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Neiman Marcus is selling a pair of six foot tall “His and Hera” servant robots built by International Robotics that cost $400,000 and can answer the door, help you with your groceries, and relay messages to other family members. Which doesn’t sound like a whole heck of a lot for $400,000, so we’re guessing they…
ComputerWorld puts the new dual-processor Apple G5 desktop through its paces, and comes away very, very satisfied: It’s clear from two weeks of testing that Apple’s new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to…
Someone’s gone ahead and invented a new motorized surfboard that’s sort of like a flat jet ski. Mechanical Engineering magazine has a piece on how the “jet board” (which will soon be the bane of surfers around the world) was created. Read [Via Slashdot]
In case you missed any of them, some highlights from the past week of Gizmodo: Ultra HDTV Pocket PCs for the blind The WiSIP: new voice over WiFi phone Disney’s video-on-demand set-top box Three new Palms out today 3G causes headaches and nausea. And it improves your memory. Creative’s wireless media adapter Sanyo’s new supersmall…
There have been about a billion reviews and articles about those three new Palms (the Tungsten T3, the Tungsten E, and the Zire 21) that came out on Wednesday, so to save you some trouble, we’ve put together a roundup of as many as we could find. We’re sure there are tons we missed, but…
You always gotta take these kinds of studies with a big grain of salt, but Allied Business Intelligence is predicting that by 2008 25 million cars will come with Bluetooth or WiFi. While we haven’t heard of many cars with built-in WiFi, Bluetooth is already turning up in new models from Acura, Audi, Lexus, Lincoln,…
Sales of the PlayStation 2 have dropped off considerably this year (which isn’t that surprising given it’s been out for a few years now), so a few months ago Sony revealed plans to come out with a new version of the console called the PSX that would hopefully help jumpstart sales. Besides being able to…
By Raffi Krikorian, the author of the book TiVo Hacks, a guide to picking a TiVo that gives an overview the four main categories of TiVos — the Series 1 Standalone, the Series 1 DirecTiVo, the Series 2 Standalone, and the Series 2 DirecTiVo — and the different advantages and disadvantages of each. Read [Via…
Article over at MSNBC.com about the “8-bit underground” of people who make music with the original Gameboy, the Atari 2600, and the Commodore 64: Back in the day (i.e. the 1970s and 1980s) consoles like the Nintendo NES could dedicate only so much hardware and programming to sound effects and music. The resulting sounds were…
Another personal video player has turned up, this one the TAZ I from Tight Audio Systems. It looks like it’s still a bit vaporish at the moment (there are no actual photos, just illustrations), but the features it claims to have are pretty sweet: a 60GB hard drive that supports the MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, and…
ZDnet Japan has some great photos of several of Sony’s QRIO humanoid robots (which used to be called the SDR-4X) riding the bullet train in Japan to celebrate the opening of a new station in Shingawa. What the pictures don’t show are the robots later becoming really rowdy and eventually getting themselves kicked off of…
Panasonic is coming out with the first four megapixel digital camera with a 12x optical zoom lens. The Lumix DMC-FZ10 uses a Leica lens and uses Panasonic’s MEGA Optical Image Stabilizer technology to increase sharpness when taking pictures with the telephoto zoom engaged or when shooting in the low light. Read
BargainPDA has some more details on those two new wireless iPAQ Pocket PCs that we first learned of last month. We had originally reported that they were to be called the h4155 and the h4355, but it looks like they’re now just the h4100 and the h4300, or perhaps that’s the name of the series…
Steve’s DigiCams review of another of Minolta’s new digital cameras, the Dimage E323, which has a resolution of 3.2 megapixel, a 3x optical zoom lens, and a vaguely retro-ish styling to it that we find oddly compelling. Steve says it’s a great choice for the “intermediate photographer.” Read Amazon – Dimage e323
We’re digging all the crazy speculation about what major player is going to be announcing a new Microsoft Smartphone on Wednesday. We’re pretty sure it’s going to be Samsung, but according to MSMobiles, some of the other names that are being thrown out there are ViewSonic, Psion, and Sony Ericsson. We’ll know for certain in…
Recently a family in Finland was pretty startled when their TV went blank while they were watching the news and pictures of their neighbors started appearing on the screen: Confused, they went to the neighbour to see if they were aware of this apparently inexplicable phenomena. It transpired that the neighbours, the Lunna family were…
It’s a bit complicated to explain, but a company called Smartner (which we presume is some amalgam of “smarter” and “partner”) has created a special server which makes it possible to access everything on your desktop PC from a PDA. While we’d love to hook one of these up at home, they’re actually aimed at…
A Japanese company called Omron has figured out a way to use tiny “nano” prisms to make the screens in PDAs and cellphones brighter, crisper, and use less power. Read
Not surprisingly, questions are being raised about that Dutch studied which found that exposure to radiation from 3G cellular base stations caused headaches, nausea, and improved memory in some people. Besides the study only being performed on a small number of particpants, the Register sorta hits the nail on the head, writing that, sure, “some…
Toshiba’s fuel cell for laptops, which was supposed to come out next year, has been postponed and now isn’t due out until 2005 at the earliest. Read