etech

We promised it to you last month, and here is CNET's first review of a dual SIM card cell phone. We know the Duet D888 from Beyond E-Tech is not the first dual SIM phone ever, but it is the first one we've reviewed. Even better, it is the first dual SIM card phone widely available in the United States. You can get it for $199 from National Geographic and Cellular Abroad.

With the D888, you can make calls and send texts from two numbers on the same handset. Outside of a few usability quirks, the arrangement works … Read more

iPhone clones (or iClones) are a dime a dozen, but this model caught my eye. Sold by Houston-based Beyond E-Tech, which also produces the Duet D888, the D-8 only would confuse someone who's been living in a bunker for the last three years.

It's about the same size as the iPhone, but the display is much smaller (2.8 inches) to make room for a calling controls, a dedicated music player button, and what look like soft keys. And to be honest, while the D-8 apparently has an accelerometer, I'm not even sure the 65,000-color display … Read more

Though dual SIM card cell phones have been around for a while, I've only seen them while traveling abroad and at trade show booths. The premise is simple and very attractive: with slots for two SIM cards, a single phone can have two phone numbers. You can receive and make calls on both lines and the SIM cards can even be from separate carriers.

It's a great option for anyone who wants to combine their work and personal phone and it's perfect for frequent international travelers who want a local number while retaining their U.S. number.

With such advantages, it's no surprise that a lot of CNET readers have asked how they can get such a phone. But outside of a handful of unlocked models, and a few crude adapters for regular handsets, dual SIM card phones remain relatively scarce in the United States. No U.S. carrier sells them and you can bet that no carrier would give up that kind of control.

But leave it to National Geographic to come up with another option. The organization has partnered with Cellular Abroad to offer the Duet D888. Made by Beyond E-Tech, the unlocked Duet accommodates two SIM cards: one for the Cellular Abroad intentional SIM card and one for another card of your choice. You could use your own SIM card for a GSM carrier like AT&T or T-Mobile or you could buy a prepaid card during your travels. … Read more

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--By now, just about everyone who follows the media industry has heard of the deep fiscal troubles of The New York Times. But even as the paper does its best for all the news that's fit for newsprint, it is also conducting experiments aimed at moving itself into the forefront of digital journalism.

At the Emerging Technologies conference (ETech) on Tuesday, Nick Bilton, the design integration editor and user interface specialist at the Times' research and development lab, spoke about "sensors, smart content, and the future of news," essentially a recap of some of … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I'm staring at a table covered in circuitry, a solderless "breadboard," a bunch of wire, an antenna, and some other components--all the things I've been given to build a rudimentary RFID reader--and I'm having serious thoughts about whether I'm in the right room.

I've certainly used RFID before--tiny radio frequency ID tags are increasingly showing up in everything from grocery store items to hospital wristbands to lift tickets. But the sum total of electronics that I've made in my life is, I'm now reminding myself, zero.

And yet, … Read more

At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.

Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).

If … Read more

Maybe two years ago, I hosted a panel discussion on the emerging Web 2.0 economy, and I asked my panelists if we were in a bubble. Because it's clear to me that we are. Not that it's a bad thing, mind you. This is how technology evolves: like life itself, in blooms and crashes. And I think we should all acknowledge where we are in the cycle. Anyway, one of my panelists, SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier, was adamant that this was no bubble.

Now Mr. Not-a-bubble is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if … Read more

SAN DIEGO-- At the side-by-side ETech and Graphing Social Patterns conferences, before the Monday Night Werewolf social event kicks off, there is the AppNite session, in which 10 developers showcase their new apps, in five minutes each. It's like a mini Demo. But the apps are rougher, and because of that, a bit more intriguing. The first six apps were made for Facebook, the last four were Open Social demos.

Biggest Brain is a quiz game that challenges you with geeky brain speed tests such as counting blocks on-screen. Then you get to compare the "size of your brain" with your Facebook pal. Verdict: You Don't Know Jack it ain't, sorry.

Just Three Words is a group story-telling app for Facebook in which participants weave a story by entering three words at a time, in a giant text free-for-all. The presenter said, without a hint of irony, that these stories are helping "weave engagement at a level of depth." He also said a lot of the stories can't be run on a family site. What would you do with three words? Verdict: Fun parlor game, less likely to get the developers sued into oblivion than Scrabulous.

Puzzle Messages lets you enter a message for another person or to put on s site, but it scrambles it as a jigsaw puzzle, which your viewers have to reconstruct before they can read. Works in Facebook or you can put on a blog or other social site. Verdict: Someone please find this app on Facebook (I couldn't) and send me a press release as a puzzle message so I can mock it. Please.

Ski & Snowboard is a Facebook app that lets you find resorts that other users like. You can also collect "badges," like lift tickets, to show others where you're been. There's a bit more here, too: There's a mini wall for notes, a way to find ski buddies by level (it asks you to confirm double-black-diamond eligibility by having your friends to confirm it). And there's a trip planner sub-app within. Verdict: Impressive demo. A lot of functionality for a very focused, and very social, activity. See also Liftopia.

… Read more