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Verizon broke new ground this week with the introduction of the Motorola DEVOUR, their first smartphone to sport MOTOBLUR.  Feature wise were looking at a 3.1-inch touchscreen, touch-sensitive nav pad, Android OS, 8GB microSD card slot, Bluetooth with A2DP support, 3G connectivity, media player, WiFi, a slide out QWERTY keyboard, GPS and much more.  There’s no word on a price but you can expect the street date to hit sometime in March.

MOTOROLA DEVOUR™ BRINGS MOTOBLUR™ TO VERIZON WIRELESS’ 3G DATA NETWORK

MOTOBLUR Service Gives Customers Home Screen Access to Content and Contacts

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – Verizon Wireless and Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced the availability of Motorola DEVOUR™ in March.   Motorola DEVOUR will be the first Verizon Wireless phone to feature MOTOBLUR™, Motorola’s unique Android™-powered content delivery service created to make wireless phones more personal and customizable.

MOTOBLUR is the first solution to sync contacts from work and personal e-mail services, including Gmail™, with posts, messages, photos and more from popular sites such as Facebook®, MySpace and Twitter.  With MOTOBLUR, content is automatically delivered to the home screen and fed into easy-to-manage streams.

Key features:
·         Touch-sensitive navigation pad
·         3.1” capacitive touch screen
·         Pre-loaded applications such as Gmail, Google Talk™, YouTube™, Google Search™ and Google Maps™ with Google Maps Navigation.
·         Android Market™ gives users access to more than 20,000 applications.
·         Happenings Widget – MOTOBLUR automatically pushes status updates, wall posts and photo updates from popular social networking sites to the Happenings Widget on the home screen. Customers can flick through the latest updates and fire back responses using the slide-out full QWERTY keyboard.
·         Universal Inbox – MOTOBLUR gathers texts, social network messages and e-mails into one home screen widget for quick response.
·         Back-Up and Security – Contacts, log-in information, home screen customizations, e-mail and social network messages are backed up automatically on the secure MOTOBLUR portal.  The portal also allows customers to use the phone’s fully integrated aGPS to help locate the phone if misplaced. Remote wipe easily clears information from a lost device.
·         8 GB microSD™ card pre-installed
·         Bluetooth® profiles supported: A2DP, HID, HSP, HFP, AVRCP and GAP

Service plans:
·         To get the most from Motorola DEVOUR, customers will need to subscribe to a Nationwide Talk or Nationwide Talk & Text plan and a Data Package for smartphones.  Nationwide Talk plans begin at $39.99 monthly access, and Nationwide Talk & Text plans begin at $59.99 monthly access.  A Data Package for smartphones is $29.99 for unlimited monthly access.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Media can access high-resolution images of Motorola DEVOUR in the Verizon Wireless Multimedia Library at www.verizonwireless.com/multimedia.)

About Verizon Wireless
Verizon Wireless operates the nation’s most reliable and largest wireless voice and 3G data network, serving more than 91 million customers. Headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J., with  83,000 employees nationwide, Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) and Vodafone (NASDAQ and LSE: VOD).  For more information, visit www.verizonwireless.com. To preview and request broadcast-quality video footage and high-resolution stills of Verizon Wireless operations, log on to the Verizon Wireless Multimedia Library at www.verizonwireless.com/multimedia.

For those of you who count yourselves as classic gamers, or just plain enthusiasts of same, you will be unquestionably happy to hear that Final Fantasy–yes, the original!–will be coming to the iPhone.

And on the off chance that that’s not enough for you, then surely you’ll be made to smile by the news that Final Fantasy 2 will also be coming.

It IS officially confirmed via Square-Enix’s Twitter, not to mention their Facebook, but the sad news is that no one knows what they’ll be asking in terms of price, or when it’s coming out.  This sadness really isn’t that sad, though–for most gamers, as long as the answer is “before I die”, the exact release date isn’t that relevant as long as they know about a week in advance so they can get their hands on it.  Same goes for price, except here, the magic answer is “less money than I currently have”.

So iPhone gamers, you’ve got yet another reason to be feeling your retro mojo–there are plenty on iPhone as it is, and this is just one more great one.

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Before Facebook rolled out its new privacy settings, Mark Zuckenberg promised that it would “create a simpler model for privacy control” and allow users to more control over access to their online profiles. Yet the general consensus is that the new model actually makes it harder to protect your privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has even said the new model is to push Facebook users to share even more personal information with the general public. Much of the information you could previously control access to, such as your list of friends and the pages you are a fan of, is now considered “publicly available information” (PAI).

Even worse, there is now no way to limit the access of Facebook app makers to your PAI. Gone is the option to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API”.

The controversy has made more people aware that, at its core, Facebook is a business that’s all about helping people share their personal data with others, and hopes to earn money off this exposure-driven activity.

Post from: The Gadget Blog

A woman in Tennessee was recently arrested for poking someone else on Facebook. By doing so, Shannon D. Jackson apparently violated a restraining order that prohibited her from Dana M. Hannah. Violating this so-called “order of protection” is a Class A misdemeanor in the state—meaning the potential maximum sentence is “11 months, 29 days”, or barely below a complete year! All for clicking a link on a social networking website.

Proof of the alleged misdemeanor was a screenshot of said poke

Technology and law traditionally haven’t meshed well together, as technology’s constant stream of new developments sometimes make the law’s adherence to the letter ludicrous. Stanford fellow Ryan Calo laid out the legal rationale behind the whole affair:

…it is still a form of communication restricted by a protective order.

“A poke is a very deliberate action,” he said. “You have to select the person and say, ‘this is what I want to do.’”

Advances in technology have expanded the spectrum of communication, from low-engagement to high-engagement ways of interacting with others, Calo said.

Fair enough, a woman goes to court and successfully gets a court order protecting her from further communication from an offending party, and that protection was violated. Getting arrested for poking someone else on Facebook sounds a bit rough, but there’s a lesson here: If someone hated or feared me enough to actually file a restraining order against me, I would simply delete him or her from my list of Facebook friends. Common sense people!

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Post from: The Gadget Blog

Last year on November 19th, the Xbox 360 saw a major interface update in the form of “The New Xbox Experience.  This year’s most major update will contain Twitter, FaceBook, and Last.fm accessibility.

Sources indicate that the update will launch in the UK on November 17th with no reports surfacing at this moment in regards to a US release.  I think we’ll have to wait until next week before some more solid news rears its true image.

With this update sure to be fun and synergistic, the question people are continuing to ask is where is the web browser at?

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So while it is known that the PS3 Slim will not be backwards compatible “disc-wise” with PS2 games, Sony may have something up their sleeves to offer players in the form of downloadable content.

A document leak has occurred that involves Sega discussing Sony’s plans to bring the PS2 back catalog to to PS3’s PSN and even possibly to throw some old Dreamcast games in there as well.  With each new iteration of the PS3 containing a larger hard drive, it only seems plausible that DLC is indeed the wave of the future.

If you are having trouble remembering what some good Dreamcast games were, IGN has just run some content on the 25 best games for the 10-year anniversary of Sega’s now defunct last console.

There’s no doubt in my mind that DLC is a great thing I’m just worried that Sony is going to charge too much for each game.  I can surmise that each PS2/Dreamcast title will be between $10-20, but I would be much more inclined to buy them if they were priced at $5 a piece.

Any thoughts?

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People just like these kinds of posts.  Our pink DSi post from February 25th is still getting comments to this day.  On October 23rd, Europeans will have the luxury of choosing some new Nintendo DSi colors.  Those new colors are: Metallic Blue, Light Blue and Red.

Each new DSi will have Facebook connectivity and FlipNote Studio preloaded as well as 1,000 DSiWare points.  The colors will be available with the aforementioned supplements until March 2010.  Let’s see the US get some!

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For some reason I always associate dial-up connections with Grandmas.  I actually know somebody’s Grandma that has a FaceBook account.  All ignorance aside, FaceBook Lite is now available worldwide for those out there who wanna stay connected with family and friends but have a less than stellar internet connection.

FaceBook Lite was in Beta testing all last month and as of yesterday became a legit site ready for public consumption.  Encompassing a more streamlined structure (sans 3rd-party applications) with less features, FaceBook Lite will run faster and be more accessible for those new to the service or in countries that have bandwidth limitations.

Those of you with regular FaceBook accounts are welcome to seamlessly transfer over to FaceBook Lite if you like it better.

Now only if they could dumb down Myspace a bit.

[via Coated]

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