Web Design

Dell’s got a new lineup heading your way this fall, this time taking its low-cost Inspiron laptop brand to thin land. The Inspiron Z “family” isn’t anything stunningly slim, and the 11.6-inch, disc drive free Z in the low end looks positively netbook-ish, but all the laptops are CULV-powered and should probably be arriving at pretty trim price points to fend off the likes of Acer’s Timeline series . Hopefully we’ll have more details soon (Dell sure does love to tease when it comes to CULV), but for now there are some ultra-exciting laptop stacking pics below to keep you entertained

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Dell’s slim new Inspiron Z family is totally carb free

Lawyers who won a huge patent case against Microsoft say they did not shop around for a friendly court – despite the statistics suggesting otherwise Plenty of questions spring out of the case of Canadian technology company i4i, which has been awarded nearly $300m in a patent lawsuit against Microsoft that also led to a judge in Texas injuncting sales of Microsoft Word . Will Microsoft actually stop selling the software? Will it wait for the appeal

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Lawyers reject cherry-picking claims over $290m Word case

It’s not the most comprehensive survey, nor is there any official confirmation, but the crew at PreThinking has checked in with a number of new Pre owners and discovered that Palm’s apparently building its webOS handset better lately — and what’s more, it’s even made some minor improvements. The biggest change appears to be a fix for that nasty bug that caused the Pre to reset or turn off when the keyboard was closed — that bit of grey foam pictured was added to the battery compartment to tighten up the battery connection.

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Palm quietly improving Pre build quality, tweaking hardware

If you were hoping for RealNetworks’ “Facet” set-top box to come to market, you probably don’t want to know that Kaleidescape has already done preliminary work on a Blu-ray ripper box, at least according to chief executive Michael Malcolm. The problem, of course, is that a California appellate court reversed a trial court’s decision and paved the way for Kaleidescape to be sued for breach of contract by the DVD Copy Control Association, making any such product a pretty slim hope for now. But it’s a hope nonetheless

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Kaleidescape Still Dreaming of Blu-ray Ripper

Looking for something in between a nettop and a full-fledged, sometimes HTPC? Then you might want to consider Lenovo’s recently announced Q700 system, which the company describes as the “perfect fit” for anywhere in your home. That’s apparently assuming you have some less-than-demanding computing needs, however, as the Q700 is currently only available with a Pentium Dual-Core E5200 processor, along with 4GB of RAM, a max 640GB hard drive, a built-in DVD burner, and the usual integrated Intel X4500 graphics.

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Lenovo debuts "fit anywhere" Q700 home entertainment PC

Are you a currently unemployed Software Engineer? If so, here’s a recession antidote of an altogether different stripe: Microsoft is taking applications for a LIVE Community Director, whose job it will be to manage “LIVE community strategy and execution across a range of properties, from Xbox LIVE to Windows Mobile.” The posting then goes on to discuss how the team will be tasked with constructing a next gen, LIVE-enabled platform across the web, the console, mobile and more… which, you know, sounds a little bit like the Live Anywhere concept

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Is Microsoft gearing up for Xbox Live on mobile?

SBCs (or single board computers) may not always be the most exciting components around, but it looks like InHand Electronics has managed to break out from the pack a bit with its new FireFly board, which the company claims is the world’s “smallest and most power efficient full-function Atom-based SBC.” That translates to a total power consumption of about 4.5 Watts in actual numbers (or 500mW in sleep state) and, just as notably, it apparently boasts some performance that’s “comparable” to your average Atom-based Dell Mini netbook.

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Atom-based Inhand FireFly SBC promises netbook-level performance at a "fraction" of the power

If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is you chance. Mozilla just announced the launch of Test Pilot , the organization’s new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla’s ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products.

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Become a Test Pilot: Mozilla Wants Your Help To Make Firefox Better

Just 46% of iPhone users discover new apps via recommendations from friends , but that number could take a big jump if a new app just submitted to Apple gets approved for placement in the iTunes App Store. Israeli and French project AppsFire has submitted a new app that will allow anyone to select from the list of apps they have on their phone and send links to those apps to anyone else by email. Exploring the App Store is maddening, sharing App suggestions with friends is enough fun to make almost anyone jump up and down, clapping like a little school girl

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Share Your Favorite iPhone Apps by Email; There’s An App (Submitted) for That

We’ve already had a pretty clear indication that the Xbox 360 Elite would be replacing the current middle-of-the-road Pro model as Microsoft winnows its SKU options down to two, and a new Meijer ad obtained by Kotaku has now further backed up rumors of the switchover, and seemingly confirmed that that, as expected, the Elite will also be occupying the Pro’s $299 price point. Of course, all of this is still far from official, but the ad does also peg the date for the price drop as August 30th, so it seems likely we’ll hear something from Microsoft before then — perhaps at a conveniently timed major gaming conference

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Xbox 360 Elite replacing Pro at $299 price point August 30th?

Android’s supposed to be all about peace, love, and openness, but that apparently doesn’t exempt it from copyright law and trigger-happy general counsels (who knew?). In a move that should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, Palm has sicced its legal team on the makers of the aptly-named “Palm Pre Android Theme” that borrows icons, wallpapers, and mojo (not to be confused with Mojo ) directly from webOS . The concerns center around the usual suspects — graphics copyrights and trademark infringement — and the company is demanding that they cease use of the Pre’s interface, name, and all that good stuff by some date that’s been redacted from the leaked letter (we’re assuming it’s soon).

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Palm lays the smack down on Pre theme for Android

Yesterday news broke that Microsoft and Nokia were announcing a partnership that would take Office outside of Windows Mobile for the first time. But after today’s press conference, it’s clear that this isn’t just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint slapped onto Nokia smartphones: the world’s largest cellphone maker will now support a whole slew of key enterprise software from Microsoft. “This is much more than putting Microsoft Office on Nokia smartphones,” said Nokia Devices executive vice president Kai Öistämö.

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Microsoft & Nokia: Not Just Office, It’s the Whole Mobile Enterprise

It’s been nary a fortnight since Amazon started taking pre-orders for Snow Leopard and now, according to the kids at Mac4Ever , a handful of “reliable sources” (their words, not ours) have stepped forward to proclaim that the OS has gone golden, meaning that this final iteration (reported as build 10A432, for those of you keeping track) is the one that will hit the stores in September . Additionally, MacRumors reports that in the time since this little bomb dropped benchmarks for the build have popped up — and quickly disappeared — at the Geekbench database.

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Snow Leopard build 10A432 goes ‘Golden Master,’ mischievous sources claim

Hey, remember that seemingly random patent case from May in which a federal jury awarded a company called i4i Ltd $200 million in patent damages against Microsoft? Things just got worse for Redmond: the judge in the case today issued a permanent injunction against sales of Word 2003, Word 2007, and any future versions of Word that can open .xml, .docx, or .docm files containing “custom XML.” Yeah, no kidding — that’s pretty much all of ‘em

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Microsoft forbidden from selling Word, will probably keep selling Word

It’s not the kind of thing you’ll probably want to brag about winning, of course, but, according to new research conducted by the OECD , people in the US, Canada and Spain come out on the top of the heap when it comes to high cellphone bills . The research was conducted by categorizing bills into three usage categories, with the mid-range being 780 minutes per year of voice calls, and 600 SMS per year

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US, Canada, and Spain ‘win’ the battle for most expensive cellphone bills

Researchers at England’s National Physical Laboratory are working on a device that uses a modified microwave measurement system, terahertz and far-infrared radio frequencies, and a clever cauliflower detection algorithm to let robots “see” beneath — and harvest — crops that current technology cannot. So far, the imaging system has been successfully demonstrated in the lab, sparking the interest of at least one UK lettuce grower, and it looks like a product could be commercially available as early as next year. According to Dr.

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Researchers develop infrared vegetable harvesting robot, to the disgust of children everywhere

Samsung has been teasing us with its Blue Earth solar-powered smartphone since February, and now it’s showing us a bit more of that sultry photovoltaic skin a mere day after its budget-minded solar brother, the E1107, came out into the light . This cerulean one has finally been given an official name, the S7750, but we’re still missing many bits if crucial information, including how effective that solar panel will be in the real world, when it will be available in that real world, how much real money it will cost, and how many eco-chic celebs will be spotted talking on these while drunkenly driving their Priora (it’s Latin, dig) into crowds of spectators — all bits of info we can’t wait to learn. Filed under: Cellphones Samsung’s Blue Earth solar touchscreen phone gets dubbed S7550, handled in Moscow originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:24:00 EST

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Samsung’s Blue Earth solar touchscreen phone gets dubbed S7550, handled in Moscow

Matt Cutts, in an interview at SES San Jose , explains what’s to be expected from Google’s first major update in a few years: Google announced yesterday that it has been working on a project called “Caffeine” that will re-write the architecture for Google’s Web search. As Matt Cutts shares exclusively with WebProNews , Caffeine is comparable to the “ Big Daddy Update “back in 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.

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Google Announces Major Update: Caffeine

Got this via my Twitter stream, a retweet on a post from Guy Kawasaki: 20 Must Read Beginner Twitter Tips for Small Business Owners Getting links to great articles from smart people is my main reason for wading through the clutter on Twitter, but by following other people in the industry and maintaining searches on key topics, it’s also a way to keep up with what’s happening. I highly recommend TweetDeck as a management console…as long as you go into settings and turn off the little beep that happens with every tweet!

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The How-To Guide to Twitter for Small Businesses

There’s just something about a keyboard that promises to “cradle our fingers” that gets us all hot and bothered, and right or wrong, we just can’t stop thinking about what a joy it must be to bang out dissertations, love letters and Nigerian scam emails on one of the beauties shown above. Logitech ’s Wireless Desktop MK700 is a two-piece kit comprised of an LCD-equipped keyboard and an ergonomic mouse with built-in hyper-scrolling. Both devices seem to go easy on the juice, with the keyboard able to run for three years on a single set of AA cells and the mouse for 12 months

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Logitech Wireless Desktop MK700 ‘cradles your fingers,’ caresses your soul