Shift

This blog was updated at 10:30 a.m.

Beginning in the next few weeks, Dell notebooks and desktops will be for sale at Best Buy, the companies announced Thursday.

Several models of XPS and Inspiron PCs will be available at 900 Best Buy locations, including the XPS M1330 in white, the Inspiron 1521 in blue and black, the Inspiron 1420 in black, and the all-in-one XPS One desktop. Other available desktops will be the Inspiron 530, 531, and 531s. More models and colors will be added in the next few months, Dell said.

This is a huge step for … Read more

Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos suggests that enterprise applications are dividing into Web and data-enabled applications and more traditional enterprise applications. Those that are Web and/or data-enabled are exploding (confirming Tim O'Reilly's theory of where the value is, perhaps). The rest are not.

What does this mean?… Read more

Today the iPhone is the alpha gizmo, the one item of consumer electronics that dominates all the others.

But in 1993, the hot new gizmo was Apple's Newton, and it was a whole different thing.

Not very many people had Newtons. Apple sold fewer Newtons over the whole life of the product than it sold iPhones the evening of June 29.

Also unlike the iPhone, the first Newtons weren't even very useful. Although called "personal digital assistants" (PDAs), using a Newton was significantly more difficult than using a Day-Timer. The original MessagePad had very poor handwriting … Read more

Many of us are more than willing to do our part to fight global warming, but not everyone is quite ready trade the family gas guzzler for a Prius or a diesel Honda. Yet you can still take a small step toward lessening your environmental guilt with a new shift knob designed to promote fuel efficiency.

The "Gaslock Indy Cater" has an LED indicator that reminds the driver what gear the car is in. Some might think it's about as useful as the "qStart"--the gadget that tells you which side of the road you'… Read more

Increasing memory capacity and reducing the footprint of mobile phones is akin to taking one step forward and one step back. The two sort of cancel each other out.

Instead of trying to do both, CMWare is introducing a service called myMobileMedia, a PC-based place-shifting technology that streams media content to MP3-enabled phones. Other companies, like Orb Networks and Avvenu, have the same idea, but myMobileMedia's hook is its ability to stream even DRM-protected content.

CMWare's proprietary technology allows all music files, including those purchased from Apple's iTunes Store, to be played without violating any DRM rules, … Read more

HTC, maker of high-concept phones (excuse us, "Microsoft Windows Mobile-based smart devices"), such as the T-Mobile Dash, is bringing Windows Vista to UMPCs with the HTC Shift, announced this morning at CTIA 2007.

The company describes the device as about the size of, "a couple of DVD cases," and it sports a 7-inch wide-screen display, 30GB hard drive, and every flavor of wireless connectivity you can think of, including, "Tri-Band UMTS/HSDPA, Quad-Band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Bluetooth 2.0 and WiFi."

We've already seen Windows Vista in the promising, if not entirely practical, … Read more

As luxury items or egregious excess appear to be the theme of the day, it seems fitting to include this gem from that icon of motoring wealth, the Bentley.

It's not a gadget per se, of course, but we just couldn't resist because this thing is so far over the top. Finished in white gold and 30 carats of diamonds, the knob costs $150,000--almost as much as the $165,000 Bentley Continental GT, as Luxist points out. As far as we know, it's the only shift knob that has its own Web site. But if … Read more

Motorola's Follow Me TV feature for its DVR set-top boxes lets users choose which TV to watch a recorded TV show on.

Instead of keeping content stored on only that TV, Follow Me TV lets users bring TV with them from room to room. Any recorded show is aggregated and made available on any TV on the network. In addition to TV programs, music and photos can also follow to any TV, and the content can also be sent to portable devices.

Or, as Motorola CEO Ed Zander demonstrated for the audience here at CES 2007, you can pause … Read more

Writing about gadgets around the holidays can get pretty hectic--hello, PlayStation3!--but there are some pretty cool perks. Take Tuesday night, for example, when the DigitalLife folks (the ones who organized the big tech trade show last month) invited a host of NYC-area reporters to Manhattan's fashionable Nikki Midtown bar and lounge for a packed evening of consumer tech. The agenda included a press conference from TiVo featuring CEO Tom Rogers, as well as a showcase of some products that people may or may not be craving this holiday season. Oh, yeah, there was free food, too.

The general … Read more