Back to School!

• Engadget's Back to School guide: Netbooks and laptops

All About Apple

• iMac (mid 2010) Core i3 review
• iPhone 4 jailbreak enables FaceTime video calling over 3G
• Official: iPhone 4 jailbreak hits from iPhone Dev Team (updated with video)

Other news of import

• Switched On: The Galaxy S paradox
• Entelligence: Let's get digital
• Page-turning 'Macallan' UI will hit a Windows 7 tablet this year (video)
• BlackBerry email, web and messaging banned in UAE due to 'security concerns'
• Hacker intercepts phone calls with homebuilt $1,500 IMSI catcher, claims GSM
  is beyond repair
• PS3 firmware 3.41 said to be causing hard drive upgrade problems
• EVO 4G starts getting Android 2.2 update over the air
• BlackBerry users running out of loyalty: 50 percent plan to defect to iPhone or Android

Don't forget! The Engadget Show returns next Wednesday, August 4th with game designer Peter Molyneux, Windows Phone 7, and much more!

We're not quite sure when they'll arrive or for how much -- we haven't heard a peep out of Casio -- but Digital Photography Review is reporting a pair of new pocket shooters from the Japanese company. Both the Casio EX-S200 (pictured) and the EX-Z800 are your standard 14.1 megapixel compacts with 720p video recording and 4x optical zoom, as well as the Exilim Engine 5.0 processing the company introduced this year and the supposedly fire-and-forget Premium Auto mode. We doubt you'll find any surprises in the spec sheet or even figure out a good reason to choose between the two, but the S200 is slightly thinner, has an autofocus assist lamp and an instant-on Quick Mode. Meanwhile, the Z800 is slightly lighter and shorter in both directions. Oh, and in case you're curious, that "super resolution zoom" is just marketing speak for a 6x digital zoom plus algorithms that will hopefully reduce image degradation -- you're still blowing up those pixels. PR after the break.

CBS has been doing a good job testing the waters of its online content -- and has even promised to have HTML5-supported episodes this Fall season. All the while, however, it's remained one of the last broadcast holdouts against offering content to the Hulu empire. Now, CBS chief Les Moonves says new Hulu Plus subscription service has interested the broadcaster enough to open talks with the video service. Don't get your hopes up, though, as discussions won't necessarily lead to anything and it's not necessarily your only option for legally streaming the channel online. Still, feel free to fancy a converged queue of episodes from across the networks. Why, that'd be awesome times awesome. That'd be awesome squared.

We've just gotten a deluge of tips that EVO 4Gs are starting to get blessed with the official update to Froyo -- a few hours prior to the promised August 3 rollout -- so if you've got one handy, you're going to want to start checking it right this second. Seriously, now that it's got a trick flashlight app included in ROM, what could you possibly be waiting for? On a related note, if you happened to apply that early update that HTC posted and pulled late last week, the company's working on a fix so that you aren't out of the over-the-air update loop and promises to "get back" in "the coming days."

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Amazon's new Kindle has plenty of desirable features -- like a month-long battery, double the storage and a more responsive screen -- but some exciting new additions weren't highlighted on the press release. Diving through the official User's Guide for just such unheralded items, the Kindle World Blog discovered the unit will come with a second English dictionary, a PDF contrast adjustment and... a microphone. As you can see immediately above, that last won't be accessible out of the box -- and may just lead to audio annotations down the road -- but the hacker community (or more legitimately, Kindle developers) could do very interesting things with the discovery. We hesitate to even mention for fear the feature will get pulled, but we're dreaming of Skyping across that free 3G connection already.

Man, if only this had been discovered before Ariadne was tasked with building impossible dreams. A team of scientists caught high-fiving over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have a new and riveting announcement to share, and it revolves around our old and trusted friend, graphene. This go 'round, the self-proclaimed "extraordinary form of carbon" is being stressed to its max, but not without good reason. Thanks to inquisitive minds and a "stroke of serendipity," a research team was able to create magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla by simply straining graphene in a certain way. For physicists, the discovery is a dream come true, particularly when you realize that magnetic fields in excess of 85 tesla were practically impossible to come across in a laboratory setting. The benefits here? It's honestly too early to tell, but gurus in the field are already suggesting that the "opportunities for basic science with strain engineering [are] huge." Something tells us Magneto would concur.

There's nothing outwardly different about the new iMacs Apple just released last Tuesday, but the hardware underneath that familiar aluminum chassis has gotten faster -- particularly on the low end, where a new 3.06GHz Intel Core i3 processor and discrete ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics chip have taken over for the previous gen's 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo and integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400m. That's a big boost -- Apple claims the new version is some 50 percent faster -- and so we actually turned down the hot-rod 27-inch 2.93GHz Core i7 iMac in favor of a stock $1,199 21.5-inch Core i3 when it came time to pick up a review unit. We wanted to see just how much bang Apple's delivering for the entry-level buck, and we weren't disappointed when the tests came back. Read on for the full review!

There's a fascinating discussion going on over in MoDaCo's forums today suggesting that Dell Streak units that were given out recently as part of the company's US beta test in and around Austin, Texas are no longer functioning on AT&T, the result of an apparent IMEI block; voice calls placed from the devices all get re-routed to AT&T customer service, and 2G / 3G data doesn't work at all. Our understanding is that beta testers were allowed to keep their units after the conclusion of the test period -- some of those ended up on eBay, naturally, so you can imagine that buyers are probably feeling a little steamed by this. One user has had luck with data by using the iPad's APN and plan settings, but otherwise, there seems to be a bit of frustration going around. We've reached out to AT&T to figure out what's going on; we'll let you know when we have more.

[Thanks, Reece M.]

Update: We've had at least one buyer of a beta unit write in to tell us that his Streak is still functional, so it seems that the IMEIs haven't been blocked across the board -- so far, anyhow. Leave us your experiences in comments, won't you? Thanks, Josh G.!

Nielsen has its own angle on the smartphone numbers game out today, and the results vaguely resemble the numbers from Canalys. Perhaps more interesting than the ever present market share tug-of-war (Nielsen pegs Google, RIM, and Apple at 27 percent, 33 percent, and 23 percent in sales to new smartphone subscribers, respectively) a note on brand loyalty turns out ugly for BlackBerry: while 89 percent of iPhone owners plan on getting another iPhone, and 71 percent of Android buyers plan to re-up, only 42 percent of BlackBerry owners plan to stick around. The defectors are pretty evenly split, with 29 percent planning to go iPhone, and 21 percent to go Android. That compares to 2 and 3 percent in the iPhone and Android camps planning a move to BlackBerry. We'll see if BlackBerry 6 can solve this little problem for RIM, but the few tweaks we've seen so far seem hardly capable of stemming the flow.

Welcome to Engadget's Back to School guide! We know that this time of year can be pretty annoying and stressful for everyone, so we're here to help out with the heartbreaking process of gadget buying for the school-aged crowd. Today, we've got laptops and netbooks in our sights -- and you can head to the Back to School hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the month.

We've already gotten a glimpse at MeeGo's prerelease stock UI for handsets, but just like Symbian, there's no guarantee that the experience is going to be consistent across manufacturers -- and a new video apparently captured from an online survey makes it seem like Nokia might be looking to go in a slightly different direction. The one minute, twenty-nine seconds of footage walks us through five parts -- starting up, the "powerful multitasking UI," getting connected, the Ovi Store experience, and the music player -- and as you might imagine, it's the Ovi Store portion that has us feeling like this is a thoroughly Nokia-customized experience (not to mention the copyright in the lower left). It generally looks richer and more functional than what we've seen before, and parts -- like the webOS-esque multitasking -- remind us of Maemo 5's thumbnails, which makes perfect sense considering MeeGo's roots. Follow the break for the full video.

[Thanks, MTA]

Remember SLAP widgets? It was a project at RWTH Aachen University's Media Computing Group, trying to add some tactile controls to touch-sensitive displays. Now that concept is back and better than ever with Madgets, magnetic widgets crafted by Malte Weiß and Jan Borchers. Madgets start with the same idea as SLAP widgets, but take it to another level thanks to an array of electromagnets inserted behind the touchscreen. Reflective markers are detected in IR to tell the table the location and state of a physical dial or pressed button, while the array of electromagnets can cause those buttons to be popped back up or actually move that dial across the multitouch surface. Inductive power transfer is even possible, with one Madget offering a red warning LED powered through the surface. It's mighty impressive stuff and we think you won't want to miss the video embedded after the break.

[Thanks, Fabian Hemmert]

The original Cray supercomputer, the Cray-1, is an iconic piece of computing history, so big it had a ring of padded seats around which engineers could sit and contemplate esoteric questions of life whilst the machine humming behind them answered the more finite ones. This semi-hexadecagon shape has been brought back to life, scaled down quite a bit, by case modder and woodcrafter Daryl Brach. The original 5.5 ton behemoth is now a desktop-friendly size, and though those seats are now too small for human behinds they're still leather-covered and padded, hiding a pair of DVD-ROM drives connected to not one but two motherboards. We're not sure what other hardware Brach populated the thing with internally, but given that original Cray-1 had 8MB of memory to work with we're guessing this modern version would have no problem computationally wiping the floor with its inspiration.

We'd actually already hacked up a 3G FaceTime video call using an iPhone 4 and a MiFi, but now that Apple's latest handset has been jailbroken, you can toss the extra hardware -- you just need a little Cydia app called My3G, which lets you run WiFi apps over 3G. FaceTime video quality appears to be unaffected, but from what we've seen the framerates suffer depending on your connection -- pretty much what you'd expect to get when running a video stream optimized for high-bandwidth connections on a smaller pipe. Still, it's instantly the best reason to jailbreak your phone -- check a video after the break.

P.S.- If you're averse to jailbreaking, remember that Fring lets you make video calls over 3G without any shenanigans -- and unlike FaceTime, you can also video call non-iPhone users. Just sayin'!