‘Tis the season shop until your brains melt (or skip it all entirely, depending on your interpretation of the term holiday). In that spirit, for the next few weeks we’ll be rounding up a dozen daily deals courtesy our friends at DealNews.com. Each afternoon tune in to TUAW for this handy summary. Keep in mind that while our posts will live on, the deals won’t. Each is lovingly generated by the deal-bot every day, so get ‘em while they’re hot. Enjoy!
iTunes Music Store: [iPhone / iPod Apps] App Store Freebies: Super Santa, Roller Uberball, Enso-Dot, BuddyFeed, more
We know you’re itching to get your hands on a Nexus One — Google’s managed to build buzz here the way only a couple companies in the world know how. Unfortunately, it sounds like you’re going to need to cross your fingers (or pull out that eBay emergency stash) to get one out of the gate, because we’ve got some intel here suggesting that it’ll be available only by “invitation” at first. Our tipster doesn’t have information on how those invites are going to be determined, other than the fact that it’s Google doing the inviting — if we had to guess, current registered developers are a strong possibility — but the good news, we suppose, is that T-Mobile will apparently sell the phone directly at some to-be-determined point in the future.
Oh, but that’s not all — we’ve got specs, too. Lots of them. Here are the highlights, but follow the break for the whole shebang:
Sick of Motorola meting out Android firmware updates when it chooses? Trust in The Dude — TheDudesAndroid, to be specific, a user over at ModMyMoto who has posted The Dudes Root for Cliq (following up an earlier and similarly unkempt version for the G1). The install process looks about as complicated as you might expect, so make sure you keep Walter away while you’re re-flashing lest your handset go all nihilistic on ya. At this point it’s just another 1.5 ROM being installed, but the hope is for a 2.1 port coming in the not too distant future. Unless you’re really pining to get full control over your handset we’d go ahead and wait for that version of the Dude to preside.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Still have a bit of faith left for the OLPC project? Good, you’re gonna need it: designer Yves Behar has unveiled his latest concept design for the now-aiming-for-$75 vision, and it’s all screen. Keeping with the newfound trend toward tablets, the XO-3 is an 8.5 x 11 touchscreen, coupled with a little folding ring in the corner for grip and a camera in the back. To keep things minimal the plan is to use Palm Pre-style induction charging, and less than a watt of power to keep an “8 gigaherz [sic]” (800MHz?) processor and a Pixel Qi screen powered. At half the thickness of an iPhone, this vision is obviously banking heavily on presumed technology advances by 2012 (the projected release date), but it’s not too hard to see somebody making this form factor happen by then-ish. Nick Neg isn’t all hubris, however: “Sure, if I were a commercial entity coming to you for investment, and I’d made the projections I had in the past, you wouldn’t invest again, but we’re not a commercial operation. If we only achieve half of what we’re setting out to do, it could have very big consequences.”
Update: According to our man Nicholas Negroponte, who took time out of his busy schedule to email us with the info, there are two other variations of the XO headed our way before we see the XO-3. Nick says we’ll see an XO-1.5 appear in January for around $200 — an update to the current version. The 1.5 iteration will swap a VIA CPU for the current AMD one, and will double the speed as well as quadruple both the DRAM and Flash memory of the current version. Furthermore, he says that in early 2011 the XO-1.75 will make an appearance, and will sport rubber bumpers on the outer casing, an 8.9-inch touchscreen display inside, and will run atop a Marvell ARM processor which will enable two times the speed at a quarter of the power usage. That version will sell for somewhere in the $175 range. Then, no 2.0… straight on to the XO-3.0!
Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.
In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins that currently has over 1.6 million active users
Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones. The first 50 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will be able to try it out for themselves, though it’s limited to Mafia Wars only for now. It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for.
Zynga’s ties with Facebook run deep. They now share some of the same investors, including Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies which has poured as much as $400 million into Facebook and just led a $180 million round in Zynga. Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible.
NVIDIA’s Ion technology may be hogging the limelight when it comes to netbook graphics, but Broadcom’s no stranger to the space. After giving Acer’s Aspire One HD playback capabilities that it could only dream of just months prior, the company’s newly announced Crystal HD platform could provide Intel’s Atom N450 with the multimedia boost it badly needs. The nitty-gritty details are still being withheld, but we’re told that “top-tier OEMs including Asus, Dell and Samsung” will be slapping this into their upcoming N450-based netbooks. If you’re curious as to why you should care, the BCM70015 promises “near flawless” HD video playback, including support for Flash Player 10.1 and Blu-ray flicks. We’re told to expect it to start popping up in forthcoming machines throughout 2010, and if you’re looking to soak up anything else in the meanwhile, a promotional video awaits you after the break.
Continue reading Broadcom’s Crystal HD tech to liven up HD capabilities of N450-based netbooks
Cowon has finally made its latest and greatest PMP official, and the spec sheet does not disappoint. Mixing appealing curves with a 4.8-inch display, the V5 HD offers 720p video playback that can be channeled out via HDMI or Composite outputs. On the software front, there’s the usual litany of wide-ranging file compatibility and basic apps — cortesy of Windows CE 6.0 — as well as a world clock, RSS reader, Flash games, voice recorder, and an optional T-DMB tuner. We still don’t know what’s doing the dirty work under the hood, but you won’t be wanting for storage, with integrated memory options up to 32GB being augmented by SDHC expandability. Battery life is rated at 10 hours of video or 45 hours of music, and the Korean landing date is January 1 with prices starting at 299,000 KRW ($256). Until then, you can check out more pictures after the break.
[Thanks, The DarkSide]
By our count ASUS has released — at the very least — 20 Eee PC netbooks since 2008. Some had 8.9-inch or 10-inch displays, some ran Xandros Linux or Windows XP, and some packed hard drives instead of flash storage. But common to virtually all of them was an Intel Diamondville 1.6GHz Atom N270 or N280 processor. That all changes with the 10-inch Eee PC 1005PE — one of the first netbooks to feature the next-generation Intel Pine Trail platform, which features a 45-nanometer Pineview Atom N450 processor that integrates both the memory controller and GMA 3150 graphics onto the CPU die. The newly compact package promises improved performance and power efficiency, but will you notice the difference? Does the $380 1005PE blow past the Diamondville Eee PCs of late? Read on to find out in our full review.
Gallery: ASUS Eee PC 1005PE Review
If there’s one thing that 2009 proved, it’s that there’s nothing like an addictive game to keep people coming back to your service for more. Over the last year, we’ve seen Foursquare and Gowalla tap into this with their colorful badges, and Zynga is making a killing off games like Farmville. But what if you could turn that habit into something that might actually be helpful to school or your career? That’s the premise behind Lingt, a new startup that’s looking to leverage gameplay elements to help with the mother of all repetitive tasks: learning a new language.
The Y Combinator funded company is launching today in public beta, offering a suite of matching games to help English speakers learn Chinese. Using the app is quite straightforward. First, you choose a set of words that you need to learn. You can use a one of Lingt’s suggested lists, a list of vocabulary words drawn from one of thirty US/Chinese textbooks, or you can manually enter your own words. From there, the site will quiz you on the meaning of the words. You can either input your answers via text, by saying them aloud, or as a matching game (click on one of five choices).