Jamie Condliffe

Navigation Really Sucks When Your Phone Is Bust

The single best thing about this image is the destination on the Google directions print out: Fix A Phone, 220 Glen Huntly Road. Siriacus, I hope they fixed you up. [Reddit]

This HTC Passive Speaker Costs $8,000

If you’re looking for particularly decadent accessory for your HTC One, perhaps you’d be interested in a wonderfully elaborate gramophone-inspired passive speaker? If you’ve got $8,000 lying around, at any rate. Designed by Justin Wolter as part of HTC’s push for more creative design, it’s actually called the Gramohorn II. No electronics are involved: it…

The Next Generation of SD Cards Will Guarantee 4K Video Shooting

A couple of smartphones aside, 4K video has until recently been the preserve of pro-level equipment, and the memory cards found in most devices just can’t keep up. But the next generation of SD cards will change that. The SD Association—for such a thing does indeed exist—has announced that an Ultra High Speed Class 3…

Panasonic’s Ridiculous 20-Inch 4K Tablet Will Go on Sale for $6,000

Panasonic showed off a crazy concept device at CES earlier this year: a 20-inch, 4K tablet. But now, that device is going on sale—for a price. https://gizmodo.com/panasonic-4k-tablet-hands-on-unbelievable-tiny-details-5974219 When we first saw the gigantic slate we weren’t entirely convinced. At the time, we said: The 15:10 tablet in Panny’s booth at CES is relatively stacked: Windows…

This Is What Google’s Barge Should Eventually Look Like

While Google is still encouraging mystery about what will lurk within its barge, documents unearthed by the San Francisco Chronicle seem to suggest that its outside will end up rather more striking than at present. https://gizmodo.com/google-finally-acknowledges-mystery-barges-encourages-1459645053 The documents, filed with the Port of San Francisco by By and Large LLC, explain that the floating… thing…

If you’re still not sure if your details were thieved in that massive Adobe hack, you can use this tool to see if your email featured in the smash’n’grab.

This Chair Can Be Worn Like a Backpack

If you demand that your furniture is both reassuringly substantial and also portable, then you probably have a tough time navigating life. But here’s something to help: a real chair that can be worn as a backpack. The Nomadic Chair by Jorge Penades is constructed from wood, but doesn’t require any screws, nails or glue—it…

Microsoft’s Office Web Apps—Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—are finally being blessed with real-time collaborative editing today. Took long enough.

The Internet Archive’s Scanning Center Has Been Destroyed by Fire

Yesterday, a huge fire destroyed the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center, which digitally preserves all manner of books, films and microfilms for future use. Most importantly, nobody was harmed. And, while the Archive lost some physical materials which were in the process of being digitized, the bulk were in a separate physical archive. There…

Do Kids Use E-Readers?

Look around any gathering involving kids and, these days, it’s likely that there are plenty of tablets floating around, too. But have you ever seen kids hunched over an e-reader in the same way? Beth Callaghan raises this great point on Apartment Therapy. Maybe tablets are to e-readers as comic books are to books? Or…

A Mind-Boggling Display of Earth-Like Planets

Kepler keeps finding more and more potentially habitable planets in our Universe—and it turns out that looking at them can be just as perplexing as thinking about them. https://gizmodo.com/one-in-five-sun-like-stars-have-earth-size-planets-in-h-1458356751 This video, by New Scientist, is a dizzying display of all 3538 known and candidate exoplanets that are part of multi-planet systems, as identified by NASA…

Dear Samsung: A ‘Fonblet’ Is Not a Thing

During its Analyst Day today in Seoul, Samsung has been trying to coin a new term. Brace yourselves, because if you thought ‘phablet’ was bad, then the ‘fonblet’ is something else entirely. Tech in Asia reports that the Korean manufacturer wants to establish the term to refer to “a large-display phone with a stylus and…

Can Technology Ever Make Us Truly Happy?

Humans are clever: what sets us apart from the rest of the creatures on the planet is our ability to think about the world around us—and shape it. But in making all the technological advances that seems so smart, are we making the world better, or just different? This video takes a pretty lofty view…

Rdio’s new iOS app recommends music based on your listening habits. Hardly innovative, but useful.

Your Google+ Photo Will Soon Be Displayed When You Call an Android

Google has plans to make better use of your Google+ profile picture—by throwing it up on the display of whoever you call, from early next year. According to Attila Bodis from Google, accounts that have a verified phone number attached to them will be automatically opted in and linked to the associated Google+ account. That…

Kazam Smartphones: Stock Android, Free Broken Screen Repairs

You’ve never heard of Kazam—because it’s a brand new manufacturer, set up by ex-HTC execs in the UK. But they’re offering up a range of new smartphones that come loaded with stock Android and, intriguingly, a policy which offers free broken screen replacement. Created in June, the company has now announced a line of phones…

Samsung: 2014 Phones to Have Twice the Pixels, Folding Displays by 2015

The future is slowly arriving, with the advent of phones with radically curved screens—but Samsung isn’t yet content. In fact, the company insists that the displays of its devices will be foldable by 2015. https://gizmodo.com/why-samsungs-curved-smartphone-display-isnt-just-hype-1453993230 Speaking at Samsung’s Analyst Day this week, the company announced that it’ll bring fully-foldable screens to the market “some time…

King Tut’s Body Spontaneously Combusted Inside Its Sarcophagus

The world’s most famous mummy, King Tutankhamun, may not have had quite the civilized send off that we thought: researchers are now suggesting that a botched mummification process led to his body spontaneously combusting inside its sarcophagus. A fresh new analysis of King Tut’s remains, using X-ray and CAT scans, reveals that his bones were…

The Weird Math Behind Paper Sizes

Despite all the talk of the paperless office, for some reason most of us still seem to drown under piles of dead tree. But while we’re all intimately familiar with the stuff, understanding where those weird sizing conventions came from never seems to get any easier. Turns out there’s plenty of math behind the puzzling…

Graphene Ink Will Let Us Print Circuits on Pretty Much Anything

Modern miracle stuff graphene has been used by developers to print circuits on clothing, creating a genuinely wearable form of tech that doesn’t rely on bulky watches, AR glasses or sewing computers into your flesh. Given that graphene’s USP is that it manages to work despite only being one atom thick, it creates a form…