style

Though most of its features mimic those of the iPod Nano, Creative's new Zen Style music player is trying to up the ante by including Bluetooth and a microSD card slot.

Available next month, the Zen Style M300 is Creative's latest attempt to carve out a bigger slice of the portable music player market.

The $79 device is a combination music, photo, and video player with a built-in FM radio and touch-control buttons to maneuver around the 1.45-inch screen. A built-in mic allows for voice recording.

The included Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity lets people listen to music through any compatible Bluetooth wireless headset as well as through Bluetooth wireless speakers. The microSD card slot can hold up to 32GB of music beyond the unit's internal storage space.… Read more

Graphics editors need an angle to compete with Photoshop. Many hit Adobe's pricey program where it's most vulnerable by taking the freeware route. Others offer portability, or an emphasis on photographs, or different methods. Hornil StylePix Portable does a little bit of all of that. It's a full-featured desktop graphics application in the Photoshop mode, with layers, highly customizable tools, multiple undo, browsing, batch processing, histogram, slideshows, filters, and effects. It's also totally portable and compact enough to run from a USB drive or portable PC; in fact, it's designed to be light and speedy … Read more

I love that you can now write full, rich, graphical applications for the Web--even for core tools like word processors. As Stephen Shankland recently noted, Google Docs has evolved into something surprisingly useful, even for a professional writer. I second that opinion, and add that competitors like Zoho Writer are similarly powerful, usable, and useful--as are other "Office 2.0" apps for spreadsheets, presentations, project management, and other tasks. Cloud apps have come a long way, baby!

Online editors let you move your work easily to just about any connected computer, and they enormously facilitate live, real-time collaboration. … Read more

Research In Motion has been butting heads with foreign governments over its tight security, but its latest BlackBerry 6 OS has won approval from the U.S. government for those same standards.

RIM announced today that its BlackBerry 6 operating system is now FIPS 140-2 certified. FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) is a series of standards set up by the U.S. government to ensure that computer products meet certain high-level security requirements. The standard is used by government agencies, regulated industries, and other organizations that store and send data dealing with sensitive information.

The FIPS 140-2 standard (PDF) specifically … Read more

We recently covered a few approaches to fixing abnormally small or large text on Web pages, including the use of the zoom function, removing cookies, and managing system fonts. In addition to these approaches for fixing or adjusting font problems on Web pages, another thing to keep in mind is how Safari and other browsers manage the default font settings for a Web page.

While most Web sites will set a specific typeface (such as Arial or Georgia instead of Times), there are two ways that a site can handle font sizes: relative and absolute, and the use of these … Read more

There's a new Palm handset! It's the Palm Pre 2, and it's... very similar to the old Palm Pre. Oh well. However, we do get excited about the RIM BlackBerry Style, cheaper prepaid plans, 4G in the Big Apple, and yes, even the Verizon iPhone. Also: A special report on the new FaceTime for Mac.

News Palm Pre 2 makes official debut, Verizon bound RIM officially introduces BlackBerry Style Verizon to roll out BlackBerry updates Boost Mobile plan rewards on-time payments … Read more

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook disables applications that were found to be sharing user identities

BlackBerry announces the BlackBerry Style flip phone

Rhapsody launches a streaming app on BlackBerry

The Barnes & Noble Nook update will let you read across devices and offers faster search and page turning

Microsoft announces a game lineup for the Kinect launch

Pleo the robotic dinosaur is back from extinction and better than ever

RIM just announced the BlackBerry Style, a new flip-style BlackBerry complete with a full QWERTY keyboard, but it is not the BlackBerry Oxford as we had previously reported. The Style will be the second-ever BlackBerry to ship with BlackBerry OS 6 (the first was the BlackBerry Torch), and it is also the first CDMA BlackBerry to have OS 6. It will be a Sprint exclusive at launch.

The Style is the first BlackBerry we've seen with this particular form factor. Most phones that have this unique clamshell and keyboard combination are quick messaging devices like the Motorola Rambler and … Read more

We'll be honest with you: Imagelys Picture Styles produces the kinds of images that we used to use on our first Web site back in the mid-1990s, when we were first learning HTML and thought that having a different colorful pattern of wallpaper on every page was really cool. We're not big fans of this aesthetic anymore, but for those who are, this program can create a wide variety of customized patterns and textures.

The program's interface isn't the most intuitive we've ever seen, but the Help file contains a handy tutorial to help newbies … Read more