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Aura Communications is coming out with a cheap wireless headset for cellphones called the foneGEAR that uses magnetic induction rather than Bluetooth or other radio frequency technology to connect to its base station (which then connects to the handset). The foneGEAR works at a different, lower, frequency than Bluetooth, which uses the same overcrowded 2.4GHz…
Remember those hundred new products that HP announced last month? Well PC Mag reviews one of the gadgets that got plenty of attention at the time, the HP DVD Movie Writer dc3000, an external DVD+RW burner that has analog-in ports for to simplify the process of making copies of VHS tapes. Read
A beautiful-looking video iPod from Sony that just might be the gadget we’ve been waiting for. Right now it’s just a prototype, but a Vaio personal video player with a 3.5-inch high-resolution LCD screen and a 20GB hard drive for loading up to 10 hours of MPEG-2 video has turned up at the WPC Expo…
This is such a good and obvious idea, we’re surprised no one has done this yet (or maybe someone has and we missed it): a portable DVD player with a tablet-style design, rather than a clamshell like every other player out there. The PlayScreen, as it’s called, has a 7-inch widescreen LCD screen, two stereo…
MSMobiles has a handy chart for keeping track of all the different cellphones running on Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system, with details like their processor speed, how much RAM it has, whether or not it has Bluetooth, and the resolution of its digital camera, if it has one, that is. Read
This is something really aimed at businesses, but Kineto has a new WiFi cellphone that can make voice calls over both cellular networks and wireless 802.11b networks. The cool thing is that calls made over WiFi get better indoor coverage and have higher-voice quality than calls made over cellular. Read
An extraordinarily feature-laden new cellphone from Dbtel, which recently threw down the gauntlet against Vertu to see who could sell the world’s most expensive cellphone. We’re not sure if the M8 is part of that challenge, but we’re pretty sure this is going to be one expensive phone. Just 95 grams, the dual-band GSM/GPRS M8…
We scarcely even consider this news, since we’d just expect it to happen sooner or later, such is our confidence in the relentlessly forward march of technology, but Apple’s senior VP for hardware engineering says that a Powerbook G5 is on the horizon and just a matter of “good, solid engineering.” Read
Article in this week’s Circuits section of the New York Times about some of the more interesting uses Ideo have been coming up with for cellphones, like at the reception of the Lisbon, Portugal offices of Vodafone, where waiting visitors can amuse themselves by using their phones to play games on an LCD screen mounted…
We’re not sure how people find this stuff, but someone digging around on the Sony Ericsson website found a Flash presentation for the still-not-officially-announced successor to the P800 PDA phone, the P810 (which is also known as the P900). The file quickly disappeared from the site, but not before some screen captures were able to…
Motorola has updated one of its best-selling cellphones, the V60, adding a color internal display and a small external display that can show 2 line text messages. The V60t should be out now from Cingular. Read
Rumors about two new wireless Pocket PCs from HP, the iPAQ h4155 and iPAQ h4355, both of which will have built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. The h4155 is about the size as the Pocket PCs in HP’s h1900 series, and will have a 3.5-inch screen, and SDIO expansion slot, a 400MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, and…
World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1,800 a day, each one entitled to a proper military funeral, if their family requests it. But the military is having a problem fulfilling one crucial part of a military funeral, the playing of taps, because there are only 500 official buglers in the American…
We were sorta wondering when somebody was going to take up this cause: a group of people in Los Angeles have filed a lawsuit against Apple,. Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba, alleging that computer companies are misrepresenting the true capacity of the hard drives in the computers they sell, like that a…
Researchers at one of HP’s labs in England have come up with a prototype of a pair of sunglasses with an embedded digital camera built-into them. The glasses dump all the thousands of digital images it captures to a PC or handheld at the end of the day, and fortunately there’s some special software available…
Over at The Morning News, a short story by Joshua Allen that might constitute the very first piece of TiVo fiction ever written. Not to be outdone, we’re hastily trying to complete a novella detailing the wild adventures of our Aibo robotic dog. Read
We’d never much warmed to the Nokia 3650, mainly because of its inane circular keypad. Surprisingly enough though, some pics have turned up of what purports to be the Nokia 3660, and guess what? The circular keypad is gone, and in its place is a regular, normal keypad like they should have had there in…
A couple of ultraslim combination DVD recorder/digital video recorders from Sharp that are just 59mm thick, one with an 80GB hard drive, the other with a 120GB hard drive. The 120GB model, the DV-HR350 (pictured at right), can store up to 150 hours of video on its drive. Both also have Firewire ports for dumping…
New portable USB 2.0 hard drive from Archos that they claim is the world’s smallest and lightest external 20GB drive. And we’re inclined to believe them, the ARCDisk is pretty damn small, too, smaller even than a floppy disk (remember those?), and weighs only 2.7 ounces. Also available in a 40GB version. Read
To tie in with its sponsorship of the Ferrari F1 grand prix team, Olympus is coming out with a special limited-edition Ferrari digital camera. Read