Filed under: CBS , New content We ask, and we receive. A few months after Craig Ferguson topped our poll asking who is still watching standard definition television comes word that The Late Late Show is going high definition. CBS plans to flip the HDTV switch August 31, complete with an updated show opener and theme song. There’s nothing better that we can think of than seeing that beautiful, beautiful face in HD…wait, we may need to reconsider this.

Judging by the name of the company, at one point radios were the big thing to buy at Radio Shack. Today radios aren’t exactly high-end tech. Consumers today lean more towards computers and mobile phones. In an apparent attempt to get with the times, Radio Shack will be rebranding itself as The Shack reports Engadget. This makes sense when you consider that Radio Shack is more into phones with the recent addition of T-Mobile than it is anything else.

So, this whole “The Shack” relaunch is really happening, and the San Francisco and New York “Summer Netogether” events promise to be speaker wire-riddled mayhem. Take this giant laptop keyboard an anonymous tipster sent us, for instance. You could probably write a really nice email to your mom on that thing, don’t you think? Like we said: ominous. The tipster also said The Roots are slated to perform at the Times Square version of this event, which will connect two gigantic, fake laptops with live webcam imagery of the two events being beamed across the country — sure to prompt either national unity or riots in the streets.

Intel wants you to know that the rumor that its Z-series Atom chips are headed for the “discontinued” pile is not true. A few days back, we heard that the chips — which were initially designated for MIDs but made their way into some netbooks — could no longer be ordered from Intel . A spokesperson for the company, however, speaking with Register Hardware , said that the rumors were “100 percent inaccurate.” We’ll just have to wait and see how this all pans out, but we’re still not feeling terribly positive about poor little MIDs’ odds.

DigiTimes is reporting — in its usual sourceless, rumorific way — that a slew of Taiwanese manufacturers are set to deliver smartbooks based on the Snapdragon and Tegra chipsets by the fourth quarter of this year. Acer is leading the charge with an Android-sporting device, adding to its push of the Google mobile OS , while Mobinnova has confirmed US and European orders for its 8.9-inch élan , shipments of which might top half a million units in 2009.

Typically when we see products leaked before their official launch the culprit is some insider with blurry images of the products. Other times products are outed by the FCC or an overzealous reseller posts specs early. Walmart has sold and activated the new Blackberry 8520 early to one geek who lovingly went home to give the rest of us a video of him unboxing the device. The T-Mobile 8520 was set to ship on the 5th, but it slipped out of the Walmart bowels a few days early.

Filed under: Blu-ray With Angels & Demons still without a U.S. release date (September 14 in the U.K.) and Easy Rider set to debut September 15, there’s a possibility Sony Pictures new BD-Live powered movieIQ feature could find its debut on a pair of western movies: The Quick and the Dead & Silverado . Both are set to hit the streets September 8, while Silverado promises a never-before-seen featurette sure to interest fans in this collector’s edition, neither is quite The Man with No Name-series material or packing other notable Blu-ray exclusives beyond movieIQ.

Filed under: China Mobile , Android In China, Android’s well on its way to mutating into an entirely different beast thanks to China Mobile’s OPhone initiative to standardize the carrier on a smartphone platform — and with devices like the lovely (well, from a distance, anyway) Lenovo O1 backing up the effort, we’d say they’ve got a fighting chance of making the whole thing work. Of course, any good smartphone platform needs developers, and developers need an SDK; to that end, China Mobile has just unleashed version 1.0 of its OPhone developers’ site on the world.

Sure, you’re still waiting for your Nüvifone, but in the meantime it looks like the kids at Garmin have taken all that hard-won knowledge and applied it to their latest PND. The nüvi 1690, which recently popped up at the FCC, features GSM, GPRS, and EDGE connectivity. The unit won’t support voice calls, although with Bluetooth you should be able to use it as a hands-free unit for your current cellphone.

PMP Today is always up for new PMP brands. The iMux (or :Muz) brand has just launched three new devices: MU-959–is a 3-inch touchscreen PMP featuring the VibeTouch haptics technology. It’s a dual-core PMP that gives it gaming capabilities and should also be good enough to support multiple video codecs. It should be in the top-range among the three new iMuz PMPs coming in luxury brown, pink and black. MX1–a 1.5-inch budget PMP with up to 4GB of storage and an MSRP starting at $31.