The last time we heard from Sony’s VP Mike Abary , the company had finally acknowledged the existence of netbooks (more or less). Now the man’s back in a Laptop Magazine interview, where he spills the beans on some of the company’s reorganization, and what it means for consumers. Internally, the PlayStation, VAIO, Walkman, and Reader now come under the same umbrella — enabling much broader collaboration between the groups, and an all around more cohesive experience for those who buy Sony products. What’s on the horizon, you ask? Well, as Windows 7 is unleashed we should start seeing VAIO devices that take advantage of “certain things that will be native on Windows 7,” including touchscreen

We’ve known since E3 in June that Sony would open up the PlayStation Network for direct video downloads over WiFi to the PSP — no PC or PS3 required. Now it’s live, in Japan anyway. At the moment, there are about 90 PSN video titles to choose from at the moment including anime episodes at

Despite being virtually unknown in the US, and still somewhat hemmed in by its core German speaking market, XING , the LinkedIn competitor, refuses to lie down. And like a scene from the Rocky movie, it’s going into training to become better, quicker and faster than the LinkedIn machine. Although let’s face it, it has it’s work cut out as LinkedIn is now worth over $1bn and has 43 million members to XING’s 7.5 million. XING however is worth $213m and is publicly traded . And today XING launches a partner ecosystem based on 16 (count’em) OpenSocial applications from 13 partners, in 7 countries

Still undecided about what to do with those precious few months before the biggest doomsday since Y2K? Then you’re in luck, ’cause the much anticipated / feared restart of the Large Hadron Collider has now been delayed yet again, almost exactly a month after the last delay. This time it looks like a couple of vacuum leaks are the culprit, and CERN says that the collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, which just so happens to coincide with the peak of the Leonids meteor shower. Coincidence?

If you have the dominant high-def optical storage format — which can serve both movies and games with equal aplomb — built right into your consoles, shouldn’t you be leveraging that synergy ? Sony certainly thinks so, and it seems Warner Bros agrees. The two heavyweight sluggers have today announced the very first “hybrid” Blu-ray retail package: the Director’s Cut of Watchmen is being sold together with the PS3 version of Watchmen: The End is Nigh Parts 1 and 2 for $49.99. Though this collectible package comes on two discs, the ultimate idea is to have both the game and film on the same disc. At present, you’re not saving anything by going this route, but should somebody at Sony HQ wake up and offer a financial incentive to buy them, these hybrid discs could gain traction pretty rapidly — heck, we might even see worthwhile titles make an appearance on ‘em. Filed under: Gaming , Home Entertainment PlayStation 3 gets game-plus-film ‘hybrid’ discs, first one comes on two discs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

Shure is sure (forgive the pun) that they’re pretty much at the top of the pecking order when it comes to developing headphones that target professionals, and this time round they’re proud to bring a trio of models for the masses – and they are the SRH840, SRH440 and SRH240 which are touted to offer unparalleled audio quality, ergonomics, and durability. While tradition dictates that professional headphones are more often than not limited to recording studios and production houses, Shure’s latest releases ensures that they will also work superbly with a wide range of other portable listening devices, user-generated content and home recording studios. These three headphones are able to achieve a masterful balance between comfort, durability, and rich lows, warm mids, and crisp highs, where individual models boast their very own sound signature, making them useful be it active listening or critical monitoring. According to Scott Sullivan, Shure’s Senior Director of Global Product Management, “Recording engineers need three critical things: flat, natural audio reproduction, comfort during extended wear, and gear that can stand up to the rigors of everyday use. To perfect those attributes, we combined Shure’s legacy of working with sound engineers and recording artists with the depth of experience we gained with our consumer line of Sound Isolating(TM) Earphones. Our new Professional Headphones represent the next step in Shure’s recording story – one that engages professional and amateur recordists.” The SRH840 Professional Monitoring Headphones was specially optimized for studio recording and critical listening, where it comes with reference-quality frequency response, rich bass, clear mid-range and extended highs.

Sony already announced its intentions to bring more developers to the PSP platform at the big E3 gaming show last month. And the move to simplify its development tools was seen as a hint of new PSP applications beyond games. Now Develop has laid bare Sony’s PSP development strategy as explained by Zeno Cola

Well this be the final chapter in the infamous and incredibly entertaining tale of former Gizmondo head Bo Stefan “Fiery Ferrari Crasher” Eriksson? Doubtful, but with any luck it’ll serve as a decent thread to wrap up that optioned movie on his life . An Uppsala, Sweden District Court has sentenced the man to 1.5 years in prison for his most recent round of escapades , which include illegal threats, attempted blackmail, and robbery. Assuming he starts jail fairly soon, mark your calendars and place your bets, we’re expecting a whole new slew of comical misdeeds to hit the news feeds by March 2011 — and no, we still don’t think a new Gizmondo will be out by then. [Thanks, piraya] Filed under: Misc. Gadgets , Gaming , Handhelds , Transportation Former Gizmondo exec Stefan Eriksson gets 1.5 year sentence, movie might now have ending originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

Filed under: Apple , iPhone Two reports from Friday indicate that the iPhone will soon make it to market in China, although the Communist government wants to make sure that users aren’t free to use their newly-acquired Apple goodness to criticize official policies. Gizmodo published an unconfirmed report that China Unicom may have a deal with Apple to sell iPhones with Wi-Fi blocked. Some of our readers might comment that China Unicom could just sell customers devices that have been upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0, since Wi-Fi doesn’t appear to be working properly on many of those iPhones , but the Chinese government wants assurance that Wi-Fi is blocked on any iPhones sold in the country. Why? To quote Gizmodo, “it’s harder to sniff local packets than ones drifting through a wide-area network.” What they’re referring to here is the Golden Shield Project , known to many as the “Great Firewall of China.” That’s the Internet censorship and surveillance project run by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. The Gizmodo post is in turn based on a story by Business Week , which is reporting that Apple applied yesterday (July 10th) to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for a Network Access License to sell the iPhone in the country. Business Week notes that Apple may receive permission to officially sell iPhones in The Middle Kingdom by the time of the Spring Festival in 2010, which occurs in January. TUAW iPhone may debut in Chinese market by early 2010, sans Wi-Fi originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:30:00 EST

Filed under: Gaming , Software , Odds and ends , Developer , iPhone , App Store , SDK We’ve talked about OpenFeint quite a few times on the site before (and even interviewed the creators ), but while they’re definitely one of the biggest names in creating gaming communities for the iPhone, they’re not alone. A company called Scoreloop has today announced a service called “Scoreloop Community,” made up of two different features: a web presence , and a downloadable application for the iPhone that hooks right into other developers’ games and apps and allows players to create avatars, view friends and their activities, and share challenges and high scores with others. Just like OpenFeint, Scoreloop says they’re offering an easy-to-implement solution for push notifications, letting players send and receive messages (as well as promote and encourage usage of games in the service) and earn achievements and tokens. Of course, the real test for services like this will be in the implementation — while OpenFeint claims a nice stable of developers, we still haven’t seen too many apps take advantage of the latest and greatest versions ( Pocket God is an extremely popular app that has implemented OpenFeint, but they use an older version of the software that doesn’t have nearly as many features as the latest).

It may have already been teased , poked and prodded , but the TG01 from Toshiba still insisted on making a big splash on its arrival to the UK and we were only too happy to oblige and join in on its launch event in London. As you should know by now , this is Toshiba’s most significant attempt to date at penetrating the consumer smartphone market, and it’s coming equipped with a battering ram named Snapdragon . Head over to Engadget Mobile for the juicy details on the UI, construction and general feel, as well as a neat stash of images and videos of the phone in action. Filed under: Cellphones , Handhelds Video: Toshiba TG01 gets UK launch, we handle it again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

It’s no secret that some game consoles consume a whole lot more power than others , and it looks like that fact hasn’t escaped the folks at TrickleStar, who’ve now rolled out their TV TrickleSaver device aimed at cutting down on some of that rogue power consumption. As you can probably guess from the looks of it, you simply plug both your TV and game console into the device (it’ll also work just fine with a power bar, thankfully), and then the device itself works its magic to completely cut off power to the game console or consoles whenever your shut off your TV. Of course, it’ll also work just fine with devices other than game consoles, but TrickleStar goes out of its way to single out the PlayStation 3 as its primary target, followed closely by the Xbox 360 — each of which should consume more than enough power to eventually cover the $34.95 price tag for the TrickleSaver. [Via OhGizmo! ] Filed under: Gaming TV TrickleSaver cuts off power to rogue game consoles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

“Dear Grandma, would you like to come out to the bar with my friends and I for a drink tonight?” Your grandmother is on Facebook now and Facebook introduced today a new way to invite all your “friends” on the site to an event. The way the tool works is the best example yet of how Facebook is moving in exactly the wrong direction with its new privacy settings. Facebook continues to implement features in a way that presumes all our contacts are in one big bucket, instead of recognizing that we want to communicate different things to different groups of people. Sponsor The company announced today that Events will now be publishable through the same Publisher tool that all your status messages are posted in. Unfortunately, that Publisher tool does not include the ability to limit access to event invitations (you have to go through the separate Events menu to do that) and the site’s new emphasis on pushing all updates out to everyone never looked so shortsighted. Last week Facebook acknowledged in a call with press that it really does want more people to be sharing more content outside their immediate friends and family with the whole of Facebook users. Prior to that acknowledgment we wrote about how a more accurate understanding of privacy on the web would respect peoples’ desire to limit access to messages to the appropriate people in appropriate circumstances .

Depending in your level of geekness, an extravagant mod can be pretty cool. And arcade consoles are damn near always really cool. But making a stand-up console game out of your beloved Nintendo DS? That is pretty amazing.

All we’ve got to say is that they’d better be selling seats to the first living room demonstration of this tech when somebody gets cute and grabs a real baseball bat for a demo. Sony has filed a patent for technology using the PlayStation Eye which can detect regular objects in 3D space and file them away in a database for later use in gameplay. Naturally, the camera already does object motion detection of a sort with the blocky embedded codes on Eye of Judgement cards, but this seems to be taking that tech to a new level, and would imply that you won’t necessarily need to be waggling that goofy ball-on-a-stick controller that Sony demoed at E3 for all upcoming motion control titles for the PS3. But for some reason we’re sure we should be scared of whatever combination it does turn out to be. [Via Joystiq ] Filed under: Gaming , Peripherals Sony nabs patent for everyday object motion detection: the fragile glass of your TV won’t know what hit it originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds