Renting a bike in most urban areas of the US is a difficult proposition. In Japan not only can you easily rent a bike, you can now rent an electric bike — a solar powered electric bike to boot. Sanyo has dropped Eneloop stations on three locations around the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, each having 100 of the company’s electric rides on offer for passers by to borrow (for a sadly undisclosed fee). When the bikes aren’t being pedaled around town they’ll sit in the station, being recharged by 46 square meters of solar panels that not only juice up batteries but also provide LED lighting for the station itself. While Sanyo does offer some solar stations for Eneloop owners, these look to be for renters only, meaning those who’ve bought their own will have to take themselves and their little baskets somewhere else.

Sanyo surrounds Tokyo with Eneloop charging stations and bikes to match originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With Steam officially hitting Mac in just a few weeks many Apple gamers have suddenly lost their need to emulate. But, for those who are hoping to get busy in a little Command & Conquer 4 under Snow Leopard this week — or any of the other myriad of PC-only gaming options — virtualization is the only way to go — short of rebooting into Boot Camp, of course. Parallels is the most commonly used solution, but how does VMware’s Fusion 3 stack up for gaming? Not too well, as it turns out. MacTech sat the two down together on matching Mac hardware and ran them through a number of benchmarks, including 3DMark. The results of that test fall heavily in the favor of Parallels, offering better framerates and far more consistent visuals, which you can see for yourself in a video below. Most of the many, many other tests run favor that option as well, but we won’t spoil all eight pages worth of results just waiting for you on the other end of that source link.

Continue reading Mac virtualization face-off: VMware Fusion 3 vs. Parallels Desktop 5 (video)

Mac virtualization face-off: VMware Fusion 3 vs. Parallels Desktop 5 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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WASHINGTON: US regulators have unveiled an ambitious plan to make the US world leaders in high-speed internet access over the next decade.

Hot on the heels of giving our opinion on Cowon’s (relatively) big-screened V5 media player we have some news on the next player in line from the company. It’s called the J3 and, while Cowon has officially acknowledged its existence, its specifications have only been unveiled thanks to what looks to be an internationally coordinated effort on behalf of gadget lovers everywhere. The J3 is said to have a 3.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a resolution of 480 x 272, pulling content from 4, 8, or 16GB of internal storage — content that can also be routed to a TV. There’ll be Bluetooth to pump tunes wirelessly and a new metal case that’s said to improve the quality feel of the player. That, of course, we won’t know about until we can feel one of the things, and according to the company some folks will be able to do just that before the month is through.

Cowon J3 PMP looks cool in its brushed metal case originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Very cagey way to play it Comcast. While DirecTV, ESPN and Discovery were first to say they would have 3DTV broadcasts back at CES, the cable company will actually be the first to deliver it, starting with the Masters Tournament (but why not the 3D broadcast of the Final Four?) April 7-11. That’s right, the first “live next-generation 3D broadcast of a major sporting event on TV, the first live simulcast of a next-gen 3D event online, and the industry’s first live multi-camera next-gen 3D production” will be on cable (& internet), not satellite or telco. Again, that’s right, if you don’t have a 3D television set up yet, it will also be streamed at Masters.com (no word whether this is a Comcast only or if it will be open to all) for those with a 3D setup on their PC. We’ll temper our expectations until we see what kind of quality is able to squeeze through Comcast’s fiber backbone and down our neighborhood coax wires, but this should certainly blow away the anaglyph stuff currently offered on VOD. Of course, the old school HD streams will still be broadcast on ESPN and CBS, but if Tiger really does make his comeback at Augusta this should give us a better view of the course (and any residual damage from that “car accident”) than ever before.

[Thanks, Simon]

Comcast will beat DirecTV to the punch by broadcasting the Masters Tournament in 3D April 7-11 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not that we’ve never seen Surface-like touch tables interacting with mobile devices before, but now that the whole thing is being repackaged as “the magazine stand of the future” and those trendy tablets are involved, we might as well have a look. Cynergy is demonstrating a seamless method for purchasing digital content from one of these kiosks using your e-reader or tablet pc. It’s just a matter of plopping your device — which already knows your identity and available credit — atop the display table and then flicking the particular magazine or newspaper you want onto your storage. It looks effortless and all, but it also requires that you have the “custom designed and built” software from Cynergy, which you’ll have to pump funds into in order to get the seamlessness going. We don’t know how we feel about yet another proprietary ecosystem floating about, but you can make your own mind up after watching the video after the break.

Continue reading Cynergy’s magazine stand concept serves up digital content a la carte (video)

Cynergy’s magazine stand concept serves up digital content a la carte (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well it’s about time, Spring Design! After missing its February ship date, the company is finally ready for you to whip out the plastic and pre-order its Alex — that dual-screen, Android-based ereader we liked so much at CES. While you can shell out the $399 today, you’ll still have to wait until mid-April for the mailman to drop off the package. We’d like to say the wait stops there, but we’ve also learned that early buyers won’t have access to the promised Borders eBook store until June. When we chatted with Spring Design CEO Priscilla Lu last week she confirmed that Borders will officially launch its store in the “June time frame,” which will be around the very same time that the 3G version of the Alex will be ready to hit the market — at least there’s access to Google Books and an micro-SD card slot for sideloading in the meantime. With so much coming down the pike it may be worth waiting a bit more time for this one, but our own Alex arrived just last night so no matter what it’d behoove you to wait a few days for our review before you hit the source link to pre-order.

Spring Design Alex finally up for pre-order, Borders eBook store launching in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You might think, given our recent bout of attentiveness toward wristwear, that we’re starting to develop an Enwatchet subsection, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s just that when we come across such wild and quirky designs, there’s nothing to be done but share them with the world. Case in point: the Cabestan Nostromo watch, inspired by the ship from the Alien movie. In the words of its own designers, the Nostromo combines traditional watchmaking with “retro-futuristic audacity,” and when we gaze upon its exposed vertical mechanics, we can’t exactly argue otherwise. With a titanium case, Superluminova phosphorescent coating for dusky situations, and side windows (see them after the break), this is as appealing a watch as any geek can dare to imagine. Sure, you could probably buy a sports car for less than the 150,000 Swiss Francs ($141,400 in American currency) asking price, but it’s not like you can strap a Porsche to your wrist, now is it?

Continue reading Cabestan’s Nostromo watch is geared for success

Cabestan’s Nostromo watch is geared for success originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that we have clarity with regard to a Windows Phone 7 update on the HD2 (sorry, folks), let’s move on to the next contentious platform: Nokia’s N900 and MeeGo. As Nokia’s only Cortex-A8 handset, there’s plenty of hope that Nokia sees fit to upgrade the N900 to MeeGo once the unified Maemo and Moblin OS is ready for consumers. Hope all but crushed yesterday after CNET reported the following from an unnamed, but apparently official Nokia source:

“Maemo on Nokia N900 is not upgradeable to MeeGo.”

We ran this past Ray Haddow, Senior Manager within Nokia Communications who took the quote back to the project team in Finland. According to Ray, the “the door is not closed” with regard to MeeGo on the N900 — a final decision has not been made. This also echos the words of Valtteri Halla when he announced the MeeGo repository in early March. In response to questions at the time, this one-bodied half of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group had this to day:

“N900 is a natural tool for Nokia to drive MeeGo support for our designs and for the ARM CPU architecture in general. We want to have baseline HW that is powerful, easily available for anyone and form-factor stuff so that one HW works for most platform and application development needs.

That said, please do not take this yet as a commitment to fully productise MeeGo on N900. I am quite confident that we will end up having a really good developer distro for N900 already but committing to stabilise a consumer-grade MeeGo 1.0 (first half this year) for N900 is another story. That is a product business decision beyond my scope. Also, we do not yet know about MeeGo 1 release content. I am not yet sure if I would be personally ready to let my Maemo5 go for the first MeeGo release in my daily N900 use. Let’s see.”

So, looks like another long game of wait and see, eh?

Nokia: MeeGo “door is not closed” on N900 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sometimes, when things are going too good, you just need a poster or five to bring you back down to earth, and these funny (and geeky to us) demotivational posters should do the trick. Continue reading to see them all.

Via Techeblog