BestGadget.Info

Toyota just announced a recall of its 2010 hybrid cars. Four hundred thousand worth. The reason? A change in “brake feeling” caused by faulty antilock braking software. There is no fix for cars on the road yet.

This problem, unrelated to the sticky gas pedal issue that other drivers complained about. But I’m still wondering what exactly is bothering our Prius-loving friend Woz, who claims he has a faulty cruise control issue that is software related, not mechanical.

Remember that old joke about if cars were as crash prone as computers? Yeah, not funny in 2010. [CNN]

The good news first: Adobe’s promising Flash 10.1 is going to hit smartphones—Android, WebOS, Windows Mobile—and desktops in the “first half” of this year, a slightly less squishy date. And it’ll come over the air. The bad part?

Well it’s bad for Android, anyway: You’re gonna need Android 2.1. At least. Because it provides some access Adobe needs to make the Flash magic happen. So, sorry everything but the Droid and Nexus One, at least for the moment. The “over the air” thing is also kind of “up in the air” as to what that means: It could come from your carrier, it could come from your phonemaker, or failing all else, it could come from Adobe. Which means, Flash isn’t necessarily going to hit your phone at the same time as everybody else’s. Depends on your phone. But, they’re betting that over half of smartphones—53 percent—will have Flash Player by 2012. Not surprisingly, Adobe says Flash 10.1 is going to be all over some tablets, too, with accelerated performance on Nvidia’s Tegra 2, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon (like what’s in the Nexus One), and Freescale’s i.MX515.

Lastly, Adobe would like you to know that this whole Adobe vs. HTML5 thing is silly, since they totally support HTML5, like all web standards. They love them some web standards, they say. But! They would also like you to note that HTML5 standardization is years away, and Flash works right now. And the reason you notice crappier performance on the Mac is sorta the Mac’s fault, they say, because they need more access to APIs and they get half-assed crash reports. Plus, Adobe claims, apps tend to run faster in Windows than OS X generally, because performance is about 20 percent worse using OS X’s GCC compiler, not to mention performance varies even within an OS, since Flash runs 20 percent faster in IE8 than Firefox, for instance. Either way, performance will be better on Mac with Flash 10.1, since it’s shifting over to using CoreAnimation.

Okay, you can resume your “death to Flash!” chants now (even though it’s not going anywhere for a while, people!). [Adobe]

The vision of ebooks Google has presented to publishers: allowing people to print copies, cut and paste portions, and paying publishers 63 percent of the revenue. The vision the publishers presented in return: Go eff yourself.

That’s right, Google’s finally getting around to opening an ebook store too—called Google Editions, and it’s been in the works for a while—the idea being that people will be able to read the books on any internet-connected device.

What’s incredible is how the Times says negotiations are now proceeding. Now that Apple and Amazon are fighting over publishers and their books—imagine how oh-so-hotly desired they must suddenly feel—publishers have real power to negotiate, and it comes with wondrous effects, like getting an information monolith like Google to actually back down. There will be no printing, no cutting and pasting. And 70 percent, like what Apple and Amazon are now offering, is apparently starting to sound dandier to Google. Another point Google gave in on, surprisingly, is search. Previously, they planned to make up to 20 percent of every book they sold through the store searchable, but that wasn’t kosher with some of the publishing execs, so now they can choose to opt out of search.

Google finally jumping into selling ebooks, with the idea of being the ebook seller to everyone—or at least, everyone not toting a special reading device, just your average thing with a screen and internet access—could definitely shake things up even more than they already are. And you know, a Chrome OS tablet with an ebook store would be slightly more interesting as a cheaper iPad rival.

Publishers should enjoy the attention, and power, while it lasts. Because it won’t. [NYT]

Sure, Google’s Superbowl ad was cute and left us giggling, but how would a French romance powered by Google really go? [UCB—Thanks, Mackenzie!]

If you’re a huge space buff, you might not be surprised by anything in this video tour of the International Space Station. But it’s still great to just get a simple walkthrough of this incredible project and all its corners.

Anyone else get a bit bit light-headed watching all those twists and turns? [CrunchGear]

Apple’s hiring again and this time they’re looking for “Performance QA Engineers” in their “iPad Media” department. Based on the description for the job, we might be seeing an increase in iPad camera rumors:

The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.

Based on the demand for someone to work on video capture frameworks for a device which can’t even capture video we could presume that Apple’s exploring some future options. As if we didn’t already think that. [Apple via MacRumors]

I hate spiders, I hate horror movies, and I hate gimmicky computer cases. But I love the commercial for the Lian Li Mini-atx case. Maybe it’s just because it reminded me of Steve Irwin.

There aren’t details on availability and pricing for this case, but who cares when the promo video alone is fun. [CrunchGear]

Some folks decided to study the calling habits of 5.3 million people over an 18-month period. 350 million phone calls later, they came to an almost obvious conclusion: Prepaid cellphone users make and return fewer calls than their postpaid counterparts.

You can click on the image to take a closer look at the graphs.

Initially the study done at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland, was intended to analyze reciprocity—the likelihood of an individual receiving as many calls in return as he or she makes. But during the course of the research, a clear difference was discovered in the calling habits of prepaid and postpaid users:

Postpaid users tend to be more prolific, having on average 5.41 people they call. Prepaid users, by contrast, have only 3.41 contacts on average (although the notion of “average” is a little strange here since there is a very long tail on these distributions).

Postpaid users also made about 10 times as many calls as prepaid users while 25 percent of prepaid users had odd relationships in which “one participant makes more than 80 percent of all calls.”

Technology Review suggests that the differences in calling habits could be explained by the fact that prepaid users are more likely to be younger individuals, but I’d go as far as considering that the unlimited mobile-to-mobile or weekend benefits of postpaid plans may play a role as well. [Technology Review via NY Times Bits]

The upcoming i5 MacBook Pro refresh might be closer than we thought, with TUAW discovering that Best Buy emptied their systems of the current version. Since they’re not likely to go MacBook-less for long, that points to soon. [TUAW]

This concept scale that doubles as a decorative rug might—might—be the thing to finally get me taking better care of myself.

Designer Kwan Sunman’s Rug With Scale project does away with the cold, judgmental form factors of your average bathroom scale, ensconcing it instead in a warm and inviting rug. The readout from the scale shows up on a small red tag that illuminates its user’s current weight, previous weight, and goal weight to help chart progress.

The rug portion is also removable (for washing) and interchangeable (for personal style preference). That is, it will be, if this ever becomes an actual, buyable product. Fill in your own “worth the weight” pun here, if so inclined. [Red Dot via Yanko]