Forget thumbing through racks of paper greeting cards. Some card companies are now offering a video alternative on cell phones. According to The New York Times, American Greetings has taken the lead, and is now offering short video messages that are selected from a Web site and sent to a phone. Best of all, these e-cards are available to customers of all the major service providers. You don't need a data plan to send or receive a greeting, but you will have to pay an annual $15.99 subscription fee. That price will get you access to about 500 video cards, with plans for thousands more. Yet, unless you're a chronic card sender, Hallmark's pay-as-you-go service seems like a better option. It costs just 99-cents to send a card from the Web to a cell phone.

While video greetings aren't about to eclipse text messages in popularity, some predict they do have huge market potential. Portio Research, a British firm, estimates it'll be worth about $31.5 billion by the end of this year. We'd be open to dropping some cash on a video greeting and saving a trip to the store -- unless there's a pricey subscription fee. Then, a simple hug or phone call on a friend's birthday will suffice. [From: The New York Times]

Filed under: Cell Phones

eCards Too Much Work? Procrastinators Send Video Cards From Phones originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unreal Engine 3? The graphics engine that powers many, many games (Gears of War, Mass Effect, Arkham Asylum) on consoles today? Ported on to Palm's webOS? Neat, but not as neat as you'd think. More

DARPA looking to develop iPhone and Android apps, App Store originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Using a foam packing peanut to hold a nail or screw in place is brilliant. I like to think of myself as a pretty mild-tempered person but any time anybody’s asked my wife about the most angry she’s ever seen me, she always tells the story of when we first moved into our apartment here in Boston and I went around the house hanging our window blinds. Shoulda used peanuts.

The universe was angry that day, my friends. Forces everywhere were conspiring against me. Every single screw that needed to be driven into a window frame wobbled violently and then fell to the ground. Over and over and over again.

I finally succumbed to using a power drill to bore starter holes where each of the screws would eventually go but, of course, I hadn’t properly charged the battery and couldn’t remember where I kept my drill bits. Basically, a project that should have taken an hour ended up consuming me with rage for the better part of what felt like eternity.

Anyhoo, I should have used foam peanuts. That’s the takeaway. Hold the screw in place, get it started far enough into the wall that it’s stable, and tear the foam away. Simple.

10 Uses for Foam Packing Peanuts [This Old House via Lifehacker]

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Tip: Use packing peanuts to hold nails and screws in place

Instructables user zieak upcycled some discarded keyboard circuit sheets into this attractively geeky document folder for his wife.

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How-To: Document folders from keyboard circuit sheets

It's a lousy time to be a record label. Profits are tanking, bands are angry—OK Go just ditched EMI—and YouTube and BitTorrent changed the game. Still, some labels are transforming themselves to help musicians in the digital age. More

Android Forums is alight today with fresh HTC Incredible chatter -- a phone every Android fan on Verizon is desperately waiting for -- and we've managed to glean a few more pictures and possible specs out of the mess. It looks like we can expect a half gig of RAM with about 320MB available (roughly the same as what you find on the Nexus One) and an 8 megapixel cam, but interestingly, the phone's Snapdragon core is apparently underclocked to 768MHz, almost certainly a battery-saving measure on HTC's part; fortunately, the Sense-powered Android 2.1 firmware is still said to be "blazing fast." It measures 117.5 x 58.5 x 11.9mm -- just a hair narrower, shorter, and thicker than its Nexus One doppelganger, small enough of a difference so that we think it'll be virtually indistinguishable in person. As shots go, we're seeing now that HTC has moved from the brightly-colored glossy shell to a soft-touch black one while keeping the strange contours; we think there's at least a chance that this is final ID, too, since the Verizon logo is silkscreened at the bottom. Inside, the entire thing (including the battery itself) is a shockingly loud shade of red, mirroring an odd design trend first seen on the HD mini. We definitely dig it. If the stats over on the forum hold up, the Incredible's on track for a launch in April or May, so it's still a few weeks off -- in the meanwhile, we encourage you to check out more of the new shots after the break.

[Thanks, Matt and EBBY]

Continue reading HTC Incredible out in the wild once more, Verizon color scheme alive and well

HTC Incredible out in the wild once more, Verizon color scheme alive and well originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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