Shenzhen netvertible flips its lid, apes Dell Inspiron Duo with days to spare
If you thought the Inspiron Duo would be the only netvertible to have a slick spinning screen, think again — with less than three months since Dell’s design debuted and ten days till it ships, that trap-door design’s been copied by the gadget giants of Shenzhen. This time around, it’s not an obvious KIRF, but it’s also not a terribly powerful little PC — where Dell at least attempted to push the envelope with a dual-core Atom N550 processor, 2GB of RAM and a Broadcom Crystal HD chip, here we’re looking at a bargain-basement netbook with all the usual suspects (Atom N450, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, Intel GMA 3150) and what looks like a tiny optical trackpad. At least it’s got a capacitive screen! No word on when or how much you can expect to pay if flipping bezels are your thing.
NFC certification program announced just in time for Android 2.3 Gingerbread launch
Call it coincidence if you want, but a December 7th press conference to launch the NFC Forum’s new Certification Program likely has something to do with NFC read / write support built into Google’s new Android 2.3 “Gingerbread.” An OS that could be officially unveiled as early as today according to a cheeky blog post by Notion Ink that includes this bullet:
“6th December is another big day for Android and you will find out how fast Notion Ink can work. (Eden is extremely compatible with 2.3).”
Recall how gung-ho Eric Schmidt was on the topic of Near Field Communication while demonstrating it using a still unannounced Nexus S with an embedded NFC chip at the Web 2.0 Summit. That was way back on November 16th when Schmidt promised a Gingerbread release “in like the next few weeks.” According to the NFC Forum, a device must be certified in order to display the official “N-Mark” (pictured) — a symbol for NFC that tells you where to touch in order to initiate NFC services on your device. So, Google… anything you’d like to announce before Tuesday?
Official Android 2.2 (Froyo) update emerges for Sprint's Epic 4G
Samsung may have missed its promised September (and November) ship dates for Froyo on the Galaxy S range, but at this point, we’re just pleased to see any progress at all. Sprint’s Epic 4G has just become the first US Galaxy S phone to nab an official Android 2.2 (v2.2.1, in fact) build, with the requisite files populating Google’s servers this evening. If you’ll recall, a near-final build actually leaked out around three weeks ago, but the DK28 version making the rounds at xda-developers looks to be the real deal. Head on over to get your update going, and be sure to let us know how everything turns out in comments below.
This is the Google Chrome OS netbook keyboard
It’s just a Chrome OS sorta day, isn’t it? To catch you up here, we told you earlier that Google is planning to announce its own Chrome OS netbook this coming Tuesday, and well, now we’re peering at a supposed picture of that very machine’s keyboard. We don’t know all that much about the rest of the netbook — we’ve heard from multiple sources that it’s powered by an Intel Atom processor — but the image above was taken from an Inventec (as in, the ODM making the netbook) presentation. We’ll call a spade a spade here and say it looks like your average chiclet keyboard, but there are obviously some interesting differences. Over on the left side of the panel you’ll see a “search” key subbing for a Caps Lock key, and up above, the function row has forward / back keys as well as Window, full screen, and “configuration” keys.
Wait, but couldn’t this be any old netbook keyboard? Sure it could, we’ve got an exclusive photo of Acer’s Chrome netbook (that “ZGA” model) which happens to have the same exact keyboard layout. You can check out the picture of that one after the break, and you’ll see it looks extremely similar to this shot. We should also mention that the tipster that sent the above photo in claims the Google-branded Chrome OS netbook will be announced next Tuesday, but won’t be on sale until December 14. Looks like it’s going to be a very interesting Tuesday morning!
Touch Pad Pencil lets you draw on your touchscreen experience
If you can’t afford to splash out £25 on the North Face Etip gloves, and you cannot be bothered to sew on your own conductive tips, but still need to use your touchscreen whilst keeping your paws warm, then the Suck UK Touch Pad Pencil Stylus could be just what you need.
Taking the form of a retro pencil that will remind you of your school days, the Touch Pad Pencil Stylus is made up of a conductive rubber material, that will work on the capacitive screen of your smartphone or tablet.
“They say the pen is mightier than the sword, so by extension it’s safe to assume the pencil is mightier than the finger,” says the official site. “Make you and your smartphone look even smarter with a Suck UK Pencil Stylus.”
It’s makers describe it as the “most stylish stylus money can buy” and we have to agree. Well, it beats using a sausage anyway.
The Touch Pad Pencil Stylus is available from Suck UK for £7.50.
BlackBerry Curve 8520 in pink
Phones 4u recently announced an exclusive pink BlackBerry Curve 8520. We braved blizzards and black ice to get our hands on one to bring you all the details.
Well we say details, but the Curve 8520 has been around for a while. We reviewed it in full back in August 2009, and you can read that review here if you want to know exactly we thought about it at the time.
It isn’t the most advanced BlackBerry around, but it is affordable: Phones 4u are selling this pink number for £129.95 on pay as you go, or free on certain monthly tariffs; we glanced over those listed and we reckon you could probably haggle on some of them for a better deal… Read more 
Android 2.x now accounts for 83 percent of all active Googlephones
The Chart above shows the amount of Android devices hitting the Android Market by OS version. Android 2.1 and 2.2 are now above a combined 80% of the total mix in deployed Android OS’s. The first chart is represented by data collected over the last 14 days, whereas the chart below shows the mix on 14 day increments along the x axis dating back from June 1ts 2010 until today.
This is interesting because it shows the growth in Android OS deployment as Android versions 2.x became more widely released to devices, as well as newly launched devices. As you can see, September saw a spike.
AIVAnet 