Two Hands Archive

  • Exclusive: The Helio Ocean 3 that could have been

    Exclusive: The Helio Ocean 3 that could have been

    Posted on May 26, 2010 | No Comments
    Yesterday was a sad day for me, albeit one that was a long time coming. Yesterday, Helio, a wireless MVNO co-operated by EarthLink and South Korea's SK Telecom, let out its final death cry. As I predicted in March, Virgin Mobile, who had acquired the failing company just two years prior, was pulling the plug on the post-paid side of their service that Helio had become. The lights were dimmed, the blinds were closed, and accounts were terminated. Just like that, Helio was dead. As a small (yet lovely) chunk of our MobileCrunch readers may know, Helio was of some importance to me. On a whim one weekend, long before I became a writer here, I founded a community called Heliocity -- which, as you could probably guess by now, was focused on Helio. It was a pretty tightly knit group of 10 thousand-or-so of the geekiest geeks you'll ever meet, hacking at -- and nerding out over -- every Helio phone we could get our hands on. That community got me into blogging, which took me to all sorts of industry events, where I in turn met all the people who eventually lead me to my job here at TechCrunch. To celebrate this nostalgia and recognize the rather cool company that once was, I present: the Helio Ocean 3. This is the phone that was to be Helio's savior; this is their unfinished magnum opus. Prior to today, it was a myth; no one outside of the company had seen it, and the number of people within the company who had seen it could be counted on two hands.

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  • Review: Viliv S7 Premium

    Review: Viliv S7 Premium

    Posted on December 15, 2009 | No Comments
    True story: About two months back I was walking through my house with the then-new Viliv S7 convertible netbook. I started babbling to my wife while she was tending to the kids about how much I loved this little netbook. Even though she clearly couldn’t care less, I went on to proclaim that if Apple would have gotten in [...]

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  • Motorola’s shiny XT800 shows off its Android

    Motorola’s shiny XT800 shows off its Android

    Posted on December 15, 2009 | No Comments
    Could this end up being the prettiest Android device to date? We don't want to call it before we have it in our own two hands, but China Telecom's likely entrant from Motorola -- the XT800 -- is looking better than ever in these live action shots unearthed by Chinese site tgbus. What's interesting here is that Moto's reusing the font first seen on the Droid's dock standby screen for a new home screen date / time widget, but the old-school Power Control widget below it has us believing that we're looking at an older Android 2.0 build (or heck, who knows, 1.5 or 1.6). It'll apparently have a 3.7-inch WVGA display with 720p playback and, as we've mentioned before, an HDMI-out for some serious multimedia street cred. It's still unclear whether this is being thrown around internally as the Titanium, Zeppelin, or something else entirely, but whatever -- Verizon, Sprint, bring it on over, alright?

    Motorola's shiny XT800 shows off its Android originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Nokia N900 glitch leads to useful portrait mode, caught on video

    Nokia N900 glitch leads to useful portrait mode, caught on video

    Posted on November 29, 2009 | No Comments
    File this under "it's not a bug, it's a feature" if true. According to Guyver at the maemo.org forums, some glitch in the OS caused his Nokia N900 to switch into portrait mode for everything, not just dialer and photo apps as previously allowed. We'd love to eliminate the need for two hands to run our favorite chunks of mobile software, but so far we haven't been able to recreate his trick. Try it at home if you'd like by tilting the device to launch the phone app, then sliding up the screen and closing the app. Perhaps the gang at Espoo can turn this into a legit update -- if they're awesome people, of course. Video after the break.

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    Nokia N900 glitch leads to useful portrait mode, caught on video originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Review: Jakks Pacific EyeClops Night Vison 2.0 Binoculars

    Review: Jakks Pacific EyeClops Night Vison 2.0 Binoculars

    Posted on August 5, 2009 | No Comments
    Whether you want it to put the lotion in the basket or have some great fun running around in the back yard after dark, the Jakks Pacific EyeClops Night Vison 2.0 Binoculars are for you. These super cool, $59 binocs have a built-in infrared night vision system for spying on folks in complete darkness up [...]

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