The Verizon Fascinate was the last Samsung Galaxy S variant to hit the U.S. and the carrier is doing its best to keep the phone up to date with software updates, even though some of them caused problems for users. Interestingly, Verizon is now listing the phone with a “retired” label.

You can see the red watermark embedded all over the device page. It says the phone is retired and so has already been removed from the carrier’s online store. So what would they replace it with? Probably the Galaxy S II variant for Verizon (whether it will be called Samsung Galaxy S II, Function, Fascinate II or Stratosphere).

Say what? Sony’s new handheld console already passed through the FCC and the rumor was that it had an October release date. But now it looks as if Santa has let us down this year.

Bloomberg is reporting that Kazuo Hirai says the Vita won’t launch in the US and Europe until early next year, but Japan is still getting the device before Christmas. We hope this is not the case. It’s like getting coal in our stockings several months early.

The $367 Hauppauge PCTV Broadway 2T will stream TV to any iOS device, Mac or PC with no third party app required. And Android support is expected to be added within a few weeks. It doesn’t require a computer either. It connects to your wired or wifi network and contains dual DVB-T tuners to enable streaming of a TV signal to a host device either over a home network or the internet.

The 2T also features USB and video inputs so you can stream video from your USB device or set top box. You can even connect it to an analog camera to create a remote home surveillance system viewable on an iPad or iPhone. This is one handy device that should be well worth the money.

This is far from the first optical add-on for the iPhone, but the OWLE Bubo focuses on giving the smartphone’s video capture abilities a boost. The Bubo is a hand-held video rig made from aluminum. The handgrips help keep the iPhone steady while the weight, at just over a pound, helps with stability during pans. There are also four tripod mounts and access to the dock connector and headphone jack.

The 0.45x wide-angle/macro combination lens doubles the iPhone’s field of view and adds contrast and extra detail. The rig will accept any 3rd party lenses (37mm) and filters (49mm) and the macro lens allows for close shooting.

Toshiba has announced details and a release date for its new flagship 55ZL1 HDTV. It is the first model powered by the new CEVO-ENGINE, which replaces the company’s Cell-powered models. The CEVO-ENGINE is a stack of Cell multicore processors in a seven-core processing unit that provides the muscle for the various features like 2D to 3D conversion, 3D depth control, HDD video recording, Auto Calibration, and even a face recognition feature that will identify you and switch to your personal settings.

Channel lists can be personalized and Toshiba says a new Auto Calibration feature in the 55ZL1 uses a color-analyzer approach to optimize the settings and display movies with the same colors and gray scale intended by the movie’s director. The 55″ model will be available in Europe this May.

Ben Heck, the man behind thousands of awesome mods is back. This time it’s an old school 1977 Atari merged with the Xbox 360 in a laptop kind of deal. This custom mod looks just like Atari would have made the device had they been capable.

It will handle all of the newest games and the old, including Yar’s Revenge and Star Raiders. In his latest show, he takes viewers through the entire build process. The final build is a thing of geek beauty. He has done it yet again.

The Samsung Galaxy S 4G just became available today and if you are wondering what makes this phone tick, we now have a gadget autopsy that reveals all, thanks as usual to the folks over at iFixit, who have given it the standard teardown.

They tore it apart piece by piece, lovingly describing the process and every component. Just for you, you morbid people. This time they even used fire to conduct an experiment to determine the material of the main structural plate inside the phone. Spoiler: It’s made from aluminum.

There are plenty of tablet cases available for the iPad but how many are lined with solar panels? The Spark Tablet Case by Voltaic can generate up to 8 watts of power to provide about an hour of iPad runtime for every hour in the sunlight. Not bad. It also comes with a solar chargeable battery that contains almost enough juice to give the iPad a single full charge. The battery can be charged using the solar panels on the case, or via a USB port or wall charger.

Other features include a high-power 2A USB port, a regular 650mA USB port to speed up the iPad recharging process, water resistant solar panels, and the case itself is also waterproof. It’s also large enough to fit other accessories with your iPad and the charger can charge other mobile devices.

eGANG Corporation has released the W3 IGM-7000 Audio Mouse. The device comes with a built-in stereo speaker and a microphone. It also offers 1000dpi tracking, a 2-channel stereo speaker and a microphone that can be used for listening to music and making VoIP calls.

It’s basically an all in one mouse. Well, not all, but the eGANG W3 IGM-7000 Audio Mouse does more than yours does. It is also ergonomically designed and has browsing control and volume control buttons.

Netflix was rumored to be offering to pay $100,000 per episode for these shows. We don’t know if that was the price or not, but the company has reached a new deal with Disney-ABC Television Group that keeps episodes of shows like Lost on your streaming list and adds some new ones.

The delay time for adding new episodes is 15 days minimum so they will arrive soon. You can look forward to every single episode of Scrubs, Ugly Betty and Reaper due in 2011, plus expanded offerings from Disney Channel and ABC Family.

As a general rule, SD cards are not tough. They’re wimpy and easily broken. Not this one though. The Raw Steel Super Tough SD card from Hoodman has protective metal imbedded in the front to make it extremely rugged.

The storage device is also made using epoxy, so it is waterproof as well. Sounds like this memory card is tougher than your digital camera. It’s available in 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB of storage sizes and the SDHC cards will be released on November 15th.

The Samsung Solstice II from AT&T is another mid-range handset with the Samsung TouchWIZ user interface skin running on top of the operating system. It features a QWERTY side-sliding keyboard, a 3-inch WQVGA (240×400 pixels) touchscreen display, a 2-megapixel camera, 7.2Mbps HSDPA connectivity, GPS navigation, Bluetooth 2.1 and a microSD memory card slot for expansion.

Some other features include AT&T Social Net, AT&T Navigator, and AT&T Music and Radio. It’s only $29.99 with a 2-year contract.

It should arrive on November 7th.

[intomobile]

Pioneer Computers of Australia is outing their latest Android tablet called the DreamBook ePad P10. The device is based on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform and features a 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 multi-touch display and up to a 1GHz SMP Dual Core Cortex-A9 processor.

Other features include 512MB RAM, 512MB ROM, a microSD card slot (up to 32GB), a SIM card slot, a 1.3-megapixel camera, optional 3G and GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, an HDMI port, a 3300mAh battery and Android 2.2 is running the show.

Dell’s upcoming Looking Glass 7-inch tablet wasn’t showing off in pictures when Michael Dell took it out the other day, but now a video of the event has surfaced, so we now have a better look at this Android device.

We can see a volume rocker on the side of the device, as well as a headphone jack, a possible PDMI connector port (like the Streak), and a switch that might be for rotation or to lock it. The device shows up after 1:27 in the video below.

A 17-year old boy from Australia claims to be responsible for that Twitter security flaw yesterday. He might have accidentally set the whole thing off. According to reports, he might have exposed the security flaw by tweeting a piece of code related to the onMouseOver JavaScript function that caused a pop-up to appear when a user moved his mouse over the message.

The code was quickly modified to perform all kinds of unsavory tasks, some malicious. He claims that he modified the idea from another user (a Japanese developer) who used the code to make his tweets colored. Twitter had been notified of the flaw before, and it was patched, but a recent update caused the flaw to rear it’s head again.