It's probably best to think of Samsung's Pixon 12 not as a phone with a killer camera, but more so as a good point-and-shoot with phone capabilities tacked on. Our friends at Engadget Chinese managed to get some hands-on with the device, and while they say the voice and SMS portion is nothing to write home about, the form factor and AMOLED screen seems quite nice and the sample pictures come out even nicer. Hit up the read link for some odd, machine-translated text and pretty photography.

Filed under: Cellphones, Digital Cameras

Samsung Pixon 12 phonecamera hybrid gets tested originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's been the story of the week. T-Mobile Sidekick customers were told that all of their data might be lost and warned not to turn off their devices to prevent losing what's already on them. It's about the worst case nightmare scenario for any vendor and it underscored the weakness and vulnerability of cloud-based computing with no other means of backup and storage.

The Sidekick story is complicated, and there's much rumor and speculation as to what went wrong and how. To be clear, Sidekick is a T-Mobile branded-and-sold device and service, but the Sidekick technology comes from Danger, a former startup now owned by Microsoft, which T-Mobile pays to keep Sidekick going. Trust me, there's going to be lots of finger pointing and perhaps a few class-action lawsuits before this all comes to an end. While finger pointing is fun, it's not the issue. (And, as grandpa used to say, when you point your finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you.) Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it's the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger's been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.

Continue reading Entelligence: Cloud's illusions I recall

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc. Gadgets

Entelligence: Cloud's illusions I recall originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Pocket steel drums aren't made of steel, aren't really drums (video)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Pocket steel drums aren't made of steel, aren't really drums (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Props to Lenkeng for dressing up their otherwise anonymous VGA-to-HDMI converter box with a PSP-related angle -- the LKV8000 comes with the necessary cables to take your PSP-2000 or above's 480p video output and push out a 720p HDMI signal complete with stereo audio. Not a bad idea -- except that we can't think of an HDTV that lacks either component or VGA jacks and that doesn't have a built-in scaler to do the same job. Maybe you're just out of ports? In any event, this guy needs a Stateside distributor before we can tell you pricing or availability, so you're stuck swapping cables for a while, Sparky.

[Via Oh Gizmo!]

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

PSP to HDMI, all with one giant converter box originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Gaming

250GB PlayStation 3 Slim coming to US November 3rd originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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