KIOSGEEK

Worried that former HP CEO Mark Hurd might not know what to do with himself after getting caught falsifying expense reports to hide girl #2 and being forced to resign? Don’t be: ol’ Mark’s getting a $12,224,693 severance payment in exchange for agreeing not to sue HP. Yep, Mark Hurd just got $12 million in cash for fraudulently filing expense reports to conceal his mistress — not a bad trick if you can pull it off, we suppose. (We don’t know how much he’ll have to pay back, but we’re …

Nokia’s prepping for a fourth quarter launch of its MeeGo smartphone. The N8 will hit before the end of Q3. The company’s absolutely not planning to use Android and a tablet isn’t happening anytime soon. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the stuff we learned this morning during our captivating chat with Niklas Savander, Espoo’s executive vice president and general manager of the Markets unit. With its quarterly profits dropping and losing daily (in mindshare, at least) to the Apples, HTCs and Motorolas of …

Wild news out of HP just now — CEO Mark Hurd has just resigned over a sexual harassment investigation. Hurd and HP’s board of directors decided that he should resign following a sexual harassment claim against Hurd and HP by a former marketing contractor — HP claims that although there was no violation of its sexual harassment policy, Hurd violated the company’s standards of business conduct by submitting inaccurate expense reports that covered his relationship with the contractor. CFO Cathie Lesjak is taking over on an interim basis, and she’s …

Unless ASUS means “$400 under $599,” we’ve got a feeling this e-reading device might as well not try its luck on the market. Nevertheless, word from Taiwan is that the company is indeed preparing an 8-inch LCD-based ebook reader — with 64 levels of gray, no backlight, and fast refresh times — to take on the E Ink-powered incumbents this October. Sounds very much like the Eee Tablet to us, but the headline feature of handwriting recognition isn’t mentioned, so this could be the same or a slightly different device. …

In another case of Canadians getting things ahead of their southerly neighbors, the Motorola Flipout has made its journey across the Atlantic and settled on Rogers as its first North American carrier. 3-year contractual commitments will be greeted with a lowly C$30 charge for the phone, or if you can’t bear the thought of being locked in for so long, you can buy the flipping thing outright for C$375. As a quick reminder, the Flipout runs on Google’s Android 2.1 OS, but embellishes things a little with a freshened up …

Not like it matters much now — after all, Project Natal has had time to incubate and come out as Kinect — but those wondering about the inner workings of the motion sensing system now have more one outlet to investigate. A patent application filed on February 23, 2009 was just made public today, describing a “gesture keyboarding” scenario where users can make gestures that are caught by a “depth camera” and then converted into in-game controls. Of course, those paying close attention could’ve read between the lines when we …

A Motorola support forum response about issues involving Exchange 2003 email problems on the Droid X has actually yielded something far more juicy: an updated window for the Froyo upgrade’s release. Promised since the phone’s initial launch, Moto’s now saying that the new build is “scheduled for deployment by early September,” so barring a miracle, we can probably toss out those dreams of getting it by late August — and we can certainly forget the rumors that it had already started going out. Clearly we’d like it sooner rather than …

We’ve been flooded with a deluge of tips about the HP Zeen ever since we posted those first FCC images of the tablet device this morning, and it’s actually a little surprising at how perfectly everything aligns. We’ve now had multiple tipsters confirm that the Zeen is an e-reading-focused Android tablet with the unique ability to connect directly to an HP printer and function as its interface without the need for a computer. But that’s not all — here’s everything else we know:

The Zeen is a capacitive tablet running a …

Contactless payments made using your phone are hardly a new idea in themselves, but when the three biggest US carriers decide to unite behind it, the time might have come to start paying closer attention. Bloomberg reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are about to test the NFC waters with pilot schemes in Atlanta and three other cities, potentially aided by partnerships with Discover Financial Services and British bankers Barclays Plc. This would require all-new readers for merchants and embedded NFC chips in phones, but we reckon plenty of people …

On Friday, during a visit from President Obama to its Detroit-Hamtramck plant, GM announced some good news for all the Volt fans out there. Production from 2011 to 2012 for the electric vehicle — originally slated at around 30,000 units — has been boosted to a projected 45,000 units, a 50 percent increase. The Volt, which has a range of 340 miles (on gas — it goes approximately 40 miles on battery alone) is being produced at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, which received $336 million in investments to prepare for the …