Huffington Post — known for its liberal slant and independent voice in news — now essentially becomes the flagship news site of one of the more corporate and profit-driven media conglomerates in the world. To many, including myself, the deal makes little sense. Liberals bemoaned the move. How could Huffington sell out a brand that they had come to trust for news from a perspective they could align themselves with? Some in the tech world wondered how this matched up with recent revelations of the “AOL Way?”

Gawker founder Nick Denton may have said it best. “I thought Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer were reinventing news, rather than simply flipping to a flailing conglomerate,” he told The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons. Denton’s lament boil down to a familiar phrase: money talks, and — well, finish the rest. See, CEO Tim Armstrong has a vision, and it’s to follow the path of Demand Media — churning out content and making sure it’s optimized to hell so Googlers are coming to AOL sites rather than their competitors. With Huffington at the helm, it’s likely that she’d be tasked with carrying out Armstrong’s vision. (One could argue acquisition of the Post is part and parcel of the AOL Way itself, just a more artificial way of getting to the company’s lofty traffic and revenue goals.)

That would come as a huge surprise. While yes, the Huffington Post has in the past been criticized for a lack of original content — preferring to scrape from other outlets — it never has been anything like a content farm. Transitioning to a more corporate-driven media strategy, where pageviews and ad revenues are king is not going to be easy for Huffington. She will also have to face dealing with a ragtag bunch, some of which don’t have the best working relationship. TechCrunch founder and now AOL employee Michael Arrington cannot seem to keep his comments to himself, as evidenced by his spat with Engadget editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky last month. While Arrington no longer controls TechCrunch, it’s hard to see him falling in line under Huffington, making her job of building the AOL that Armstrong wants even harder. All in all, while AOL may have seen the acquisition of Arianna’s self-built media empire as a way to buy its way to the top of digital media, in the end it’s still AOL — a company whose time has long since passed.

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The British Broadcasting Corporation has made its iPlayer app plans that extra bit more official by announcing that iPad- and Android-specific versions of its software will be arriving by the end of this week. The iPlayer is a free TV catchup service hosting the best and most popular (those two being almost mutually exclusive categories) from the BBC’s catalog of recent programming, and the new native apps promise to bring that to your portable device in a touchscreen-optimized format with a “simple and intuitive design.” The finishing touches are being applied right now and the apps should be with us before the week is through, but the real cause for excitement is that the BBC plans to take the iPlayer out for an international walk, which will likely rely on such platform-specific apps for distribution and the collection of subscription fees. Then we can all watch Question Time together, yay!

P.S. – Take note, Android users, that you’ll need to have Froyo and Flash Player 10.1 installed on your phone or tablet in order to partake in the new app. Sort of a one step forward, one step back manoeuvres.

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PDP, known in the gaming biz for everything from PlayStation Move accessories to heart-shaped guitar-ish (and garish) controllers, has really pulled out all the stops with its latest. The Marvel Versus Fighting Pad is a wired joypad that sports micro-switches for the thumb stick and six front-facing buttons, which is what you get on most arcade consoles (and what you don’t get on cheaper controllers, so theoretically this should be rather nice). Available February 14, this bad boy will set you back $40. Right now only an Xbox 360 model is planned, but if it sells well they will also be bringing it to the PS3. And yes, that is a panel from an actual Marvel comic slathered all over the thing.

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Fujitsu’s latest image processor, the Milbeaut MB91696AM, has a new bag of tricks on tap, and it’s fixing to unload them in April. The new Milbeaut sports ARM processors and a “newly-developed” Full HDH.264 codec engine, making for 14-megapixel shooting at 8fps (or about 20 megapixels at 5.5fps) and low-noise Hi-Vision video recording at 1920 x 1080. So the processor, in its sixth iteration, sports high resolution photos and HD video all on the same chip, and features continuous photography speeds up to five times faster than its predecessors. Fujitsu’s got plans to show off Milbeaut’s mobile solutions at MWC next week, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the MB91696AM make its debut in Barcelona as well. Either way, the new processor is scheduled to ship starting in April for ¥3,000 (right around $36), which means new Milbeaut-equipped cameras won’t shouldn’t be far behind. Full PR after the jump.

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The rumored Xperia Neo still isn’t official — we think we’re probably looking at MWC next week for that — but there are enough floating around at this point so that they’re getting tested pretty thoroughly (or, at least as thoroughly as you can test a pre-production device). The latest tidbit comes via a series of videos and stills that put the phone’s 8.1 megapixel sensor through its paces; frankly, they look a little washed out, but it’s really common for camera performance to improve by leaps and bounds through firmware updates right up until a phone’s commercial release so we don’t want to sound the alarm quite yet. My Android Life has also thrown together a quick video walkthrough of the UI, where you see that Sony Ericsson seems to be standardizing on the same experience first seen on the Xperia Arc and later on the Xperia Play — highly widgetized with a Gingerbread core. All things considered, it seems the Arc’s a higher-end device — but if the price is right, this Neo could win some hearts as well. Follow the break for the UI walkthrough.

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Sure, the Dell Means Business event this morning was a bit of a snore, but amidst all the talk of backlit keyboards (egads!), four-times faster hard drive encryption, and cookware-inspired design, we spotted a rather attractive (perhaps even enticing) enterprise system — the Dell Latitude E6220 laptop. According to Dell, this 12-inch thin-and-light is targeting “field workers” like us, so we wasted no time getting some hands-on time with it alongside our trusty 11-inch Mac Book Air. Check out the gallery below, and read on for our first impressions.

Despite being a pre-release unit without a battery installed, the E6220 felt solidly built. The screen lid is inlaid with brushed metal while the main body of the laptop is made of black plastic with a silver rim. The edges of the bottom cover are tapered in the front and sides, making the system look thinner than it actually is. The rear protrudes beyond the hinges and contains all the ports, just like the Adamo — in fact, the styling reminds us of the XPS 14. On the left side you’ll find smart card and SD card readers, as well as audio, eSATA / USB, and VGA connectors. On the right side there’s an ExpressCard slot, wireless switch, two USB ports, and an HDMI connector. Power and Ethernet are located in back, with a docking interface on the bottom. The 12-inch screen uses a matte finish and while we’re not sure of the exact resolution, it’s likely 1366 x 768 pixels. Quality seemed on par with LCD panels found in other modern laptops. There’s a web cam above the display, flanked by a pair of microphones. We liked the full-size keyboard, which is backlit and features standard key travel. The track-pad works as expected, including two-finger scrolling, but the buttons felt a little too mushy. In addition to the trackpad, the palmrest incorporates an RFID reader and a fingerprint scanner.

Under the hood, you’ll find an Intel Core i3 CPU with integrated graphics, your choice of hard drive or solid state storage, plus a plethora of wireless options (including 3G). Performance seemed adequate for a Core i3 laptop running Windows 7, despite a reported Windows Experience Index of 1.0 (which we suspect is inaccurate, since this was not final hardware). Our unit, which was equipped with a 2.1GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a hard drive, loaded Engadget and other websites without any drama. Dell was mum on pricing, availability, or battery life, but we expect the E6220 to be competitive in the enterprise market.

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Dell unveiled a mighty business laptop lineup this morning, but only a few stood out — like this Dell Latitude XT3 convertible tablet PC with a quad dual-core Intel Sandy Bridge processor inside. Yes, it seems Dell’s decided to forgo the incredible battery life of its predecessor for potent performance instead, with this particular unit packing a 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M CPU and 2GB of RAM underneath that swiveling 13-inch display. While the prototype XT3’s screen seemed a little washed-out and viewing angles left something to be desired, we have to admire its matte dual-digitizer display, which takes multitouch input from at least three fingers simultaneously and also recognizes a pop-out stylus pen (the former responsive enough to navigate Windows 7 by touch alone, and the latter beyond our can’t-draw-a-straight-stick-figure ability to easily test). That sunlight-readable screen isn’t just for traveling artists, though, as Dell was quick to inform us that the XT3 is the company’s attempt to make a convertible tablet that corporate IT will accept as one of its own, thanks to the same magnesium frame and universal docking port as the rest of the new Latitude lineup. We can’t lie: we’d be pretty excited about the potential for awesome here, if we had any notion of release dates or price.

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Is it spring already? Nikon has just assaulted us with no less than nine new Coolpix models, freshening up its consumer offering with a litany of hot new shades, touchscreens and hardware updates. We’ll let you dig into the press releases after the break for the full details, but the two new Performance range cameras, the P500 and P300, are worth discussing in more detail. The P500 improves on Nikon’s P100by a few orders of magnification, touting a voyeur-friendly 36x optical zoom, while also offering a 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor, 1080 / 30p video plus stereo sound recording, max ISO of 3200, and an 1100mAh battery. The back is also adorned with a tiltable display, sized at 3 inches diagonally and fitting 920k dots. Yours on March 3rd for $400, €464 or £400, depending on your local currency. The P300 is cheaper at $330 / €348 / £300, however it might well be the more appealing option for image quality obsessives as it boasts a lens with an aggressive F1.8 aperture and 4.2x optical zoom. It shares the same backside-illuminated sensor as you’ll find in the P500, but benevolently permits its user full manual control to let him or her capture that perfect shot. Rapid-fire shooting at 8fps for up to seven frames is available, but we’re loving the fact it can also do 1080 / 30p with continuous autofocus and the ability to both capture images and use its optical zoom while recording. If Nikon is to be believed, the P300 is basically the P7000 that came out last year, but shrunken down to the size of a compact. It really is a very diminutive and attractive — it has that intentionally understated matte black finish that huskily whispers the word “prosumer” in your ear — compact camera. It lands on March 17th.

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Last we heard from Nikon on the topic of high-end point-and-shoot cameras, it was touting Full HD video and a backside-illuminated 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor on its S8100. Well, here comes the S9100, still possessing those goodies, but now it’s attaching them to a lens capable of 18x optical zoom — a feature you’d usually expect to find on shooters far bulkier than this pocket-friendly portable. ISO sensitivity can stretch up to 3200 (only 800 in automatic mode), there’s a 1050mAh battery helping power the 3-inch, 920k-dot rear-mounted display, and you’ll also probably want to know that the 1080p movie mode records sound in stereo and ticks along at a healthy 30fps. Our brief time with the S9100 revealed it to be a typically well built little shooter, although we did notice zooming it backwards and forwards is a fairly slow affair — which can grow into something of a nuisance when you’ve got such a massive zoom range — while the tripod mount is way off to the left of center. We’re sure Nikon has thought that decision through and balanced the camera’s weight appropriately, however. Sales around the world begin on March 17th, with local pricing set at $330, €348 and £300 in the major markets.

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