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Well, sure, there are accessories, but I want the iPhone 3G! Don't you?

You are not alone. I've been to many AT&T and Apple stores over the last few days--the furthest of those being in Sacramento. (I live in the Bay Area and went there to visit some friends over the weekend.). At each AT&T store I was told to wait for more stock, and at every Apple store I got discouraged by the long line and withdrew. It's crazy.

Now, I can't help but wonder why Apple is doing this. Obviously … Read more

Now that you've gotten your iPhone 3G, it's time to get some accessories for it.

Digital Life Outfiter (DLO) didn't wait for long and has just come out with a slew of stuff that you can use to protect, carry, and enhance your iPhone 3G. Most of them work with the original iPhone and the iPod Touch, too.

To keep your iPhone from scratching or bumped around if dropped, you can choose either the HybridShell ($24.99) that's bulky yet stylish, or the VideoShell ($19.99), which is clear and sturdy. Of course, you can get … Read more

No sooner did we post an item about an ill-advised promotional tchotchke that another one has popped up on the radar. But unlike the previous gadget, this one isn't of dubious value because of anachronistic timing; rather, it would be questionable no matter when it came out.

The reason: It's a paper clip dispenser. Not that we have anything against paper clips, mind you, but we can't exactly see the point of a dispenser that's also a pen holder with USB ports.

Hong Kong-based Earth Trek is trying to cast this in the best possible light, … Read more

When Jasmine and I evaluate MP3 players for CNET reviews, we always try to spend a few sentences describing any noticeable audio performance characteristics we detect during our subjective testing. We'll play around with all of the gadget's different EQ and sound enhancement options, listen back on our reference headphones, and run through a playlist of familiar music. We're only human, however, and hearing loss, ear wax, head congestion, and hangovers can skew our perceptions of audio quality from day to day. Thankfully, we have Eric Franklin.… Read more

Last week NBC quietly released a learning tool called iCue in conjunction with MIT. (See coverage on CNET TV's Loaded.) It's been designed as a "learning environment" using a large collection of news clips taken from NBC's video archives to enable anyone to catch up on news coverage and current events. This archived footage is put into context, as long as viewers are willing to acknowledge that the content is coming only from one source (NBC), and for now only with the focus on the U.S. presidential elections.

To get going, users can simply … Read more

If movie theaters are indeed facing extinction as some believe, Columbia Pictures and Regal Entertainment deserve credit for experimenting with free and readily available technology to help stave off the pending obsolescence.

To promote Adam Sandler'sYou Don't Mess With Zohan, moviegoers will encounter a novel prop in the lobby: a hair stylist's chair that they can sit in and then download Zohan voice clips to their Bluetooth cell phones. Six "voice tones" will be available for free as part of a "proximity marketing" campaign coordinated through Blue Media, which will distribute them … Read more

Programs that grab videos from Web sites such as YouTube aren't a dime a dozen--they're a dime for 200 dozen. Most of them aren't that good, either, which makes Ashampoo ClipFinder such a breath of fresh air in the video-grabbing game.

ClipFinder sports an atypical interface that's still simple to navigate. The main window holds a series of long filmstrips. Each of the 14 strips represents a video site, which are searchable either individually or globally. Unfortunately, you can't add new portals, but the ones available include all the major video sites: YouTube, Yahoo, iFilm, … Read more

Update: Information about the frame rate has been updated, see more below.

Today Flickr is introducing the single biggest change to its service since launching in 2004--video. The photo service is rolling out the capability to upload video clips of up to 150MB to its paying Pro members. Free members will still be able to view these clips, but will be unable to add their own, at least for the time being.

The company has taken a very different direction than I originally imagined by limiting user video clips to just 90 seconds. It's a far cry from the arms race of higher quality and unlimited length offered by services like Vimeo, Viddler, and even YouTube to a certain degree.

That's not to say videos will look poor and grainy, though. The system has been designed to scale any clip you can throw at it, including high-definition from high-end point-and-shoot cameras or your HD-capable camcorder. The frame rate also maintains 30 FPS, which is half the speed of video captured on most modern point and shoot digital cameras, but a step up from the 12 FPS that was available while I was testing the service over the weekend.

What Flickr is trying to do with these small clips is provide a place for people to post and share the little videos they're capturing on their digital cameras. The throwaway items that are still very watchable, but hardly worth spending the time to upload to a separate service. The company knows this move will turn many off to the new service, but as part of the Yahoo ecosystem there are important boundaries that dare not be crossed. In light of Yahoo Photos shutting down last year to make way for Flickr, the company seems to have recognized the importance of brand separation and seems intent on creating these artificial boundaries if only to keep people from being confused.

The folks at Flickr say the time limits were not a move forced from having to share company resources with Yahoo Video. Kakul Srivastava, director of product management at Flickr says Yahoo Video is all about giving people a place to create their own content channels and drop those large videos. Her vision for Flickr video is simply to popularize the longer version of photos--something they hope becomes an artistic medium, and that people simply get used to taking alongside their still photography.

So how do videos fit in with the photos? Quite well, actually. Glancing at someone's photo stream (now classified as a media stream), photos and videos sit side by side with no differentiation besides a small play button in the bottom corner of video thumbnails. Like photos, you can simply click on them to go to the page that contains all the usual things like user comments, tags, and metadata, or you can simply view the video in its thumbnail size right in the stream--complete with player controls. It's absolutely wonderful, albeit tiny.

The player is a modified version of the one found on Yahoo video with controls that fade away after a few seconds to reveal the full shot. Users can embed clips on third-party sites as they would anywhere else, and developers can pull in them in through the same data API that's helped integrate Flickr into all manner of third-party tools and services. Expect to see Flickr videos making their way to photo mashup and editing services in a few weeks--JumpCut excluded (for now at least).

Getting your videos on there in the first place is almost as easy as viewing them. Videos can be uploaded at the same time and the same way you're used to uploading your still photos. The Web uploader takes them just fine, and so does an updated version of the desktop software for PCs and Macs. Once your videos are on the service, you can't get them back to your hard drive, something I'm told will be coming later on.

Video on Flickr is off to a good start, but with the artificial time limitations, I find it to be unsuitable for most of the clips I take. For those I'd be better off uploading to a standalone video service with more generous time and file size limits. I can only imagine some of my less tech-savvy friends trying to upload a video that's slightly over the size or time limit and simply giving up. That said, power users and people who are intentionally shooting short-form video will find the service a joy.

In the future I expect Flickr to lift the size and length restrictions entirely. In my chat with Srivastava, she had alluded to as much. The company also plans to let free users upload videos later on when the platform matures.

Various specs can be found after the break. See also News.com photo guru Stephen Shankland's post on it.

… Read more

Don't count out VideoEgg just yet.

Rumors have circulated that the San Francisco-based company is on the verge of a shutdown, but that's not the case, said Matt Sanchez, the company's CEO.

The rumors no doubt were churned up by the e-mails the company has sent notifying users of its decision to stop hosting videos uploaded to the site by the public and to scale back hosting services on the VideoEgg Publishing Platform.

"What we're doing is focusing on efforts around our ad network brand, the EggNetwork brand," Sanchez said Wednesday. "We want … Read more