Filed under: Home Entertainment

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Filed under: Handhelds

Screen grabs chronicles the uses (and misuses) of real-world gadgets in today’s movies and TV. Send in your sightings (with screen grab!) to screengrabs at engadget dt com.

Yeah, we know a Screen Grabs about a commercial about technology is kind of cheating, but there are a couple of gaffes to point out here. First, Mr. Smug Surfer-Do “I Was In A Band But We Split Up Over Creative Differences” Verizon FiOS Guy is a total jerk, so we’re totally rooting for the Zach Galifianakis look-alike, even if his bandwidth might suck. Second, waving a Kindle around might make you look like you rock at your job, but we’re guessing a paper clipboard is about 100 times more functional for the actual task, unless you’re supposed to read self-help books to your customers. Bitter cable users who can’t get FiOS yet unite!

[Thanks, Don R.]

Continue reading Screen Grabs: jerkface Verizon FiOS guy brandishes a Kindle

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

In a somewhat perplexing (okay, maybe not so much) release from Verizon, it is essentially crawling to the FCC and begging that it assist the telco in bolstering its own market share. How so? By enabling cable subscribers to jump ship without even notifying their cable company, that’s how. More specifically, it’s seeking to banish “a significant obstacle to consumer choice and competition in the market for bundled communications services” by allowing disconnect orders from the new provider (read: Verizon) to take the place of, you know, the customer calling up their carrier and shutting things down. Verizon argues that said procedure “significantly complicates the process of switching video providers, thereby entrenching the cable incumbents’ dominant market position.” Beyond the inordinately high level of ridiculousness crammed into those statements, we wonder if Verizon’s all geared up to start receiving similar letters from Comcast, Cablevision and the whole gang should any of its customers decide to walk away in silence.

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Filed under: Household

With data integration in mobile handsets, it’s no wonder home telephones haven’t been able to keep up. But what happens when you’re using a service like Verizon’s FiOS and all of a sudden that boring handset has broadband data piped right into it? One example could be OpenFrame - a new home phone envisioned by John Sculley, former Apple CEO - that maybe-a-little resembles Apple’s iPhone. The various devices are built on Freescale MX31 processors “with two 600-MHz ARM11 chips doing the heavy lifting” for features like streaming video, music, web surfing, and more. According to the manufacturer’s chief executive, the heavily subsidized phones could be shipping out in four or five months straight from the carriers (no retail presence here). Though the phone was built specifically for services like FiOS, they’re not yet saying if it’s coming to FiOS. Why so shy, fellas?

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Filed under: Networking

Uh-oh, it looks like Verizon’s been too busy ramping up speeds on its FiOS network to mind a little thing called the GPL — the company has just been sued for using a GPL’d app called BusyBox in its FiOS routers but not providing the source code. BusyBox is a bundle of utilities used in embedded Linux applications, and the authors have been pretty vigilant in policing GPL-compliance in distributions that include it — they’ve sued two other companies that have shipped devices with BusyBox, and gotten settlements both times. We’re not sure what Verizon is doing with BusyBox on its routers or why it hasn’t released the source, but expect this one to reach a resolution rather quickly.

Disclaimer: Although this post was written by an attorney, it is not meant as legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Networking

Not content with blazing up your local connection at 20Mbps downstream and up, Verizon has once again bumped its already-painfully-fast FiOS broadband service into the realm of ridiculous. According to reports, the company is now offering a 30Mbps / 15 Mbps service at $89.95 a month, and the nerve-shattering 50 Mbps / 20 Mbps speed at $139.95. The telecom has also introduced symmetrical connections in all 16 states where it currently offers FiOS service, with a 20Mbps / 20Mbps on the up and down, starting at $64.99. Of course, it’s all bleeps and buzzes in our particularly lonely corner of Brooklyn, where we’ll have to suffer the indignation of a lowly 10Mbps connection until the big V blesses us with some real speed… you hearing us, dudes?

[Via GigaOM]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Verizon FIOS customers have been feeling left out of the great HD race lately. Sure they have access to some of the fastest Internet connections in the US, but at a time when other providers are adding HD goodness in record number, FIOS customers only got one new HD channel in the past six months. Well the big V has finally broken its silence and promises that starting in the spring it’ll deliver more 60 new HD channels, — on a market by market basis — and will have more than 150 HD channels by the end of 2008. Of course this begs the question, why is it going to take so long? Seriously, it’s not like they have to wait for a satellite to launch or something. It’s almost as if there’s a limitation in their current infrastructure.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Networking

Well, it looks like Verizon might be out to put those rumors of it running out of bandwidth to rest, with it today announcing its new symmetrical 20/20 FiOS service that it says “redefines fast.” While we’re normally skeptical of such hyperbole, Verizon does look to have a case for itself in this instance, as that 20/20 stands for 20 Mbps download speeds and 20 Mbps upload speeds. As Verizon points out, that should let you upload or download a 3GB file in 20 minutes flat. Unfortunately (for some), only those in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will be able to take advantage of all that bandwidth for the time being, where it’ll run “as low as” $65 a month, although Verizion says it expects to roll out “similar symmetrical services” in the 13 other states where it currently offers FiOS internet service “soon.”

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Although FiOS just celebrated its second birthday last month, the third year isn’t exactly off to a sensational start. Reportedly, Digital Art Services, a New York-based advertising company, has slapped Verizon Communications with a lawsuit alleging that the firm “overstated subscribers to its fiber-optic service and charged inflated prices for advertisements there.” Essentially, the plaintiff is suggesting that Verizon included “pending customers” in its public subscriber reports which were “false and inflated.” Interestingly, a spokesperson for Verizon stated that while he had yet to see the lawsuit, it sounded like a “garden variety business dispute.” Of note, Digital Art was informed that pending customers could be included “as they were usually converted to active subscribers within two weeks,” but it found that many prospective buyers “waited up to 10 months for their service to become active.”

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!