Isaiah's Tech

If you're dying to get the T-Mobile myTouch Slide then you don't have to wait any longer. On eBay (here) there's an auction right now for the handset. There's 6 days left if you want to bid or you can always "Buy It Now" for a whopping $1,200. If you're interested then go ahead and blow your money away.

[Mobile Crunch]

Earlier this morning a couple of iPod Touch prototypes were spotted on eBay. Both of these prototypes sported cameras, so you can bet that the model that comes out this year will sport them. Of course, since then they've been pulled off of eBay. Not much to tell you seeing how they've been pulled.

[9 to 5 Mac, Mac Rumors]

Boy Genius has already reviewed the Motorola Droid and they seemed to love it. Well, we've just heard that it could be available as early as November 6th - which matches the old rumour. The Motorola Droid has also passed the FCC with 850 / 1900 MHz bands, which means that it's compatible on both AT&T and Rogers' networks. But, Engadget Mobile points out that Verizon likely has exclusivity rights on this handset in the US. They also point out that it is compatible with both Bell and Telus' upcoming new HSPA networks. It could be launching in Canada, as well as Latin America, but we'll just have to wait and see.

If you're really interested, the unreleased Motorola Droid is available on eBay for just $1,125 USD (at the time of writing). Check out the auction here.

Motorola Droid Passes FCC: Engadget Mobile, Gizmodo
Droid Launching On November 6th?: Phandroid

Later today, eBay plans to officially announce that they are selling Skype. I won't jump into speculations about who's buying it since it'll be made official later today anyway. In the meantime, this Pocket-Lint quote says it all.

EBay is considering selling off Skype, its $3.1billion VoIP acquisition from 2005 and a deal that the New York Times has called "one of the worst technology transactions of the decade".


Update: According to Beta News and ZDNet Blogs, the deal was actually much better than it was originally thought. eBay sold 65% of their Skype stake to an investor group for $1.9 billion. eBay was paid in cash and they still own 35% of Skype.

[The Next Web, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Pocket-Lint]

Update: At the time of writing, there has been 46 bids on this item and it now costs $1,125 USD. The bid ends in just over 11 hours.

Update: According to Mobile Syrup, there is also a BlackBerry Onyx available on eBay as well. This one is more expensive and is labelled as a pre-release item as well. The Onyx (at the time of writing) costs $1,625 USD and there have already been 27 bids on the item. The auction is set to expire in just over 9 hours. Check out the auction here.

[CrackBerry]

Yes, what you see above is the HTC Touch Pro 2, just in case you didn't know. The picture is a bit deformed and Best Buy should probably fix that, but that's not the point. On Best Buy's website, the HTC Touch Pro 2 is going for $249.99 CAD ($231 USD) on a 3-year contract and also $649.99 CAD ($600 USD) contract-free. Anyways, you can check it out on Best Buy's website now!

We know that the HTC Touch Pro 2 is hitting T-Mobile on August 12th, but if you can't wait then you can head over to eBay and scoop up a T-Mobile branded HTC Touch Pro 2 for $1,049 USD or get one unlocked for $560 USD.

[Boy Genius, Mobile Syrup, WMPowerUser (eBay)]

eBay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million USD 2 years ago and now they have split. StumbleUpon will now be standing on their own two feet without the help of eBay. StumbleUpon will now be under the power of Garrett Smith who is the founder of the service. I've never used StumbleUpon, but I plan to... soon. I don't really know what it's about so I can't really tell you much about it.

On a side note, I wonder if Skype will also be sold back to its original founders. Could this start a new trend for eBay?

[Tech Spot]

"As the New York Times reported, Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are in talks with several private equity firms and are amassing their own financial resources to make a bid for the internet phone business." Back in 2005, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 to $3.1 billion, but apparently, they now want to buy it back. I don't know what will come out of this, but I do know that eBay has yet to do anything with Skype so they might as well sell it. They should have sold it to Google, wait, whatever happened to those rumours?

Skype has been increasing in popularity the last couple of months, so it's no surprise that these two want to buy it back. Skype was even worthy enough to become a free app on the Apple's App Store and was downloaded 1 million times in the first 2 days.

[Tech Crunch]

Apparently, "Google is in 'late stage' talks to acquire microblogging service Twitter, according to a report Thursday on TechCrunch citing two unnamed sources." This rumour is pretty juicy because Facebook tried to buy Twitter when it first started to become popular, but that never happened. As Twitter's popularity expands, Facebook continues to try to imitate them as much as possible - clearly missing the big picture. It would be interesting to see how Twitter would help Google in the future. Whatever happened to that rumour about Google acquiring Skype from Ebay?

[CNet News]

This is a scary chart of what our economy has become. Job losses galore. I can't even get a job, so this doesn't affect me too much. Maybe the economy will make its turn like the other 2 years did. Then again, maybe not.

Skype's users are continually growing. Apparently, Skype is growing at a 330,000 user per day pace. Skype is owned by Ebay currently, but there were rumours of Google acquiring them over a month ago. I remember the days when i used to hate Skype. It would be unreliable when making calls and that's why i ended up choosing Ventrilo over Skype. A couple of years pass and my girlfriend ends up being on residence for university, so she tells me to try Skype out so that we'd be able to keep-in-touch. I was hesitant at first, since i remembered my first experiences. Skype came through for me and i thank them for such a good service. Without Skype, me and my girlfriend would hardly see each other. I also congratulate them on their success. Skype raked in $550 million USD last year in revenue, which was a 44% increase over the previous year.

My friend uses his Asus laptop for gaming, so i thought i'd talk about the new Asus N81Vg. This 14-inch laptop will be the first to have NVIDIA's GeForce GT 120M graphics card. This laptop will let you choose from numerous Core 2 Duo processors, will have: "up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, upwards of 500GB of hard drive space, an optional Blu-ray burner, 1.3 megapixel webcam and a battery good for three to four hours." Asus hasn't released a specific price for this laptop, so i'll tell you that information when i find out. This looks like an amazing gaming laptop, from my point of view.

Today, more news has surfaced about the LG Arena KM900. We all know about its 3D UI and its iPhone or Linux-like interface. The LG Arena looks like it will have multi-touch functionalities (Is Apple going to sue them?) and "web page zooming." LG will be spilling all of the Arena KM900's secrets on Monday in Barcelona for MWC. Personally, i think this phone will be decent. I think it has a chance against Samsung's flagship S8300 phone, since it has the multi-touch going for them. Although, i do still think the Samsung S8300 is a better phone overall. I guess i'm contradicting myself, but whatever.

Behold the gScreen TITAN M-1. This 15-inch dual screen behemoth may have been inspired by the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds. The TITAN M-1 will have the Intel QX9300 CPU, which is also found in Lenovo's W700-series systems. It also has 4GB of memory and 500GB of storage. Apparently, there will also be a 13.3 and 17-inch model, which will be released later this year. No word on price or availability of this system yet.

Economy picture: http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/joblosses26091.gif
Skype's Users Growing: http://www.pcworld.com/article/159279/skype_growing.html?tk=rss_news
Skype picture: http://netsecurity.about.com/b/2007/09/12/worm-spreading-through-skype-im.htm
Asus N81Vg (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/asus-n81vg-first-laptop-with-nvidias-geforce-gt-120m/
LG Arena KM900 (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/lg-arena-km900-hangs-onto-limelight-reveals-multitouch-capabili/
gScreen's Dual-Screen Laptop (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/gscreen-creating-rugged-dual-screen-laptop-for-animated-frogs-an/

As you can now see, my new layout is complete. I absolutely love this layout and it was actually going to be one of my first layouts, but that obviously didn't happen. My new blog is also ready for my first post, which i did not do yesterday or today. I will write on it tomorrow though, i promise. Yesterday, i took a longer nap than i originally expected and i was also experimenting with this new layout. So, my 'Thought's' blog took my old layout and i think now would be a good time to start this tech post. This will be one of my shorter posts because i am at a "party" right now...

Ahh yes, the good old PSP2 rumour that i've talked about here, here and even here. But, these PSP2 rumours are just building up with controversy and a bit of evidence. The rumoured PSP2 will reportedly have a "widescreen multi-touch interface." I am actually starting to believe that Sony is working on the PSP2 because of their survey that they put out a couple of weeks ago. The PSP2 may not be released anytime this year, but Sony may announce it for a scheduled release in 2010 or 2011. A PSP2 does sound good, but will it be popular, is the real question. Sony has a tendency to overprice all of their products, so at launch it may not be as successful as it intends to be. When the price drops though, consumers will have second thoughts and maybe go out and buy this product. This is only if these PSP2 rumours are true. But...

Following this news about the PSP2 we head over to Sony to see what they have to say. Well, of course, Sony denied it and they also took a shot at IGN. Since the PSP2 rumour came from IGN's "several credible sources," Sony said that IGN are "on the money." What does this mean? Well, i think this means that Sony is accusing IGN of making up this rumour because they want money. More people will visit their site, due to these rumours and they will gain money in the process. As i said, Sony denied the PSP2 rumours and also called the speculations nonsense.

A new rumour has surfaced about Skype. I use Skype everyday, since my girlfriend lives on residence for university and we just video call each other whenever we need to talk. The rumour about Skype is that eBay is going to sell it to Google. This rumour may actually be true because Google's video chat is rumoured to be in 'HD' soon. If they acquire Skype, they can work together to imply this 'HD' that Google is talking about. I hope these rumours are true. Another step to Google dominance.

PSP2 Rumours Continue: http://kotaku.com/5139818/touchscreen-psp2-coming-soon-rumors-ign
Sony Denies PSP2 Rumours Again: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/01/27/sony-dismisses-igns-psp2-rumors-disses-ign/
Google to Buy Skype (and picture): http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/rumour-google-to-buy-skype-513789