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Despite one of the worst economic climates in decades, consumer spending on Black Friday hit $10.6 billion, 3% higher than the day after Thanksgiving in 2007, according to researcher ShopperTrak.

Gadgets accounted for nine of the top 10 most popular Black Friday products, PriceGrabber said.

Data from PriceGrabber.com shows that online consumers are taking advantage of promotions on popular electronics, including LCD and plasma TVs, Blu-ray disc players, digital SLR cameras, laptops and video game consoles.

The most popular products on Black Friday:

1. Nintendo Wii Console
2. Ugg Australia ‘Classic Short’ Boot (how about that!)
3. Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-Ray Disc Player
4. Samsung LN52A650 52″ LCD TV
5. Nintendo Wii Fit
6. Panasonic TH-42PX80U 42″ Plasma TV
7. Sennheiser HD 555 Headphones
8. Canon EOS Rebel XSi Black SLR Digital Camera Kit
9. Acer Aspire One AOA110-1295 Notebook
10. Canon PowerShot A590 IS Black Digital Camera

And while we are at it, here are the Top 10 categories and percent growth over Black Friday 2007:

1. Women’s Boots - 203%
2. Watches - 202%
3. Blu-ray/HD-DVD Players - 147%
4. Women’s Sleep & Lounge Wear - 415%
5. Games &amp Puzzles - 151%
6. Women′s Jackets - 110%
7. Music - 96%
8. Headphones - 103%
9. Women’s Dresses - 107%
10. Women’s Casual Shoes - 143%

More at PriceGrabber.com and The Washington Post.

Tags: acer, black friday, canon, nintendo, panasonic, samsung, sennheiser, sony

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Displays

Nothing much to phone home over here, just a run-of-the-mill 22-incher with a mighty respectable WUXGA (1,920 x 1,200) resolution. The Buffalo FTD-HD2232HSR/BK also boasts a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 300cd/m2 brightness, HDCP-compatible DVI port, 170-degree viewing angles and an “ECO” mode that’ll save energy… somehow. Word on the street has it landing here shortly for around €280 ($390).

[Via CrunchGear]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Portable Audio

Creative got a bit more creative with the ZEN Mosaic’s name since we spotted it in Singapore last month, but the freshly rechristened ZEN Mozaic is now available (and in stock, just to be exceptionally clear) in the US of A for your purchasing pleasure. For those seeking a brief refresher, here goes: there’s a 1.8-inch display (160 x 128 resolution), up to 36 hours of audio playback / 5 hours of video playback, support for MP3 / WAV / WMA / JPEG / BMP files, a 5-band custom equalizer, calender / contacts / task list and USB 2.0 connectivity. The oddly designed DAP can be procured in both 2GB and 4GB flavors (but only in black, at least for now), with the former going for $59.99 and the latter $79.99.

[Thanks, Oscar]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Creative’s got yet another on the way: the Zen Mosaic, which will have a 1.8-inch display, 2, 4, or 8GB capacities, FM tuner, speakers, MP3 / WMA / WAV / Audible codec support, and 32 hours of battery life. They’re apparently starting in Singapore and working their way over, but they shouldn’t top $200 when they’re eventually announced for the US.

[Thanks, Rube]

Read - Announced details on the player [Via EpiZenter]
Read - First hands-on

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Original post by Ryan Block

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Not a ton’s changed with Creative’s ZEN X-Fi — which we all well know at this point — so for right now we’re just paying closer attention to its innards all broken out like a science fair project. Careful, the teardown link below contains graphic representations of disrobed consumer electronics.

[Thanks, Josh and Mindy]

Read - Zen X-Fi teardown
Read - Anything But iPod’s review
Read - Pocketables review

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Original post by Ryan Block

Filed under: Peripherals

iKey’s done this whole rugged keyboard thing a time or two before, so when it builds one meant to operate like a champ around environments laden with grease, you know it means business. The new line of Membrane keyboards — which arrives in a trio of flavors — boasts a stainless steel enclosure, or customers looking to integrate can snag the OEM edition and do as they please. The board possesses a “hard-coated, textured, polyester film that is more rugged than industrial silicone rubber keypads,” and it’s designed to withstand “directed hose water, disinfectants and environmental contaminants.” Seems as though you’ll have to phone up iKey to find out what this Apocalypse-approved device will run you, but it should get along quite well with that impenetrable Iron Drive of yours.

[Via Coolest-Gadgets]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Seems that Blu-ray sales have not taken off, despite the all-but-official demise of HD DVD. You can read more at Ars Technica here.

Really hard not to see why, when prices remain high and supply remains low — besides, how many copies of the same movie in different formats do you need?

Am sure many of us still have video copies of the DVDs stuck in our closet, taking up space and being considered for sale at a pittance on eBay …

Now through in a sluggish economy, and Blu-ray may be the DAT of the 21st Century — another Sony product that hit the market at the wrong time.

Tags: Blu-ray, DAT, DVD, HD-DVD, Sony, video

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Networking

Although we just heard that Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0 rollout was on track for 2009, folks in the Twin Cities region now have exclusive bragging rights for an undisclosed window of time. Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota have become the first markets to have access to an all new “extreme″ broadband (or wideband, as it were) connection, which promises 50Mbps down / 5Mbps up. As expected, the carrier isn’t being modest about the launch, claiming that users can suck down a 4GB HD movie “in about ten minutes,” compared to “more than six hours” on a 1.5Mbps DSL connection. The newfound speed won’t come cheap — for residential users, look to lay down $149.95 per month for the privilege. Even if you aren’t springing for the good stuff, current customers in the area will have their existing broadband connections hastened gratis, with 6Mbps / 384Kbps users moving up to 1Mbps uploads and 8Mbps / 768Kbps users seeing 2Mbps uploads. Kudos, Twin Cities — you just made the rest of America sick with envy.

[Image courtesy of TheRedWoodMotel]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals

Okay, raise your hands if the first thing you thought when you heard about IOGEAR’s Germ Free Wireless Laser Mouse was “That probably uses an unregistered pesticide that warrants government involvement.” Yeah, that’s what we thought — but it appears some freak concerned citizen had your best interests in mind, because the EPA just fined IOGEAR $208,000 based on a tip that the company’s Germ Free keyboard and mice peripherals were violating the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. Apparently no one ever verified that the titanium dioxide and silver nanoparticle compound on the mice is actually effective at killing nasties, and even if it is, it’s illegal to sell pesticides without Uncle Sam’s blessing. IOGEAR’s stopped claiming that the products kill germs and forked over the cash, but it’s not clear if the products still have the coating on them. Either way, you should probably start washing your hands more, Mr. Filthy.

[Via Nanotech Project]

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Original post by Nilay Patel

The Asterisk.org development team just released Asterisk 1.6.0-beta5. According to the announcement with beta5 of 1.6.0 the feature-set is frozen. One thing still missing is "caller name screening" where you can screen the call and accept/reject the call. I′d also like to see&nbsp"voicemail call screening", which would allow me to screen a caller leaving a message and pull them out. Here’s the announcement according to Asterisk.org:

In addition to a number of bug fixes, the following new features have been added since betώ:

• The SMDI interface in Asterisk has been reworked to fix a number of issues as well as add some new features. SMDI message information is now accessed in the dialplan using some new dialplan functions. New options have been added to map Asterisk voicemail boxes to SMDI station IDs. Also, MWI will now properly be sent for systems that have some external interface modifying voicemail boxes, such as a web interface, or with an email client in the case of IMAP storage.
• The Postgres CDR module now supports some of the features of cdr_adaptive_odbc. Specifically, you may add additional columns into the table and they will be set, if you set the corresponding CDR variable name. Also, if you omit columns in your database table, those fields will be silently skipped when inserting the record.
• The ResetCDR application now has an ‘e’ option that re-enables the CDR if it has been disabled using the NoCDR option.
• A new CLI command, "devstate change", has been added which allows you to change the state of a Custom device. Custom device states were previously only settable by using the DEVICE_STATE() dialplan function.
• The Originate manager action now has its own permission level called originate. Also, if you want this action to be able to execute applications that call out to a subshell, it requires the system privilege, as well. These changes were made to enhance the security of the manager interface.

For a full list of features that have been introduced from Asterisk 1.4 to Asterisk 1.6.0, see the following file:

• http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.6.0/CHANGES?view=markup

For a full list of changes to Asterisk 1.6.0 from beta4 to beta5, see the ChangeLog:

• http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-beta5/ChangeLog?view=markup

And if you’re really curious, you can view the full feature-set changes after the jump…

Continue reading Asterisk 1.6.0 betϏ…

Tags: Asterisk, Asterisk 1.6.0 beta5, IP-PBX, open source, VoIP

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Original post by nafiz

eldavojohn writes “On message boards, Linus Torvalds was explaining why NDISWrapper is not eligible to be released under the GPL even though the project claims to be. Linus remarked, “Ndiswrapper itself is *not* compatible with the GPL. Trying to claim that ndiswrapper somehow itself is GPL’d even though it then loads modules that aren’t is stupid and pointless. Clearly it just re-exports those GPLONLY functions to code that is *not* GPL’d.” This all sprung up with someone restricted NDISWrapper’s access to GPL-only symbols thereby breaking the utility. Linus merely replied that “If it loads non-GPL modules, it shouldn’t be able to use GPLONLY symbols.” As you may know, NDISWrapper implements Windows kernel API and then loads Windows binaries for a number of devices and runs them natively to avoid the cost and complication of emulation.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by CmdrTaco

thorwil writes “Brainstorm is a new site where everyone can submit and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. It’s inspired by Dell’s Ideastorm. By default, you see the ideas submitted by the community sorted by popularity. Each idea is accompanied by arrows so you can vote it up or down (you have to log in first). You can only click once per idea. So this is an easy way to submit ideas and see what people are really wanting.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Laptops

While its claim of being the “first” to offer an OS specifically designed for the latest crop of low-cost laptops and UMPCs may be a little dubious, the unfortunately-named Linpus is at least pretty quick to jump on the bandwagon. To that end, the company’s just let loose its Linpus Linux Lite OS, which it says will run just fine on laptops like the Eee PC and Cloudbook, or any other system with as little as a 500MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM and 512MB of storage. Just as importantly, the OS is also apparently designed with low-res 7-inch screens in mind, although as CLUMPC points out, it doesn′t go so far as to include support for little things like built-in WiFi out of the box. Still, if you want to give it a shot, you can grab it now in the form of a Live CD direct from Linpus.

 

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Gaming

It’s only been a short while since we saw the first successful attempts at Wii homebrew, but things now look to have busted wide open, with hacks seemingly turning up left and right these days. Most notably, the folks from the GameCube Linux project have recently let loose a proof of concept Linux “mini-distro” that makes use of the now infamous Twilight Princess hack to turn the Wii into a tiny (and so far not very useful) Linux box. If that’s a bit too much you, however, you may be interested in some of the tamer homebrew fare that recently made its debut, including an MP3 player and, you guessed it, an SNES emulator. In related news, Nintendo also just pushed out an official updated to the Wii OS (version 3.2), but contrary to what the timing would suggest, it apparently doesn’t do anything to block you from getting your homebrew fix.

Read - GameCube Linux project
Read - TehSkeen, SNES emulator
Read - Wii News, Wii Mode Ṃ Player
Read - MaxConsole Forums, Wii Update 3.2

[Thanks to everyone who sent these in]

 

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Desktops

If you′re after a really, really low power, small footprint, generally inoffensive desktop solution, you probably can’t do better than the new Linutop 2. This miniscule, Xubuntu-based system runs on top of a 500MHz AMD Geode CPU, packs in 512MB of RAM, and 1GB of flash memory, you know, for applications and stuff. Of course, the draw here isn’t massive specs, but rather a tiny drain on energy, and a simple, cheap solution for people with basic computing needs. Amazingly, the Linutop 2 uses only 8 watts of power, and weighs a feather-light 20 ounces. The miniture box also has four USB ports, an ethernet jack, audio outs, and comes bundled with open source gems like AbiWord, Open Office, and your good buddy, Firefox. The little guy starts shipping on February 26th for &euro280, or about $412.

[Via LinuxDevices]

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky