The JTT WACAHD8GB is a somewhat ordinary timepiece that, when not telling the time, is shooting 1280x960 video at 30fps, or grabbing stills at 8MP.

Well, technically. This example 8MP photo has been scaled down to once again reminds us that there's a lot more to image quality than resolution:
Still, the most interesting aspect of the watch may not be its spy style or its pseudo-HD quality—the watch uses what looks like a 3.5mm to USB connector for syncing to your PC. Seriously, I'm not sure I've ever seen that before. $150. [JTT via technabob via Le Journal du Geek via Ubergizmo]

Rounding out the feature list are a few watchphone necessities, like voice recognition and speakerphone, all in a package that measures in at about 12mm thick—bulkier than your average Swatch, but well within acceptable wristwear territory. The first wave of releases will be scattered throughout Europe, starting in France, where the S9110 will retail for around $650.

The most striking thing about this—as well as the LG GD910—is that unlike pretty much every watchphone we've seen before, these might be usable on a day to day basis, granted you're willing to accept the inherent awkwardness of the watchphone form factor. No word on a stateside release yet, but import costs aren't likely to stop the kinds of dapper jetsetting gentlemen and/or independently wealthy James Bond superfans who'll be buying this thing anyway. [SamsungHub via Mobilecrunch]

Peter Nelson has spent most of his life and money assembling James Bond equipment scattered across the globe. But his museum collection includes vehicles representing almost every Bond film, ranging from a typical Aston Martin DB5 to the 42-ton Russian tank from Goldeneye.

Just nobody tell Nelson that James Bond isn't real. At this point, it will destroy him. [James Bond Museum and News & Star via Wired]

Note: Getty image of 1976 Lotus Esprit Coupe from 'The Spy Who Loved Me' - spotted at a recent auction.

Most of the infernal devices never existed in the original Ian Fleming stories. “Our only excuse for using them” says screenwriter Richard Maibaum, “is that such devices are available and cry out to be buckled onto James Bond’s back.”

Interestingly enough, while most of the tech found in Quantum of Solace can possibly be made, Thunderball's $500,000 budget imagined up a whole slew of inventions that had never been seen before. Have movie goers become addicted to portrayals of Bond more rooted in reality, or are our gadgets so advanced now that we don't have to make them up? [Modern Mechanix via Neatorama]

To start with, real multitouch makes a stellar appearance with a giant Microsoft-Surface-style table which Judi Dench—the head of MI6—and other agents use with ease, simultaneously. In fact, the user interface on the table—albeit adorned for the required Hollywood eye candy—actually makes sense and is extremely attractive, gestures included. Everything on it is doable with current technology, even the part in which they place a dollar bill and it gets automatically scanned and identified.

There's also the huge video wall at M's office. Unlike the multitouch surface, this is a CGI effect. However, with enough money and the use of transparent OLED technology and gesture recognition, the video wall is also perfectly doable. In fact, I saw something similar in my visit to Philips Labs last August, although that transparent video wall—a simulation of a glass storefront—used projection rather than OLEDs.

Only a couple of technologies were exaggerated. One was Bond's cellphone camera capabilities—with 007 taking pictures of faces with 3D depth of field information from a very long distance. The other was the speed of data transmission between the cellphone and MI6's headquarters. However, you can perfectly imagine that all that may be real in the military world and just not available to consumers, specially looking at some of the latest camera and communications research.

But what really makes this movie is not the technology. Yes, it plays an important role: Bond gets geolocation information on the baddies, and he uses his camera to get some of their pics, which then are analyzed and cross-referenced by MI6 databases. But none of it is a gimmick. There is no magic zippo lighter capable of launching kinetic rocket fire balls and save the day at the end of the movie. The technology in Quantum of Solace is realistic and it integrates naturally into the film, it flows with the plot.

What makes it the best Bond movie ever is what makes an action movie good. The script to start with. Serious, but also witty, and with the right amount of reality stretching. It even has an underlying social theme, which is interesting and relates to the current world's political climate. Marc Forster's direction makes you wish he directed Indiana Jones IV. His movie runs like clockwork, with the action scenes being masterfully choreographed and filmed, and painting a deeper, much more complex portrait of not only Bond, but also M, who gets a lot more presence in this one (and is Judy bloody Dench. I rest my case).

And then there is Bond himself. Daniel Craig really makes the movie work with his presence alone. He's a badass, but feels absolutely human. He has flair and a taste for luxury—wait until he arrives to Bolivia to see what I mean—but he gets gritty and dirty all the time. He could be a psychopath, but you can see that he has heart. He can seduce a women into bed like the best Connery would do, but you can actually see that he cares about her. You can feel that he is a hopeless romantic below the cold surface. A guy consumed by the need of vengeance and the contradiction of being betrayed by the love of his life. Yet, at the same time, he still loves her to the point of risking everything, even while she is dead.

And he likes cocktails.

Yes. Go. See it. Now.

James Bond without Q is like toast without butter. Over more than three decades, Q’s work amazed audiences and saved Bond’s life. Q’s inventions confounded Bond’s adversaries and inspired engineers at the CIA—really—to stretch the limits of physics and adapt the most advanced technology to espionage needs. I used to run that department, the CIA Office of Technical Service.

“Q was an inspiration,” a long-time technical officer once told me. “When a new Bond movie was released, we always got calls asking, ‘Do you have one of those?’ If I answered ‘no,’ the next question was, ‘How long will it take you to make it?’ Folks didn’t care about the laws of physics or that Q was an actor in a fictional movie—his character and inventiveness pushed our imagination.”

Former Soviet intelligence officers have commented to American counterparts that Bond movies were carefully analyzed by KGB technicians. The Soviets believed that Q’s gadgets telegraphed the Western technical capabilities that Soviet counterintelligence would eventually face.

But Q’s devices, unlike those available to American cold war spies, always worked exactly as they were designed.

The late Richard Helms, former Director of Central Intelligence, noted this contrast with Bond in writing, “[Our] operational plumbing…included…versions of some of the gadgets James Bond always had at hand. It sometimes seemed the more impressive a device appeared in the workshop, the more fragile it was. It took some experience before case officers learned not to fling these prima donna utensils into the back seat of an automobile, but to treat them with the delicate hand they required.”

By the mid 1990’s digital technology was revolutionizing technical espionage just as the integrated circuit had done three decades earlier. IC’s made possible tiny bugs for clandestine audio, electronic communications devices and new sensors for collection and detection. But by 1999, software code—visually unexciting strings of ones and zeros—buried in a computer or a PDA, rather than sleek concealments, tiny bugs and miniature cameras, had became the heart of spy gear. In QoS, fast cars, exotic weapons, brilliant explosions and smooth seduction apparently remain, but the inestimatible Q and his amazing gadgets are gone, possibly forever.

Robert Wallace, a retired CIA officer, is the former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service and author of SPYCRAFT: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda. Having appeared on Gizmodo many times in the past, he may be reached at www.ciaspycraft.com.

Along with a new Collector's Edition of Casino Royale by Sony, MGM has released a slew of classic Bond films in standalone singles or value packs. Dr. No included one of the dullest documentary featurettes we've ever seen, but taking a quick tour through From Russia with Love, we found a gem of an interview with Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond who died in 1964).

So the DVD collection may be a little hit or miss, though both feature commentary by director Terrence Young and cast (and the newer films are packed with similar fan-worthy extras). Video quality on the early titles is predictably a bit rough and grainy, but luckily not sharpened and flattened to kill the original print feel.

Lots of other decent releases this week, including Sweeney Todd and Zombie Strippers. (Admittedly, we've never seen Zombie Strippers, but we're pretty sure it's one of our ten faves.)

• The Breed (First Look)
• Casino Royale (2006, Collector's Edition) (Sony)
• Diary of the Dead (Weinstein)
• Die Another Day (MGM)
• Dr. No (MGM)
• Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Vivendi Visual)
• For Your Eyes Only (MGM)
• From Russia with Love (MGM)
• Halloween (2007) (Weinstein)
• Holiday Favorites with the Wonderland Carolers (Cinevolve)
• The Incredible Hulk (2008) (Universal)
• James Bond Collection Three-Pack: Volume 1 (Dr. No, Die Another Day, Live and Let Die) (MGM)
• James Bond Collection Three-Pack: Volume 2 (For Your Eyes Only, From Russia with Love, Thunderball) (MGM)
• Live and Let Die (MGM)
• The Strangers (2008) (Universal)
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (DreamWorks)
• Thunderball (MGM)
• The Woods Have Eyes (Echo Bridge)
• Zombie Strippers (Sony)

[hidef digest]

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Update: adaorardor points out that Full Metal Jacket was actually the first to double-dip. Thanks!

Gilmour has imposed a strict logic on his works he makes objects using only cardboard and glue. There is no supporting structure, no wooden or metal frame. His interpretations of everyday objects are created in adherence to the use of a pure and single material, but instead of the marble or bronze of classical statues, he has chosen one of the most humble and commonly found of our industrial times.

It's true: the detail and fidelity are amazing. Too bad cardboard is not rain proof, like marbel and bronze. On the positive side, knowing that Bond is a noted Dry Martini addict who crashes every single vehicle he gets his hands on, giving him a cardboard car to fight against a cardboard SPECTRE is not a bad thing at all.

[Chris Gilmour via Jalopnik]

The outdoor version will include a flat Phillips screwdriver, flint stick and combo edge blade while the spy version will utilize a diamond tip glass cutter, Phillips head screwdriver, lock pick, magnifying glass and a straight edge blade. Users interested in the everyday version will get a flat Phillips screwdriver, bottle opener, refillable pen, magnifying glass and a combo-edge blade. As an added touch, the design of the "Q" watch resembles the hammer mechanism of 007's Walther PPK pistol.

The watches are currently in pre-production and a timetable for their release has not yet been determined. However, expect to pay far out the ass to feel like James Bond—to the tune of $2-$3,000 for the sterling silver model, $5-$7000 for Gold or Rose Gold and $10-$15,000 for platinum. [Veldini via BornRich]

Gear Crazy
No offense to Steve Carell, but I'm not talking about goofy Maxwell Smart crap—I'm talking about serious Bond-grade hardware: Inflatable getaway airplanes, remote-controlled spying insects, cigarettes that fire .22 rounds, hallucinogenic cigars, about 100 other tobacco-related instruments of deception and an ingeniously camouflaged speedboat or two, not to mention digital audio recorders and CCD-based digicams developed decades before their commercial appearance. They've all been built by CIA engineers and used successfully, at least in the test phase.

The extensively researched book chronicles the gear and the people behind the gear, operatives still shrouded in pseudonym (or even anonym) who went around Moscow on cold winter days planting listening devices in hotel rooms or dead-dropping microfiche in the middle of public parks. It's about the nerds in the labs who were asked to make debris-free drills and didn't balk, guys who were asked to mount blow-up sex dolls as pop-up in-car decoys and didn't laugh. (OK, some probably laughed.) In short, it's an incredible page turner, mostly because none of it was dreamed up by Sir Ian Fleming or any of his thousand copycats.

Whodunit
The book is so good because it's written by two of the only guys who could write it. Bob Wallace was a CIA agent for 32 years and the director of the CIA's Office of Technical Services (that is, "office of covert badass spy gear") from 1998 to 2002. A guy who chose spy work over journalism after leaving the University of Kansas, he did his first 20 years the hard way, in field ops. He admits that many of his own early exploits can never be written down.

Keith Melton is an espionage historian, something of an international man of mystery if I ever met one, whose most authoritative claim on this project is that he has the largest collection of espionage devices the world has ever (not) seen. You know that Palm III that features heavily in the 2007 spy thriller Breach, about late Cold War Soviet turncoat Robert Hanssen? Yeah, Melton owns that Palm III—Hanssen's original, complete with stolen state secrets. I asked Melton how he got it, and he just said vaguely that he has his ways. "Let's leave it at that."

Too Many Secrets
I asked both of the authors how they were allowed to release a book filled with spy secrets, and they admitted it had not been easy. By Wallace's account, the CIA tied it up for 18 months. Melton says it's more like two years, and that at one point the CIA deemed the work "the most damaging book on espionage ever to be published," and "a virtual primer on espionage." As you can tell, the CIA eventually consented to the book's publication, more or less intact.

"At one time, all this material would have been classified secret or higher," Wallace says. "But given the change in technology that has occurred, the time that has passed and the fact that the primary target, the Soviet Union, no longer existed, these stories could be written down to fill a major void in American intelligence literature."

In truth, the reason it can be declassified is that espionage involves totally different kinds of machines now, mainly laptops and BlackBerrys, and instead of needing microphones and cameras, agents need software to "listen" to chatter in the ether.

CIA's Secret Gadget Rooms
I asked Wallace if there was a secret room at CIA headquarters where all the gadgets hung from the wall, his answer was even better: there are multiple rooms, one for each department: the guys who did disguises and forged documents had one, the guys who did secret listening devices had one. "It was like going on a Hollywood tour," he says, only as OTS director, he was the guy giving the tours, to visiting congressmen and other senior Washington staff.

"I don't know that I ever had a bad visit with a congressman. You would put things in their hands to touch and feel, to operate and manipulate, and then you'd tell them the operational story that went behind the object: what it was used for, and the product that came from it," says Wallace, adding wistfully, "It was a dream job."

End of Spy Gear?
Melton says that Wallace may be the last OTS director to give those tours, or to bring a briefcase of neat-o hardware to his closed congressional hearings. In the future, directors would be "more likely to come and show you a printout or algorithm, something that could do more than 1,000 spies." Melton explains, "The gadgets are the spies, while the humans are support, now more than ever." How's that for making you feel sad and Matrix-y all at the same time?

If the age of the crazy cool spy gear has come to an end, all the more reason we should celebrate it. For the next several days, I will be posting spy hardware from Wallace and Melton's book with a "CIA Spytech" tag, stuff that will make you laugh, cry or just hide under your dresser for a while. It's amazing, chilling stuff and again, it's ALL TOTALLY REAL. Stay tuned! [Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda]

Our picture shows the java interface on a Nokia, but Autopage assures us that the WAP interface gives C3 iPhone compatibility as well. The price for all of this control starts at $149 for a year of "basic usage" which offers the full feature set, but is limited to 200 uses per month - unlimited use costs $249 per year. The system itself is installed as an aftermarket product and will cost around $1000 when it is released in two weeks. [C3]