By Chris Scott Barr

The battle between Verizon and AT&T has heated up since the former managed to land the iPhone on their network. Both sides have their pros and cons, most of which boil down to which carrier has better coverage in your area. Well if you’re on the AT&T side of the fence, Target wants to help you out. How? By giving you some cash towards a shiny new iPhone 4.

Until this Saturday, February 12, you can get up to a $200 credit towards an iPhone 4 by trading in your old 3GS ($100 by trading in a 3G). Essentially, that means if you have a 3GS, you could land yourself the latest hardware for free. You’ll of course need to sign a new 2-year plan to get in on the deal.

[ Target ] VIA [ Gadgetsteria ]

By Chris Scott Barr

If you haven’t hopped on the Blu-ray bandwagon, it’s becoming easier and easier. Heck, the last two Blu-ray movies I bought also came with a DVD copy as well. Blu-ray players themselves have long since broken the sub-$200 barrier, and now you can even get yourself one that plays your old-school VHS taps on the cheap.

Up for grabs over on Amazon Is a Panasonic DMP-BD70V which plays Blu-ray and VHS for $140. If you’ve got the cash and are thinking about upgrading to the new format, then this sounds like a solid buy. Barring the formats that died before they ever took off (Betamax, Laserdisc, HD-DVD) it’ll play pretty much any video you’ve purchased since the 70′s. There’s even an SD card slot, USB port and internet functionality to stream video from YouTube and Amazon VOD. The price was supposedly only good through yesterday, but it seems to be sticking around. I’d jump on this soon though.

[ Amazon ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

If you’re too lazy to refresh the page to see when the item changes, here’s a list of automatic Woot-Off checkers.

[ Woot! ]

Woot.com normally sells one heavily discounted gadgety item every 24 hours, but during a Woot-Off, a new item appears as soon as the current item sells out (sometimes after mere seconds). Nobody knows what’s coming up next, but whatever it is, it’s dirt cheap (with flat rate $5 shipping). Among the items you’ve missed so far have been a Philips 1000 watt home theater system for $80, HDTV USB stick for $25, an Asus EEE 900 netbook for $140, and an 18 watt solar charger and charge controller for $80. And, of course, a whole bunch of random weird crap.

If you’re too lazy to refresh the page to see when the item changes, here’s a list of automatic Woot-Off checkers.

[ Woot! ]

Woot.com normally sells one heavily discounted gadgety item every 24 hours, but during a Woot-Off, a new item appears as soon as the current item sells out (sometimes after mere seconds). Nobody knows what’s coming up next, but whatever it is, it’s dirt cheap (with flat rate $5 shipping). Among the items you’ve missed so far have been an 8 gig 4th gen iPod Nano for $90 and a 6 pack of Star Wars bobble heads for $30.

If you’re too lazy to refresh the page to see when the item changes, here’s a list of automatic Woot-Off checkers.

[ Woot! ]

by Shane McGlaun

The economy is bad; you have to have been living in a cave or in a coma to not know about that. So poor is the global economy that retail chains once rolling in the profits have been forced entirely out of business. Circuit City was one of the most recent chains to close up shop.

Nationwide camera retailer Ritz Camera filed for bankruptcy recently and has now announced that it will be closing 300 of its locations around the country. Despite boarding up 300 stores around the country, the chain will still have about 400 locations in operation nationwide. That is assuming it doesn’t come back in a week and close the remainder like Circuit City.

Ritz blames the bankruptcy filing and the closing of its locations on the poor economy and slow retail spending by consumers. The same liquidation firms that sold off Circuit City inventory will do the same for the $50 million in cameras, camcorders, and other electronics sitting in the 300 locations around the country in Ritz stores starting this weekend. It’s time for some good deals on cameras if you have the scratch.

[ Ritz Camera ]

Recession? What recession? Now is the perfect time to buy more electronic crap that you kinda want but don’t really need! Woot.com normally sells one heavily discounted gizmo-y item every 24 hours, but during a Woot-Off, a new item appears as soon as the current item sells out (sometimes after mere seconds). Nobody knows what’s coming up next, but whatever it is, it’s dirt cheap (with flat rate $5 shipping). Among the items you’ve missed so far have been a solar gadget charger for $10, an 8 gig 2nd gen iPod Touch for $170, a PowerSquid for $4, a 4.3″ GPS nav for $89, and a badass Roomba 565 for only $170.

If you’re too lazy to refresh the page to see when the item changes, here’s a list of automatic Woot-Off checkers that do it for you.

[ Woot! ]

By Evan Ackerman.

Solid State Drives. They’re fast, they’re efficient, they’re durable, they’re sexy, and until recently they’ve been wicked expensive. Unless you’re loaded, you’re still not going to be using them to store all of your illegally downloaded media, but that’s fine, it’s not really what they’re for. Super Talent has come out with a line of UltraDrive SSDs that might just be cheap enough for you to stuff into a netbook, where you don’t really need tons of storage but you do need battery life and shock protection. Or stick in in your desktop and move your OS there to take advantage of the fast read/write speeds.

There are plenty of ways to take advantage of an affordable SSD, and the Super Talent UltraDrive series is just about there… A 2.5″ SATAII 32 gig drive costs $128. You can get 64 gigs for about $200, and the drives top out at 256 gigs for nearly $650. The UltraDrive ME series has read/write speeds of up to 200/160 MB/sec, and should be substantially more efficient when it comes to power consumption. They’re available now from NewEgg.

$128 for a 32 gig SSD still too much for you? How ’bout 30 gigs for $83 shipped? You can get an OCZ drive from NewEgg by clicking here, downloading this rebate form, and using coupon code EMCLPMX37.

[ Super Talent SSDs @ NewEgg ] VIA [ Hot Hardware ]

Woot.com normally sells one heavily discounted gizmo-y item every 24 hours, but during a Woot-Off, a new item appears as soon as the current item sells out (sometimes after mere seconds). Nobody knows what’s coming up next, but whatever it is, it’s dirt cheap (with flat rate $5 shipping). Among the items you’ve missed so far have been an 8″x6″ USB graphics tablet for $30, a Pentax K100D DSLR body for $240, and a Netgear wireless router and USB print server for $20.

If you’re too lazy to refresh the page to see when the item changes, here’s a list of automatic Woot-Off checkers.

[ Woot! ]

By Evan Ackerman

Now’s the time to get your hands on bushels of underpriced electronics to fill all of those gaps in your holiday shopping list. Woot.com is having a pre-holiday rapid fire blowout sale, and so far you’ve missed some cheapo MP3 players, a Roomba 565 for a scant $170, a portable iPod video player, and a bunch of other excellent crap at ridiculously low prices (even for the internet). Stay up all night to cash it, ’cause once it’s gone, it’s gone, and new items are popping up quicker than you can click the buy button. Get your automatic Woot-Off checkers here.

[ Woot ]