While vacationing in France, you find a DVD of Ishtar. Score! (It’s never been released on DVD in the US). But when you get home, you discover that you’ve purchased a Region 2 disc, which, in your Region 1 player, is as useful as a coaster. This raises two questions: Why do you want to watch Ishtar? And why do we still have region codes?

The answers: taste and money, respectively. Though there’s no accounting for the former, those codes may soon be gone.

Regional restrictions began in 1997, as DVD technology was rolling out. They have nothing to do with the NTSC and PAL...

Where most slider phones have a keyboard, Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play sports Playstation controls. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

And while it’s a bit on the chubby side, we think that, for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, big is beautiful.

You could almost call the Xperia Play the shorter, fatter cousin to the svelte Xperia Arc, which Sony Ericsson once described as the “world’s thinnest smartphone.” At .62 inches, the Play looks positively bulky compared to its Xperia-line relatives — a veritable Jan Brady to the Arc’s Marcia.

AMD is laying the foundation for its Socket AM3+, Bulldozer-based Zambezi processors with the 990FX chipset, functionally identical to 890FX. The big news is that motherboard vendors are licensing SLI again, and we want to compare performance to Intel.

Thought military tracking technology couldn’t get any creepier? Hold onto your tinfoil hats and hide behind the nearest curtain because the next generation of manhunting gear just took another step closer to reality.

One set of instructions for the Moleskine iPad app.

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

Asus risque de faciliter la tâche aux personnes qui n'arrivent pas à se décider entre un smartphone et une tablette. Selon des fuites en ligne, le fabricant taïwanais est sur le point de présenter le Padfone au salon informatique Computex 2011, qui se déroule du 31 mai au 4 juin. Le site PocketNow a en effet révélé des images d'un nouveau concept de tablette. Après le Motorola Atrix, qui permet de transformer un smartphone en netbook lorsqu'il est connecté à un dock, le Padfone se présente comme une tablette numérique dans laquelle vient se loger un smartphone. Ce dernier devrait tourner sous...