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This week, Verizon is giving away one of these gorgeous pink blackberry Pearl 8130 smartphones to one of our email subscribers. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.

Read more about the pink Pearl.

Take a peek at some of our past easy-on-the-eyes emails:

Popgadget Drop: Giveaway - Belkin Rockstar ipod Hub
Popgadget Drop: Giveaway - The Amazing Logitech Air Mouse
Popgadget Drop: Zamzar file conversion now bigger and better

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Its always fun to see how we are finding out about new phone releases, this time the announcement comes courtesy of a leaked advertisement. The LG Glimmer is a slider style phone that will feature a 2.8-inch touchscreen display, haptic feedback, 2.0-megapixel camera with 5x zoom, Bluetooth, speakerphone, 128MB of internal memory with a microSD card slot for additional storage, 3.5 hours of talk time and EVDO coverage.

As you would expect, no official release date or pricing has been announced, although the phone is rumored to be available beginning in March.

Keep reading for a view of the back of the announcement…

Via [Phone News]

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Posted Feb 27th 2008 12:51PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Displays, HDTV
There’s displays made for digital signage, and then there’s Samsung’s SyncMaster 820DXn. Put simply, there’s no commercial screen we’d rather have sitting in our living room, and while we doubt many would go for it, the specs here are pretty impressive. Outside of the expansive 82-inch 1,920 x 1,080 resolution S-PVA panel, you’ll find 178-degree viewing angles, a 5,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, “ultra-high” brightness levels, eight-millisecond response time and the firm’s own DNIe PRO image enhancement technology. It also includes built-in fans for extended usage along with an integrated PC consisting of an 1.8GHz Athlon64 X2 3400+ CPU, 4GB of flash storage, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, an ATI graphics set and Windows XP to boot. Granted, this thing was designed with luring customers in mind, and given the lofty $76,999 price tag, we don’t expect it to do much else.

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Fresh off the format war win, Sony has announced two new Blu-ray players. The BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 players both offer compatibility with formats to include BD-R/RE, DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW, CD, CD-R/RW and JPEG on DVD or CD recordable media. In addition to the wide variety of format support the players will also feature BonusView (Profile v1.1), BD-Live (Profile v2.0) and offer 1080p24/60 output via HDMI. Both players also have an Ethernet port and can handle up to 7.1 channels decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DD+ along with 7.1 channels bitstream audio output including DTS-MA.

Above the BDP-S350, the BDP-S550 will include 1GB of persistent storage along with up to 7.1 channel decoding for DTS-HD MA and up to 7.1 channel analog output.

The BDP-S350 will be available this Summer and retail for $400, the BDP-S550 will be available in the Fall and retail for $500.

Via [SlashGear]

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Dodge Ball Ball Game

At last there is a good excuse to hurl balls at your ?friends?. Test your reflexes, speed, agility and throwing skills in one fun-filled game. Eshopmegastore.com accept no responsibility for the affects this game may have on your friendships. Set includes 2 dodge ball vests, 2 catch pads and 10 balls.Great Fun For All The Family This Summer

Technorati Tags: Home gadgets

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CFast is a new, CompactFlash based card format which will use a SATA interface to deliver much faster data transfer.

The cards, which will come to market in the next two years, offer theoretical speeds of up to 375MB/sec, much better than the 45MB/sec in current CompactFlash cards. These will be most useful in still cameras and Hi-Def video cameras, where a major bottleneck exists in dumping the image data from the camera to the card.

There’s a catch, though. Despite being related to CompactFlash, CFast is neither backward nor forward compatible. The old cards won’t work in the new slots, and vice versa, so it looks like you’ll have to dump all your old cards into the bottom drawer, next to the Zip disks and floppies. Me? Ever since breaking the pins inside a Canon whilst swapping cards at a drunken party, I’ve stuck with SD.

CompactFlash revamp aimed at cameras [CNET]

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Posted Feb 27th 2008 8:24AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops var It’s a good thing Microsoft has tons and tons of money, because they keep finding themselves in a position where they’ve got to pay out — big time. Such is the case today, where the European Commission has fined the monolithic company $1.4 billion due to failure to comply with a 2004 ruling on monopolistic business practices. The Commission found that the folks in Redmond had been guilty of — gasp! — freezing out competition by not providing “vital information” to rival software companies. This isn’t the first time it’s had to pay, as the company already dropped $357 million on the case back in 2006. “Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision,” said Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Perhaps Ballmer and co. saw this one coming when they went “open” last week, though we’re fairly confident this kind of fine carries only the slightest sting for the software giant.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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PC World reviews the T-Mobile Shadow and writes, “…I didn’t like the camera’s operation. It took reasonably good-looking pictures for a 2.0-megapixel device, but I found the shutter lag frustratingly slow. When taking a picture on a city street, I’d press the dedicated camera-shutter button to initiate a shot, and by the time I’d see the image on screen, a car would appear smack in the middle of the frame. Saving pictures between shots was slow, too.”

Read more about the T-Mobile Shadow.

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Vtech’s V.Smile gaming consoles are aimed at kids so squarely that you might never notice how interesting the technology is. Take, for example the handheld V.Smile Pocket.

That it uses the exact same cartridges as the standard set-top V.Smile console is a neat touch that parents will appreciate. That it’s basically a handheld $40 SNES equivalent is an even neater one.

There’s even a 3D-accelerated version called the V.Flash, sold for about $60.

Of course, the games you can actually buy aren’t of much interest to mature gamers: they’re kids’ stuff, like alphabet learning games and basic platformers with movie tie-in themes. If you’ve ignored these things in the past because you thought they were overpriced gimmicks, you can at least rest assured: these new ones are respectably equipped, solidly designed, and will get Junior off the family PC so you can get back to doing the taxes. The games have good production values, crisp graphics and plenty of stuff to learn and do.

The standard V.Smile is about the size of a shoebox, and the handheld version is also quite big: about the size of an airport paperback. It’s easy to hold, though, even for kids, and is built of sturdy stuff.

In its console incarnation, V.Smile has a graphics tablet and an external mic for games that use them. The Pocket version lacks the tablet and has a built-in mic, but retains the joystick and the four button layout. Each button is identified by color in both machines. In addition, each version of the system has a power button, help button, volume controls and so on.

One especially nice touch, for the left-handed, are the portable’s direction-pad and main button. A switch behind the unit allows each to be internally rotated, converting the d-pad to a button and the button to a D-pad.

V.Smile pocket comes in orange one or pink. Extended-life batteries and a car charger are optional. Games are $20 each and can be bought just about everywhere.

I wonder how difficult it would be to hack one of these? Specifications are not listed anywhere. I’ve sent questions in to V.Tech, but never got an answer–they probably thought I was a crazy person. The unit is not screwdriver-accessible.

Product Page [Vtech]

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If you think that you don’t have enough desktop space to work with, why not buy a second monitor instead? That’s fine and dandy, but if you’re using one of the older computers where video cards do not support a secondary display, then you’re out of luck. Logitecof Japan has a solution with its new USB-to-DVI dongle that targets PC users (sorry, Mac users). Known as the Logitec LDE-SX010U, it is capable of supporting a maximum resolution of 1,400 x 1,050 pixels. No word about pricing, but this unique dongle will be released later next month.