles like Superbad, Bad Boys, and We Own the Night over to “Not available on Xbox” status (curiously, SPHE movies are still available to all.) Word from the official Netflix blog cites “the ebb and flow” of what is available on license at any given time causing a few hundred titles to be “temporarily” unavailable on the console, while still open for streaming for other devices, with an eye towards licensing them for the Xbox 360 soon. There’s no way to know what movies won’t work until adding them to your queue, so when you find your Karate Kid trilogy watching time suddenly wide open for more Gears of War 2 or Left 4 Dead action, just remember you have Sony to thank.

[Via Joystiq & Multiplayer]

Sony Pictures celebrates NXE eve by… blocking Xbox 360 Netflix movie streaming originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been nearly a year since we first saw the USB 3.0 connector make an appearance at CES, and after months of corporate infighting, spec-polishing, and technical navel-gazing, the future of consumer peripheral connectivity is here — in the form of complete specifications and a demo. Yeah, so maybe SuperSpeed USB isn’t making the most dramatic entrance ever, but hey, it doesn’t have to with 4.8Gbps transfer speeds, improved power management, and backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 along for the ride. As expected, the first wave of devices won’t hit until 2010, but Symwave’s giving attendees of this week’s SuperSpeed conference a taste of tomorrow with a demo of the Quasar USB 3.0 chipset, which is targeted at “sync-and-go” devices like phones and media players. Sounds lovely — now if you’ll excuse us, we have to go back to mourning the death of FireWire 400.

[Via Gearlog]

Read - SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec released
Read - Symwave demos first USB 3.0 physical layer device

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec officially released, first chipset demonstrated originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are you a classy sort of lady or gent? Looking for something understated and sophisticated to adorn your iPhone that says, ‘Hey world, I’ve got refinement to spare’? You’re in luck then, as German artist and rising accessories star Antje has created the bacon iPhone sleeve with which to adorn your precious, high-society gadget. It’s the perfect thing to go with your meat iPod case, and your actual meat cellphone. Get them while they last for only €25 (or around $31), you foppish bon vivants!

[Thanks, Jesse]

The bacon iPhone sleeve: for discerning eyes only originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Leopard

For Leopard, you need to use a program called DarwiinRemote. It’s tiny and free and clumsy, but here’s how you set it up. Download it and drop it into your Applications folder (because that’s what we do, isn’t it?) and launch it. If you haven’t shut off your Bluetooth capabilities on your Mac, you need to make your Wii Remote “discoverable” by holding the 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously. While you’re doing that, click Find Wiimote in the DarwiinRemote window. Then wait. This tends to take a couple of tries for some reason, but eventually you’ll see the chart begin to register the motions of the Wii Remote and the diagram at right will light up as you press different buttons. Turn off the motion sensors by clicking the Motion Sensors button, because there’s no point in trying to use that for what we’re doing here.

Open the app’s Preferences panel by clicking through DarwiinRemote>Preferences or CMD-, and click “Add” at the top to make a new profile. Notice that you can use this application to set up key mapping for the Wii Remote, the Nunchuk, the Classic Controller, or a mouse. Pick your poison and start mapping. At far left you’ll see what the button is named on your controller, and then in the drop-down for each you can choose what key that will map to. If it’s not in the list, either select “Key” and type it in the field, or check the appropriate box at right for shift, control, option, or command respectively, since those keys can’t be typed into the text box provided. There is no way to map tilts or gestures to key presses unfortunately, even if you leave those sensors turned on.

It helps here to have two windows open side-by-side: this one where you’re mapping the controls, and the one in the target game or application that lets you set what keys to use for what. That way there’s no swapping back and forth to figure out what’s going where. The last thing to remember is that “up” on the Wii Remote is actually “left” when you hold the Wii Remote sideways, so you need to compensate for that when mapping the d-pad. For example, if your target program (BSNES in the case of this image) will have you using the Wii Remote sideways, you need to map the directionals as shown above. When you’re done mapping, you can click OK, or click Add again to make a new profile for another application. You’ll need one for every target application if the mapping is going to be different. Then you can open DarwiinRemote, sync your Wii Remote, select the profile and click OK, then launch your application. Doesn’t get much easier than this, but it may work better to go into each individual application and set up your key controls to conform to a single Classic Controller profile, saving you the trouble of selecting different profiles for different applications. But of course, that’s a matter of preference.

Windows XP

The Windows option is much harder to pull off than the Leopard one. Again, you’re syncing a Wii Remote with a special application using Bluetooth and mapping the button presses to keystrokes. In XP, you’re using Carl Kenner’s GlovePIE, another free program. The author’s server is overloaded, so I had to get it elsewhere. There’s an open source alternative in the works called OpenPIE, but it doesn’t appear to be ready as of this writing. GlovePIE is not the friendliest program in the world, but it’s free and gets the job done without making you die, so let’s get to it.

First, you need to open your Bluetooth Control Panel and sync up your Wii Remote as a device. Hold 1 and 2 on the Remote and click Add in the panel. For me, this took multiple attempts as for some reason the connection was repeatedly lost as soon as it was made. Once you’ve got the connection made (there is no passkey, as you can see) you can rename it to Nintendo Wii Remote if you like (instead of RVL-whatever) by selecting the device and clicking Properties and choosing a new name. Click Apply and OK.

Next, open GlovePIE. You have two ways to approach this. You can either hand code the mapping for the controller or you can use the GUI tab to do it by clicking. Shown here in both is my completed code for playing Konami Collector’s Series: Castlevania and Contra using the Wii Remote turned sideways in Windows. Neither way is great. You need to know the language it’s using to write your own, or you have to deal with clicking things in the right order in the GUI. One wrong click and everything just disappears and you get to start over. Fortunately, it’s not as complicated as it looks.

At left, click “detect output to emulate” and select keyboard. If your Wii Remote is synced up, click “detect input” and once the application picks up the Remote’s presence, you can start mapping. Select a key from the list at left, then choose Wiimote, 1, and the input on the controller, in this case, Right. Then you need to click Apply. Repeat this for every mapping, and you’ll see a little asterisk appear next to each key that has a map assigned to it. What was confusing for me was that this feels like it’s going backwards. First you’re selecting the destination, then the source. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

I mentioned this above, but since you may not have read that part, I’ll repeat it. Keep in mind if you’re going to be using a Wii Remote turned sideways that the D-pad’s directions need to be adjusted for. Up on the Wii Remote is Left on a Wii Remote turned sideways, and so forth. You can see this in my code above in the screenshot, how Left is mapped to Up.

Once you’ve finished your mapping, you can save your little program to disk, creating a sort of profile for every game or application you might use your controller with.

One last thing

I have to credit GlovePIE with making a lot of games much friendlier, since you can play them with a comfortable controller rather than a keyboard. While strategy games may be best suited to play on a keyboard, there are a lot of games that aren’t. I would say most of those originally appeared on consoles, but eventually found their way to home computers one way or another. Have fun out there!

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Hey, pal — remember that 160GB PS3 Drake’s Fortune bundle we told you about back in August? Well thanks to the totally awesome skills of one intrepid reader, we now know that they’re available for purchasing pleasure at your local Best Buy (and other spots, we like to imagine). From what we can tell based on that extremely blurry photo you see, the package will sell for a holiday-destroying $499.99, so you’d better hope grandma drops a big check on you this season.

[Thanks, Nasser]

160GB PS3 ‘Drake’s Fortune’ bundle caught in the wild originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve been waiting for that Minority Report-style interface to really come to fruition, you can finally exhale. One of the science advisors from the Steven Spielberg film — along with a team of other zany visionaries — has created an honest-to-goodness, real-world implementation of the computer systems seen in the movie. Dubbed g-speak, the mind bending OS combines “gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels,” to deliver what the creators call “the first major step in [a] computer interface since 1984.” There are some things that need to seen to be understood, so watch the video after the break, and prepare to have your mind thoroughly blown to bits.

[Thanks, Jamie]

Continue reading Oblong’s g-speak: the ‘Minority Report’ OS brought to life

Oblong’s g-speak: the ‘Minority Report’ OS brought to life originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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