HTC launches trio of Dragons in China, Ice Cream Sandwich on all

HTC launches trio of Dragons in China, Ice Cream Sandwich on all
HTC's been far from quiet since unveiling its One series to the masses, and today the company's continuing the trend by launching three new devices in China. This trio makes up HTC's Dragon lineup, which our partners at Engadget China first met at MWC. Leading the way is the 4-inch HTC VT T328t for China Mobile, featuring Sense 4, an S-LCD, WVGA screen, a 1GHz CPU alongside 512MB of RAM, the famed Beats Audio and of course, it's running a flavor of Android ICS. As for the VC T328d (Telecom) and V T328w (Unicom), they're both rocking similar specs as the VT model, with the exception of dual-SIM card slots on each. All three Dragons are expected to be available by month's end, but save for the T328w costing 1999 yuan (around $320), pricing remains a mystery.

Continue reading HTC launches trio of Dragons in China, Ice Cream Sandwich on all

HTC launches trio of Dragons in China, Ice Cream Sandwich on all originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Apr 2012 03:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alexandre Herchcovitch dresses up HP Pavilion dm1 with golden doilies, higher sticker price

Alexandre Herchovitch dresses up HP Pavilion dm1 with golden doilies, higher sticker price
Ask the most fashionable folks you know, looking good isn't cheap -- no surprise then, that playing dress up has put a premium on the HP Pavilion dm1's price tag. Brazilian designer Alexandre Herchcovitch has dolled up the ultraportable laptop with a lacy gold topcoat, applying the signature flair to the machine's keyboard, palm rest and lid. The cost of style? About $1800, according to Notebook Italia, which buys you 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, a 500GB hard drive and 1.65GHz dual-core AMD E-450 brain. A pretty penny, considering the notebook's Core i3 model can be had for a mere $600. Sure, Herchcovitch takes the dm1 out of our holiday gift guide's "on the cheap" section, but where else are you going to get a designer doily kicks?

Alexandre Herchcovitch dresses up HP Pavilion dm1 with golden doilies, higher sticker price originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How To Make Ice Cubes Shaped Like Tiny Baby Heads [How To]

When it comes to serving a chilled drink, you can use cube-shaped ice like adults do—or you can show your eternal youth with custom ice replicas of your favorite toys. With a few basic supplies and a bit of patience, you can make a reusable mold to cast frozen replicas anything—even a baby doll head that's just about the right size for a rocks glass. More »


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GM: Explosion at battery research facility ?unrelated to the Chevrolet Volt?

One person was hurt at the GM research site in Michigan during ?extreme testing on a prototype battery? unrelated to the Volt ?or any other production vehicle,? the company said.

An explosion during "extreme battery testing" Wednesday morning of a prototype energy cell at a General Motors battery research facility in Warren, Mich., injured one person and did major structural damage to the building.

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At the heart of the explosion was a lithium-ion battery, according to a fire department official cited in local news reports. The morning blast did not, however, involve batteries that power the Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in hybrid car whose batteries caught fire weeks after a crash test, General Motors said in a statement.

But the flap over the Volt battery fire has left some insiders feeling more than a little peeved and defensive at the amount of news media attention being devoted to what they say is an almost inevitable, if not routine, event in the business of battery research and extreme testing.

"The whole reason they have these labs is precisely to do this kind of aggressive testing ? anticipating the worst thing a consumer could do with this product," says one expert with direct knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the explosion, who asked not to be named. "This is going to turn out to be a mountain out of a mole hill. Yeah, we're doing a lot of testing. That's what we have to do. Sometimes things explode."

?The incident is still under investigation by GM and the Warren authorities," the GM statement said. "Any information or discussion of the nature of the work in the lab or cause of the incident is entirely speculative and cannot be confirmed at this time. The incident was unrelated to the Chevrolet Volt or any other production vehicle. The incident was related to extreme testing on a prototype battery.?

Despite criticism of the Volt by conservative pundits, a follow-up investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration concluded the new car was no more prone to fire than any other vehicle.

"The debate over batteries recently really hasn't been about safety so much as about their longevity," says Tom Turrentine, director of the plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle research center at the University of California, Davis. "I think we are mostly over the hump with battery safety. But there's no question that battery labs are notorious for explosions when they're testing."

Lithium-ion batteries are attractive to automakers because they can hold so much power ? about four times the amount of energy a conventional lead-acid battery. Even so, earlier lithium-ion batteries used in other commercial applications burst into flame on occasion. Laptop computer manufacturer Dell Computer recalled millions of batteries after a handful of its laptops burst into flames several years ago.

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Zotac ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus mini PC launches with E-450 APU, gets reviewed

Zotac ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus mini PC
Zotac and its XBOXes -- just when you think your next dorm room PC couldn't get any smaller... it does. The latest in the stable is the long-winded Nano XS AD11 Plus, a hysterically titled small form factor PC equipped with a dual-core 1.6GHz AMD E-450 APU, Radeon HD 6320 GPU, 2GB of DDR3 memory and an HDMI output. There's also a 64GB mSATA SSD, a pair of USB 3.0 sockets (as well as a couple of the USB 2.0 variety), a gigabit Ethernet jack and a bundled MCE-compatible remote. In a smattering of reviews that also cropped up alongside the box's launch, we've learned that the E-450 moderately bests the prior E-350 rigs and soars past similarly equipped Atom-based machines; the mSATA SSD is perhaps the biggest upgrade, however, easily helping the system as a whole feel far faster than those with mechanical hard drives. Hot Hardware was pleased with the overall showing, though they did note that the include USB WiFi adapter gave 'em headaches when trying to stream high-bitrate content from a NAS / home server. Worth the $359? Hit those More Coverage links to help you decide.

Zotac ZBOX Nano XS AD11 Plus mini PC launches with E-450 APU, gets reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PSA: Pottermore is no longer colloportus, open to muggles and magicians alike

PSA: Pottermore is no longer colloportus, open to muggles and magicians alike
It's been a waitus longissimus, but finally Pottermore has raised the portcullis to the rest of us muggles. You can sign up right now, after which you'll be allocated to your respective Hogwarts house, but it might take a few more days before you're fully initiated into the hallowed halls proper. Just don't tell Voldemort.

[Thanks Daniel]

PSA: Pottermore is no longer colloportus, open to muggles and magicians alike originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Apr 2012 07:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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'Girls': The Reviews Are In!

Critics praise HBO show while questioning whether it will connect beyond urban audiences.
By John Mitchell


Lena Dunham in "Girls"
Photo: HBO

HBO's new comedy "Girls" is easily the most buzzed-about series debut so far this year. From the almost uncomfortably realistic sex scenes and sharp dialogue to series creator/producer/writer/star Lena Dunham's Louis C.K.-style multitasking — not to mention the show's similarities to and differences from that other landmark show about four single females in New York — people cannot stop talking about "Girls." Luckily for everyone involved, most of the things being said range from good to rave.

"Girls," which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO, has critics using words like "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary" to describe the series, about four friends (Dunham and co-stars Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet) in their early 20s trying to get their lives off the ground in NYC.

Here in the MTV Newsroom, we're as enraptured with the show as everyone else seems to be, but in her otherwise rave review in Salon, Willa Paskin makes an observation about "Girls" that has come up often during chatter about the new series: that its specificity, minus the fantasy element that made middle America fall in love with "Sex and the City," may make the show unrelatable to those outside East Coast urban centers.

"My concern was that 'Girls' speaks so specifically and accurately to the experience of me and my census buddies — and to be clear, that's urban white girls with safety nets; have at us in the comments — that people would either write it off as navel-gazing, snark at the innate privilege undergirding the whole thing, or find it unrelatable," Paskin writes.

That concern doesn't diminish the show's quality, though, and the site goes on to call the show "smart, bracing, funny, accurately absurd, confessional yet self-aware."

"Few series come out of the box as brilliant as 'Girls' does," Tim Goodman rhapsodizes in The Hollywood Reporter. "The new HBO series from Lena Dunham ('Tiny Furniture') is one of the most original, spot-on, no-missed-steps series in recent memory. For her part, Dunham, who writes, directs, stars in, created and executive produces the series, is a talent as unique and refreshing to the medium as Louis C.K. — high praise indeed, as FX's 'Louie' is one of the most critically acclaimed series on television."

Sex factors heavily in "Girls," but unlike the glamorized romps we saw on its HBO foremother "SATC," the sex acts depicted here are graphic, button-pushing and realistic but not gratuitous. According to Verne Gay in Newsday, the sex serves as a visual manifestation of the characters' internal issues. In a four-star review, Gay writes, "Hannah [Dunham's character] and the show are all about internal conflict and so is the humor, while sex — and fair warning, it's pretty graphic here, which may be the handiwork of Apatow — is the metaphor for all that conflict. It's grotesque, malignant, unpleasurable and a particularly devious torture chamber, at least for the women, who still submit to it."

The Los Angeles Times isn't as unconditional in its praise, calling the show "nothing short of revolutionary" but "hard to love." "There is a cool cleverness to the show that is both attractive and off-putting," Mary McNamara writes. "The characters are flawed and hyper-aware of their flaws, the stories so bent on covering every angle of self-examination that there is no real role for the viewer to play. Which makes watching it an intellectual rather than emotional experience."

The show positions itself as being a far more realistic version of the girls in the big city trope that "SATC" glamorized, which the Atlantic Wire's Richard Lawson sees as a reflection of the times the two shows premiered in. " 'SATC' was fantasy and fable, with a few bits of relatable relationship stuff thrown to the commoners like chum. 'Girls' is something else; it's a very particular, very of the moment dissection of mundanely funny minutiae, of boredom and anxiety in these brownly grim times," Lawson writes. "Though I guess it's possible the difference really is merely generational — the rich late '90s gave us Sex, while the wobbly '10s give us Girls, a witty and occasionally touching glimpse into our immediate neighbors' lives. They've got something here, it just remains to be seen how big a thing it is."

That "Girls" could be the next big things seems like the consensus opinion of critics, but will this story of a group of friends struggling to discover themselves and succeed in the big city connect with audiences in Peoria, Illinois? Lawson seems to think it may. "Who knows, it could be that soon enough young women the nation over will be saying they're 'such a Hannah' or 'totally a Marnie,' " he writes. "Maybe fabulous is officially out. Maybe the new aspiration in these punishing times is, simply, to aspire."

Are you excited for the series premiere of "Girls" Sunday on HBO? Let us know if you'll be watching in the comments below!

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Boss Talks, Pickles N' Sno Cones, and Motherf***ing Pterodactyls (NSFW) [Video]

Roll that spliff phatly, pack some fresh ice into the binger, and set the Volcano to "toastify." It's time for tonight's Stoner Channel. We've collected our best high-times material for the discerning pothead so sit back, relax, and pass that shit on the left, yo. More »


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