Tuxtops

Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm's next-gneration (Linux-based too) smartphone platform.

Geeks.com sent us in the Brookstone universal mini mp3 case for a review. Read on for more!

The Brookstone Mini MP3 case came in a gray color. It is a well-designed, beautiful case. When you open the case you will see a transparent plastic holder. This is where the mp3 player goes and stays securely, so when you later open the case, your player won't fall down. Through the transparent plastic you can operate the mp3 player as long as it doesn't use a touchscreen or iPod-like touch controls.

Speaking of safety, there is a nice plastic strap-and-pin closure which securely locks your player in the case. The rest of the case is rugged and pretty shock-resistant adding to the usability of the product.

There are several ways you can use the case with. Either with the included lanyard around your neck or hand, a D-ring that secures around your belt or bag, and an actual belt loop. The case is also pretty small and so it will easily fit on a pocket or a hand bag.

The case will fit the iPod Nano, the Creative Zen Micro, and the iPod Mini. In our tests it also fit the iRiver E10 and a bunch of Sandisk's mini players. If your player is really small, it will also fit and store your earbuds, while if your player's headphone-out is on the top of the player, you can playback music while the player is safely in the case.

Overall, this is a pretty versatile, secure, and pretty good-looking generic mp3 player case. It's especially a must buy if you own a no-name small mp3 player that has no accessories in the market. At $1.75, you can't possibly lose.

Rating: 9/10

Tiffen sent us in one of their most impressive filters for a review. The 52mm color grandient Sunrise filter, or as I call it, the "CSI:Miami filter".

The filter, which comes in a number of sizes, it has an orange & transparent gradient that transforms either sunrise or sunsets to a more colorful experience. These days it's easy to add "in post" such gradients using multi-track NLEs, but nothing beats the clean and authentic sensor image you get when you use a filter instead.

The filter allows you to rotate it, so this way the photo/videographer can decide which part of the image to intensify. We tested the filter during sundown, in San Frascisco. The results are very telling, both in the low-quality version we uploaded on YouTube and on the better quality PSP/iPhone version we uploaded here (11 MBs).

One interesting aspect of the Tiffen filters is how resilient they are. The evening we were shooting there was quite some wind and the filter fell on the concrete while we were trying to remove it from the camera. We were relieved to see that there was not a single scratch or break on the glass, which speaks volumes about the product's quality.

In conclusion, this is a great special effect filter, and it's the same kind of filter that the director of photography of CSI:Miami uses. If you are after similar breathtaking scenes (tutorial), that's the filter to get.

What we have here is the HTC TyTN II, or the Kaiser as it was known before the official announcement. This is the successor of the TyTN (which replaces the Wizard) bringing resemblance in the design, but moving the form-factor to the next level. After the upper part slides and the keyboard is revealed, the Display tweaks at an angle and gives a laptop-like view, which makes it more comfortable to use.

Forget the device itself. Google will announce next week that it has entered the market for Linux-based mobile phone operating systems or operating system software components, suggests a rumor story posted at device blog Engadget.

Except the normal phones and services that Nokia announced today (1, 2, 3, 4), they also let slip an iPhone-like device, possibly running Symbian S60 4.0-pre.

This site received a whole bunch of press photos for Nokia's announcement in London tomorrow, and decided to share with you. Supposedly there would be five phones all focused on entertainment. The N81 gaming phone, N95 music edition with 8GB memory built in, and XpressMusic series 5700, 5610 and 5310.

Linux smartphone pioneer E28 says one of its handsets supports VCC 7.0 (voice call continuity) when used with infrastructure equipment from NewStep Networks. The Linux-based E2832 handset is said to have completed interoperability testing with NewStep's Converged Services Node (CSN) equipment for enterprise and carrier networks.

Palm is expected to launch its first Linux-based smartphone in October, with the company likely to introduce more Linux models in the future, according to sources close to the company. Palm's new smartphone will be based on the Linux platform developed for consumer devices by Wind River Systems '“ a continuation of cooperation between the two companies following Palm's launch of its "mobile companion," the Foleo, in the second quarter of this year, said the sources.

Sony Ericsson's P-series of business phones have long been popular in many parts of the world, though not particularly so in North America. The devices have always combined some of the best modern day technology that was available into a device that, while big, was still no larger than a typical PDA. The P1, Sony Ericsson's new flagship workhorse, is the first P-series device to cram all of that raw capability into a form factor that is only slightly larger than a typical candy bar phone.