techomaticblog

Oxygen Tank Lamp Is Sure to Make Loved Ones Smile [Decorating]

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/o2tank2.jpg" width="340" height="526" /I can't speak for everyone here, but most of us have 3, 4 or 5 industrial-sized oxygen tanks just rolling around, taking up precious space in our homes. Well here's a tip that'll put Martha Stewart's upcoming book emOxygen Tank Decorating Made Easy/em straight to the bottom of the charts. Just stick a lampshade on the thing, run some wiring through the base and empresto/emmdash;you have a cute lamp. If, of course, you already used up all of your oxygen tanks during our Halloween decorating extravaganza special from last month, this lamp is still available for an undisclosed price. [a href="http://www.yabdesigninc.com/other_big_pic.php?pic=4category=new%20itemsorig_pic=2502id=81desc=Oxygen%20Tank%20Lamp"Yab Design/a via a href="http://nerdapproved.com/bizarre-gadgets/oxygen-tank-lamp-will-be-a-hit-at-the-nursing-home/"Nerd Approved/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=5186eb0efcb4cd6bf3892358b85e0a3c" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=5186eb0efcb4cd6bf3892358b85e0a3c" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=2GI0gfB3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=YfGDgrLm"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=NfIjY6KZ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=NfIjY6KZ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Hhl9Z3wg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=Hhl9Z3wg" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/xBH4HsMIIB0" height="1" width="1"/

YourTour Makes Complex Travel Easy

centera href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/zoom.php?dir=2008/11/yourtour/" target="_blank"img title="YourTour Makes Complex Travel Easy" style="MARGIN: 0px" alt="YourTour Makes Complex Travel Easy" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/11/YourTour_468.jpg" border="0" /br /img src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/img/photo-gallery.gif" border="0" //a/centerbr / pBy a href="http://ustrategy.com/"Ravit Lichtenberg/a (a href="http://ravitlichtenberg.typepad.com/"blog/a)/p pa href="http://yourtour.com/"YourTour/a, a Belgian company, is among the demoing companies at the a href="http://showcase.dowjones.com/"Dow Jones Venture Wire Technology Showcase/a. YourTour helps people turn highly complex travel simple by enabling them to build full itinerary based on advanced criteria such as budget, accommodation, and attractions. br /Users start from the location they want to travel to, their budget, duration, and number of people--and then are able to choose from a number of accommodation options (hotel? Chateaus?), available attractions (Museum? EuroDisney?), frequency of hotel changes, etc. /p pFor their data, YourTour has partners with the hotel database, booking.com and LonelyPlanet.com; their ldquo;powerful algorithmrdquo; crunches all the data in the back and delivers results within 20 seconds. /p pKeeping things simple seems to be the guiding principle for this Mons Polytechnicrsquo;s department of mathematics spinoff. Still in private beta, the company is focusing on travel in France and plan to extend to Spain and Italy next. The interface is plane but it seems to work. This will make it easy for the company to act on its users feedback. User generated content will also be integratedmdash;for now, user ratings are used to influence the order of displayed results./p pa href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/yourtour_makes_complex_travel_easy.html#comments"Add a comment/a | From: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/yourtour_makes_complex_travel_easy.html"YourTour Makes Complex Travel Easy/a | Visit a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"Ubergizmo/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081119090545" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081119090545?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081119090545" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081119090545amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F11%2Fyourtour_makes_complex_travel_easy.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/SFEroErMN7jBx3wvI2ljI4c36Kk/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/SFEroErMN7jBx3wvI2ljI4c36Kk/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=FljJFJ9Z"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=wnsiF1tl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=wnsiF1tl" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=qajTwvbi"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=9ZLnz4qX"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=9ZLnz4qX" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=MuLWjvv9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=MuLWjvv9" border="0"/img/a /div

Japanese Milk-Carton-to-Jambox Resonance Speaker Conversion Kit: My Kind of Recycling [Audio]

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/device1.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="672" height="504" style="display:block;float:none;" /Resonance speakers that turn any hollow or low-density surface into a speaker are not new, but how many of said speaker kits come with their own nicely designed milk carton SOUND REVOLUTION speaker simulacrum? The Yoruzu audio kit does just that, via a Jony Ive-inspired stethoscope attachment. It will turn your hollow drywall into a two-watt boomer, much to the delight of your neighbors, for yen;4980 ($51). [a href="http://74.125.93.104/translate_c?hl=ensl=jatl=enu=http://www.devicenet.co.jp/yorozu/usg=ALkJrhiP6oMsQGdis2GMK9ZowwoeaSE_0A"Product Page (translated)/a via a href="http://74.125.93.104/translate_c?hl=ensl=jatl=enu=http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/20081119/device.htmusg=ALkJrhgWjOSWzwoJkDNrXmod1s_mvMgJsA"AV Watch (translated)/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=eaf6672f68b55a427f0cd495f599f54e" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=eaf6672f68b55a427f0cd495f599f54e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=P0wmmWoU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=pv6IA2Z0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=zmhJ3W8D"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=zmhJ3W8D" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=VlfsUiXb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=VlfsUiXb" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/IU1Ps9LhQNw" height="1" width="1"/

MyCaption for BlackBerry aims to replace the keyboard with voice recognition

div style="FLOAT: right"img title="MyCaption for BlackBerry aims to replace the keyboard with voice recognition" alt="MyCaption for BlackBerry aims to replace the keyboard with voice recognition" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/11/mycaption.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pMyCaption is a service for Blackberry that converts voice into text. In addition to converting voice into text, it has basic commands like "Compose", "Reply" (email), "Quote" or "Unquote" (text dictation). This is a bold (no pun intended) approach, as similar attempt on desktop PCs have yet to become popular. MyCaption thinks that it can beat the productivity of a small keyboard with voice. That's quite a challenge. Users can have access to the trial version at a href="http://mycaption.com/home"MyCaption.com/a. It is limited in time and if you want to continue, there are different plans ranging from $6.95 to $24.95 depending on how long your messages are (from 1 minute to 3 minutes). If you try it, let us know how it works for you by writing a comment on this page./p pSupported devices: BlackBerry Bold, Pearl, Curve, 8700 and 8800 /p pa href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/mycaption_for_blackberry_aims_to_replace_the_keyboard_with_voice_recognition.html#comments"Add a comment/a | From: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/mycaption_for_blackberry_aims_to_replace_the_keyboard_with_voice_recognition.html"MyCaption for BlackBerry aims to replace the keyboard with voice recognition/a | Visit a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"Ubergizmo/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081119085329" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081119085329?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081119085329" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081119085329amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F11%2Fmycaption_for_blackberry_aims_to_replace_the_keyboard_with_voice_recognition.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/GZjJZDGeqcExaT_prgkqSfbWhTQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/GZjJZDGeqcExaT_prgkqSfbWhTQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ZtueNiRR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=9xQC4KDf"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=9xQC4KDf" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=hOH0qb0s"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ikWIbm8P"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=ikWIbm8P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=zhw8JXP6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=zhw8JXP6" border="0"/img/a /div

Philips Won’t Sell Home Theater Equipment in North America Anymore [Philips]

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/Philips_No_North_America.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" style="display:block;" /Back in April, Philips a href="http://gizmodo.com/377355/philips-wont-sell-tvs-in-north-america-anymore"announced plans/a to hand over its television promotion, sales and manufacturing to Funai. Now the company has expanded those plans to what sounds like all of their home theater products, including DVD players, Blu-ray players and surround sound equipment. Oh, you'll still see Philips DVD players for sure, but it won't emreally/em be Philips. So have a good time dropping that little factoid to your favorite, know-it-all salesperson next time they gush about the Philips brand name. [a href="http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/philips-lays-off-dvd-business-to-funai/"NYT/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=f5883c8998622acfe667f7095a81f34f" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=f5883c8998622acfe667f7095a81f34f" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=o0fAvYTG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Gk3SxAg1"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=KgJu32h6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=KgJu32h6" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=9ISPdxTQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=9ISPdxTQ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/UGySfBq5xZE" height="1" width="1"/

Treehouse Restaurant Built Around Redwood Like Beautiful Fungus [Treehouses]

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/yellowtreehouse_08_03_2UloG_48.jpg" width="550" height="374" style="display:block;" /So a href="http://gizmodo.com/367835/bellavistas-biodigesting-treehouses-are-endor-on-earth"modern/a treehouses aren't new, but the designers of this project in New Zealand have crafted something that blends fantastically with its host redwood tree. The fungus or chrysalis-shaped buildingmdash;take your aesthetic pickmdash;will be a smallish restaurant built by, of all people, the NZ Yellow Pages. It's currently under construction from laminated pine, plantation poplar and redwood thirty feet up a giant tree in a place north of Auckland. Getting there'll be fun when it's finished though: entry is via a 120-foot high treetop walkway. [a href="http://www.contemporist.com/2008/11/17/the-yellow-treehouse-restaurant/"Contemporist/a via a href="http://www.bornrich.org/entry/treehouse-restaurant-a-romantic-hideaway-close-to-nature/"Born Rich/a]script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" galleryPost('yellowtreehouse', 3, ''); /script/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=42cf017fd05edfed2d4bf0a9540c86d4" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=42cf017fd05edfed2d4bf0a9540c86d4" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=10m78uiC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=RKgBVtQ3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=krw12Vtt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=krw12Vtt" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=hpqalDgB"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=hpqalDgB" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/UFmHgj_TjOY" height="1" width="1"/

New Yorkers can finally ‘Look Good In Pictures’

Click to get more details

Hate the way you look in photos or the way you take photos? Here's your chance to get some free help with both, assuming you're in the New York City area Wednesday, November 19. Carson Kressley, former Queer Eye guy and current star ...

Whisking, the hands-free way

The Stirr

(Credit: Lakeland)

When I was little, my grandmother would often draft me to help her in the kitchen. Invariably, she would hand me a whisk, position me at the stove, and instruct me to keep stirring no matter what. Whether there was gravy, pudding, or something else in ...

Originally posted at Appliances and Kitchen Gadgets

Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web [Battlemodo]

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/Browser_War_top.jpg" width="807" height="350" style="display:block;float:none;" //p div style='float:right; margin-left:-9px;'script type="text/javascript" digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/Mobile_Browser_Battle_Which_Phones_Deliver_The_Real_Web'; /scriptscript src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript" /script/div pBefore 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the ireal/i internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web./p pBefore we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:/p pstrongCHART KEY:/strong Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: strongGreen = good overall, Red = fail overall/strong.br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/3g_web_browsing.jpg" width="681" height="457" style="display:block;float:none;" /br clear="all"/p pThis second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/Wi-Fi_web_browsing.jpg" width="683" height="361" style="display:block;float:none;" /br clear="all"/p pIt's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0278.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="385" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongAndroid/strongbr A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a pagemdash;various touch methods and the trackballmdash;few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. strongGrade: B+/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0205.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="539" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongBlackBerry Bold/strongbr Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. strongGrade: B-/C+/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0246.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="418" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongiPhone/strongbr What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browsermdash;which is also based on WebKitmdash;in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) strongGrade: A-/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0260.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="581" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongNokia E71 Symbian S60/strongbr Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. strongGrade: B-/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0221.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="468" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongInternet Explorer on Windows Mobile/strongbr Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only emmostly/em screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. strongGrade: F-/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0248.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="464" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongOpera Mobile on Windows Mobile/strongbr Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you emcan/em use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. strongGrade: C/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0356.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="357" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongSprint Instinct/strongbr Holy CRAP. This is emnot/em the painfully lousy browser the a href="http://gizmodo.com/5014419/samsung-instinct-full-review-verdict-best-sprint-phone-ever-best-samsung-phone-ever-too"Instinct shipped with/a a href="http://gizmodo.com/5017957/iphone-clone-battlemodo-which-one-is-the-iphoniest"not by a long shot/a. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The a href="http://gizmodo.com/5059300/sprint-instinct-firmware-update-includes-non+crappy-browser"new 1.1 browser/a really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. strongGrade: C+/strong/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/_DSC0218.jpg" class="center" width="800" height="409" style="display:block;float:none;" /strongLG Dare/strongbr Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbpsmdash;I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) strongGrade: C/strong/p pstrongMethodology/strongbr We tested every browser only using the fullmdash;not mobilemdash;versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks)./p pA few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as a href="http://gizmodo.com/5020820/verizons-lg-dare-full-review-verdict-best-iclone-yet"best-of-class/a examples a href="http://gizmodo.com/5014419/samsung-instinct-full-review-verdict-best-sprint-phone-ever-best-samsung-phone-ever-too"of feature phones/a, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image filemdash;besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer./p pstrongThe Big Gulp/strongbr Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. strongAn awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is./strong It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3Gmdash;hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi./p pAnother thing to note is that the strongzoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail/strong. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*)./p pAs much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little emtoo/em sci-fi./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=b99fc945506303fe3800b5378f8ba282"img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=b99fc945506303fe3800b5378f8ba282" border="0" //a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b99fc945506303fe3800b5378f8ba282" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=aLznP8J7"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=H5aCVgLD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=wxeZh3aY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=wxeZh3aY" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=1eFc2MwV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=1eFc2MwV" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/QCoPm4xCM9Y" height="1" width="1"/

Adobe ships Configurator for custom Photoshop

Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com has released a proof-of-concept tutorial for Photoshop selection techniques using Configurator. A final version is due soon.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

After a slight delay, Adobe Systems has begun shipping Configurator, an application that lets people create customized Photoshop CS4 control panels and share them with ...

Originally posted at Underexposed