BlackBerry Q10 available for pre-order on Verizon, $200 with a two-year contract Mobile

For those of you who wouldn't touch a tactile screen if we gave you one, Verizon's just put a smartphone up for pre-order that might be preferable: the Blackberry Q10. Big Red will carry the regular black model and has exclusive dibs on the dapper white Q10 we saw earlier, both of which are on pre-order for $200 with a two-year activation, or $600 sans commitment. On top of real QWERTY chiclets, you'll get a 3.1-inch, 720 x 720 Super AMOLED touch display, dual-core Qualcomm CPU, 2GB of RAM and Blackberry 10.0. As a bonus, Verizon's estimated ship date of June 6th might even line up nicely with the imminent arrival of a certain new version of the OS, too.

Plex app now available for Drobo's media-savvy 5N NAS HD

With its quad-core ARM processor, the Drobo 5N is capable of much more than just storing files, and you can now grab a Plex app to help it live up to that potential. Once installed, it'll turn the NAS into a full blown media server to distribute up to 16TB of protected media to any of your Plex- or DLNA-supported SmartTVs,handheld devices, Mac or PC computers, set top boxes and gaming consoles. Plex said that the Drobo, while not capable of performing real-time video transcoding, will be able to demux multiple video and audio streams and transcode multi-channel audio to stereo AAC in real-time. If you already shelled out $600 for one of the speedy boxes -- on top of the drives to populate it -- the free cost of the app is probably a relief. You can grab it from your Drobo Dashboard.

The Wall Street Journal to launch LinkedIn-style social network

The Wall Street Journal will soon launch a business-minded social network along the lines of LinkedIn, according to a report from The Times of London. The news comes amid reports of restructuring and new financial offerings from the media giant, including a personal messaging system for investors and a newswire service called Dow Jones X. Of course, this isn't News Corp's first social network rodeo, as it had a dubious fling with Myspace that ended rather badly. Though there's no word on an exact date, The Times said it should be arriving in several months -- but we're not sure if corporate types will be high on trusting the Rupert Murdoch-helmed outfit with their personal info.

DARPA builds an Android-based, low-cost ground sensor (video)

This isn't an ignominious box you're looking at -- it's the potential future of military sensors. The device is DARPA's first reference design for a ground sensor based on ADAPT (Adaptable Sensor System), a modular Android processing core that does the hard work for surveillance gear. The mobile technology inside is miserly enough to run on its own power, and smart enough to simplify both networking and remote control. More importantly, it should be cheap: DARPA expects to cut sensor development times from several years to less than one, with lower costs to match. The agency starts field testing the ground sensor this summer, and it's already contemplating air- and sea-based ADAPT designs. Catch an example of DARPA's airborne sensor experiments after the break.