Today Amazon is introducing two new Kindles. A WiFi-only version costs $139xxx, and a a $189 3G version (utilizing AT&T’s network, just like the last model) is. Amazon will begin taking orders Thursday and the new models will begin shipping Aug. 27 to customers in 140 countries. The units are 21 percent smaller a

Microsoft’s Street Slide is a new 360 immersive viewer similar to Google’s Street View and Microsoft’s Streetside. But Microsoft’s Street Slide enable users to navigate between immersive 360° panoramas, or “bubbles”. You can move from bubble to bubble with a coherent visual sense of the

PC Magazine picked their top 10 smartphones in America. We’ve lifted it pretty much verbatim, with links back to the magazine’s original content. 1. iPhone 4 (AT&T)   Our top smartphone is more smart than phone, but its reception problems don’t outweigh its excellent OS, sharp camera, fast proces

The HomePlug Powerline Alliance today announced the HomePlug AV2 specification, designed to meet the expanding requirements of the connected digital home. The AV2 specification claims to deliver a 5x increase in performance over current HomePlug AV solutions and offer significant improvements in whole home coverage. The new

Peter Kafka in All Things D, says Time Inc. has been unable to get Apple to let it sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad apps — much to Time Inc.’s surprise. Last month, the publisher was set to launch a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines [...]

The UK government has [finally] given the green light for regulators to auction “4g” frequencies. UK regulator Ofcom said it aimed to hold the auction at the end of 2011 and will conduct a combined auction of 2.6GHz and 800MHz spectrum, reports the Financial Times. The bandwidth becoming available in the new fre

For the first time in three years, Sprint is showing net subscriber growth. Sprint said in a statement that it expects to continue to add net subscribers for the rest of 2010 and cut postpaid subscriber losses in the second half. By the numbers: Sprint had 48.2 million customers in the second quarter, a sum [...]

Today, the Library of Congress ruled in favor of both jailbreaking and unlocking phones according to the Washington Post. Jailbreaking the iPhone allows you to shop for apps anywhere on the internet, not just the iTunes App Store, where all of the apps must be approved by Apple to go on sale. Bypassing a manufacturer’

Lasers will replace copper connections in everything from supercomputers to servers to PCs, according to Intel researchers who demonstrated 50-Gb/s optical transmitter and receiver chips that the company plans to scale up to terabit-per-second speeds prior to commercialization, reports EE Times. “This is the first com

Forrester Research says location-based start-ups are still too small for major marketers. The research firm finds location-aware apps currently make sense mainly for brands seeking male influencers. Forrester says only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), an alliance of telecommunications companies committed to building an open applications platform, today announced its formation as a corporate entity and said it will join forces with the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), accelerating the commercial launch of application stores that comp

Blue Jamb Media has launched the White Rock Bluezone, a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth network enabling visitors to the city’s promenade to surf the net on their laptops, receive video content about local events and happenings on their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones for free. The innovative advertising concept provide visitors wi

A spectrum database solution now enables access to 5GHz spectrum previously unavailable due to interference. Spectrum Bridge, in partnership with the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) today announced the release of the U-NII Device Interference Advisor — an online database that reduces potential inte

The WikiLeaks disclosure, which posted some 90,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan was illustrated by this mashup by The Guardian. It highlights key events. Just mouse over the map. Mashable has a bunch of how-to articles.

Google today announced another new version of Google Maps for the Android. The new version adds a “Places” feature with a new icon on the main menu. Places is Google Maps’ search tool for finding nearby businesses and other points of interest. With Places as a separate search tool, searchable categories ca

Kmart is selling an Android tablet for $149.99, reports Liliputing The Augen GenTouch 7 inch tablet features an 800 x 480 pixel display, an 800MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM, 2GB of storage and WiFi, as well as an SD card slot and runs Google Android 2.1. In addition to the 7-inch tablet, Augen has also [...]

In May, AT&T set up a free Wi-Fi hot zone in New York City’s Times Square. Now AT&T has added free public Wi-Fi hot spots in Charlotte, N.C. to help alleviate network congestion. It’s free only to AT&T customers. AT&T announced today that it will provide free Wi-Fi in large outdoor Wi-Fi hot

Superimposing historic photos on current locations is a neat way to bring history to life, using augmented reality, as the website History Pin and Museum of London demonstrate, says Engadget. But you need to ensure it is taken from the same spot, and with the same zoom level. If you don’t, the combined picture ends [.

In 2008, the FCC attempted to auction off a block of 700 MHz to the wireless industry, with a requirement that the winning bidder help build out a sturdy communications network that would be shared with first responders in an emergency. But those conditions proved too onerous, and the $1.5 Billion minimum bid failed to [...

Sprint has not announced when its second WiMAX smartphone, the Samsung Epic 4G,will hit the shelves but the official Samsung Mobile USA Twitter feed says, “The Sprint Epic 4G is arriving in a few weeks.”. Samsung’s Galaxy S has variants offered on all major US carriers, but only Sprint offers WiMAX on the

Ford showcased some of its improvements on Sync this week with improved voice recognition and user friendliness. The newest version uses voice-recognition technology from Nuance that can now recognize up to 10,000 voice commands and enables drivers to talk in more complete sentences. The goal is to make nearly every functio

Akron is rebuilding every public school as a Community Learning Center, with 17 schools already completed. Four more Community Learning Centers are coming online, seven are under construction, and more are in the design and planning stages. Cisco today announced that it has joined with OneCommunity, a leader in incubating p

Verizon’s Droid X, currently Verizon Wireless’s flagship Android device, shipped with the older Android 2.1 OS, and is expected to receive the Android 2.2 update (Froyo) toward the end of July. Now it appears that Droid 2, coming in late August, is set to be the first phone to ship with highly anticipated next-g

Lockheed Martin has successfully conducted a test of its MagneLink Magnetic Communication System (MCS) at a Test Mine in Bruceton, Pa. on June 15 and 16. MagneLink MCS is a wireless, through-the-earth communications system developed to meet the mining industry’s post-accident emergency communications requirement. The

Proxim has announced its new Tsunami 8150-CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) series of products, designed to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying wireless broadband service. The 8150-CPE supports both licensed frequency and license-free frequency bands in the 2.3 – 2.5 GHz and 4.9 – 6.1 GHz bands to maximiz

T-Mobile USA today HSPA+ service availability to more than 85 million Americans. T-Mobile says it’s on track to deliver HSPA+ speeds in 100 major metropolitan areas with backhaul in place, covering 185 million people in the U.S. by the end of this year. Now HSPA+ network service is available in nearly 50 major metropo

The Washington Post and PBS Frontline have produced Top Secret America, a groundbreaking series which profiles the fourth arm of the U.S. government (Articles, Blog, Map and Connections). The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 t

Exalt Communications today unveiled its newest microwave backhaul platform, ExploreAir. The new platform delivers 500 megabits per-second full-duplex Ethernet plus native TDM, and supports world bands from 2 GHz to 40 GHz. Exalt claims ExploreAir delivers the industry’s highest throughput and longest range in the micr

When ABI Research first examined the media tablet market, neither Apple’s iPad nor any other multinational-branded tablet had been released. Six months later, the firm has revisited its forecasts, almost tripling the original estimate to reach about 11 million tablets expected to ship by the end of 2010. Its long-term est

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group today announced an Application Developers’ Contest to promote open source collaboration. The Bluetooth SIG hopes to encourage developers to discover original and innovate applications of Bluetooth technology in mobile phones and PCs. Contest finalists will be selected by a panel of ind