News about what is happening in technology today!

Nintendo has announced that worldwide sales of their twin-screen handheld console the Nintendo DS have reached the 10 million mark since its launch in the United States during late November 2004. The vast majority of sales have been in the United States (4 million) and Japan (5 million) where the DS became the fastest selling games machine of all time. From the Reuters article: ‘It is on the upswing of its life cycle,” Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo of America’s vice president of marketing, told Reuters in a telephone interview. She declined to give a sales forecast but said the Japan-based company would provide additional information during its upcoming quarterly financial report. Kaplan added that Nintendo’s seven-week-old Wi-Fi Connection wireless gaming service has had more than 550,000 unique visitors globally.’

Read more at Forbes and at Gamespot.

Buy Electric Blue Nintendo DS Hardware Here
Buy Nintendo DS Here

French Magazine Linux Pratique recently published an interview with General Brachet of the Gendarmie Nationale. In the interview he discusses why they have moved over 100,000 personnel over to Firefox and Thunderbird (70,000 and 45,000 respectively). This follows on last year’s switch to OpenOffice.org so it seems like the French Military Police are enjoying the success of open source.

Grabbed some hands-on time with Samsung’s i830 smartphone—and had trouble putting it down. It’s a quad-band Windows Mobile unit outfitted with EVDO. It has 64MB internal memory / 128MB Flash and an expansion slot. The screen is 2.8-inches and 65K color TFT, touch-sensitive too. Slide the 5.2-inch top vertically to reveal the full QWERTY keyboard. The keys are a bit smaller, I think, than the ones on the Treo 700w. The i830 is a bit thinner (.6-inches) and the same weight (6.4 ounces) as the Treo 650, but it lacks a camera (!!) and has a slightly lesser screen at 240 x 320 pixels. But if I was considering buying a Treo 700w, I would take a serious look at the i830 first. It’s available January 12, pricing TBA.

Motorola is showing off their tiny, in-ear headset at CES. The wee fella is about as big—and cute—as a button and doesn’t have a strange boom mic hanging off of it to add to my “moron on the go” look.

The H5 sequesters itself into your ear canal and picks up audio via the bones in your head, leaving your hands free for driving and slaughtering the Spring lambs.

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A ha! Stuff we want. inno is the first portable XM2go radio with 1GB memory (says Pioneer). You can listen live, record live, and will store and play MP3 and WMA files. It’s a very nice looking unit, but the built-in storage seems way too low for the $400 purchase price. When it shows up in March, you can make a decision for yourself. However, the ability to record and listen to XM while mobile is excellent.