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We have no idea who would choose an iPhone app over a real, honest-to-goodness textbook, but if you really want to spend marathon cram sessions hunched over a 3.5-inch display, a company called CourseSmart has just made its entire catalog available for viewing with its eTextbooks app. Certainly, it seems that the company’s selection is nothing to sneeze at — electronic access to over 7,000 titles from 12 publishers — so if you’re already using the service, additional on-the-go access to the books (as well as the handy search, notes, and bookmarks) might prove quite worthwhile.

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CourseSmart releases eTextbook reader for iPhone

We’re not sure why we didn’t hear more about this way back at RIM’s WES conference way back in May, but it was apparently mentioned by VP Antoine Boucher at the time that they’re working on a Bluetooth-enabled watch. Furthermore, it’s said to be more advanced than the models Sony Ericsson has put forth so far, featuring streaming audio (3.5mm jack on the watch, perhaps?) and Twitter / Facebook updates in addition to the usual things like caller ID and text messages. Note that the image floating around today of this thing isn’t real — it’s just a Sony Ericsson MBW-100 with a swapped logo — so it remains to be seen what this magical wrist accessory will look like, assuming it’s real and coming to retail.

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RIM working on Bluetooth watch, other spellbinding accessories?

Now that everything Zune HD is official and available for pre-order, Microsoft has seen fit to loose official specs, putting to rest — at least until we can do a full hands on — questions about what to expect from the OLED touchscreen packing device. From dimensions (52.7 mm x 102.1 mm x 8.9 mm, 2.6 oz) to battery life (24 hours for music with wireless off, up to 4 hours of video) and charge time (3 hours, 2 hours to 90%.) While the offical site (incorrectly) currently lists max video res at barely-better-than-DVD 720 x 480, we contacted Microsoft and received the official specs on video support, and if for some reason you needed to hear it again: the Tegra chip is a beast

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Zune HD specs fill in the blanks on video format support, battery life and more

David Pogue of The New York Times whipped up a frenzy against the cellphone companies. As soon as he urged everyone to rise up against those absurd voicemail instructions used by every cellphone provider in his “Take Back the Beep” campaign , 28,032 blogs wrote about it, and thousands of e-mail messages rained down on Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in a torrent of disdain. Now, there’s a glimmer of hope, and results could be on the way

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Cellphone providers starting to buckle under torrent of complaints

Check out this Dell Inspiron Zino HD, a tiny PC destined for your home theater. Shipping this Fall, there’s scarce information about this hotshot, but the company says there are desktop parts inside, unlike the favorably reviewed Studio Hybrid that’s so small it uses laptop parts to save space. Why is Dell talking about “desktop parts” when the Intel Atom processor and NVIDIA Ion graphics processor have proven to us to be such a highly capable duo in the home theater?

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Dell Inspiron Zino HD destined for home theaters

It’s already gone through more than its share of name changes, but it looks like Sprint’s upcoming Samsung m850 Dash , most recently known as the Instinct S50, has now apparently found one that’s stuck: the Instinct HD. No word if that means it’ll actually handle HD video in one way or another, of course, nor is there any word on anything like a price or release date — although with the FCC business out of the way, it seems like this one could be getting fully official sooner rather than later.

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Samsung Instinct S50 now reportedly the Instinct HD, ‘HD’ officially the new black

So here’s some interesting insight into the wild, rough-and-tumble world of wireless product launches: Verizon announced ZTE’s AD3700 USB modem today, a product that gained FCC approval over five months ago , which means it’s probably been getting a trial by fire on Verizon’s test labs since then. You’ve gotta figure that ZTE was working on the prototype for many months before FCC approval, so all told, this launch is probably a culmination of a solid year of work, cash, blood, sweat, and tears.

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Verizon announces AD3700 global modem from ZTE

Astronomers have discovered a planet in another solar system 1,000 light years away that orbits its star opposite from the way the star rotates, making it the only planet ever discovered to do so. The system was discovered by the UK’s Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory, according to Space.com . It’s also turning out to be quite a curiosity among the 350+ extrasolar planets known to date.

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Astronomers Discover Planet Going the Wrong Way

We just got a quick look at Samsung’s new trio, the TL220, TL225 and CL65 , and outside of some pretty impressive specs, all three cameras offer a nice bit of innovation and looks in their own special ways. The TL220 and TL225 are the most interesting, with those snazzy front-facing LCDs. Luckily, that creepy clown picture from the press shots is just for entertaining children, and it’s easy enough to switch it to a live view of our charming, MySpace-ready face

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Samsung’s new compacts in person: front LCDs, GPS and WiFi don’t go to waste

Well, it’s looking increasingly like those very first shots of a rumored Dell smartphone that cropped up way back in June were indeed the real deal, as two separate sets of purported spy pics have now turned up showing an identical-looking phone. Better still, they also show the device powered on, offering us our first look at Dell and China Mobile’s customized Android interface for the thing. The Boy Genius Report also goes one step further with a complete list of the phone’s purported specs, which includes quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity, a 3.5-inch 640 x 360 display, a 3-megapixel camera with a flash (and support for 30 fps video), Bluetooth, A-GPS, and a microSD card slot for expansion, to name a few features.

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Dell Mini 3i smartphone captured in pair of spy shots

In a move that took most industry pundits by surprise, Sony today announced that it will adopt the open ePub standard as the default format for books in its eBook store by the end of the year. EPub is an XML-based standard for publishing eBooks that has been adopted by a wide variety of hardware manufacturers, publishers, and retailers – with the notable exception of Amazon and it’s Kindle store and eBook reader

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Sony Adopts Open (But Still DRMed) Format for eBooks

Large screen nettops are somewhat of a mystery to us. Lenovo’s latest, the all-in-one IdeaCentre C300 , is certainly a looker on the outside, but the beauty of that screen real estate is hampered by a 1.6GHz Atom processor / integrated graphics unable to handle our internet streaming needs — Hulu, Pandora, and Netflix were all but a wash. Still, it’s pretty light and sturdy, and when powered on absolutely quiet and cool — we watched four hours of a DVD with a minimum of stutter and little to no heat or machine noise

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Lenovo IdeaCentre C300 unboxing and hands-on

Step aside, World’s Cheapest Laptop , Lanyu of China just undercut you — and the magical $100 barrier — with the 666 Yuan ($98) LY-EB01. This marketing marvel might have a processor slower than most netbooks’ FSB at 266MHz, and its 128MB of RAM might spontaneously combust if you even type the word Vista into it, but it is , technically, a laptop. And you can totally store, like, a few hundred Word files on the 2GB flash drive.

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Lanyu LY-EB01 is world’s cheapest laptop with built-in obsolescence

Microsoft is quite confident of its leadership status on the Netbook front, boasting earlier this year of 96 percent attach rate for Windows and making other, more recent claims of return rates on Linux netbooks that are “like four or five times higher” than their Windows equivalents. Dell’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Todd Finch is refuting that last claim, saying “we don’t see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux.” He does, however, continue to say that many people who return Linux netbooks simply bought the cheapest option they could find, expecting Windows and shipping the things back after being greeted by something other than a familiar UI upon startup

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Dell refutes high Linux netbook return rates, but not customer ignorance

It sure seems like the world is ready for an Android MID or, until it gets one, rumors and leaks to that effect. Tell us, what do you make of a slate-style device featuring the word “android” in the appropriate font, pics of the thing browsing the web (which, truth be told, look just as real as they could be ‘shopped in), a couple perfunctory specs (Rockchip CPU, somewhere between a 4.3 to 5-inch display, 3G, MSN Messenger and GTalk, WiFi) and a source for the images that fails to cough up names / links to the “handful” of Chinese tech sites that are allegedly all a-buzz about this thing? Well, we don’t know either — but if you do get your hands on one of these guys, send it our way, will you?

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Mysterious Android touchscreen MID pics surface, Charles Fort notified

We already knew that the Zune HD would be available in five different colors, and a just sent out pre-order email has now given us our first (very small) glimpse of the options available. In addition to the standard black and silver (or platinum, as Microsoft calls it), it seems you’ll also have your choice of blue, lime green, and a red / maroon color, each of which can also be adorned with your choice of 10 exclusive Zune Originals designs.

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Zune HD color options revealed in pre-order email

If you’re anything like us (and let’s face it, you’re exactly like us), you’ve been counting down the nanoseconds until Samsung finally revealed what its ‘ Tap and Take ‘ campaign was all about. This, folks, is it. As many of you sharp folks surmised , Samsung is delving deep into the intelligent camera arena, equipping its luscious CL65 (no, not that CL65 ) with a 12.2 megapixel sensor, 5x optical zoom, 720p (30fps) movie mode, an HDMI output, and a 3.5-inch touchscreen that utilizes a Smart Gesture user interface

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Samsung crams WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth 2.0 into well-specced CL65 point-and-shoot

Arrival of Wii forced ‘testosterone-fuelled’ games company EA Sports into rethink, says its president, Peter Moore “The only time our testosterone-fuelled business talked to women was about games for their boyfriends, sons or fathers,” said Peter Moore of EA Sports, the games company best known for its realistic depictions of driving and football. But in his keynote speech at the Edinburgh Interactive Conference this morning, the EA Sports president described how the company had reinvented itself for a more family-focused, and female, environment. He pointed to the Wii and games such as Rock Band as game-changers.

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Peter Moore on how EA Sports learned to talk to women

Clickfree, the outfit responsible for breathing new life into the notion of automatic backups, has just introduced what may very well be its most interesting and useful product yet. The Transformer for iPod / iPhone is a dual-purpose device, giving users the ability to backup multimedia from their PCs onto any remaining space on their iPod or iPhone as well as providing an easy way to retrieve content from those devices should your PC’s hard drive ever decide to call it a day life. Per usual, no software installation is required, and the adapter plays nice with Vista, XP and OS X 10.5 or later.

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Clickfree Transformer for iPod / iPhone makes auto backups, music retrieval painless

Looking for an ultra-cheap machine to take to school, are you? If you couldn’t care less about extreme portability, Toshiba’s shockingly inexpensive Satellite L355 (S7915) could be just the thing. $348 at Walmart nets you a 17-inch display (1,440 x 900), a 2.2GHz Celeron 900 CPU, Vista Basic, 3GB of RAM, a 250GB (5400RPM) hard drive, 8x DVD writer and GMA 4500M integrated graphics

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Walmart’s $348 17-inch Toshiba Satellite L355 reviewed: surprisingly awesome