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Carnegie Mellon University has put together a “Robot Hall of Fame,” inducting two real and two fictional robots as the first honorees: NASA’s Sojourner robot, GM’s Unimate assembly line robotic arm, R2-D2, and the HAL 9000 (pictured at right) from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Read [Via Slashdot]
In a classic case of overreaction, the South Korean government is going to require cameraphones to emit a loud shutter-type noise whenever a photograph is taken. The idea being to make it more difficulty to surreptitously snap pictures while in public. Read [Via TechDirt]
We wouldn’t keep kicking the N-Gage when it’s down like this, but the bad news keeps on coming. The latest calamity: the encryption that prevents N-Gage games from being played on other cellphones has been cracked, so now there’s no reason to buy Nokia’s gamephone if you just want to play one of its games.…
New 20GB hard drive based MP3 player from Gateway. With a few minor differences, the DMP-X20 seems about the same as Samsung and Dell’s new hard drive MP3 players, and has a built-in FM tuner, a mic for voice recording, a 2.5-inch LCD screen, and uses USB 2.0 for transferring files from a PC. Read
A new wireless GPRS laptop card from Dell for connecting to cellular data networks. GPRS isn’t as fast as WiFi, but the coverage is considerably better, and so will get the job done. To work, at least here in the States, the TrueMobile 5100 Tri-Band GPRS PC Card requires a service plan from either AT&T…
This is almost certainly a fake Photoshopped image (someone out there must have a lot of free time on their hands), but a photo of what purports to be the Tungsten T4 has been floating around the Internet. Obviously palmOne hasn’t uttered a word about this yet (or if they’re even planning to make a…
An article in today’s New York Times asks a big question that we may never know the answer to, but which we’re going to be asking a lot in a few years: Can robots ever become conscious? Read
It was supposed to have been out by now, in time for the holiday shopping season, but Microsoft’s Smart Personal Object Technology, which uses FM radio subcarrier frequencies to deliver information like the weather, news, stock quotes, etc directly to all sorts of like wristwatches and refrigerators, has been delayed. Microsoft won’t say now when…
I guess it’s that time of year, but there’s another list of the top inventions of the year out, this one from Time magazine. Included on the list: cameraphones, the no-contact jacket, the digital guitar, the Aquada amphibious car (pictured at right), Sony’s Qrio robot, and those sunglasses with the built-in video camera. Read
Looks like Belkin is backing down from their inane decision to offer an “upgrade” for their wireless routers that reprograms them so that every eight hours users’ web browsers are automatically redirected to some webpage advertising a Belkin product. Read
As we mentioned last week, a sizeable number of people have been complaining to Apple about the new 15-inch aluminum Powerbooks they’ve bought, saying that mysterious white spots that won’t go away have started appearing on their screens. On the off-chcance that you were wondering what this looked like, here’s a photo of one person’s…
Ever the innovator, NTT DoCoMo is carrying Panasonic’s new P505iS, the world’s first cameraphone with an auto-focus lens. The P505iS has a 65,000 color display, a mini-trackball for navigation, and a resolution of 1.27 megapixels. Sooner or later auto-focus is going to be a standard feature on all cameraphones. Read
Mark Evanier bought the DVR-810H, Pioneer’s new TiVo digital video recorder with the built-in DVD burner, and he seems to like it quite a bit. Fulfilling the dreams of many a TiVo fanatic, you can use one of these things to easily create an archive shows or movies stored on the TiVo’s hard drive by…
We rarely cover the low-end of the cellphone market these days, but Cingular is carrying a couple of nicely designed new handsets from LG that are the first models from the South Korean manufacturer that work with GSM cellular networks. The G4050 (pictured at right) has a 65,000 color internal display, an external Organic Electro-Luminescent…
Not that this news is taking anyone by surprise, but Verizon officially started offering Samsung’s i600 Smartphone today. The SCH-i600 (or the SPH-i600, believe it or not Microsoft’s press release and Verizon’s website actually differ on what it’s called) is the second cellphone running Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system to become available in the US, and…
Popular Science has announced its Grand Award Winners for the Best of What’s New in 2003, and among the recipients are a few names that regular Gizmodo readers might recognize: 802.11g, the new high-speed wireless networking standard; RCA’s RD2780 and Archos’ AV300 personal video players; JVC’s GR-HD1, the world’s first high-definition consumer camcorder; and Mitsubishi’s…
Excellent article by Mark Delaney, the design manager of Samsung Design Europe, about something we’ve said time and time again: that aesthetics are becoming increasingly important when it comes to gadget and consumer electronics design: Most consumer electronics brands are so focused on studying their competitors’ products (benchmarking) that they forget about where their products…
A new 1.3 megapixel digital camera attachment from Veo that fits into the SD expansion card slot of Pocket PCs. The Photo Traveler 130S can also record video clips and has a lens that can swivel 180 degrees. Read
Remember that prototype of a Sony personal video player we had on the site a few months ago? Well it’s coming out. The Giga Pocket PCVA-HVP20 Personal Video Player has a 3.5-inch LCD screen, a 20GB hard drive, and play Windows Media, MPEG1, and MPEG2 video files (where’s support for MPEG4 and DivX?). Comes out…
It’s been one year since the launch of the Tablet PC and ComputerWorld assesses its progress over the past twelve months, saying that while it hasn’t been a raging success for Microsoft, it hasn’t been a dismal failure either. What’s been holding it back? The paucity of applications designed specifically to take advantage of the…