Motorola Droid Comes To Verison

For all of the Verison customers out there, you will finally have a good smartphone available to you. The Droid is the first Android powered device that will be available for Verison. It will boast a 5 mp camera, Android OS 2.0, wifi, bluetooth, rumored multiple apps running at once, gps, and many other features. Boy Genius got it's hand on it and wrote a nice review of it. But since a smartphone that is reported almost as decent as the iPhone (and with a heck of a better camera) is going to be on Verison, their customers who have been stuck with only Blackberries and WinMo devices will actually have a decent phone to invest in now. Droid, we hope you fulfill the high expectations you bring.

The official Verison Droid site: press here (can anyone figure out the countdown?)

Window 7 releases and Apple updates

Today is the day. The release of Windows 7. Geeks everywhere rejoice! Windows 7 has had a successful launch (so far) with the downloads of the OS and the sending of DVDs that were pre-ordered. Along with such a release, a plethora of laptops were released from many companies as well. For those that still haven't jumped on the bandwagon, win741 is still selling 7 for only $30, and if you have multiple computers (and are not a student), the Windows 7 Family Pack is the deal for you. For only $149 it has the ability to install Windows 7 Home Premium on up to 3 machines (for an average of $50 a machine). Beats having to pay the $119 for Home Premium by itself. So get on the bandwagon and upgrade (trust us, it is WELL worth the upgrade from Vista).

Also, Apple released a couple of new updates to their PC's this week. Some of the main upgrades included the newly designed iMac that has a screen up to 27 in, and the new bluetooth keyboard and Magic Mouse. The other releases were (as mentioned) the Magic Mouse that has multi-touch gestures, the unibody Macbook, and an upgraded Mac Mini (along with the new Mac Mini Server that replaces the disk-drive with another 500gb drive giving it 1tb of memory). With these releases, we were disappointed that the Macbook wasn't lowered in price to compete with most of the laptops sold these days, but the rest of the upgrades were a needed refresh.

Windows 7 releasing in T-minus two...

Windows 7 is being released to the public two days from this post. All the public that has free upgrades to 7 is itching to upgrade. Now for the readers of this post, here is out question. Are you upgrading to Windows 7? And why are you upgrading? Is it the new features that is inspiring you to upgrade, the performance upgrades, or do you just want to off of XP, Vista or whatever other OS you are running?

Our answer here at The Latest of Tech is it is a very good OS. Many of the UI features are very helpful and the performance is amazing. Many of the faults we found with Vista have been fixed, and it is a smoother OS in general.

We will be doing a full overview of 7 later on, (for now you can look at our "First Looks" post giving a brief description of some of our first impressions of 7) so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

Also, here are some of our other Windows 7 posts you might want to read (especially students who want to upgrade)
Windows 7 $30 for students (including free Windows 7 Pro upgrade)
TLOT Windows 7 Party Blog

Gadget Thursday: Nikon D3s and Blackberry Storm 2

So, a selection of new gadgets have been announced and are close to release. To start Gadget Thursday, the release of the Nikon D3S is coming soon. It is the first of the D3 line to have video recording. With video of 720p with 24 fps, it is a moderate video-camera. Of course this is not the main selling point of the D3 (heck, if you are paying $5400 for a video camera only capable of shooting 720p at 24 fps, then your messed up), but the main upgrade from the D3 is the new ISO range. Capable of doing 200 to 12,800 (which can be upped to 102,400!) the upgrade will surely be noticed. But for the people hoping for a upgrade to the megapixel sensor, sorry, your out of luck. The D3S will have the same 12.1 MP as the D3.

Our second gadget is the Blackberry Storm 2. Hopefully for all of the people who originally just threw out the Blackberry for laggy OS, annoyance of the clicking, and all the other complaints, will take a second look. Gizmodo has a leak on some of the specs. So far it sounds like the laggy OS was re-designed and some much needed improvements were added. Hopefully it will give all the Version users out there another solution to the lack of (good) smartphones?...But the key word in that is hopefully...

T-Mobile Sidekick FAIL: UPDATED

T-Mobile had a major fail this last week. During one of it's server upgrades, it failed causing an entire outage with the Cloud backup service available for the Sidekick phonse. During this time, all the back-up data on the T-Mobile servers were completely lost. T-Mobile quickly sent out an message to all the Sidekick users saying to keep the phone on as long as possible as they tried to recover data from the failed upgrade. All the users effected were given a free month of service, and a $100 gift card. But can that honestly cover countless hours of data and contact? Now the question that comes from this entire ordeal is: "Are the Cloud services as secure as we think them to be?" If this happens to data once, could it happen again with some BIGGER service? T-Mobile Sidekick customers will surely be thinking of this from now on...

Update: Microsoft has released a report saying that most of the data has been recovered. There still will be people effected by this upgrade problem, but it will be a very small minority.

Windows 7 Hands On (First looks)

We were able to get a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (thanks to Houseparty.com...More about our Windows 7 House Party at tlotwin7.blogspot.com). So, here is a first look of Windows 7 and some of the features we like.
First off:
The taskbar was the one of the first noticed changes after the upgrade completed. It takes some getting used to, but the pinned programs list works VERY well. Having the ability to combine multiple screens into an easy to use interface really caught our attention.

Some of the visual features that proved to be handy is snap, aero shake, and aero peek. It was easy to implement, and we found that they become commonly used features after a while of use.

On the speed side of things, 7 has a dramatically increased speed jump. We are running 7 on the 64 bit version, and programs, startup, and related things has a face-lift with speed.

Now, this is just a very quick overview (we will post a in-depth one after we have more time messing around with it...It's our second day after installation we are posting this). But so far 7 is a win in every sense of the word.

Flash 10.1 bringing Flash to BlackBerrys

In Adobe's 10.1 Flash announcement, Adobe is working with RIM to bring Flash to the Blackberries. For all the other many phones, the Open Screen Project is a collaboration of businesses and developers working to bring Flash to other phones, and better functionality to computers. So, Hulu on your Blackberry anyone?