I am a big fan of racing games and driving games, especially those that let you race on the street and do things you can’t do in real life without risking life, limb, and jail time. One of the coolest games this holiday season to meet this need is Midnight Club: Los Angeles.

Rockstar has announced that free download content will be coming for owners of the game. The DLC is called the South Central Upgrade Map and will include a new area of the city that is about 1/3 the size of the entire original map. The pack includes Exposition Park, USC campus, Crenshaw Plaza, and more.

Smartphones are the top growing mobile phone category. The Apple iPhone may be at the top of the sales charts, but it has many competitors looking to take that top spot away. One of the smartphones that hoped to steal some of the iPhone thunder was the HTC Touch Pro.

When the Touch Pro first launched it was a Sprint exclusive handset. Verizon Wireless has announced that it is now offering the HTC Touch Pro to its subscribers as well. The features of the handset are the same as the Sprint version with Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro as the operating system. Users get access to Word, Excel, and Outlook on the device.

Last week Sprint launched the HTC Touch Pro at “select national retailers” and said that the device would be available online on November 2nd. True to their word, it’s available. The base retail price of the smartphone is $579.99. There is however an “instant savings” of $180 combined with a $100 mail-in-rebate which will bring the price down to $299.99 (with a 2-year agreement). That’s a whole lot of savings. Don’t forget you can always do it the old fashioned way and find a Sprint store and buy one there.

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips has built imself an awesome looking Guitar Hero guitar mod that marries a Korg Kaoss pad, working GH controller and a white Gibson double-neck guitar. He’s even using this beast to film an 8-second spot for NBC. Okay, so why did he create it? Because of those damn kids. “there’s a lot of kids out there that think this is actually how you play guitar now — that you just press a series of four or five buttons and and sort of different sort of sequences and it makes every sound that the guitar can make,”

You can check out a video here. The Kaoss pad is used to control a synth tone that can be modulated by the five colored neck buttons. No word on whether he’s using it on tour or not, but it will be playing the three-note NBC chime in a promo spot. Pretty cool.

Sprint finally released the new HTC Touch Pro smartphone. Those who have been waiting can purchase the handset online in the next few days. It will be available in Sprint stores beginning on November 2nd, 2008 for $299.99. That’s after a $100 mail-in rebate. The HTC Touch Pro features a high resolution touchscreen display, sliding QWERTY keyboard, and is expandable to 16GB via SD card, with Video Out to display PowerPoint presentations or media files should you wear a tie and have need of such a thing.

While people love the G1 and it has an excellent keyboard…and it’s only been available for about a day, many users are already complaining that they cannot type in landscape mode.

Never fear, according to the Android development roadmap, we’ll be getting a touchscreen keyboard in Q1 2009 that features “a dictionary of suggestions and a suggestion algorithm.” So it will basically work like the iPhone keyboard. Great news as many find it annoying, having to slide open the G1 every time they want to enter some data.

The HTC Touch Diamond just got a new color, and it will be available in white. That’s right. The most boring device color known to man. The eternal white limbo that the Wii is damned to walk the Earth wearing. The new color will be available on store shelves this October, but other than the color change, everything beneath the hood is the same. Will it remain white or is the quality such that it will turn yellow after a few years? I have no idea, but I’m sure most of you want neither white nor yellow. Colorware to the rescue!

There have been lots of rumors about the highly anticipated Android-powered, HTC Dream phone. Now it’s official. T-Mobile confirmed today that it plans to launch an Android mobile phone made by HTC. They are hoping to make it a direct threat to Apple’s popular iPhone.

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company gave no details on the launch date, but according to the New York Times, the phone will hit stores in the United States before Christmas. Maybe even as early as October. Apparently the device will have a touch screen and will slide out to reveal a full five-row keyboard.

The Martin Jetpack is defined by the FAA as an “experimental ultralight airplane, equipped with a gas-powered, V-4 piston engine and two ducted fans that provide the lift.” The jetpack was unveiled among an enthusiastical crowd in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It will allow the flyer to hover for about 30 minutes and rise to 8,000 feet.

It will cost you $100,000 and you’ll have to complete 15 hours of flight training as well as undergo a “safety screening.” I’m getting flashbacks of 70’s TV. Back when it seemed that everyone used a jetpack in at least one episode of their show. I can just see that trend being revived today. How would you like to see House tossing his cane and taking off? Video below.

Those looking for a nice alternative to the iPhone may have found Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone market with HTC’s recent launch of the Touch Diamond. The Diamond is the latest in High Tech Computer’s line of Touch smartphones, and looks to be the best one yet.

The Touch Diamond runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and in addition to the many common features of popular smartphones it has some custom applications built in for watching YouTube video and taking advantage of Google’s mapping service. To top it off, HTC has included a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen which they claim brings near print quality viewing.

The first “official” photos and specs for the HTC Diamond have now been leaked and it looks pretty sexy. It sports a 2.8-inch 640 x 480 pixel screen (that’s twice the lines of the iPhone in a smaller surface,) Windows Mobile 6.1 and 3G connectivity. Could this be the most important product of the year for HTC? Maybe so.

It seems like a pretty sweet cellphone, judging from the specs: Large 2.8 inch VGA display (640×480 pixel resolution), Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, Quadband GSM/GPRS/Edge and UMTS/HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, 3.2megapixel camera with autofocus, Extra VGA camera in the front for video telephony, QWERTY keyboard, Qualcomm 528 Mhz CPU, 4 GB of internal memory plus a MicroSD slot, FM Radio, An accelerometer sensor like the iPhone has.

No, this is not a vintage Pink Floyd Album cover, but it looks bizarre enough that it could be. It’s also not a photo from the Brick’s new Borg-style Female Assimilation project.(We do have such a project, but it’s all pretty hush-hush. It looks alot like this actually.) The O2 Lounge is the latest fad in salons, spas, massage parlors, hotels, nightclubs, and apparently the great outdoors.

You get all the benefits of a Shiatsu Massage and an Aroma O2 Oxygen Maker. They throw in some audio/video therapy too. The Entertainment Oxygen Lounge has a multimedia DVD player with loudspeaker and hi-fi earphones, Music massage transfer with various massage techniques, and the Aroma O2 Oxygen Maker, along with the Aroma O2 Headset. It comes in four vibrant colors, with a price tag of $7,995, but for now, they are offering it for a special price of $4,595.

The sweet Apple iPhone spawned a whole host of me too devices that looked to cash in on the ground breaking touch screen navigation Apple introduced. HTC was one of the players that jumped into touch in a big way.

HTC announced that its HTC Touch Dual handset would be coming to the U.S. this quarter and would be powered by the new Windows Mobile 6.1 OS. HTC says that Best Buy will be the first retailer to offer the HTC Touch Dual device.

A new patent application showed up recently on the USPTO website from Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry mobile devices. The application shows a slider phone with a hidden QWERTY keyboard behind and looks an awful lot like some mobile handsets we’ve seen recently from HTC.

The device is described by RIM as a Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard. I don’t think we’ve seen any devices from HTC that have a trackball which is somewhat of a trademark of RIM, but is that enough to make this a novel invention? We’re also wondering if this could be the new touchscreen BlackBerry that we’ve been hearing rumors about for quite some time now.

HTC is out today with a new mobile Windows-based touchscreen device which also offers built-in GPS. The HTC Touch Cruise looks like it will be hitting European markets first, with an eventual launch in the United States not announced but logical at some point down the line.

The HTC Touch Cruise sports a 2.8-inch touchscreen display and built-in technology to enhance finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, contacts and other on-screen information. As a GPS device it comes pre-loaded with mapping and navigation material from TomTom. Wireless options include 3G-HSDPA, 802.11 and Bluetooth support.