Mar 5, 2011

8 million Kinect sensors sold in first 60 days

8 million Kinect sensors sold worldwide in first 60 days -- that's 3 million more than Microsoft had planned. Not bad. Microsoft also announced 30 million Xbox Live members and 50 million units sold worldwide with the Xbox 360 outselling all other consoles for the last 6 months in the US. Not bad at all.

Firefox 4 beta 5 for mobile released, available on Android, N900, your computer

Tired of using the default browser on your smart phone to browse Engadget? Got a thing for Firefox? Great, 'cause Mozilla just pushed out the fifth beta of Firefox 4 for mobile. You might be familiar with the on-the-go version of Mozilla's creation, but if not, here's your chance to grab the latest (and probably) the most stable build to date. In addition to the Android and Maemo version, the company has released a Fennec build for use on Windows, OS X and Linux.

We tinkered with the OS X build of the browser on our Macbook Pro and although pages appear to render quickly, we can't quite figure out how to navigate backwards. You can pinch-to-zoom with the trackpad and scroll with the d-pad, but once you've loaded a page, it seems you need to be on a mobile device do any further navigation. Of course, as you'll see in the gallery below, the beta comes packed with the usual -- preferences, downloads, add-ons, bookmarks and Firefox Sync. If you want to give the software a whirl, hit the source link to grab the build of your choice.

Android Market adds e-books; movies and music soon to come?

The Android world's been a-buzz this last week over a few new Android Market URLS, including http://market.android.com/music/ and http://market.android.com/movies/. In case you thought there was nothing to this tip, guess again: the third member of this trifecta (http://market.android.com/books/) has gone live. That's right, visitors to the Android Marketcan pick up Glenn Beck's mile-a-minute thrill ride The Overton Window for a mere $9. We hope that takes some of the sting out of the fact that a Google Music launch wasn't part of this month's Honeycomb event -- although if we had to wager a guess, we'd say that the company will have Music and Movie offerings soon enough.

Twitter for BlackBerry 1.1 hits beta, adds new notifications and geotagging

The official Twitter app for BlackBerry has gotten a nice little bump today -- though you'll need to be a member of RIM's BlackBerry Beta Zone to get it at this point, since it's not quite gold yet. The new version adds a bunch of "features users have been asking for" including support for geotagging tweets, new push notifications for mentions, threaded direct messages, integration with BlackBerry OS' Social Feeds functionality, support for gestures on touchscreen devices, and new languages (Polish and Czech, it seems). As long as you've got a data plan and a device with BlackBerry OS 4.5 or higher, you should be good to go.

Verizon Xoom teaser ad will eat you up (video)


Verizon's first Xoom ad is out leaving little doubt about how the company plans to market Motorola's new tablet. While the Honeycomb slab might lack the Droid branding, VZW looks set to maintain the overtly machismo tone that helped sell so many Android handsets over the last year while dismissing any of that cerebral nonsense preferred by Motorola. And really, who amongst us, man or woman, can resist the temptation of strapping on an $800 jetpack come thursday?

Nokia CEO: cheap Windows Phones can come 'very quickly'

We'd raised our own concerns in interviews with both Stephen Elop and Microsoft's Aaron Woodman in the past week that Nokia could have difficulty pushing the Windows Phone platform low enough to fill the holes left by Symbian's departure in the bottom rungs of the market, but the Nokia CEO is making it very clear that he thinks that won't be a problem. In a talk with Finnish journalists on Friday, Elop said that it has become "convinced" that it can hit "a very low price point" and do it "very quickly," a strategy that will be key to converting significant swaths of Symbian market share into Windows Phone market share without losing it to other manufacturers or platforms. Of course, something tells us the leaked design concept (pictured right) doesn't represent the types of hardware Nokia has in mind for those low price points -- but no single device or market segment is going to take Espoo to the promised land here.

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