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Ok, ok. So now there’s a USB-powered ionic air purifier that pops into the back of a computer and cleanses the air of “smoke, dust, germs, and other dangerous particles.” The perfect complement to that mouse which also doubles as a hand sterilizer. Read
Piece by Jeff Goldman in The Feature about how “zoomable user interfaces” could be in the cellphone’s future: In terms of memory capacity, mobile phones just keep getting better, but screen size is a problem. Smartphones are now able to store everything from photos to documents: finding your friend’s phone number by scrolling through an…
Samsung just got FCC approval for the SCH-A790, the first cellphone that can connect to CDMA cellular networks in the US (i.e. Verizon and Sprint) and also roam on GSM cellular networks everywhere else (but perversely, not in the States). Besides all that, the A790 looks like a decent phone in its own right, and…
SmallNetBuilder did some tests of NetGear’s new “superfast” 108Mbps 802.11g WiFi gear and found that actual throughput topped out at around 31Mbps. Which admittedly, is still pretty fast. Just not as fast advertised. Read
It takes a lot for us to be impressed by an MP3 player with just 256MB of Flash memory these days, but I4U points us to FancyLogic’s lighter-sized Compact 290, which has a few features that aren’t usually found on many smaller players like an FM tuner, a built-in speaker(!), line-in inputs for recording, and…
Dell is going to start selling their first flat-panel LCD television next Tuesday, a 17-inch model pictured above called the WT1700. Read [Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this]
Kyocera is supplying an MTV-branded cellphone for Virgin’s pay-as-you-go Virgin Mobile cellular service. Besides wearing an MTV logo, the Slider V5 will have a sliding keypad (duh), MTV-themed wallpaper, and special ringtones. Kyocera will also sell an unbranded version of the Slider V5 as well. Read
Nokia is claiming that in the past two weeks it’s sold 400,000 of its N-Gage gamephone, but if you read the article closely, that figure refers only to the number that have been shipped to retailers and distributors, not that have actually been sold to consumers. We’re still skeptical that Nokia can reach their target…
According to a new report, demand for robots is up, way up, with sales of so-called “domestic robots” — like the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner (pictured at right) — up more than 50% over the year before. The total global population of robots now stands at about 1.4 million. This number is sure to shoot…
This is unconfirmed, but it looks like Sony is going to kill its proprietary MicroMV digital video camcorder format, which uses tapes that are smaller than MiniDV tapes. Apparently MicroMV camcorders (like their incredibly small DCR-IP1) just haven’t been selling all that well. Read
Some eagle-eyed observers over at TabletPCBuzz noted that Bill Gates was using a brand-new, unreleased next-generation Toshiba Tablet PC while he was demonstrating the new OneNote application software at Microsoft’s Office 2003 launch event yesterday. Not a whole lot of details, other than that it will be lighter and have better battery life than the…
New iBooks today. Apple’s bumped up the speed of the iBook, adding a G4 processor, support for 802.11g (which Apple calls AirPort Extreme), a better video card, and USB 2.0. Read
ExtremeTech review of the SIPphone, which looks just like a regular telephone, and is the latest brainchild of MP3.com and Lindows.com founder Michael Robertson. It’s basically a telephone that plugs into an Ethernet port instead of a phone jack that let’s you make free phone calls over the Internet to anyone else with SIPphone, anywhere…
Sony, Sharp, Pioneer, and Kenwood are working together on a new line of stereo systems with Ethernet ports that can download music directly from the Internet without requiring a PC. The joint-venture is called Any Music Planning, and right now the stereos only connect to a Japanse online music service called LabelGate that charges about…
This might just make us forget all about the Exilim: There’s a new superslim digital camera coming from Sony that will be the smallest five megapixel camera ever made. The DSC-T1 is just eight-tenths of an inch thick, 2.4-inches tall, and has a 2.5-inch LCD viewfinder and a 3x optical zoom Carl Zeiss lens. Comes…
A bunch of new laptops from Toshiba, including the P25-S509, a new 17-inch widescreen model; the P15-S409 and the P10-S429, which both have 15.4-inch widescreen displays; and several lower-end budget models. Read
Julio Ojeda-Zapata of The Saint Paul Pioneer Press goes for a ride on both the Segway and the Equinox, a sit-down electric scooter which can go up to 30 miles per hour and has nearly four times the range of the Segway, and comes away a bit more impressed with the scooter: When I twisted…
As promised, here’s a roundup of all the reviews we could find of the new Treo 600 from Handspring (we suspect there will be many, many more appearing over the coming weeks). Read – BusinessWeek Read – PC Magazine Read – BargainPDA Read – Wall Street Journal Read – PDAlive Read – AlexKing.org Read –…
New 3.2 megapixel digital camera from Kyocera that’s noteworthy because it’s one of the few models out there with decent resolution that can record video clips in the MPEG4 format rather than the bulkier MPEG1 format which most digital camera use. Why is this a big deal? Because MPEG4 files take up much less space…
Some of you may recall that it was a small manufacturer named Sendo that was supposed to make the second cellphone running Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system, the Z100. Most unexpectedly, they got into a nasty spat with Microsoft about something or other (let’s just say everybody is suing everybody now) and hastily killed the phone…