Palm Pre Arrives June 6

Sprint (NYSE: S) today announced pricing and nationwide availability for the highly anticipated Palm Pre phone, offered exclusively from Sprint.

Palm Pre will be available nationwide on June 6 in Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online at Sprint.com for $199.99 with a two-year service agreement and after a $100 mail-in rebate.

Sprint has high hopes for the device:

"It's the highest confidence I've ever had going into a device launch that this is going to be a blockbuster," said Kevin Packingham, senior vice president for product and technology development at Sprint. "I'm pretty sure we'll know within the first week."

Bruce Sterling on Earth-Friendly Pervasive Computing

Noting that the word 'computer' is disappearing from technologists' vocabularies, science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling believes that as the Internet subsumes computing, we are truly on the path toward a highly embedded wireless network in which nearly everything is a node:

In 2007 the computer gave up taking over the world. Instead the world took over the computer. The Internet became a wholly owned subset of Reality 2.0. When the actual world invades the virtual world, it scatters the computer into tiny physical pieces, some no bigger than dust. "Intelligent printing," another modern darling, is semiconductor ink sprayed on cardboard. There's never been a humbler, cheaper "computer."

Sterling envisions a world in which the chips that drive it are powered by tiny amounts of ambient energy -- nearly any form of heat or light will do. Such chips would have such low power requirements that they wouldn't need a dedicated power source, and would use up hardly any natural resources.

Source: Futurismic

TomTom lleva su servicio de navegación a los Samsung Wave 3

TomTom ha anunciado que ha llegado a un acuerdo con Samsung para llevar su conocido software de navegación GPS a los teléfonos Samsung Wave 3, que os recordamos utilizan la última versión del sistema operativo bada.

Es extraño, pero la nota de prensa sólo habla de la tercera interación del teléfono Wave, cuando no creemos que haya muchos problemas para que apareciera en el resto de la familia bada, bien necesitada de software de primera calidad (por cierto, hace días se anunció Angry Birds).

No creo que haya que hacer una presentación muy profunda del servicio de TomTom, que proveerá al teléfono de Samsung de la navegación guiada en más de 35 millones de kilómetros de carreteras, en más de 200 países alrededor del mundo.

En la versión que estrenará el Wave 3 no faltarán los mapas en 3D, los puntos de interés, o la información de tráfico.

iPhone Game Review - Parachute Panic

I was poking around the iTunes AppStore this week and took a $.99 chance on a recently launched game from FDG Entertainment called Parachute Panic.

This fun casual game requires you to successfully land a host of parachutists into passing boats while trying to avoid obstacles such as helicopters, U.F.O´s, sharks and thunder clouds.

The game play is reminiscent of the vintage Nintendo Game & Watch handheld parachute game that I used to love to play back in the early 80's.

The game has very cool hand drawn graphics, smooth animations, catchy music and awesome sound effects. The game has been getting good reviews in the App Store and I have to agree - it is very well done and lots of fun.

Check out a video of the game here.

The only slightly negative comment I will make is that this game is not easy. It takes a little while to get used to the controls and even after mastering the techniques, the action picks up fast and furious. My 7 year old lost interest pretty quickly as it was too hard, but personally, I love the game, and for a buck it's well worth it. Click here to get it now.

Bird Population Falls Over Past 40 Years

A recent study by the National Audubon Society has found that bird populations -- even those of common, robust species such as grackles -- have fallen drastically over the past 40 years. The populations of whiporwills and bobwhites have fallen by well over 80 percent, a drop so great that these once-common birds are now seldom seen or heard in the eastern US. Deforestation is partly to blame, as well as global warming, which appears to be affecting arctic birds especially hard. Because cold-climate birds must migrate farther north each year to reach their shrinking habitat, they rarely migrate below the northernmost regions of the US.

'These are not rare or exotic birds we're talking about -- these are the birds that visit our feeders and congregate at nearby lakes and seashores and yet they are disappearing day by day,' said Carol Browner, Audubon board chairperson and former Environmental Protection Agency administrator in the Clinton administration. 'Their decline tells us we have serious work to do, from protecting local habitats to addressing the huge threats from global warming.'

Source: Boston Globe

Is Tesla Getting the Electric Car Right?

If the internal combustion engine is the technology environmentalists love to hate, the electric car is the technology everyone else hates to love. Electrics have long had the reputation for being underpowered, inefficient, and no more eco-friendly than any other type of car, as the electricity needed to run them normally comes from fossil fuels.

Enter Tesla Motors, a California-based startup that has developed the Tesla Roadster, a stylish, high-performance electric car that can reportedly go from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and travel up to 250 miles between charges. The Roadster is still in the prototype stage, but just as important as the car itself is the way that Tesla proposes to fuel it. Tesla envisions a distributed network of charging stations that draw power from sustainable, environmentally friendly sources.

Source: Long Tail