Just when I was looking for the completion of the LEGO Millennium Falcon, I got sidetracked by another Harrison Ford minifig, this time with a fedora and a whip: these LEGO Indiana Jones sets are not as massive as the 5,195 pieces of the Falcon, but all together they are begging for some silly playing and block whipping. The four sets cover all the (good) movies:
Newertech’s iPhone Speaker Dock allows you to rock out in between calls, and will further function as a loudspeaker when a call is received or made. The flexible microphone means you will be able to comfortably speak at a distance, with limited loss in calling quality. As if that was not enough, the iPhone Speaker Dock will also charge your iPhone whilst it pumps out your tunes. At $US34.99, it doesn’t matter if it’s black or white; it’s a steal whatever the colour. As well as the dock, Newertech shall be introducing other iPhone specific peripherals.
Made from a block of aircraft aluminum, Mobiado’s black Stealth Mobile is inspired by the bomber of the same name. Only 1200 will be made, so expect the price, while not quite as expensive as a B-2 Spirit, should hit you in the pocket. Full specs of the small-buttoned beauty are below.
Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, who hosted Larry Page’s storm-tossed nuptials on his Caribbean island, Necker, last year, says that he and the two Google founders are working on a project together. According to a diary item in a British newspaper, the British tycoon and the two search engine billionaires are working on a secret project together. And they’ve given it the most awful working name:
Virgle.
The Skinny: NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800, launching in late Feb / early March, will be successor to the 8800 Ultra. With an estimated 30% performance increase over the aforementioned top end GPU, and apparent support for “Quad SLI,” it is certainly no slacker.
The Catch: Expect the 9800 GX2′s 1GB frame buffer, two 65nm GPUs and 256 Stream processors to make this one seriously expensive graphics card. [ [H]Enthusiast]
The Players: Panasonic DMP-BD30 ($US500) and Sony PlayStation 3 with 2.1 firmware ($US400 to $US500) The Movies: Fox’s Sunshine and Sony Pictures’ Resident Evil: Extinction The Challenge: To find out what’s so special about Blu-ray’s BD Profile 1.1, also known as Full Standard Profile or just simply “Picture-In-Picture Enabled”
Okay, hackers with Cheez Whiz in their veins apparently aren’t behind the Xbox Live outages. We are. Record signups and numbers of people are online, so “as a result of this massive increase in usage,” the service got all wonky, sez Live’s General Manager Marc Whitten. But they’re super sorry, and to make up for it they’re “offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge.”
Specific details on the deal are coming in a few weeks, though fingers crossed we’ll have some choice in the game that’ll occupy space on our hard drives, ’cause a lot of the games are crap I’d never play, and getting one of those would weirdly annoy me more than just receiving a nicely worded apology. Which, coincidentally, is reproduced below. [Major Nelson]
The last of the major smartphone operating systems, RIM’s BlackBerry, has finally received support for SlingPlayer Mobile. Not only can stock brokers, businessmen, bankers, analysts and other jerks email their co-workers at their lunch meetings, they now can catch the game at the same time. We demoed this earlier in the week for ourselves, and saw that the quality was actually very good, even over EDGE.
Hey, guess what? Xbox Live is sorta puking again (maybe due to Windows Live Data Authentication says the Pirate King) after briefly recovering from its holiday cold. Nasty weather to blame for the long illness? Nope, rumor has it greasy hackers are the reason I’ve had problems getting online to snipe your face off in Team Fortress 2 lately.
