RIM launches new BlackBerry Curve (video)

Want to get your BBM on in style without spending a fortune on RIM's latest trio? Say hello to the new 11mm (0.43 inch) thin BlackBerry Curve, now official in 3 variants -- the dual-mode GSM / CDMA 9370, the GSM / UMTS 9360 and the CDMA-only 9350. These long rumored handsets feature an 800MHz CPU, 512MB RAM, a tiny 2.44-inch HVGA+ (480×360 pixel) display, a five megapixel EDoF camera (with LED flash and VGA video recording), Bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n with UMA, GPS / aGPS and NFC. While there's no sign of that new-fangled touch screen technology, you'll find BlackBerry 7 under the hood, along with a 1000mAh battery to keep it ticking all day long, 512MB of built-in storage (1GB on the 9370) and microSD card support (up to 32GB). RIM is still mum on pricing, but the new BlackBerry Curve is "expected to be available from carriers in Canada this month and from other carriers around the world beginning in September" -- including Vodafone, based on the video (and PR) after the break. We'll have a hands-on later today so stay tuned for more.

ERPLY's mobile credit card reader handles NFC payments on an iPad, obliterates the check-out line

It may look like nothing more than a glorified chip clip, but that dongle at the bottom of this guy's iPad is actually ERPLY's new credit card reader -- the latest addition to a growing field of NFC and mobile payment devices designed for small and large businesses. Once attached to an iPad's charging port, the peripheral will send a user's encrypted credit card information to ERPLY's point-of-sale and inventory management software, allowing customers to purchase products on the store room floor and giving retailers the ability to monitor transactions and stock flows in real time. Available for $50 (with a transaction fee of 1.9 percent), the reader is also equipped to handle both NFC and traditional card payments and, after processing a purchase, will automatically send a receipt to consumers via text or e-mail. At the moment, it's only available for the iPad, though iPhone users should be able to get their own version within the next three months. Swipe past the break for more information, in the the full press release.

Canon announces PowerShot SX150 IS, ELPH 310 / 510 HS point-and-shoot cams

It's not every day that we see a new camera hit the market -- it only feels like it is. And today it's Canon's turn in the spotlight. Beefing up its point-and-shoot lineup with a trio of PowerShots, the company just announced its SX150 IS, ELPH 310 HS, and ELPH 510 HS -- that last one is billed as the thinnest camera to include a 12x optical zoom lens with 28mm wide-angle. All three models include a new IS system, Smart Auto with 32 shooting scenes, high-speed burst, and HD video capture. Photographers looking for manual control may want to focus on the $250 14.1 megapixel SX150, which includes aperture- and shutter-priority modes, a discrete-shooting mode, and a 3-inch LCD, but uses a CCD sensor. If you don't mind sacrificing manual control in favor of a slimmer body design, the $260 ELPH 310 HS and $350 ELPH 510 HS both include 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensors with improved performance in low light, and 8x and 12x optical zoom lenses, respectively. Both ELPH models will ship in early October, while the SX150 is slated to hit stores in the beginning of September. Canon is also announcing a new flash -- the $150 HF-DC2 -- scheduled to ship just in time to capture bright holiday pics this December.

Apple to release cheaper, 8GB iPhone 4 within weeks?

As the world waits for Apple to release the iPhone 5, Reuters is reporting that Cupertino may be refreshing the iPhone 4, as well. According to two anonymous sources "with knowledge of the matter," an unnamed Korean manufacturer has already begun producing parts for a cheaper, 8GB version of the smartphone, slated to launch within the next few weeks. As for that next-gen handset, the insiders went on to say that the iPhone 4S / iPhone 5 will will feature a more spacious touchscreen, better antenna and eight megapixel shooter, and that Apple is indeed aiming for a late September launch, after having already asked manufacturers Hon Hai and Pegatron to prep their facilities for the production of 45 million units, altogether. Details, as usual, are still scarce at this point, but we'll let you know as soon as we get more information.

Blackberry Curve 9360 hands-on

So, the trickle of BlackBerry juice is now a flood. Just weeks after RIM launched its high-end Torch 9810, 9850 and Bold 9900 handsets, it's revealed the refreshed mid-range Curve 9360 (aka the 9350 or 9370, depending on the carrier and region). When compared to the Bold 9900, which can be seen as a richer cousin with a similar form factor, the new Curve clearly comes with key hardware sacrifices in order to meet a lower (but still to-be-confirmed) price point, including an 800MHz processor (instead of 1.2GHz), no touchscreen and a 480 x 360 HVGA+ display rather than the Bold's full VGA panel. Compared to previous Curves, however, the 9360 is a significant upgrade. It sports the new BB 7, a 5MP camera and a physical design that RIM hopes will entice the "youth demographic" as well as the millions of international users who have helped to turn the Curve into RIM's internationally bestselling range. The question is, is this device enough of an upgrade, considering it's been two years a year since the last refresh in the Curve series? Read on for our initial hands-on impressions...

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet now available for order, priced at $500 and up

It's been a while coming, but Lenovo's ThinkPad tablet has finally made its way to market. As expected, the line of Honeycomb slates is now available for order on the company's product page, with the 16GB, WiFi-only model priced at $500 and 3G-enabled versions going for $570 (32GB) and $670 (64GB). The 10.1-inch, NVIDIA Tegra 2-powered tablets are expected to begin shipping on August 29th, but you can order one now, at the source link below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Lenovo

Google Fiber beta test goes live, bathes Stanford in high-speed regularity

When we last checked in on the Google Fiber project, engineers were busy laying the groundwork for a 1Gbps network across both Kansas Cities, while preparing to launch a beta test near Stanford. Now, it looks like the beta service has gone live in the Palo Alto area, according to a lucky Reddit user who claims to be using it. The ISP is available free of charge to students and faculty members within the area, at pretty mouth-watering speeds. No word yet on when the Kansas City communities will receive similar treatment, but you can gaze in awe at the Stanford Speedtest result, after the break.

SOL Republic intros Amps and Tracks headphone lines, we go hands-on

Oh my is this interesting. Monster Cable's VP of marketing Kevin Lee (a key figure involved with its Beats by Dre headphone line) has co-founded a new headphone company dubbed Soundtrack Of Life Republic, and we were able to get a very brief hands-on with some handmade prototypes. It's no secret that we're not fans of Monster around these parts, but being that SOL Republic isn't directly tied to it -- and because the headphones bring with them some interesting features without being crazy expensive -- we've decided to give them a quick whirl. It's all detailed just past the break.

Android SDK add-on brings Market one step closer to your Google TV

We knew the Android Market was coming to Google TV and yesterday product manager Ambarish Kenghe announced the tools to make it a reality. The Google TV add-on to the Android SDK has been released to developers so they can begin the process of porting their apps to your 40-inch flatscreen. At the moment, only developers using Linux with KVM can use the kit but Kenghe says they're working on support for other platforms. Apps that require unsupported tech like touchscreens won't be visible on the market, so developers need to make sure their software is optimized for TVs before they make their living-room debut. Hammer your finger on the source link below for the inside skinny from Mr Kenghe himself.

Survey: Carrier in-store purchases offer best phone buying experience

If you're in the market for a new cell phone, you'll probably have a better buying experience if you visit the carrier's store to shop and make the purchase, rather than buying online or over the phone, a new survey says. J.D. Power and Associates recently surveyed about 11,000 U.S. wireless customers who purchased a cell phone within the last six months (9,200 customers with full-service wireless contracts, and 1,800 noncontract mobile users). They rated customer satisfaction on a 1,000-point scale, according to six criteria.
What's the least satisfying way to buy a cell phone? According to J.D. Powers: "Satisfaction is lowest among customers who most recently conducted a Web sales transaction (738 on a 1,000-point scale, on average), compared with retail (walk-in) and telephone channels (753 and 752, respectively).
"Customers who purchased through the Web channel, where finding information quickly is more challenging, tend to rate their experience lower based on the general lack of personal assistance, compared with either in-person or over the phone."
Also, you may not get the best deal (in terms of the cost of the phone and plan) when buying over the phone. The survey found that "satisfaction with cost of service among purchases occurring over the phone averages 626, compared with 653 and 652 when purchases occur online and in stores, respectively."
That said, survey participants reported being significantly more satisfied when they called the carrier to change their plan, compared with going online to change their plan.
Contract wireless customers gave the highest overall buying-experience marks to Sprint and T-Mobile -- both scored 755. AT&T scored 744, the worst ranking from contract customers.
J.D. Powers noted that Sprint excels in its online sales experience, as well as in its variety of plan offerings and promotions, and cost of service. Overall, T-Mobile offered the most affordable cost of service.
A broader range of overall satisfaction marks was given for buying phones from noncontract carriers. Boost Mobile led the pack with an overall customer satisfaction score of 766 (surpassing all contract carrier ratings). Tracfone trailed at 708. The average score among noncontract carriers was 740.
According to J.D. Powers, "Boost Mobile performs particularly well in phone sales representative, offerings and promotions, and cost of service."
How are people buying phones? The survey indicates that roughly 60% of both contract and noncontract mobile customers most recently purchased a phone while visiting a retail store. This could be a carrier's retail store, a third-party retailer such as Apple or Best Buy, or even a supermarket or drugstore (where many noncontract phones are sold).
The survey noted: "Satisfaction with the overall purchase experience among other retailers, such as Apple, Best Buy, Costco, RadioShack and Wal-Mart, averaged 740 -- 18 points lower than among stores owned by full-service wireless carriers."

Amazon, Dropbox, Google and you win in cloud-music decision

The disk drives powering Dropbox, Amazon's Cloud Drive, and Google Music likely issued a small sigh of relief Monday, after a federal court judge found that the MP3tunes cloud music service didn't violate copyright laws when it used only a single copy of a MP3 on its servers, rather than storing 50 copies for 50 users. For Amazon and Google's nascent cloud music services, the decision clears the way for them to make it easier and faster for customers to use their music services; gives them legal cover to reduce the amount of disk space needed per user; makes it less likely that new customers of their music services will bust through their ISPs data caps when signing up; and clears the way for the companies to let users add songs found on webpages and through search to their lockers with a single-click -- all without either being sued by record labels for doing so.
Monday's decision centers on MP3tunes, a cloud-based online music locker service, that allows a customer to upload the music from their hard drives to a "locker" on the web, where they can play back the songs from any connected device.
But instead of uploading all of a user's songs, MP3tunes' software would check the library for previously uploaded songs and if a match existed, the song would just be added to the locker without requiring an upload.
No matter how many customers "uploaded" that song, MP3tunes kept only a single copy.


EMI, whose artists include Usher, Jay-Z and Lady Antebellum, sued MP3tunes over that practice and others. In a complicated federal court decision Monday (see Threat Level's write-up), a New York federal court judge ruled that the practice was legal -- but only insofar as the single storage method is done for exactly unique copies.
So for instance, all people who bought "Stairway to Heaven" as an MP3 from Amazon would have the exact same file (as determined by an MD5 Hash) and MP3tunes could just store a single copy.
However, the ruling makes clear that if MP3tunes scanned a customer's music collection and found "Stairway to Heaven" ripped from a CD with a slightly different file size, the company could not simply substitute a master copy. Instead, that customer would have to upload the file.
While the latter case still seems non-sensical, the ruling still must come as a relief to Google, Amazon and Dropbox.


Though Dropbox, an online storage provider, has never been sued by record labels, it uses the exact disk-space saving method that MP3tunes did.
If a Dropbox customer saves a file of any kind (text, movie or music) to their online hard drive, Dropbox checks the file's hash. If there is a match, then the file is instantly "added" to the user's online hard drives without the need to upload it. (This practice is not without controversy, due to the security risks it creates and because it makes it possible for users to be targeted in file-sharing suits.)
Given that the company's growing success and intention to become the hard drive of the future, it's highly likely the company would have been sued for the de-duping practice at some point.
On the other hand, both Amazon and Google launched online music services recently -- without striking deals with the labels. Both require every user to upload every song, regardless of whether other users had uploaded the exact same file. That leads to enormous bandwidth usage on the part of customers and disk space being wasted by Google and Amazon.
The other annoyance is that can take weeks of uploading files to move your entire collection, depending on your connection speed.
That design decision seemed to be in keeping with a decision in the Cablevision case, where the Second Circuit Appeals Court ruled that the cable company's DVR in the cloud was legal only because every user who told the service to record a given show got their own copy of the show made
By contrast, Apple's new cloud-music service -- created with the blessing of the big labels, only uploads the songs it doesn't know -- and uses master files. In fact, if a customer has a low-quality copy of a song from one of those labels, Apple will automatically upgrade the song to a better one.
But Judge William H. Pauley III in this case said that MP3tunes' system complies with that ruling.
"Importantly, the system preserves the exact digital copy of each song uploaded to MP3tunes.com," Pauley ruled. "Thus, there is no "master copy" of any of EMI's songs stored on MP3tunes' computer servers."
So what's that mean for Google and Amazon?
Well, now for the first time, a federal court has cleared the way for them to fingerprint songs, even in a weakened way, Google and Amazon could quickly identify which of the songs on a user's hard drive it already has an exact copy of. Those could be added immediately, creating a better initial user experience.
The decision also said that allowing "sideloading" of songs was legal. That was the feature of MP3tunes that let users add songs they'd found on webpages, such as music blogs, directly to their online locker. That song/artist/link combo was then added to MP3tunes's search function so any other user could then add a song by searching for it in a custom search box.
That, the court ruled, was legal so long as a company removed the links and all songs added to lockers via that link when a copyright holder tells the site that the link is infringing on their copyright.


If that precedent holds, Google could pair up its search engine with its cloud-music service -- making a powerful combination, though not one that would endear the search giant to the record labels, which so far have not granted permission to Google to sell their songs.

But given Google's friend of the court briefs in the case and the fact the founder of MP3tunes, Michael Robertson, works at Google now after one of his other companies was acquired by it, don't rule that feature out too soon.

AT&T's First LTE Modem/Mi-Fi Box Now Available

It is no doubt that AT&T will be getting 4G LTE with or without T-Mobile, and today they made the first public move towards their impending future. Today AT&T made available their LTE capable USB Modem and Mi-Fi box. These two devices are the first to come out with a AT&T capable LTE radio, and will shortly be followed by phones and such. For those of you who are wondering if AT&T has turned on the LTE in America, they are still working on it, but for the time being HSPA+ is what these devices are limited to.

Price wise, these LTE devices will have a data plan for $50/5GB $80/10 with $10 for ever 1GB you go over. That price is the exact same as Verizon LTE service is going for, and so this shows why the consumer phone service market will be destroyed if T-Mobile and AT&T mate.