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Wireless

great giz ideas

Great Giz Ideas: Harass Your Neighbors With Your Wi-Fi Hotspot Name

We were setting up our wireless router in this our new house when we made a startling realization. Our wireless hotspot doesn't need to be limited to boring names like LinksysN or 2Wire1969, they can be messages to our neighbors that they see every time they connect to their router. Here are some that our crack team of jerks have come up with. More »

sony

Sony Goal: 90% of ALL Our Products Networked By 2010

Wow. Stan Glasgow, at dinner last night with a few journalists, told us that Sony plans to network 90% of all of their products, thousands of models, by 2010. It's a matter of getting content on and between devices. He said that the goal was to have it happen automatically or with a click of a button. More »

motion control

PCs Get Wiimote-esque Motion Controller: The Stix

Motion-controller fans who don't want to get into Wiimote modding now have a way of playing interactive internet games on their PCs with the Stix. No, not the '70s band...it's a new and very Wiimote-esque controller from GoLive2, touch sensitive and launched with a companion website that has hundreds of "free Web-based games," whatever they may be like. The Stix 200 works with these games, while the 400 version looks like it also works with normal PC games. Available in August, press release below. More »

routers

Netgear's WGR614L $69 Open Source Router

Netgear's new WGR614L is an open source 802.11g router, able to run lots of firmwares already built by the community. So do many other routers. The sell here is that they've beefed up the usual specs beyond what's necessary for the usual packet direction. I suppose that most of these router firmwares are getting so feature heavy that the original hardware is the bottleneck. [Netgear via Myopenrouter] More »

Zen X-Fi

Creative's Zen X-Fi to Enter Ring Dominated by iPod Touch, Zune

New details have been leaked about Creative's answer to the iPod touch and Zune, a wireless music player with Wi-Fi media sharing capabilities called the Zen X-Fi. Pictures show the device sporting a chrome-and-black plastic look that's vaguely reminiscent of the iPhone, along with a nine-point directional pad. Besides certain internet features, X-Fi will also come with an SD card slot and a built-in speaker. More »

wimax

Sprint WiMax Launches Commercially in September

After countless false starts, delays, death and rebirth, Sprint's WiMax is finally launching commercially in September. Baltimore is the first city to get it, with a rollout in Washington, DC and Chicago by the end of the year—all current test markets for the service. Sprint's promising 2-4Mbps per user. In making the announcement, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse again emphasized how open WiMax will be. No word on final pricing or rollout for the rest of us though. I really am waiting for the day to write lovely things about the service, honest. [PC World]

rumor

Visual Voicemail Coming to Verizon... For a Price

Rumor has it that Verizon Wireless will be joining AT&T and Sprint in offering visual voicemail, in this case on four upcoming phones: LG's Chocolate 3 and an updated Voyager (possible software update but more likely hardware refresh), along with the mysteriously code-named "Blaze" and "Utopia" from Motorola. That's more phones than any other carrier to date, though there's no mention of it on the iPhone wannabe LG Dare. The catch is that the optional service will cost $2 a month—annoying when you consider other carriers offer it for free, though totally expected when you consider that even Verizon's email app costs an extra $5 per month. Look out for this to arrive in late July or early August. [IntoMobile]

bluetooth

Sony's DR-BT140QP Bluetooth Headset Mightn't Make You Look Geeky

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Bluetooth headsets are not a good fashion statement, even Borg-like ones. But with these little earpieces from Sony, you might be able to get away with it and not look too geeky. The DR-BT140Qs double as normal earphones with a frequency response of 16Hz to 24kHz and have 30mm drivers, while the Bluetooth part is 2.0 and supports A2DP/AVRCP/HFP/HSP profiles. The built-in battery will last you about 12 hours, and they're available in July for $138.89 in silver, white, black and pink. [Akihabaranews]

wireless

Verizon Offers Discount Bundle to Those Who Don't Want a Landline

There are few reasons to maintain a landline phone these days, which is why Verizon will offer an $8 to $12 discount per month to landline-free wireless customers who sign on for internet or TV service with their new Flex Double Play bundle. Wireless customers that tack on DSL service with downloads at 3 Mbps and FiOS at up to 20 Mbps are eligible for the discount. Futhermore, adding FiOS TV to the package increases the savings by another $8 per month. The plan is set to roll out next week. [Eagle Herald]

wimax

Sprint and Clearwire Promise WiMax Will Be Totally Open, Can Replace Your ISP

In its filing to the FCC oh-so-politely asking for the okay to merge Sprint's and Clearwire's spectrum assets into the WiMax monolith New Clearwire (helpfully poked through by Ars), they make a lot of groovy promises to stoke the FCC's approval stamp into action. Like it'll be totally open: "New Clearwire will permit consumers to use any lawful device that they want so long as it is compatible" and you can "download and use any software applications, content, or services" as long they're not illegal or mucking up the network. And they're promising to cover 140 million people in the US in 30 months with claims of sustained speeds of 6Mbps downlink, 3Mbps up. Why's this cool? More »

home entertainment

Monster Digital Express HD System: Their First Wireless HDMI Kit

We just got a briefing on Monster's Wireless Digital Express HD System, a UWB system that transmits video wirelessly in the same room, If you want to send it to another room, it'll use already-in-wall coax to transmit high-def signal. Sigma Designs, known for its Blu-ray player chips, is on board, using its Wireless HDAV cable replacement to upconvert, encode and then decode the 1080p video signal on the fly. It's going to cost $600 for a transmitter and receiver pair, which may sound like a lot for you to connect your Wii to your 32" LCD in place of a 30-cent AV cable, but considering what it's capable of doing—and the technology it's using—it's not awful. More »

health

M-Powered System Turns a Lincoln Into the Diabetesmobile

I never thought about this before, but driving around in a car can be especially dangerous for people with severe cases of diabetes. Fortunately for them (and everyone else on the road), a company called Medtronic Diabetes has unveiled its new M-POWERED car—a Lincoln sedan fitted with a system that wirelessly connects a patient's glucose monitor with the dashboard. Once connected, the system will continually update the driver's on his/her health status via audio and visual cues. There is no word on whether or not this system will actually be available for patients anytime soon however. [Medgadget]

giz explains

Giz Explains: What You Didn't Know About the iPhone's 3G

Yeah, yeah, you get it: The new iPhone uses AT&T's best-in class (in NYC at least), 3G high-speed network, one that's getting faster and more spread out all the time. But there's a lot you probably didn't know about the technology involved: How fast can you really go on the thing? Why did AT&T feel the need to cap the iPhone's speed? If you want answers to these and other questions, you came to the right place. More »

wireless

Wireless Bluetooth Pen Puts Your Mid-Air Penmanship to the Test

Bluetooth enabled pens are nothing new, but they generally require something like special dotted paper to function properly. SMK Corp claims that their new "Wireless Input Pen" is the first device of its kind to transmit characters written in mid air. Combined with Bluetooth, the pen utilizes a a built-in triaxial acceleration sensor to detect the position of the pen when characters are formed, then transmits that information to a PC. More »

mp3 players

SanDisk Buys MusicGremlin; Revisits Wi-Fi Music Player Thing

Today SanDisk announced it would acquire the company that developed the chunky MusicGremlin Wi-Fi MP3 player, a device that made a smallish splash a few years ago for being the Zune before there was a Zune. More »

iphone

Can AT&T's Network Handle Millions of Data-Hogging 3G iPhones?

We're ready for the 3G iPhone, but are AT&T's 3G networks ready for it? Om Malik raises the scary possibility that AT&T's complete HSDPA network might be newly strengthened, but still might not be robust enough to handle the onslaught of 3G traffic, rendering 3G barely more nimble than EDGE. After a year of waiting for 3G, that's kind of a nut shot right? Consider this: Even last year, iPhone users chugged nearly five times the data of an average AT&T subscriber, and twice as much as other smartphone owners. More »

wi-fi

Handlink Wi-Fi Base Station: Quick Net Access at Drop of a Coin

This gizmo from Handlink is clearly aimed at hotels, coffee shops and other public places where you may need net access, and you can't argue with the thinking in its design. Simply pop in some coins, grab the printout with your time-limited access codes, and then connect up your notebook, or phone to its 802.11b/g service. Kind of the retro-future public payphone of the internet era, it saves time from all that messing about you sometimes have to do in internet cafes. Useful if you're without credit cards, I guess. [RegHardware]

starbucks

T-Mobile Sues Starbucks Over Free AT&T Wi-Fi

T-Mobile is suing Starbucks over its free Wi-Fi from AT&T. The gist is that Starbucks and AT&T are promoting free Wi-Fi in markets where T-Mobile still has the exclusive right to "sell, market and promote its services" since the infrastructure transition to AT&T isn't complete. In fact, technically, the only two markets running Death Star-certified equipment are San Antonio and Bakersfield, California, meaning the rest of the stores are still on T-Mobile's network. So AT&T's making bank on T-Mobile's dime. More »