Toluu

CrunchGear

Gadgets, gear and computer hardware.

LIVE CES 2009 Palm keynoteToday

CrunchGear is live at CES 2009 attending the Palm keynote. What can we expect? New hardware, a new OS, and potentially a branding strategy that will move them far from everything we used to know about Palm.

Refresh this page to see updates.

---

10:30 - In line, waiting for the magic to happen.

10:39 - We’re at the Venetian Hotel for Palm’s (last?) press conference. It’s not slated to start until 11 AM PT so, we’re going to hang out for a bit and we’ll be back in 20 or so.

10:49 - Peter here, we’ll be switching to Scribblelive shortly so you won’t have to refresh the page yourselves.

Live in 30 minutes: Palm’s Saving ThrowToday

We’re about to go into the Palm press conference here at CES. What can we expect? New hardware, a new OS, and potentially a branding strategy that will move them far from everything we used to know about Palm.

Nokia bringing QWERTY-equipped E63 statesideToday

Nokia announced today that it’s bringing a US “optimized” version of the E63 smartphone stateside with an estimated retail price of $279. Citing a “loud and clear” demand for more QWERTY form factor devices in the US, Nokia sees that E63 as a solid entry level compliment to its more expensive E71.

AMD’s Dragon platform hopes to reinvigorate the brandToday

A lot of attention has been on Intel’s Nehalem/Core i7 lineup, but AMD hasn’t been slacking. They’ve been working on rolling out their next platform, which is really much more of a complete package than I’ve seen in a while. The new 45nm Phenom II X4 processor is designed to work with the Radeon 4000 series of video cards and the newest 790 series of motherboards.

They’ve got a real triple threat here, as when you buy into their whole little ecosystem, you get some serious benefits.

The new 45nm X4 is the last piece to fall into place for their platform strategy, which uses the already-available Radeons and motherboards. Now I’d go into specifics, but we’re not a CPU testing facility and Hot Hardware is. They’ve got a better round-up of the technical details than I could give you, so if you want the goods, head over there.

For those of you not too concerned with the technical details, I’ll just briefly outline the benefits: the Dragon platform offers a cooler and more energy-efficient setu

Slacker for BlackBerry now availableToday

Have you been drooling over the Slacker for BlackBerry app that made its demo-debut all the way back in September of ‘08? At long last, it’s available to satisfy your streamin’-radio needs, packed with preprogrammed genre stations, custom stations, album art and reviews, song skipping, and the fancypants caching that makes it oh-so-special. The base version of the application is free, but subscription add-on services are available if you want the bells and whistles.