>> The Blackberry Storm becomes official, Pandora lands
on the Chumby, and a few ways to make a T-shirt out of
your Myspace page. It's Wednesday, October 8. I'm
Natalie Del Conti, and it's time to get loaded.
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>> Research in motion officially announced the
Blackberry Storm, which is their touch-screen iPhone
competitor. The phone will officially launch on Verizon
in the U.S. and Vota Phone [Assumed spelling] overseas.
CNET editor Bonnie Cha got to play with it a little, and
she describes the phone's touch screen system. It isn't
multi-touch or haptic feedback. Instead, it has
something called click-through, where you actually,
physically push down on the screen, like you would any
tactile button. She found it really responsive and
easy. It also has a laundry list of other features,
GPS, 3.2 mega pixel camera, video recording and
playback, a micro SD slot, and eventual support for
Verizon's V Cast and mobile TV service. Even though
CNET editors initially did like this phone they haven't
tested it thoroughly just yet. Also, since we don't
know pricing we can't really make a judgment about
whether it actually can compete with the iPhone. We'll
know that when the phone actually hits store shelves
closer to the holiday season. Google has come up with
two new ways to make money. The first one involves
YouTube, which we have all wondering how they will
monetized. They've launched something called Click to
Buy, which let's you purchase music or video games that
relate to the videos you're watching. To start, there
will be embedded iTunes in Amazon links on music videos
so you can directly purchase that song. There will also
be an Amazon link to buy the video game that you may be
watching. Google says this is just scratching the
surface, and they eventually do hope to sell various
other products, such as movies, books, TV shows, an
more. Google is also working to monetize web-based
games with ads for games. This is a program that
integrated advertisements into web-based games. These
are video ads complimented by text and images. You'll
start to see these ads in games by Konami, Playfish,
Demand Media, and more. If you want to print out your
Myspace photos, HP is now the official company to help
you with that. Starting in November all you have to do
is locate the Click to Print icon on any photo, blog,
comment or message, and HP will process the order and
mail you a hardcopy. Eventually this will work a little
bit like Zazzle as well, where you can make merchandise
with your Myspace content, but not just yet. I'm
already envisioning Myspace profile T-shirts. That
would be quite the fashion statement. HTC Diamond has
no love for the U.S.. HTC used Twitter to announce that
it would not be launching the Diamond here in the
states. The tweet said that the company had looked into
it, and would just take too long to launch here in the
states, and by the time they did the phone would be
obsolete. Oh well. Bonnie Cha who reviewed the phone
for CNET thought the touch screen was slow to react to
function commands, plus the G 1 is coming out soon
anyway. The rugged sonic phones are going to officially
launch in the U.S. next year. The Sonic XP line was
previously only offered by carriers in Europe. The
newest model, the XP3, will go on sale in the U.S. in
March through various U.S. carriers. This is a
quad-band edge phone with GPS, Bluetooth, and a
flashlight. We've had the XP 1 here in the office for a
few months, and we've literally chucked it across the
room, about 20 feet away, and we could not break or
scratch it. It's built to all sorts of military
specifications for resistance to dust and rain. This is
a great phone for hardhat workers, or anyone with a
manly, outdoor type of job. And I use the word manly in
the most androgenous way possible, of course. We rarely
talk about these types of gadgets here on loaded, but
this one I happened to find particularly geeky. Nikon
announced a multi media headset that displays video and
plays music. It's called the Media Port UP, and it has
8 gigs of storage, Wi-Fi, and a browser. The liquid
crystal display is controlled by moving your head in
different directions, and the head set can be powered
with two double-A batteries. Unfortunately for all you
uber geeks in the states, Nikon plans to release this
only in Japan. Sharp unveiled a solar panel, 52 inch
LCD. The eco-friendly television runs off of one
attached solar floor panel, and uses LEDs that reduce
the power consumption. Since the TV does not house a
battery compartment, it won't work when the sun goes
down. The solar floor panel design is an interesting
choice, considering that most people I know consume
their TV indoors, but this is the first we've seen of a
model this size, so we can expect a few design tweaks
from Sharp in the future. The Chumby has just become a
lot more useful. The squishy, cutesy, cushiony gadget
that looks a lot like it belongs in a kids room now
plays Pandora. The Chumby is basically a small computer
but has mostly been used for widgets more than
everything else. Weather, stocks, news. You can set it
as an alarm clock to wake you up to your favorite
Pandora station. The speakers on the Chumby aren't
really great, though, so you're not really going to be
rocking out to the Chumby. Those are all your headlines
for today, but I will, of course, be back tomorrow with
more. Thank you for watching. I'm Natalie Del Conti
with CNET TV, and you've just been loaded.
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