The Retrode is the world’s most versatile (and fun!) USB adapter for vintage video games. Revive the good old 16-bit times on your computer/smartphone/tablet, using your original cartridges and controllers!

For 65€, it seems like a good deal.

The rate is equivalent to moving two million gigabytes per day, fast enough to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks-each with a complete movie and all the extras-in a day.

Adhering to standards but still making money off accessories. Genius.

The Inkling digital sketch pen captures a digital likeness of your work while you sketch with its ballpoint tip on any sketchbook or standard piece of paper. Designed for rough concepting and creative brainstorming, Inkling is ideal for the front end of the creative process.

$199, and available from mid-September. But what makes this product interesting is this:

Inkling does not require any specialized paper. It is intended to be uses with standard paper or Sketchbooks on flat, rigid drawing surfaces.

This is unlike my LiveScribe Pulse, which requires its own notebooks.

Hewlett Packard has confirmed plans to exit PCs, tablets and phones, in order to refocus on software.

HP also said it was considering a sale of its personal systems group, which includes the world’s biggest PC-making business.

Aside from the potential purchase of Autonomous, what software of major significance does HP have?

[Update] The Financial Times has the details on how large a role software plays in HP now:

Former SAP chief executive Léo Apotheker, who took the top job at HP last year, has said that the company wants to expand in software, an area that accounted for only 2.4 per cent of HP’s $32.4bn revenues in its latest quarter, and 4 per cent of its operating profit, or $154m.

If it decides to sell its PC business, the company is in for a major change in how it operates.

Sony has revealed that Vita development kits will cost just €1900 plus VAT, making the upcoming portable a viable proposition to smaller studios.

I really want the Vita to succeed, as it has many things going for it: attractive hardware, especially the addition of a second analogue stick; a competitive price point, helping it to compete with Apple’s and Nintendo’s offerings; and a cheap devkit with which to entice indie developers.

The isostick is a USB flash memory stick that likes to pretend it is also an optical (CD/DVD) drive. As far as the computer knows, there’s two things in that little device: some flash storage, and an optical drive.

The idea is to put CD/DVD images, also known as ISO9660 files or “iso” files for short, on the flash memory drive and then you’re able to “insert” any one of those files into the optical drive. The computer will think there is a real optical drive sitting there with a disc in it!

This could well be an invaluable tool for IT admins and geeks alike. Also, the product’s Kickstarter page indicates that the project is on the verge of receiving funding.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will become the world’s largest smartphone maker this quarter, overtaking struggling Nokia Oyj which has lead the market since 1996, Nomura said on Monday.

The end of an era.

Pros

• The freedom to choose either C# or Visual Basic as a programming language
• The simultaneous use of Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to work on UI design independently of underlying application logic
• Two-way data bindings
• Automatic memory management
• Every single Windows Phone 7 handset adheres to a set of baseline requirements
• Windows Azure

Cons

• Known issues with the SDK, e.g. IsolatedStorage.ApplicationSettings
• APIs yet to be implemented, e.g. CivicAddressResolver.ResolveAddress
• No proper multitasking on handsets
• The Windows Phone emulator: no support for GPS, multi-touch gestures on normal displays etc.

The disadvantages are relatively minor and will likely be addressed in the Mango update. With my limited five-day experience, I’d say Microsoft is off to en encouraging start with its mobile phone initiative.

Gamers have been waiting years for Nintendo to finally release its Wii successor, and Game Informer has heard from multiple sources that the company will unveil it at E3 this summer if not sooner.

It’s about damn time.

The manual for the Nintendo 3DS is lengthy, full of colour and made from nice paper. It saddens me that game manuals nowadays are essentially black-and-white pamphlets, created without any passion whatsoever.

As a collector, I fear for the day when all video games are sold via digital distribution.

A highly placed development source has confirmed to Digital Foundry that the new disc format being beta tested in a new dashboard upgrade adds 1GB to the storage of Xbox 360 game discs.

The maximum space allocated to game data on the current disc format is just 6.8GB out of a maximum of 7.95GB on a standard dual layer DVD, with over 1GB dedicated to a DVD-Video partition that also contained anti-piracy security sectors.

What’s most interesting about this news is what isn’t being said: allocating resources to improve the disc format of a five-year-old system suggests to me that Microsoft isn’t planning on announcing the successor to the 360 in a while. That, or the method described above can be adapted to whatever storage format the 360′s successor will have.

Of course, being a survey conducted by a third-party publisher and not Sony itself, these prices could well be pure conjecture.

Of course it’s pure conjecture, so why have such a misleading title? Also, I’d bet against a $250 price point.

The UX matters: it’s the first thing potential customers see when a friend passes them their new phone in the pub. A well-designed UX is consistent, forgiving and rewarding; Nokia’s user experience was inconsistent, unforgiving and hostile. Nokia’s designers honed in with meticulous attention to the wrong detail. Apple’s iPhoneOS UI had some unusual features – smooth graphics that played transitions at 60-frames-per-second, thanks to a dedicated graphics chip. Instead of redesigning the entire UX, Nokia acquired expensive professional-grade video cameras to determine the animation speed, and having confirmed that yes, it was 60fps, tried to recreate the transitions.

Steve Jobs took the stage to kick off Apple’s event on Wednesday, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

Nokia is not adopting Microsoft’s current Windows Phone 7 platform – which means that there is no chance of any handsets running Microsoft’s software before the end of October. It is likely to be a lot later.

If they haven’t announced a release date, how can this be called a “delay”?

Unequivocally, Qt is not dead. This morning we heard top Nokia executives like CTO Rich Green talk about Qt and the future. Qt will continue to live on through Symbian, MeeGo and the non-mobile Qt industries and platforms.

It’s dead, at least where Nokia is concerned.