Filed under: Ask Engadget, Digital Cameras, Displays, Misc. Gadgets

Frightening though it may be, the fall semester is just around the corner. You know what that means? You’ll actually have to get up at — wait for it — an appointed time. Carissa, being the proactive student she is, posed that question:

“Going to school in the fall, I’m looking for the ideal alarm clock to beat the late nights and what not and noticed a few digital photo frames / alarm clocks. I want a decent alarm clock that has battery backup and good resolution on the screen for viewing photos. An auxiliary audio jack would be a major plus. Which one do you guys recommend that falls under the 200 dollar mark? Thanks a million!”

Look at that — you all even received a thank you in advance! For those who’ve mastered the art of waking up on moment and portraying to be a real live adult, which alarm clock / digiframe hybrid have you found to be supreme? Oh, and you know that question you’ve been hitting the snooze on? Yeah, send it on by to ask at engadget dawt com.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Cellphones

We’re not certain how that one got past Apple’s App Store censors, but the intelligent kids at Nullriver have released what appears to be the first tethering solution for the iPhone. The $10 NetShare app is just a SOCKS proxy that hyperlinks an ad-hoc WiFi network to the iPhone’s 3G or EDGE connection — and whether we could get it to work, we’d probably think it was a fine, whether hacky, solution to a major limitation of Steve’s baby. As it stands, though, the directions are pretty sparse, and while we can get the app to recognize a connection, we’re not able to actually load anything. We’re not certain how faraway that one’s going to last — anyone else willing to give it a shot before it gets yanked?

[Thanks, Zoli; Warning, link opens iTunes]

Update: Aaaaand it’s offline. Shocking.

Update 2: We’ve added our own video hands-on after the break.

Continue reading Tether your iPhone, wirelessly. perhaps. (updated with video)

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Cellphones

We’re not certain how that one got past Apple’s App Store censors, but the intelligent kids at Nullriver have released what appears to be the first tethering solution for the iPhone. The $10 NetShare app is just a SOCKS proxy that hyperlinks an ad-hoc WiFi network to the iPhone’s 3G or EDGE connection — and whether we could get it to work, we’d probably think it was a fine, whether hacky, solution to a major limitation of Steve’s baby. As it stands, though, the directions are pretty sparse, and while we can get the app to recognize a connection, we’re not able to actually load anything. We’re not certain how expanded that one’s going to last — anyone else willing to give it a shot before it gets yanked?

[Thanks, Zoli; Warning, link opens iTunes]

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

If you didn’t think every single third-party peripheral provider would try to snag a piece of the band game pie, we guess you thought wrong, huh? With outfits like Mad Catz and Ion already jumping in, it was only a matter of duration before Logitech threw on its tightest jeans, blacked out its blond hair and threw up some horns. Details are admittedly scarce, but the company has promised to supply “premium instruments” for Guitar Hero: World Tour on PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and the Wii. Rockers can expect the new gear to start shipping “later that year,” though prices, designs and pretty much anything else of importance remains a mystery.

[Via NintendoWiiFanboy]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Yep, just like we’d heard, the Phoenix lander has identified water in a soil sample it collected in Mars earlier, and NASA’s extended the mission for another 90 days to go look for more. There’s no analysis of the ice yet, but it doesn’t look like there’s any organic materials in the sample, and it’ll take another three to four weeks before there’s any more goods to reveal. Hopefully that means we’ll be packing up our silver go-go boots and taking off for our fabulous future lives on Mars in a month, but we’ll see how things go.

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Laptops

So now that HP’s joined Dell in releasing information on which laptops have those defective NVIDIA GPUs, we can sort of piece together which chips are faulty — and just as had been rumored, it looks like basically every Geforce 8600M and 8400M chip is affected. That’s not good news for NVIDIA, which has been saying that only “previous-generation” chips were problematic — unless the chipmaker is planning on updating the hugely popular 8×00 series sometime, say, now, that’s not precisely true, now is it? Other affected chips seem to be in the GeForce Go 7000 and 6000 lines, as well as the Quadro NVS 135M and the Quadro FX 360M, but that’s just looking at model numbers, and we can’t be precisely certain. We’d say that whether you’ve got a machine with any one of these GPUs, it might be wise to signal in and see what your laptop maker is going to do — and it would be smart for NVIDIA to come right out and say precisely how big and how poor that problem really is.

Read - Dell list of machines and patch
Read - HP list of machines, extended warranty info

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Laptops

It looks like those already sold on Dell’s slightly less business-like Vostro 2510 laptop don’t have to wait too lengthy to get their hands on one, as the just-leaked laptop is now configurable on Dell’s website with an estimated ship instance of 3 to 5 days. As we had heard, the base price starts at a fair $899, which includes a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo T5670 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a better than usual 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphics card. whether that’s not ample, you can push things up past the $2,000 mark pretty easily with a faster processor, a max 4GB of RAM, an Blu-ray drive, and other premium add-ons. Hit up the link below to get started.

[Via Electronista]

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Original post by Donald Melanson