Peon's Place

Hotness. That’s how I would describe the latest competitor in the smartphone race.

As if resident of the UK didn’t already have a line-up of handsets to chose from that would make even the most reserved American green with envy, today Dell announced that it and O2 will be releasing the Dell Streak in early June. A giant amongst smartphones, the Streak features:

• 5″ WVGA capacitive touchscreen display
• 5 megapixel camera with LED flash
• 16GB of internal memory
• support for microSD cards up to 32GB
• Wi-Fi
• GPS
• Bluetooth 2.1
• 7.2Mbps HSDPA
• 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor

To debut with Android 1.6, Dell says the Streak has been “designed with the future in mind” and will be subject to OTA updates which will bring Adobe Flash 10.1, Android 2.2 “Froyo”, and video chat apps to the Streak before the year’s end. Pricing has yet to be announced, but the Dell Streak will be available online and in stores from O2, at Carphone Warehouse, and later “later in the month at Dell.co.uk.” Oh, anyone whose thinking of making an easy buck brining these bad boys over to the US better move fast — it’s coming here “later this summer.”

The last decade of Mark Twain’s life was spent writing a memoir that would never be seen. That was because he left strict instructions in his will that his autobiography not be published until 100 years after his death.

Now that the milestone has been reached, the University of California , Berkley, where the manuscript is vaulted, will publish the first volume of the memoir in November. Eventually, there will be a whole trilogy of books, that is sure to shed new light on a revered author.

What do you think? Will you check out a copy in the bookstore? Buy the set? Or wait until your local library has a few to spare?

Just as I start listening to my rock albums of the past 10 years and getting back into The Killers again (wonderful concerts, by the way), their lead singer is coming out with a solo album.

While The Killers take a break from recording new tunes, frontman Brandon Flowers is prepping his first solo album, Flamingo, set for an autumn release. He recently sat down to talk about the process, and revealed he’s not only doing a duet with one of my favorite female actress-slash-singers, Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, but also collaborating with producers Stuart Price – who’s worked with Madonna and Kylie Minogue - Daniel Lanois (who’s worked with Bob Dylan and U2) and Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young). It seems he is getting a ton of experience backing him up.

“It’s a pretty good line-up, I think. Stuart and Daniel have been working together, and I’ve done another three tracks with Brendan on his own. Jenny’s helped me out on a couple of songs, and we also get to duet on the record, on a song called Hard Enough, which turned out great. She’s always popped into my mind whenever I think about getting a female vocalist involved because she’s a fellow child of Las Vegas, too. It’s all very rooted right here in Las Vegas dirt.”

Megan Fox is leaving the Transformers movies? Are they even worth watching now??

Many people may not have bought that Megan Fox walked away from her very lucrative role in Transformers 3, but it seems there were other factors in the decision. According to an individual close to Foxy, Michael Bay was “verbally abusive” towards her and “she had enough and decided to get out early.”

The director has a reputation for being an asshole – especially to the ladies! A source claims that Bay “wasn’t very nice” to Pearl Harbor star Kate Beckinsale on set. And Transformers 2 actress Isabel Lucas chose not to attend the publicity tour for the film because she didn’t get along with the director. Another insider said that Bay “wants his actresses to look a certain way, and if they can’t meet his absurd standards of beauty, he gets rid of them.”

Lindsay Lohan walked out of the L.A. County Courthouse yesterday sporting a brand new fashion accessory — her court-ordered SCRAM bracelet. This isn’t something she is unfamiliar with, however it is now smaller, lighter, and sleeker.

Check out how well she rocket it several years ago. Look at Miss Fashionable Trendy! Who says she never wears the same thing twice?

Lindsay was put into her new SCRAM bracelet right inside the courthouse, where Judge Marsha Revel also informed Lohan that she would be meeting with a probation officer on Thursday.

Until the judge decides she can remove it — LiLo must wear the device at all times … even in the shower.

If you’re born in the U.S.A., you’re an American citizen. Some lawmakers, however, plan to challenge that basic assumption.

In what might be the next great flash point in the nation’s ongoing debate about immigration policy, legislation has been introduced in Congress and a pair of states to deny birth certificates to babies born of illegal-immigrant parents. ”Currently, if you have a child born to two alien parents, that person is believed to be a U.S. citizen,” says Randy Terrill, a Republican state representative in Oklahoma who is working on an anti-birthright bill. “When taken to its logical extreme, that would produce the absurd result that children of invading armies would be considered citizens of the U.S.”

Bills to challenge the fact that citizenship is granted as a birthright in this country have been perennial nonstarters in Congress, although the current legislation has 91 co-sponsors. As with other issues surrounding immigration, however, some state legislatures still might act, if only in hopes of bringing this issue before the Supreme Court. “That was the primary purpose of the bill, for someone to sue us in federal court, and let’s resolve this issue once and for all,” says Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, a Republican who has introduced a bill to deny birth certificates to the newborn children of illegal immigrants. “I believe we are giving away 350,000 citizens a year to children born to illegal aliens.” Read more here.

Do you remember the playable Pac-Man on Google.com that I posted last week? Apparently a ton of people played it for the two days that it was up. For about five million hours.

The Pac-Man game proved so popular that Google has now made it permanently available on its own page. The statistics on how many people played and for how long were gathered by software firm Rescue Time. It makes time-tracking software that keeps an eye on what workers do and where they go online.

On a typical day, it suggests, most people conduct about 22 searches on the Google page, each one lasting about 11 seconds. Putting Pac-Man on the page boosted that time by an average of about 36 seconds, the firm said based on the browsing habits of 11,000 Rescue Time users. Extrapolating this up across the 504 million unique users who visit the main Google page day-to-day, this represents an increase of 4.8 million hours – equal to about 549 years. In dollar terms, assuming people are paid $25 an hour, this equates to about $120m in lost productivity, the firm said. For that money, suggested Rescue Time, it would be possible to hire all Google’s employees and put them to work for about six weeks.

A company today released a list of the top worldwide and U.S. cities based on their broadband speeds. It measured only cities with more than 75,000 people connecting for more than three months using a 30-day rolling average. The results are subject to change, and given that no place in the U.S. ranks in the global Top 10 (the first U.S. city is San Jose, which is ranked 18th worldwide).

Here are the top 10 U.S. cities and their corresponding 30-day average speeds:

1. San Jose, Calif. 15.02
2. Saint Paul, Minn. 14.53
3. Pittsburgh, Pa. 14.18
4. Oklahoma City, Okla. 12.12
5. Brooklyn, N.Y. 12.10
6. Tampa, Fla. 12.05
7. Bronx, N.Y. 12.01
8. New York, N.Y. 11.85
9. Denver, Colo. 11.68
10. Sacramento, Calif. 11.34

The global top 10:

1. Seoul, South Korea 34.49
2. Riga, Latvia 27.88
3. Hamburg, Germany 26.85
4. Chisinau, Republic of Moldova 24.31
5. Helsinki, Finland 20.58
6. Stockholm, Sweden 19.97
7. Bucharest, Romania 19.68
8. Sofia, Bulgaria 18.99
9. Kharkov, Ukraine 18.15
10. Kaunas, Lithuania 17.46

This makes the United States appear so slow!

Yes, because all high school kids require magnums. =P

High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is “just like asking grandma or auntie.”

As such, Washington D.C. officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company’s super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called “WrapMC” — for Master of Condoms. ”If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to trash them,” said T. Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia. “So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people want?”

Health officials and consumer advocates say that in terms of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, there’s no difference between Trojans and the less-expensive Durex condoms that the city is offering. But because Trojans are considered the better-known brand, city officials say, they are willing to spend an extra few thousand dollars a year to try to persuade sexually active teenagers to practice safer sex. The Durex condoms will still be offered. ”We thought making condoms available was a good thing, but we never asked the kids what they wanted,” said D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the health committee.

The addition of the more expensive Trojan condoms is the latest move in an effort by officials to flood city streets with latex to battle HIV/AIDS. The District, where 3 percent of residents have HIV, studies show, recently received a grant to offer free female condoms. And, in what is thought to be a first for a local government, the city is mailing up to 10 free condoms at a time to residents who request them online. Free condoms are also available at more than 100 locations, including barbershops, liquor stores and youth centers. ”We want to support the regularization of condom use citywide,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the city’s HIV/AIDS administration. “We are promoting this idea that using condoms is healthy . . . to try to destigmatize condom use, not only for kids, but for grown-ups.”

Scientists and D.C. health officials said the appeal of Trojan condoms can be attributed to the company’s marketing strategy, including the packaging of Magnums in a shiny, gold wrapper. ”The gold package certainly has a little bit of the bling quality,” said Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the city’s HIV/AIDS administration.

New York began its program in 1971 and packages its free condoms in wrappers selected by residents in an online poll. The current wrapper resembles an electronic computer power button. Since “NYC Condom” hit the streets in 2007, usage has soared, said Monica Sweeney, the city’s assistant commissioner for HIV/AIDS prevention and control. The number of free condoms that the District dispenses has been steadily increasing. The health department distributed 3.2 million last year, including about 15,000 in schools. The city, which has 600,000 residents, is on pace to hand out more than 4 million condoms this year, having distributed about 2.5 million so far. The program cost about $165,000 last year. The Durex condoms cost the city 5.7 cents each, but the Trojans will cost 6 cents to 9 cents each (depending on size).

Wal-Mart is to cut the price on the entry level iPhone 3GS, with 16Gb of memory, by $100 to $97 with a two-year AT&T contract. When Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS last June, it cut the price of the older iPhone 3G to $99.

This can only mean that the approach of the new iPhone 4G is to be announced, with a likely July release date at this point. I’d be surprised to see it fall into our hands any sooner. Dual camera, flash, multitasking goodness.

We will not see the announcement of the Verizon iPhone for sure, so for all the AT&T haters – sorry! The WWDC (Worldwide Developer’s Conference) on June 7th will give all our questions some sort of resolve, when Steve Jobs takes the stand.