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Here’s a fun tidbit we just learned from Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore: in order to focus Windows Phone 7 Series on the idea of best serving end users, the team actually created two fictional targets consumers named “Miles” and “Anna,” a pair of married 38-year old “life maximizers” who demand the most from their devices. Yes, it’s a little strange and hilariously specific on the surface — Anna just scaled back her PR job to part-time so she can take care of the kids! Miles like to take pictures and use Facebook to share them with his parents in Europe! — but it makes a certain …

Well, that was quick. Just weeks after hearing that Tesla would be nixing Roadster production prior to the world ending, it looks as if those planning to blow their life savings in the next 18 or so months took issue with the intentions. So much so, in fact, that Tesla has now “negotiated agreements with key suppliers that will increase total Roadster production by 40 percent and extend sales into 2012.” Better still, the iconic electric supercar will soon be hitting Australia and Asia, so even if you hit the relocate button in the next little while, you should still be covered should you choose to buy (or lease ) in. Tesla switches gears, plans to keep Roadster …

Usually when we hear the phrase “contract-free developer phone” the words “unlocked” and “GSM” follow shortly thereafter, but apparently Palm didn’t get the memo — it just announced discounted hardware prices for its devices, but they’re carrier-locked to Verizon and Sprint. Yeah, that’s a big sad face out of us — it’s not like Verizon’s going to give you a cheaper plan if you show up with a contract-free device. In fact, you might be better off picking up a $79 Pre on a Sprint contract from Amazon and just canceling after a year or so — the ETF will have been prorated to $120 by then, putting you way ahead of Palm’s $439 price tag. So much …

We’d already gotten word of HP’s new $40 million “Let’s Do Amazing” ad campaign earlier today , but the company has just now rolled out its first series of ads to give us some indication of how all that money is being spent. Somewhat curiously, for an ad campaign partly intended to reintroduce the HP brand to consumers, the ads stray pretty far beyond HP’s consumer products (including a trip to a UPS sorting facility and the Venetian’s IT department), but we do at least get to see Dr. Dre extol the benefits of HP Beats audio — not to mention a little beatboxing …

Target ’s announced it is launching a scannable mobile coupon program — the first of its kind. The opt-in program will provides Target shoppers with a customized webpage on their mobile phones, with all offers scannable at checkout via a single barcode. Target’s no stranger to innovative marketing — its gift cards are well known for their cute, gadgety ways — and while this new program is essentially a text message driven sale (meaning it could quickly become a mere annoyance), anything that minimizes our interactions with fellow humans gets our stamp of approval, so the ability to scan your own barcode at the register? Thumbs up. The full press release is after the break. Continue reading Target launches first scannable mobile…

Having filled our business laptop lust with a T410 undressing yesterday, today we’ve come across a comprehensive teardown of Alienware’s gamer-friendly M11x ultraportable. Touted as the world’s most powerful 11-inch notebook, this is certainly one of the most tightly packed, with the battery and CPU cooling solution taking up more than half of the real estate, while the hard drive, memory, and wireless modules leave just enough room for an asymmetric speaker arrangement. From this strategic view, the examination moves into a very finely detailed investigation of the onboard components, including the particulars of the heatpipe-equipped heatsink, the SU7300 CULV processor, and the GT 335M GPU from NVIDIA. The whole thing culminates with the weighing of all the…

Lenovo loves its red mousing nipple, Apple digs its aluminum and IBM adores those light pulses. Nearly two full years after we heard this very company touting breakthroughs in science thanks to a nanophotonic switch , in flies a similar technique from Yorktown Heights that could “greatly further energy efficient computing.” As the story goes, gurus at IBM have figured out how to replace electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that chat using pulses of light. The device is called a nanophotonic avalanche photodetector, and according to Dr. T.C. Chen, this kind of embedded optical interconnection makes the “prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level” …

Guess we don’t have to wait until MIX to have all our Windows Phone 7 Series questions answered! Microsoft’s Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox 360 with the Xbox gamepad. Interestingly, not only is the development cross-platform friendly, but the game itself (a simple Indiana Jones platformer was demoed) saves its place and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick up. Pretty impressive stuff, and while the words “Windows Phone 7 Series” weren’t spoken by Eric, the use of…

It seems to us that if you indulge in mobile video from time to time, you’re either lugging around a device with a decent display size (netbook, tablet, whatevs) or more likely than not you’re watching your Britain’s Got Talent! clips on a handset — either solution is obviously less than ideal. What if we told you that Motorola has filed a patent application for a “Reconfigurable Multiple-Screen Display”? This technology will essentially let you configure multiple devices for use as one big display: Instead of lugging around your Thinkpad or suffering the indignity of watching postage stamp-sized video on your Droid you can simply and conveniently carry four phones around. Why didn’t we think of…

Dreamcast? GameCube? Xbox? They’re cute and endearing to look back on now, because they really never stood a chance. Sony practically redefined what it meant to be dominant in a console generation with the PlayStation 2 , which was launched on March 4, 2000 in Japan (the US got it that October), went on to sell over 140 million units, and is still going strong. It’s strange to think that for what many people was their first DVD player turned out to be powerful enough to bring us the cinematic experiences of Shadow of the Colossus , God of War II and Final Fantasy XII , and enough of a kicker to make it into the latest round of Madden releases. Of course, its foray into online gaming took…