Gadgets

89% of Americans Want Texting While Driving Outlawed

According to a 2,049-person poll, demographically weighted proportionally to the US, 89% of adults think that text messenging while driving is “distracting, dangerous and should be outlawed.” So how many of those polled text and drive anyway? 66% So is this a situation of “we know it’s for our own good,” or, “those other people…

Brush & Rinse Toothbrush Creates Mini Water Fountain

The Brush & Rinse toothbrush from Amron Experimental creates a little water fountain for you to sip from when it’s time to rinse. Hey, this is a solution to a problem that’s long overdue. Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web…

Dell Goes After Some Zing

Dell announced today that it’s acquiring Zing in order “to continue improving the entertainment experiences it provides its customers.” The short, vague announcement (check it post-jump) is a bit surprising because Zing’s bread and butter is Wi-Fi music players (Sansa Connect, Sirius Stiletto, Pandora’s Wi-Fi player), and Dell hasn’t really had much luck with portable…

Sole Mio Concept Mouse Recharges via Sunlight

The sun may be the bane of basement-dwelling geeks everywhere, but Sole Mio doesn’t care. Designed for office workers who have regular access to sunlight (via windows, etc.), this environmentally friendly mouse is currently undergoing testing to see if it can charge itself during normal daily activities. The designers admit its success is likely dependant…

Wibrain’s B1 UMPC is Super Connected, Super Ugly

Getting a UMPC with every wireless connection capability you could dream of will cost you. If that UMPC is Wibrain’s business-centric B1, that price will be largely social as your peers ridicule you for toting your goofy gadget around the office. 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1, GSM/GPRS/EDGE and HSDPA are all yours along with a 4.8″ touch…

Physicists Figure Out How To Cause Levitation; Hoverboards Imminent

If there was a cooler movie prop in my childhood than the hoverboard from Back to the Future, Part II, I don’t know what it was. That hoverboard made me really, really want to be living in the year 2015. And while as I got older my pragmatism and cynicism lead me to believe we…

OpenMoko Developer Preview Kit Unboxing: Wow, That’s a Lot of Stuff

Someone got their OpenMoko Neo Advanced developer preview phone kit in the mail, so naturally the first thing they did was throw the Christmas-in-August pictures up on the net. That “Hi, I might contain a portable nuke” case is indeed packed to the gills. But for $450, it should be. [digg] https://gizmodo.com/openmokos-neo-1973-open-source-smartphone-ships-in-octo-275414

Where Our Tech Dollars Go: Landlines and Cable TV, Mostly

Wired had this really cool chart that shows where we spend our tech dollars last week that we somehow missed, but better late than never, eh? The chart breaks down the average household spending on tech goods and services annually, and it shows that we spend way too much money on landline phones: 26% of…

F Cup Cookies Promise That Their Fat Will Go Straight to Your Boobs

Ladies, are you self-conscious about your breasts? Do you think they need to be bigger to get you attention from guys, or at least from guys like Charlie White? Well, you could have expensive and gross breast implant surgery, or you could just grab some F Cup cookies from Japan. These sure-to-be-effective cookies apparently make…

NASA Sponsoring $2M Flying Car Contest; Time Machine Contest Coming Next

Despite the skepticism that justly confronts any mention of a “flying car,” what with the disaster that expecting people who can barely drive a car to learn to fly a personal plane would be, NASA seems pretty optimistic about the idea. In fact, they’re holding a $2 million contest to entice people to design flying…

Lenovo will start selling its notebooks preloaded with Linux from Novell in Q4 of this year. [Reuters]

Shadow SS Watch Has Two Faces, Frightens Us

The Shadow SS watch is a two-faced little son-of-a-product from a very clever design house indeed. That is because, as your mother told you, appearances can be deceiving. The Shadow SS proves your mother was right, again. The watch on first inspection may appear to be your average run-of-the-mill, square- faced, metal bracelet, snazzy timekeeper,…

Buck Rogers Gun, Sold on Ebay

A pistol from the late ’70s TV show Buck Rogers just fetched $2,750 on eBay. Twelve inches in length, the gun features a microswitch to light up the clear tip. My initial impression: Damn, this thing is cheap-looking. And then I remembered a trip to the Star Trek museum in Vegas, and how cheap phasers…

BooRu-BooRu Speakers are CuteRu-CuteRu

Take any grotesque alien form, add large, ETesque eyes, and we’re in love. It’s a genetic weakness sure to be exploited by hostile androids that’s already being exploited by Korean radio manufacturers. The BooRu-BooRu speakers not only have adorable sound coming out of their plush bodies, but radio controls on their eyes, ears and…so cute…can’t…

Fully Functional LEGO Guitar Hero Controller Shreds Other Plastic Guitars

This Gibson Explorer-modeled, fully functional LEGO Guitar Hero controller is definitely one of the better DIY video game peripherals we’ve seen—it’s exponentially more attractive than the last homemade GH controller we saw, anyway. How does it work? https://gizmodo.com/how-to-make-an-ugly-guitar-hero-guitar-out-of-scratch-283986 The maker loses a bit of DIY cred by dumping the guts from a real GH controller…

Is it a Boat? Is it a Plane? No, it’s the Hydroptre

A 60-footer that goes by the name of Hydropt re is hoping to travel at over 50 knots (58mph) and become the world’s fastest racing ship. Using “wings”, the French-built craft glides over the waves, instead of ploughing through them like a traditional sailing vessel. Even the captain, Alain Th bault, who has crossed the…

2010 Olympics, Now WIth Hyrdrogen Buses

The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver will need a lot of transportation, so the B.C. government is assembling the largest collection of hydrogen fuel-cell buses on the planet. Twenty hydrogen buses will be in Whistler for coastal transport during the Olympic Games. Each bus costs about $2.1 million, or four times the price of the diesel…

AIGO USB Drives, for Couples

Love comes in many forms: roses, chocolates, consensual anal relations, and now, USB drives. The AIGO his and hers flash drives will not only prevent USB mixups, but they’ll further reinforce necessary gender roles in a relationship. For instance, a woman is supposed to be prissy and like hearts. That’s her job. A man is…

Inflating Caterpillar Booty Dress Pumps Itself Into a Chair

The Self-Sustainable Chair is a polyethylene garment, filled with air automatically through shoe pumps. (Translation: your butt fills with air and you can plop down anywhere.) But if our inherent laziness is tempered through the requirement more work to be lazy, is there any point at all? ‘Nihilist Chair’ might be a better, though more…

iPhone Patent Dibs Begin (Pitifully)

In the wake of consumer action lawsuits, there is another group of citizens looking for a piece of the iPhone: patent trolls. Just take US Patent 6,784,873 by SP Technologies—it’s a patent for entering information on a touch screen. If it sounds like an all-encompassing, overly-broad patent, that’s probably because it is…an obvious point when…