Posted Jan 14th 2008 4:38AM by Joshua TopolskyFiled under: Transportation According to reports, roost-ruling, green automaker Toyota has confirmed plans to launch a plug-in hybrid by 2010. Our man in Japan Katsuaki Watanabe (company president) dropped the bombshell at this year’s Detroit Auto Show while detailing the automaker’s plans for tackling environmental concerns. Apparently, the new lithium-ion-equipped vehicles will first be made available to Toyota’s commercial customers — such as government agencies. Watanabe gave no indication of when a general consumer rollout would occur. The vehicle, which is a modified version of the ultra-popular Prius, is capable of achieving fuel efficiency of 99.9 miles-per-gallon in EV mode, though it can only sustain pure battery power for about seven miles. (Read the full post about ‘Toyota announces plug-in hybrid for 2010′…)

iTunes movie rentals are official. They’ve got their own special section of the iTMS. Every major studio is onboard: Fox, Warner, Disney, Paramont, Universal and Sony, plus a whole mess of smaller ones like Miramax and New Line. To start, we’ve got 1000 films, with new ones dropping 30 days after DVD. (Studio protectionism at its finest.) You’ve got 30 days to watch, and 24 hours to finish once you start. New flicks are $3.99, older ones are $2.99. You can move your entire collection to your iPod or iPhone with a single click, available today. (Read the full post about ‘iTunes 7.6 Movie Rentals Official: Every Major Studio Onboard, 1000 Films Available [Macworld 2008]’…)

Posted Jan 15th 2008 3:10PM by Paul MillerFiled under: Features, Storage Here’s the new Time Capsule NAS from Apple. Not much to say about this one. It’s a bit larger than we expected, but still pretty well sized for a NAS.Gallery: Apple Time Capsule hands-onTags: hdtv, wireless, digital, video (Read the full post about ‘Apple Time Capsule hands-on’…)

The AppleStore has been down for a long time now. As far as we can recall, it has never been down so long before a keynote, which may be a sign about what we already said last week: this keynote is going to be huge, even if the announcements could be tiny and paper-thin. While you wait for the keynote to start in our Liveblog, what do you expect to find when the store comes back up? Our poll with the most probable items is still going on: Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser. (Read the full post about ‘Apple Store Is Gone With the Wind, What Do You Expect Will Come Back? [Macworld 2008]’…)