Gadgets Base

Bell is currently running a new promotion, offering four BlackBerry 8703e smartphones with the purchase of either a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition or BlackBerry Pearl 8130 smartphone. This offer also extends to sharing the monthly data plans, for an additional $20 per user the data plans can be shared. The data plans range in size from 4MB per month for $25 up to 1GB per month for $100. This buy-one-get-four offer is available through March 31, 2008.

Read [Bell] Via [WirelessInfo.com]

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The ad featured below almost makes me wish I was a farmer. Almost. Personally, I would drive the Valtra Revolution everywhere and after you watch the video, you will see why. I want one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUNKnmbfcHM

[via Fresh Creation]

Posted Jan 27th 2008 9:48AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Laptops
You’d think there’d be a bit more excitement associated with the inclusion of Intel’s latest and greatest, but HP decided to take the quiet route with integrating Penryn into its Pavilion laptop lineup. The Pavilion dv2700t, dv6700t and dv9700t are all getting an Intel T9300 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo option, with a 6MB l2 cache and a purported 10% speed boost over last-gen Intel processors. Unfortunately, that mild speed boost comes at a $100 premium over the T7500, so you money might be better spent on RAM or a better graphics card — or you could just choose it all, the Engadget-approved method of speccing a laptop.

[Via NotebookReview]

Posted Jan 27th 2008 1:20PM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Displays
If you’ve absolutely, positively got to have a multi-touch display system right this second, look no further than the Germany company Lumin and its creatively named MultiTouch. For an undisclosed price (available on request) you and your loved ones can be pawing all over the 42-inch, 1024 x 768 display, which is powered by a Mac Mini and can be coupled with Apple’s wireless keyboard and mouse. The screen — which is quite similar to the LG.Philips display we got our mitts on at CES — is driven by Lumin’s proprietary software, and allows you to do all Surface-esque manner of tricks, like zooming, rotating, and panning with various finger / hand combinations. The company also appears to be offering rear-projection, front-projection, and “shaped” screens, though none of those seem to be sporting touch capabilities. Check out the super-cool video after the break and see what’s happening over there.

[Thanks, Mike]

Mmm. Nothing says “Yum!” quite like the sight of a sweet confection in the shape of a beetle larva. Despite its unappetizing appearance (unless you’re Timon or Pumbaa), the candy is actually made from milk and white chocolate, cornflakes, orange peel, and . . . well, we’re back to unappetizing with this one . . . dried squid.

Anyone with a Japanese address and a questionable sweet tooth can order these chocolates online for about $2 apiece, or head over to the Chocolate and Sweets Expo in Tokyo (going on now until March 9th) in hopes of snagging a sample.

Via Pink Tentacle.

Posted Jan 27th 2008 6:42AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable VideoIf you’ve got a certain brand loyalty to the official iPhone Dev Team then take note, they just released their own special flavor of the 1.1.3 jailbreak for iPhone / iPod touch. We guess that with the splitter version already outed (and it’s secrets revealed to Apple) there was no sense in keeping it under wraps any longer. The hack requires a v1.1.2 jailbroken device with the BSD Subsystem v1.5 or greater installed — it does NOT upgrade your baseband. All the usual cautions apply hacker-boy so be careful out there, we haven’t tested… yet.

[Thanks, Ben]

Download — official 1.1.3 Dev Team jailbreak

Mozilla is working on a mobile version of Firefox. Unfortunately, it probably won’t see the light of day until end of this year. Well it’s about time. I was wondering why this was taking so long.

In case you don’t already run Firefox on your computer, get with it already. Just click the image link above and pull it down. You won’t regret it. The thing that really makes FF so much more than just a web browser and more like a platform are the slew of extensions available for it. I’ve got easily over a dozen extensions that improve my browsing experience, makes me more efficient and adds tools that I can’t live without now. After all, I blogged this entry directly in FF using an extension called ScribeFire, which rocks BTW.

While the Treo 600 or 650 may be just a memory (albeit good and bad) for a lot of the Palm users, a class action lawsuit that originally began in 2005 has just received a settlement offer. This lawsuit was dealing with the many issues that were experienced with those models and claimed that Palm “misrepresented claims regarding the phones in advertising” and in turn delivered phones that “were “inherently defective” and “failed at unacceptably high rates.”

“Palm is entering into this settlement to avoid burdensome and costly litigation. The settlement is not an admission of wrong-doing or an indication that any law was violated,” the company said in its summary of the settlement.

The offer is simple, Palm will give a $75 cash rebate that you can use to replace a Treo 600 and $50 cash rebate that you can use to replace a Treo 650. The cash rebates are assuming that you had to replace your phone two or more times after your purchase. In addition to the cash rebate Palm is also offering a “right of repair” form that can be used by customers who had trouble but never had to replace their phone.

Via [SlashPhone]

Posted Jan 27th 2008 6:14AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Portable Audio
var In perhaps the biggest threat to Apple’s global dominance of digital music, Amazon just announced the international rollout of Amazon MP3. Right, the on-line storefront offering DRM-free music from all four major labels. That’s 3.3 million songs (priced at $0.99 or less) from over 270k artists encoded in 256kbps MP3 files for playback on any PC, any Mac, and pretty much any portable device you might own. Sure, it’s beta but so is that gMail account you’ve been using for the past 4 years. Unfortunately, the best that Amazon can commit to is “this year” which leaves plenty of time for the house of Apple to get their DRM shiznit together.

It is soon to come to the Chinese New Year, which is the Year of Mouse. Hence, iRiver China introduces a limited edition of gold plated iRiver Mplayer, and only available at China. Each of these luxury mice comes with a lucky number, probably an alternative way to celebrate the Year of Mouse
[ via iRiverFans ]

iRiver, Mplayer, MP3 Players