Technewsbuzz.com

Sure, you read reviews and take recommendations from friends before you buy a new cellphone, but have you ever stopped to consider what the inventor of the cellphone uses on a daily basis? C-SPAN has, and recently took the opportunity to ask the man himself, Marty Cooper, that very question during a wide-ranging interview. While Cooper said that he has used an iPhone previously, he recently passed it on to his grandson in favor of a Motorola Droid , which he says he chose because he wanted to get more experience with Android. But that’s not all, Cooper also revealed that he…

If you’ve seen G-Tec’s thought control cap being used to control a Second Life avatar, play a game of Pong , or make music in an orchestral setting, you probably wondered when the thing would become available for less frivolous pursuits (to help the disabled communicate, for starters). Well, it looks like that day is close at hand: With the brand name Intendix, the €9000 (about $12,250) brain-computer interface gives you everything you need to send text messages with brain activity alone via EEG cap. According to the company, most people achieve five to ten characters per minute the first time they use the thing, with some folks eventually typing as fast…

So here’s a deal, but it’s a bit odd. The Toshiba R600 is advertised as being Toshiba’s ultimate notebook, and for the price it better be. You can buy it from Toshiba’s website for $2,099 for the base model which includes a 160GB hard drive, 3GB of RAM, and a 12.1″ screen, and comes standard with Windows 7. But that’s not the deal. If you don’t want to use Windows 7, and would prefer OpenSolaris, you can buy the exact same machine for $500 less . Odd, I know. And it definitely makes you wonder exactly how much you’re paying for that copy of Windows 7 Starter. [Thanks to Chris for the tip]

Remember the $200 smartbook reference design that we saw at CES this year? Well, it’s back, it’s holding on to that same price and 7-inch enclosure, but this time it’s also showing off an expanded OS compatibility. Adapting the open source Chromium OS and another Linux variant to the ARM architecture of the prototype device was apparently not much of a hurdle for Freescale, who has an Android option in the works as well and claims to be just optimizing and enhancing the user experience at this point. Presumably one of the enhancements will be the installation of a capacitive touchscreen as the present demonstration requires either a mouse and keyboard or a resistive torture test to operate, but we’ll accept the company’s explanation that this is …

If Dell’s Vostro V13 was Batman’s laptop , it looks like the new Vostro 3000 series might just be Bruce Wayne’s. They’re portable, powerful, and sleek rigs for professionals. But are they a value play, or a luxury item? That’s the big unanswered question right now, though we’ll know soon enough; they go on sale today in the US. If the pricing is in line with the V13, though, these could be worth a closer look. The Vostro 3300 , 3400, 3500, and 3700 range from 13-inches to 17-inches, and all offer Core i3 and Core i5 processor options. For true juiceheads, the 17-inch Vostro 3700 even includes a Core i7 Quad Core option. Even better: a discrete graphics option. You can add an Nvidia Geforce 310M 512MB graphics card to the 3300-3500, …

Here’s a little spicy rumor for you Palm fans on this tranquil Sunday: according to TopTongueBarry who claims to work for AT&T , his company has just finished certification tests with GSM flavors of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus ahead of a possible April 26th launch — a date not far from what we’ve heard earlier . However, the bigger news from Barry is that the big A will soon be testing a third mysterious webOS device by the name of Palm Elan, which may greet us mere mortals on May 10th (but possibly in Europe first). Another forum member Shadow-360 also dug up some cached pages that claimed to have accessories for the non-…

AT&T’s preaching about the mucho dinero it’s dropping into renovating its network to pretty much anyone who’ll listen these days, and a veritable cornucopia of press releases this week start to go into detail on some of the upgrades we’ll be seeing over the course of 2010. We’re counting at least a dozen here, covering everything from New York City to Florida to Oklahoma, but the message is basically the same in every one: more cell sites, more 3G coverage, more backhaul. AT&T liberally pimps its nine-figure investments in most states over the past several years, too — but of course, phones need spectrum to communicate, not blank checks and promises. Let’s see…

Alright, pardon our conjecture here, but we think we’re on to something. A Motorola just flew through FCC certification with ID IHDP56KV1 and model name “i1″ featuring iDEN plus Bluetooth 2.1 and WiFi — in other words, this’ll almost certainly be coming to Sprint Direct Connect. Remember that rumored Opus One with Android for iDEN? Yeah, well, “i1″ is a pretty notable, stand-out model name if you ask us — and it’s not every day that you see an iDEN device with WiFi, suggesting this’ll be a smartphone. Do a little hand-waving and liberal dot-connecting and you have a reasonable assumption that the Opus One will be coming to market as the i1 — and with FCC certification under their…

Location-based services have finally melted our brains to the point where we’re completely useless without immediate and constant access to Google Maps or a reasonable facsimile — we couldn’t fold a paper map if we tried, and even if we could, we’d spend an hour looking for the pulsing blue dot. That’s why we’re so delighted to hear that AT&T has finally outed its very first GPS-enabled USB modem, the USBConnect Velocity from Option, that includes a so-called Option GPS Control Panel for injecting your whereabouts into popular services like Yahoo and Bing ( Google, curiously, isn’t mentioned ). The other newbie…

Most of us don’t think twice about lugging a $2000 object to a public place and then leaving it for five minutes to grab a coffee refill — with no other assurance that it won’t be stolen than that there are other people around. I’ve started being a bit more careful since laptop theft has gone up around here, but it’s just as easy to forget that laptop rustlers don’t just hang out in cafes. And if they’re savvy, they may even employ wireless signal trackers to pinpoint the location of laptops hidden under car …