Nokia will follow the footsteps of Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG by launching at least one 12-megapixel camera phone later this year, with the earliest timeframe cited as the end of 2009. Knowing how the industry works, this handset could even be pushed until next year as Nokia perfects their handset. Apparently, it will utilize the famous Carl Zeiss lens that is found in more notable Nokia handsets to date, and will feature optical zoom which ought to hand Samsung and Sony Ericsson a beating – in theory, at least.

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Like solar-powered air conditioners, this solar hand fan makes a lot of sense. Well, save for the part where you have to fan yourself.

But it is a night light, which goes great with your ensemble if you’re a southern belle who’s also a robot. [Lost Values via Fashioning Tech via MAKE]

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Twitter is rolling out a user interface update to their following lists and adding functionality for social actions.

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Considering that it’s based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren’t available for Postbox when it debuted. That’s now been remedied.

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The 1969 Kitchen Computer by Honeywell was not just a fancy cutting board. It was meant to store recipes, even recommending meals from ingredients on hand. The problem is, you had to know binary to use it.

The machine’s designers assumed that housewives would do all the cooking, and yet, also assumed they’d be open to learning binary: is the Honeywell Kitchen Computer the most or least sexist computer ever made? I don’t know. I do know its the most beautiful minicomputer I’ve ever put my eyes on. The plastic chassis hid so much of the 150 pound machine’s weight in its black pedestal. Then again, it could have been a lot bigger, had it had an actual user interface that wasn’t binary: The $10,600 price set by Neiman Marcus included two weeks of programming lessons in a language known as BACK.

The machine itself was a 16-bit minicomputer—the class right below mainframes—and its official name was actually the H316 Pedestal. It was part of the Series 16 lineup, based on the DDP-116. (A machine most notable for its use as ARPANET Interface Message Processors, early machinations that ran the predecessor to the modern internet.)

It had 4KB of magnetic memory, expandable to 16KB, which was pre programmed with a few recipes. Its system clock was 2.5MHz. It took 475 watts to operate.

Dag Spicer, curator from the Computer History Museum, says, “None were ever sold.”

He adds, in an article at Dr. Dobbs, that in the late 1960s, “with that kind of budget, the solution would likely be a live-in chef or the traditional 3×5 card file, no?”

Indeed.

[Wiki, The Computer History Museum, Dr. Dobbs, Old Computers.com]

The Computer History Museum is a wonderful place. If you’re in northern CA, I recommend you find a way to stop by. We’ll be running pieces from their collection as an ongoing series called Computing Classic. Special thanks to Fiona Tang, John Hollar and the amazing Dag Spicer for their help.

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Apple has loosed the iPhone OS 3.1 Beta on developers, and this one looks much better than the wee bit buggy OS 3.0. What are you waiting for – if you’re part of the iPhone dev community, go and make a beeline for the iPhone OS 3.1 beta and start enjoying an even more bug-free iPhone experience! If you’re already played around with it, do let us know how the whole thing has worked out for you.

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We’re big Guitar Hero/Rock Band fans, but buying a controller so that it can play the songs perfectly so that you don’t have to do anything? That’s taking it a bit too far.

If pretending to rock is so hard that you have to pretend to pretend to rock, you should just go and eat your way up to 800 pounds and give up on life. [eBay - Thanks Ben!]

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Whether or not it’s coming to T-Mobile (spoiler: all signs point to yes), BlackBerry’s Curve 8520 has now been ordained with FCC approval, clearing the hurdle for its sale stateside. Optical trackpad and EDGE connection your cup of tea? You know where to look, and for everyone else, there’s always the Tour.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

Filed under: Cellphones

BlackBerry Curve 8520 is a go for US, says FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A day after converting the latest beta of its Windows Mobile phone software into a full-fledged release, Skype pushes out updates to its Windows software and its iPhone app.

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The FCC has already approved the BlackBerry Curve 8520 for its debut on T-Mobile next month, so it would be interesting to see where consumers will vote with their wallets – will they look towards the recently announced Tour, or stick to the Curve 8520? There’s a BlackBerry for everybody, but at the end of the day, it is you who must decide what’s best for your communications needs, regardless of whether you’re a power user or not. Which way will you go?

Permalink: BlackBerry Curve 8520 Gets FCC Approval from Ubergizmo | Hot: Wii, PS3 and Natal Motion Sensing

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