BGR unboxes the iPhone 3G, for real
The contact revolution will be electronicized (and lubricated)
Expo attendees try out multiplayer Commodore 64 game
Grab a moist towelette for some hot diskette unboxing
ScanLife: Barcode scanning for the 21st Century and beyond
The Japanese can even rest in peace eco-friendly
Samsung Use Your Instinct Contest

The three heavy-hitters have already reviewed the iPhone and were all, unsurprisingly, pleasantly surprised. Baig likes GPS and the 2.0 update. He couldn’t get 3G everywhere, which is a huge issue for some users.

Pogue has been rolling in a field of iPhones for months now and he really likes it… except the 3G part.

There is, however, a catch: you don’t get that speed or those features unless you’re in one of AT&T’s 3G network areas — and there aren’t many of them.

Finally, Mossberg says the battery is hitting about 4 hours with 3G running, which is pretty paltry. Hmmm… the 3G in iPhone 3G is what’s holding the bugger back. Maybe we should all go back to EDGE.

Simply input your current monthly bill, minutes you currently use, number of lines, the number of text messages you log and data usage along with your zip code and Billshrink does all the math for you. There’s an option to import your actual bill that should garner the best results. It’s a relatively easy process and eliminates the number crunching you’ll have to endure yourself which is nice. I currently spend roughly $80/month with T-Mobile for my BlackBerry Curve with unlimited everything and by switching I’d be paying $156 extra per year. An extra $13/month. Psshh. That’s a drop in the bucket. A few caveats apply, though. I lose my unlimited nights and weekends and get 5,000 instead, but I rarely come close to going over. And there are roll over minutes with AT&T. Everyone’s situation is obviously different and this is not meant to reflect the price of the iPhone, so let’s not get into that spat again. It’s not too shabby, actually.

The first pocket-watch with a phone complication

• Bi-directionnal hour display dedicated to time
• Chronograph measuring the 1/100th of a second, with a Laptimer function
• Perpetual calendar
• Countdown
• World clock
• Alarm

TAG Heuer was born in 1860 in Saint Imier, Switzerland, with its pocket watch and with the MERIDIIST we finally have today TAG Heuer’s pocket watch of the 21st century.

It is exceptional to have a revolutionary pocket watch 148 years after, revolutionary because it is displaying time differently, a digital time, it is also a perpetual calendar but above all it is a time which allows communicating globally, and all that is the MERIDIIST pocket watch.

Subtle blend of

- Function with impeccable performance
- High Ergonomy
- Iconic Design
- Perfect Execution inherited from 150 years of Swiss watchmaking experience

Function with impeccable performance

Made to communicate
- 28 days autonomy, 7 hours communication
- State of the art acoustic – Unique combination of Sound processing and mechanical acoustic chamber design
- To ensure the best reception possible, TAG Heuer optimized through 5 prototypes and over 200 engineering hours the sensitivity of the antenna.

High Ergonomics

- Unique Secondary Top Screen
To address time and incoming calls

- TAG Heuer Side Switch
To politely reject calls, to reverse time and launch 1/100th of sec. chronograph

- Mechanical Sliding Camera Shutter
To trigger automatically the preview mode

- Simple User Interface
Start up menu reduced to five entries/Graphical pure renderings

- All in One USB Plug
To recharge from Mains, Computer and exchange data

Iconic Design

Designed for Individuals
Curved, straight lines and angles emphasizing Strenght and Beauty
Inspired from Microsplit and Monaco products

Outside of fashion and ephemeral styles
316L watchmaking steel
60.5 carats of Sapphire crystal glass

Elegance and refinement
A new way of behaving with time and communication

Through the use of two unique design features – the dual display screens and the TAG Heuer switch, which allow for discreet checking of the time and call management – it endows its owner with the ability, for the first time, to use their communication instrument in the elegant and refined manner befitting of their true personality.

Swiss watchmaking experience

No Compromise for Quality

- A project launched 5 years ago and developed since 3 years (a usual time frame in complicate horology product development)
- 57 homologation and quality tests (almost all the tests endured by a TAG Heuer watch except non adequate like water resistance)
- 430 components sourced from the best suppliers (as no obligation to buy to a unique mobile constructor)
- Hand assembled in a dedicated workshop
- Buttons assembly and perfect adjustment is ten times more complex than a chronograph which has only two buttons, the MERIDIIST has 20 buttons.
- Watchmaking materials

The perfect cosmopolitan travelling companion, uniting formal purity with functional perfection, the MERIDIIST will change the way you communicate forever

• Swiss engineered and hand assembled from 430 components
• Constructed from corrosion-resistant, watch making 316L steel
• Unscratchable 60.5 carats sapphire crystal dual displays
• Front independent time unit
• 28 days power reserve
• 7 hours of talktime

A timeless iconic design for a unique communication instrument

If you have a .Mac account you can easily add your me.com account to your mail reader right now. Create a new IMAP account and follow these steps:

1. Set your incoming mail server to imap.me.com. Use SSL. Use your .Mac login information.

2. Set your outgoing server to smtp.me.com. Use SSL. Use your .Mac login information.
3. Save. That’s it. Now you’re a member of the Me generation.

This should be the same for most mail applications, including phones that support IMAP. You can safely remove your old .Mac account as all of your emails will be duplicated.

OMG OMG SOMEONE IN PORTUGAL GOT THIS OMG! IT HAS A SIM REMOVAL TOOL! OMG OMG! PEOPLE THINK IT’S FAKE! OMG! OMG!

Just got word from Samsung that we’re good to go on our “Use Your Instinct” Haiku contest. Every week we’ll be giving away a cool Samsung phone culminating in the Samsung Instinct!

We begin our contest this week gunning for the M520. The haiku should focus on hearing and must be tweeted to UseYourInstinct. We will close entries for this week at noon on Tuesday, July 15.

What is a haiku? Here’s an example. It’s a short poem of three lines consiting of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables.
For example:

The M520
doesn’t ring. It reminds me
that I’m a big nerd.

Read on for the rules.

Contest Rules:
1) Write a haiku about the sense of touch, sight or hearing using the traditional 5 syllable/7 sylllable/5 syllable formatc
2) Keep the entries clean. Haikus that include foul language will be deleted from the contest and will not be eligible to win.
3) Twitter (Tweet) the Entry to UseYourInstinct. If you’re not part of Twitter, simply create a login. While you’re there add CrunchGear, John B, and Nicholas, and Doug.

You can Tweet the entry by typing this into Twitter:

@useyourinstinct Whitecaps on the bay: /A broken signboard banging/ In the April wind.

This uses an example haiku by Richard Wright. You should simply type @useyourinstinct [your haiku here].

Your tweet may not appear immediately. Our bot only updates once an hour.

3) Make it creative. The most humorous and clever haikus will be most likely to win a free Samsung Instinct, Ace or M520

Contest Length/Prize Information: The contest runs from July 8 until July 28. One entry each week from the sense of touch, sight and hearing wins
Number of Entries: Participants can enter as many times as they want, but can only win one prize. CrunchGear Staff will pick the winners each week.

Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, an popular alternative filesystem, led Oakland, CA police to his murdered wife’s body yesterday afternoon. Nina Reiser disappeared on September 3, 2006 and no murder weapon or body were found. Reiser’s case lasted six months and it is believed that he brought the police to the body in order to bargain for a reduced sentence.

“It was difficult to reach the body,” Dubois continued. “There were steep hills involved. It wasn’t as bad going down it turned out, but we had to use ropes to get back up. It was an arduous process, and a difficult emotional trip for Hans Reiser. Very difficult.”

Reiser’s admission closes one of the oddest and most discussed crimes in open source hackerdom. “Admissions” of guilt were even found in the ReiserFS code and open source supporters held that Reiser was innocent.

A handful of lucky game journo’s had the distinct pleasure of playing single player and multiplayer GoW2 last week whilst listening to Cliff Bleszinski explain what the Epic team has done with the hottest game to launch this year for Xbox 360. I’m super jealous. The lucky few got to play the following multiplayer maps along with others they aren’t allowed to speak about until after E3: Gridlock 2.0, Security and River.

I’ve pasted in a few tidbits from Tom’s review over at Team Xbox.

In the last game, when two gamers encounter each other with the chainsaw attachment on their Lancers, the outcome of who won that head to head battle was randomly chosen if both people hit the button at the same time. Now you actually get a little arm-wrestling type mini game, where you have to hammer on the B button really quickly to fight the enemy back and cut him in half.
In Gears 2 you can stick grenades to almost anything, creating a simple proximity mine that goes off when an enemy walks by. As long as you have friendly fire turned off, it won’t go off on anyone else.
You can stick grenades all over a choke point on a map, hoping someone will trigger it as they fight through. But if you use poison gas grenades you create a much bigger and longer lasting obstacle for your opponents to get through. Grenades also cause a concussive blast now too which can knock a player down or even over something.

Now you have a variety of different finishing moves, some weapon specific, all of them completely brutal. When knocked down you can actually try and crawl away now though, and if you can survive long enough you can even revive yourself. But if you come up on someone who’s down, do one of the following: you can hit X for the good old fashioned curb stomp, B for the weapon specific finisher (i.e. if you have a shotgun, you’ll swing in like a golf club at an enemy’s head) or Y for a special beatdown animation that’s different for different characters.

The other interesting addition to the gameplay is bullet stopping power. The designers at Epic always wanted people to play the game the way they designed it: taking cover, running low, flanking enemies, etc. But as many will tell you, it doesn’t always work out that way in multiplayer. Gamers play the way they want t play, and will charge at you willy-nilly and it used to work. To counter that they have instituted stopping power into the bullets. Each round you shoot will slow an enemy a little, and a steady stream of lead can slow him down to a crawl. Should help against those people that love melee attacks too much.

Playing over Party system has been included in GoW2.

Want to know about the three game modes they played?

Guardian

Bleszinski described this as sort of like “Assassination 2.0. Both teams have one “leader” who is armed just like a real player – he’s not some dude in an El Presidente uniform holding a crowbar. But even though the leader is just another player (and will cycle equally through your team) if he dies, it’s bad news for your team. As long as your leader is alive, his escorts will continue to respawn, keeping up the fight. So teams have to strike a balance tactically between guarding the leader and hunting down the enemy leader, making for some interesting team play concepts.

Playing four on four, a lot of the players in our session played one of a couple ways. Some people stashed the leader away in well covered position, with grenades planted on the walls and obstacles leading up to his hidden position. Other teams were more brash and just kept all of their players together and stayed mobile. This often worked for two reasons. Staying mobile meant they usually got to the better weapon pickups more quickly, and if they ran into anyone along the way, leader or not, they rolled in force.

This mode really showed off the advantages of the new tactical command (or Tac/Com) system that gives you information on the location of your teammates. In Guardian mode you always see the location of the enemy leader in an icon in the upper left corner of your HUD that has a rotating arrow on it that always points in his direction. But if you want to see where your leader is, as well as the rest of you squad, you just have to hit the left bumper button and icons with rotating arrows pop up for all of them. A very useful tool when your leader is under attack.

Submission (Meat Flag)

There is something really charming and funny about playing Submission Mode, colloquially called “Meat Flag”. The description is simple: single-flag CTF with two teams, the flag is a dude. But here’s where it gets good: he has a weapon and he doesn’t want you to capture him, regardless if you’re C.O.G. or Locust. So you have to run up to him, knock him out, then grab him in a choke hold and slowly back your way to your team’s capture zone.

One of the new levels that we played this mode on - entitled Security - had an added wrinkle. The capture zones that each team had to return the hostage to were behind laser barriers that would instantly kill you if you tried to walk through them. Watch your step. There’s a button to take the shields down for a certain period of time (not long, maybe 30 seconds) but when we were playing it up at Microsoft, the team I was playing with was having a hard time finding the button. We could see one inside the gate, but since there was no other way of entry behind the beams (trust me, I looked. A lot.) it was obvious there had to be one somewhere else. So I sent my mates out to find it while I stood by the gate. You see, I had the meat flag and I was waiting by the gate with just my pistol and some dude in a headlock. Believe it or not, I killed six incoming enemies over the next couple of minutes (my teammates were having a really hard time finding the button), without losing control of my prize. Even two at one time when I shot the propane tank at their feet. Eventually, I ran out of bullets and had to find more. I saw some on the ground but realized I couldn’t pick them up while I had homeboy “in the clinch”. So I let him go, quickly grabbed the ammo, knocked him out with the but of my shotgun because he was already getting ornery, then grabbed him real quick again, backed into a corner and waited for more bad guys and screamed at my team to find that damn button. Nice.

Wingman

Everyone loves deathmatch or free for all modes and probably always will. There’s something about the lone wolf mentality in that. But Gears of War is a game where your character is meant to always be part of a group. You know, for the flanking and the reviving of buddies and stuff. So what’s the least amount of teammates an anti-social gamer would have to put up with? Just one.

He’s your wingman, and he looks just like you. So you’ll have teams of two Dom’s vs. two Theron Guards vs. two Coles, etc. May not sound that revolutionary, but it was a ton of fun. It forces players to stick together and think together. You’ve gotta help out your teammate if he falls, or put together a couple of cris-crossing firing lanes to eviscerate the competition. Somehow it still feels as urgent as traditional deathmatch, just with an armed shadow.

Some other new additions to Gears of War 2 that we can talk about at the moment include a greatly improved spectator mode that you can view after you’ve been killed. There are multiple cams to play with including the battle cam which lets you swing quickly around to fixed cameras that loop around the arena, quickly finding the action. There will also be a screenshot function built into this and an accompanying photo edit mode for making them look more awesome before you share them with your friends.
Considering how good the engine looks this time around, you might want to take a ton of them. Because we’re so accustomed to the great graphics and engine work that Epic does with their Unreal technology, you might be underwhelmed at first glance. Sure, it looks great, but I was expecting it to. Try holding it up to the original game though and you’ll notice how much more detailed the characters and the world around you are. A lot of work has been done on the lighting as well as the physics of how bodies react. That includes the way they fall apart when you cut them in half. Sweet.

There’s still a ton of stuff to talk about when it comes to Gears of War 2 multiplayer, but you’re going to have to wait until E3 time. Hey it’s only next week, and it’s very much worth it. But based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s obvious that Epic Games is putting a lot more attention into the multiplayer capabilities. That’s something they didn’t do in the first game, choosing to focus on other elements. But the effort is welcome though; we could always use another awesome multiplayer game.

Luckily he acknowledges his hypocrisy at the end.

First of all, the phone costs a freaking small fortune unless you go with their most expensive plan. And if you go with their most expensive plan, it costs a goddamn mint! The prices should be approximated to about 75% of their NZ amount, but even so you’re looking at a nearly $200 per month cell phone plan, people. This can’t be happening. [thanks for the tip, Ben]

Yeah, I know the headline says $200 and it’s really $188. Just wait a month for our dollar to drop another couple points, you pedant! $200 pops, people!

Nokia sent me this clever package with a BATMANG! themed 6205 flip phone on Verizon. Not much to say except BATMANG!

Extra credit - Figure out which comedian did the original “BATMANG!” bit back in 1990 or whenever the first Batman came out. I remember seeing it on Comedy Central way back when and can’t for the life of me remember it.

First we have the Samsung Access, a squat HSDPA which costs $199 after $100 rebate. It’s got Mobile Email and IM as well as Video Share. Hot!

Next we’ve got the LG Vu which all of us at CG actually liked. I personally enjoyed the Mobile TV and the form factor is actually quite iPhone-ish.

Then we have the Palm Treo 750w. Palm. Windows Mobile. Next.

Finally, we have the Motorola MOTO Z9. Why this thing costs $199 is anyone’s guess but if you’re 15 and like the Jonas Brothers, this is probably the phone for you.

So yes, there were very few compelling reasons to switch to AT&T before Steve Jobs agreed to drop his 3G lifeboat into Ma Bell’s tainted afterbirth. In short, the iPhone is the best thing to happen to any carrier, be it AT&T or Rogers, simply because of the beatific halo that is cast by the device.

Nokia’s N-Series is an odd amalgam of high-tech and low, melding some of the best smartphone technology with phones that haven’t changed much since the first proto-Finns heaved their bark boats onto the rocky beaches of Soumenlinna and began fashioning crude cellphones out of cork and shale.

Much has changed about the Nokia line over the years but all of the phones are refreshingly familiar. Whether they are clamshells, candybars, or sliders the buttons are always in the same place, the maddening power switch is still at the top, and the old menu-asterisk unlock code is still in force, ensuring your phone will never unlock itself under any circumstances. Nokia knows how to make good phones.

Sadly, however, the latest N-series N78 didn’t quite grab me the way its older siblings like the N95 did. Was it the form factor? The speed? The size?

The N78 is a standard candybar with a keypad and not much else in the way of input devices. It is a quad-band G.S.M. phone with HSDPA support and has a 2.4-inch screen. It weighs 3.5 ounces and comes in piano black.

The front screen is backlit and when the phone is locked or off it is almost featureless except for a silver square on the front. When activated you see the numbers and icons lit with white LEDs and you come to understand that the odd raised bumps on the front are actually buttons. Here is our first snag.

The buttons are very small. You can get used to them, but the face is cramped when the numbers and icons are lit and hard to navigate. Nokia put the menu botton on the lower left side of the phone and the hang-up and end-call buttons are also oddly placed. Too many times did I try to answer a call and actually hit the “options” button which gave me a second menu to answer the call. It was as if I couldn’t hit the green answer button.

The 3.5-megapixel camera is excellent and the version of Symbian running on this phone is much improved over even last year’s version. Everything was very peppy and browsing was a pleasure. It has GPS and Wi-Fi built-in and along with video and music playback.

Call quality was quite odd. Either the call was too loud - some incoming calls began to hurt after the other party began talking and I had to turn them down immediately, others kind of petered out and I had to turn the volume back up. The sound was simply inconsistent. Music playback was clear through headphones and the built-in speaker. I just couldn’t figure out what was up with the call quality.

Overall the N78 is more of the same. It’s a beautiful phone and folks who enjoy T9 typing and Symbian’s very specific learning curve will probably enjoy this phone. One little perk I especially liked was the Internet radio implementation. It worked flawlessly and in minutes I was able to stream live radio from the Uzbek provinces without trouble. It also has an even cooler FM transmitter function for transmitting the audio straight to a standard radio. My problems were only with the keys and the call quality and not the rest of the phone features.

I prefer Nokia’s N95 because it has more heft and more active buttons. The slide-out keypad and media functions hide things I’d like to see hidden and reveal them at opportune times. The N78 is a high-concept phone with its heart on its sleeve. Like an emo band, the dark lines and backlights add a sense of style to the traditionally staid N-Series but the $450 price tag should give Nokia fans a pause. The N78 can be aggravating but like all Nokia products it’s still better than 98% of phones out there today.

Dear Diary,

It is day one of the iPhone line and our small team, the Who Farm, has made base camp at the Apple store on 5th Avenue. The natives have thus far been curious and friendly, offering us something called “hotter dogs” and asking us to go “fugourselves” when we inquired as to why they were not composting. As environmental activists, it’s important to spread our mission as widely as possible and we hope by sitting around in front of a big glass cube we’ll turn this entire encampment into a shining example of eco-friendly line-sitting.

What is our goal? Put simply, to transform the White House lawn into an organic farm. Put less simply:

* We will spend a lot of time in a great public space, around the clock.
* We will use mobile solar power from Solar1.
* We will drink NYC’s renowned tap water.
* We will have local healthy food (especially Apples) delivered by our community gardener friends, Greenmarket farmers, and locavore restauranteurs via bicycles and pedicabs.
* We will compost our foodscraps, to help sustain our fragile soil.
* And most importantly, we will talk to whoever happens to stop by about local organic farming as a critical element to sustainable healthy living, food security, youth education, and climate change mitigation.

We have many theme songs, among them:

* The Longest Time by Billy Joel,
* La Isla Bonita by Madonna,
* Livin’ on a Prayer by Jon Bon Jovi,
* Rockin’ in the Free World by Neil Young,
* Living in the Promised Land by Willie Nelson,
* Across the Universe by the Beatles and also Fiona Apple, and
* Feeling Groovy (59th Street Bridge Song) by Simon and Garfunkel.

Our theme album is:

* More Songs about Buildings and Food by The Talking Heads.

By the way, we are not just buying iPhones for ourselves. We will also purchase iPhones for Barack Obama and John McCain, because the world needs an American president to “think different!”

We’re doing it the only way we know how: by looking like douches in New York. While others would be quietly tending organic farms on Long Island in hopes of selling good produce at good prices at greenmarkets, we have decided to bring our smelly little box of compost with us (shown above) and read some books about re-greening the planet. Then we’ll go home to our Brooklyn apartments where we will obsess over Henry Miller books until we all get jobs at Lehman Brothers and blow this green crap out the window.

Earth makes a terrible racket
Germany invests $47 billion in offshore wind farms
Seed bombs: Make the world greener while forcing your philosophy on others
Robots that learn
Mega Man 9 to be released on WiiWare, PSN, and XBLA

Drones use AI, not GPS, to frag you
Seed bombs: Make the world greener while forcing your philosophy on others
Incredibly tiny RC helicopter: prototype for Dune Hunter-Killer?
Tokyoflash SPACE WATCH!
Play your Nintendo DS like a Jedi with a Lightsaber Stylus

Will Davies, Valerie and I sat down in one of the modeling rooms for about three hours and went through the design process from brainstorming to building on one of the CAD machines. I conveyed my thoughts to Will and sketched a few ideas out in the RDD journal (all Dyson engineers are issued a journal that becomes property of Dyson) that was issued to me at the beginning of the day. Upon my departure from Malmesbury the journal was confiscated and filed into the library of journals.

Anyway, as I said before, we had about three hours to design and submit our prototype so that it could be built in the 3D modeling machine overnight. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to film the printing machine in action because of what was being built in it at the time. It was really, really cool. Essentially, the designs are uploaded to the machine and it begins to ‘print out’ whatever it was that you uploaded. There are two materials that it lays down and unfortunately I made the mistake of taking all my notes in the RDD journal, so I can’t tell you exactly what they were at the moment. The main compound is a soft plastic and around that is a gel-like material that gives the actual device support while it’s being printed and hardens. The printer basically works like any other printer you’ve seen. It slides across from side-to-side and deposits the material as it goes. My design had to be submitted by 4:30 and by 10AM the next day it was ready to go. After it’s done printing, one of the engineers scraped away the gel-like material and put it through an acid wash and then a quick blow dry to remove any remaining particles.

How did I design it? I thought about the one place that collects the most dust and dirt in my apartment and just looked down at my keyboard. Then I thought about other applications for it. I thought that PC owners would want the ability to vacuum the back of their PC case, so I added a bit of flexibility to it.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I present to you the CrunchGear Dyson Root 6 attachment. We have the only prototype and it will likely remain that way. Heh.

Of course, we had some issues with it, but they weren’t realized until after the fact. There were little nubbins inside the swivel to lock the attachment between it’s 180 degree angle and 45 degree tilt that were placed incorrectly in CAD, so they didn’t exactly come out right, hence the loosey gooseyness of it. But we had less than three hours for the entire process. There also wasn’t enough time to add bristles at the end. Overall, I can say that I’m the proud owner of a one-of-a-kind Dyson prototype. I just hope they don’t make my design better and start selling it. Heh.