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Ask any homemaker what their biggest gripe about brooms are and they will tell you that it is the head that is not perfectly shaped and angled to clean just about any nook and cranny in the home. Enter the Quantum Reach - this unique broom is capable of doing what an ordinary broom can’t and more.

The secret of Quantum Reach is the articulating head and multiple surfaces. The head adjusts to any angle, allowing cleaning of any area: under beds or furniture, above art or overhangs, ceiling fans, HVAC vents, behind appliances, and even windows. Quantum Reach has bristles on one side of the head for sweeping and unique “T” hooks on the other side to attach Mircrofiber pads for sweeping, mopping and dusting. Quantum Reach also features a telescoping pole, which provides compact and easy storage for the consumer and lower shipping cost and reduced shelf space for the dealer. Quantum Reach provides the cleaning power of a broom, mop and duster in one easy-to-use and store tool. Quantum Reach is setting a new standard in the hard floor cleaning category.

I’m not sure if getting this as a gift for your other half is such a good idea. Still, if you’re a risk taker, the Quantum Reach broom retails for $19.99.

Star of the MWC show in my eyes this year was undoubtedly the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 super-smartphone. Pitched squarely at the Nokia E90 and the Apple iphone, and combining features of both, this gorgeous looking phone has everything -all the features you could possibly need (HSPDA, HSUPA, GPS, 3G, 3 inch touchscreen and a 3.2 megapixel camera), a superb new user interface running on top of Windows Mobile 6, and looks to die for.

At the time of the show, we had to make do with press release pics from Sony Ericsson, but as time has gone on, a few more pics have emerged of this glorious new smartphone.

More pics of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 after the jump.

[Source: Akihabara News]

Posted Mar 3rd 2008 4:42AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video
So we hurried on over to the Meizu booth in sweaty-palmed anticipation of laying fleshy bits upon a working M8 MiniOne. It’s gotta be here, right? After all, Meizu CEO Jack Wong promised it his damn self. Nope. Oh sure, they did bring that siliconless, plastic mockup already seen kicking around the Nets for awhile and they offered to show us a laptop-based demo of the UI if we come back tomorrow. Although even the demo is feature incomplete. Nevertheless, Meizu is confident that it will begin shipping the M8 in China in the next “half year” while remaining coy for a rest-of-world launch. Guess reverse engineering the iphone isn’t so easy, eh Jackson?

Nowadays a great amount of people type something. It’s not important whether it’s a poem, essay, SMS or something else. Some type using their PC keyboard, others use that of their cell phones. Because of this both producers and designers try to make this process simpler by inventing various types of keyboards (for example, wireless small keyboard featuring Bluetooth).

Nokia as many others trying to invent something absolutely new and different has just filled a patent application known as “mobile device with virtual keyboard”. We can guess as much from there that the digital camera located at the back of the cell phone is used to capture the movement and position of the user’s fingers, projecting them onto a virtual keyboard which is shown on the phone’s display in real time.

It sounds really interesting but it’s not the fact that it will be easier to type on such a virtual keyboard than on a usual one. Moreover, I think that such an application will make your cell phone’s battery drained in no time, and the camera wouldn’t be fast enough to capture the image of a speed typist. Another significant problem consists in the fact that there would probably be some limitations in cell phone designs as the cameras can only be placed at a certain place on the handset in order for it to work nicely.

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Back in October of last year we reported that a mobile version of Firefox was in the works. According to the IDG News Service, a mobile version of Firefox is expected to be launched by the end of the year, and it is targeted for use in embedded Linux and Windows Mobile devices.

It sounds like Mozilla executives are making the rounds to device and chip manufacturers in addition to wireless carriers to make mobile Firefox a reality by year end . Though the company may have been a little slow to the mobile browser market, it also has a unique opportunity. Mozilla really has the chance to raise the bar when it comes to functionality offered by mobile browsers in general.

It’s not always bad to be the last one to market. Look at Apple; it was not exactly the first mobile phone manufacturer, but I don’t think many people can deny that Apple changed the playing field in mobile browsers and smartphones when it launched the iphone. Mobile Firefox may be able to do the same thing; it just depends on how innovative the designers of the new mobile Firefox want to get. There could be pressure just to get a working mobile Firefox to market as soon as possible, while leaving innovation to future versions.

Read more from the IDG News Service article.

Intel has named its Silverthorn and Diamondville processors “Atom” and “Centrino Atom”, respectively. Needless to say, the 45nm Atom processors and Centrino Atom technology will be headed towards MIDs, UMPCs and any device small enough to hit the Internet highway. What next, the Intel Electron?
[Source]

We’ve caught wind from a number of employees — or ex-employees, as the case may be — that i-mate’s US division in Redmond, Washington has all but disintegrated after a Friday bloodbath that saw the entire engineering, QA, and tech writing departments laid off, among others. Several honchos who weren’t cut left anyway, perhaps unwilling to work in a ghost town or as a show of solidarity to their fallen brethren; notably, the Chief Software Officer and VP of Sales and Marketing are both gone, leaving a sales director to be promoted to the lofty title of GM of what seems to be all US operations. Apparently, the Dubai-based firm is in the hurt locker after its inability to get the Ultimate line (also known as “the basket with all of i-mate’s eggs in it”) fully deployed to retail channels in the time frame it had hoped, and meeting massive resistance from US carriers to carry the devices, it’s been left with no option but to leave behind just enough employees to set up and maintain a web-based portal for purchasing unlocked devices in the States. To those who’ve been handed your walking papers, we wish you the best of luck.
[Source]

At the moment many companies, focusing on the customers’ needs, produce a great variety of different exclusive cell phones, which are very original and expensive. Their price varies from some thousands to million USD or even more. Yet, despite their expensiveness quite a significant amount of people buy these devices because possessing of such a unique thing emphasizes both their well-being and individuality.

Recently Vertu company that represents an affiliated undertaking of Nokia Corporation started to sell its new cell phone. Ascent Ti gadget works at 3G and four types of GSM. It has a digital camera of 3 megapixels and is made of titanium, leather and sapphire. But the main distinctive feature is an exclusive function of this cell phone. In case there is a need Ascent Ti owner can save any kind of information at the remote server. To do so he/she has just to choose the data for transmission.

All the information will be kept in a special secure place. So, if there is a necessity customer can easily restore the data. New product will be sold at quite a moderate price - 00. Actually it’s not so cheap, but in comparison with the previous Vertu models - 88 and 130 thousand of US dollars, respectively - this price can be considered as a reasonable one. As far as the design of this gadget is concerned it will fit business people perfectly.

Thus, given device represents an outstanding attempt of combining quality, exclusiveness and accessibility. However, this Vertu model still remains unattainable for middle class customers.

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Nokia labs have released the Nokia Location Tagger application, which automatically geotags your photos taken from GPS-equipped mobile phones, and embeds the latitude and longitude of where the pic was taken inside the EXIF fields of the JPEG file containing your pic. This neat trick, which, to be frank, should have been installed in all Nokia phones with GPS right from the beginning, means that you can now search for pictures not only by tag name or filename, but also by the location in which they were taken.

Why is this important? Well, as digital cameras enable us to take literally thousands of pictures, finding them again becomes an almost impossible task, particularly when the majority of people never rename the pictures, and so are left with the default number that the phone gave the picture.

Sorting pictures by date is one option, but much better is the ability to sort your pictures by date and location. It then becomes trivially easy to find your pictures from last Christmas, for example, when you simply sort your pics according to date, and then see which ones were taken at your parents’ house (or wherever you spent Christmas).

Better still, image hosting services such as Flickr let you search for images by location as well, as long as the information is contained within the image files, meaning Nokia’s new application will soon lead to millions of new pics being geotargeted and freely searchable. Just imagine what you can do with all this info, when you combine millions of geotargeted pics with mapping applications like Google Maps or Google Earth.

You can download the Nokia Location Tagger on your S60 equipped phone from Nokia’s Beta Labs.

It looks like TiVo will be ending their current TiVo rewards program as of May 28, 2008 with the last day to earn any new reward points being one month earlier on April 30. As of May 28 the program will officially end and any remaining reward points that are unused will expire, make sure you take advantage of any that you may have before they go away.

As of a new program in the works, it seems foolish that TiVo would take this away and not have it replaced with something similar, or hopefully better for their loyal customers. Per the TiVo FAQ’s page they have stated that “The current program is ending on May 28th, 2008 but stay tuned for more news and announcements; sign up for The TiVo Newsletter.”

While it does not specifically mention any new program, it could lead one to believe this will be replaced.

Read [TiVo Rewards] Via [Zatz not Funny] Via [Gizmodo]

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