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A “disposable” cellphone — one that came with a half hour or an hour of talktime, and that you could either then refill with minutes, recycle, or just throw away — isn’t such a bad idea, but so far no one seems to have gotten it right yet. One such attempt, the HopOn, was massively…
We actually got one piece of vaguely comprehensible hate mail in response to our post yesterday about how high school kids are using gadgets to cause all sorts of mischief (such as the kid who used a universal remote and then walked through the hallways surreptitiously switching on all TVs in the classrooms), but then…
Another interesting article about gadgets in yesterday’s New York Times, this one about people who buy lots of new gadgets and then never end up using them: People acquire these things — hand-held personal digital assistants, flatbed scanners, compact disc copiers and a host of other objects — because they promise to make life more…
Right off the bat we’re wowed by Sharp’s new V601SH cameraphone, which is another new handset being carried by Vodafone in Japan beginning in December. It has a built-in 2 megapixel digital camera (with an auto-focus lens!) that can record high-definition video clips, a video out port for watching those clips on a TV, and…
Dan’s Data review of the Photo3-D 303, Mission3-D’s kit for taking three-dimensional photographs with almost any digital camera that we first mentioned a few weeks ago. It does work, but you need those red and blue 3D glasses to look at the resulting images, but Dan says that with a little effort you can probably…
Scott Kirsner of FastCompany says what a lot of people are probably feeling and what execs at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung really don’t want to hear: that he doesn’t need a fancy new cellphone and that he’s perfectly happy with the handset he has now: Want to tick off the CEO of Nokia? Tell…
ThinkSecret is pretty sure that Apple is going to announce two iPod peripherals when they unveil iTunes for Windows later today, a microphone for recording voice memos and a Flash memory card reader for storing digital photos on an iPod. Read
From Danish company NorthQ, a new progressive scan DVD player/digital video recorder with one unusual feature: you can swap out the hard drive. The NQ7100 DVD Player comes with a swappable hard drive bay so you can easily replace whatever’s in there with a much higher capacity drive whenever you want, which should certainly help…
We already knew about this one because J&R Music World accidentally leaked the news a few weeks ago, but Creative has officially announced the Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (which is the regular Jukebox Zen but with a larger display), and it’s even better than we’d originally reported. J&R listed a 40GB player on their site,…
T-Mobile is issuing replacements for some, but not all, of their color Sidekicks. Apparently some of the Sidekicks that were shipped with swivel screens that have faulty hinges that could eventually damage the screen’s wiring. T-Mobile has already contacted Sidekick owners offering a free replacement, so if you own a color Sidekick and didn’t get…
We almost missed this: Vodafone says that starting in December it’s going to carry NEC’s V601N cameraphone with an analog television tuner. You can’t record TV shows and save them for later with the V601N, but it can capture still images of whatever you’re watching that you can use as wallpaper or email to friends…
The “P-series” Segway HT is out (courtesy of Segway aficionado Phillip Torrone, we got to ride one of these when we were in Seattle last week ). This is the more consumer-oriented edition of the Segway that we reported on a few weeks ago. This one is slower, smaller, more compact, and less expensive than…
Flattered though we are that Wired Magazine would borrow from Gizmodo to publish an email newsletter, this analysis by Adweek is blushmakingly over the top. “Although it’s rare for any publisher to do a press release about an e-mail newsletter — much less throw a launch party for it at New York’s Starfoods restaurant —…
First Tablet PC from LG. Haven’t seen any pictures of it yet, but the tablet will have a 12.1-inch display, a 40GB hard drive, a 1.8GHz processor, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. No word on when this might come out, but we’re guessing it’ll be sometime early next year. Read [Thanks, Christopher Coulter]
Article in the New York Times today about the use and abuse of gadgets in high schools these days and how teachers are almost totally clueless about what’s going on. The gadgety hijinks mainly consist of students using wristwatch calculators to cheat on tests or sending text messages with their cellphones while in class, but…
Olympus, working with another Japanese company, Riso Kagaku, has built the world’s fastest color printer. Called the Orphis HC5000, it can print up to 105 pages a minute. Read
Gary Krakow over at MSNBC.com got to play with HP’s new iPAQ 4150 Pocket PC from HP (the one with both WiFi and Bluetooth built-in) and the new Bluetooth GPS navigation module (pictured at right) and 1.3 megapixel digital camera attachment that HP is coming out with for their Pocket PCs. Gary gives high marks…
If you really, really need to stay connected, you may want to consider this: a wearable, solar-powered, field communications system from NetworkAnatomy called the CommanderPack. The CommanderPack consists of a backpack that comes with a cellphone, a two-way radio, a Tablet PC, a satellite link; a helmet with a built-in video camera, microphone, and “extreme”…
Norwegian cellphone site AMobile.no takes a thorough look at several different Bluetooth cellphone headsets, including Motorola’s Bluetooth Headset, Nextlink’s Bluespoon Digital, Nokia’s HDW-2, the M3000 from Plantronics, the HBH-35 and HBH-60 (pictured at right) from Sony Ericsson, and the HHB-500 from Siemens. Bluetooth headsets haven’t made a lot of headway here (we very rarely see…
This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, but The Register is reporting that the first week of sales have been rough for the N-Gage, Nokia’s gamephone, at least in the UK. A poll of 6000 game stores in Britain found that only 500 were sold, which is going to make it…