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More details and pictures of the xda II, the follow up to the Pocket PC Phone which came out last year from T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, and mm02. This new version will have a built-in digital camera, no external antenna, a swappable battery, 64MB of RAM, a better screen, a 400MHz processor, and run on the…
Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury News tests out those new two megapixel disposable digital cameras, and finds them lacking: low picture quality (they use a CMOS rather than a CCD imaging sensor), and the high cost, relative to regular disposable cameras, of making prints. One promising bit of news though, another version of…
Ok, so here’s a convergence gadget we like: IOGEAR’s Memory Mouse, a USB mouse with 32MB of flash memory built-in. Read
We’ve been in San Francisco for the past few days, escaping the agonizingly humid New York summer, working on some non-Gizmodo projects (gasp!), and catching up with friends here. Last night, while walking back from dinner with Paul Boutin and his lovely wife Christina Noren, we passed a gigantic fake Pocket PC in a window…
This is absolutely, positively the last time we’re gonna mention one of these studies on Gizmodo, but there’s yet another study gauging the dangers of driving while talking on the cellphone. This one says that leaning over to reach for something and adjusting the radio are far more likely to be the causes of driver…
Maybe we were wrong about British Telecom the other day when we implied that they were a rather stodgy company (at least they were when we lived in England). Their research group is working on a way for cellphones to connect to special interactive toys that could be cued, via text messages, to do specific…
Our buddy Howard Chui has a helpful roundup of five of the different Bluetooth headsets for cellphones that are out there, the Jabra BT200 v1, the Nokia HDW-2 (pictured at right), Nextlink’s Bluespoon Digital, Sony Ericsson’s HBH-60, and the BT400 GII from Bluetake. The end results are decidedly mixed: In the end there is no…
To figure out exactly how insects called water striders walk on water, researchers at MIT (where else?) have created a robotic insect called the Robostrider. Read
Four new digital cameras out today from Minolta: the 3.2 megapixel Dimage Z1 (pictured at right), which has a 10x optical zoom lens; the five megapixel Dimage A1, which has a 7x optical zoom lens and special “anti-shaking” technology which stabilizes the sensor, rather than the lens; the compact two megapixel Dimage X20, which has…
Scant details are available, but Nintendo says it will unveil a new “game product” early next year. No word on whether that might be another update to the Game Boy, or a new game console. Read
New York Times article on the ins and outs of using a cellphone while overseas. Their main piece of advice: leave your regular cellphone at home and avoid all those roaming charges, and instead just buy a second, unlocked phone to use outside the US and buy pay-as-you-go SIM cards for each country you visit.…
Sir Clive Sinclair, the man behind the ill-fated Sinclair C5 scooter (sort of a proto-Segway of sorts that was supposed to revolutionize transportation in the mid-Eighties, pictured at right), says he’s working on follow-up. Not many details about the Sinclair C6, apart from that it should debut next year and that it’s another device for…
It seems like most new laptops are coming with built-in WiFi these days, but if you’ve got an older PC you’d like to add WiFi to, and you don’t have a PCMCIA slot free, BenQ has an 802.11b card that pops into a USB port. Read
BBC News article on three-dimensional printers. Nothing all that new here really(these have been around for years), just that they’re gradually getting cheaper and cheaper. Read
Over at Portables.About.com, Ric Manning makes his picks for the top back to school gadgets for students. Among them, Franklin’s talking dictionary (pictured at right), Wizcom’s QuickLink Pen, which can scan and store lines of text, Aiptek’s Pocket DV digital camera, and Kingston’s DataTraveler USB keychain drive. Read
We’re not sure we buy it, but Sony is claiming that it’s new MICROMV Handycam DCR-IP1 is the world’s smallest camcorder. There’s no doubt that the DCR-IP1 is small – it’s about the size of a playing card, at least in terms of its height and width – but declaring it the world’s smallest might…
It’s definitely bad for business when a federal judge orders you to stop selling your main product. Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry email gadget, just lost a patent infringement case brought against it by NTP. The penalty: $53.7 million damages and an immediate halt on sales of the BlackBerry. Fortunately for RIM…
Nokia is looking for people to join the “N-Gage Special Forces.” Which doesn’t mean you’ll be going on secret missions to sabotage Microsoft’s offices. Rather, it’s a marketing street team to help to help drum up interest in their new gamephone. Basically they’re looking for people who won’t mind getting paid to play the N-Gage…
A new wireless network camera from Toshiba that lets you remotely view its video stream from a web browser. The IK-WB11a has a higher resolution than most of the other wireless network cameras already on the market (1.4 megapixels), and few other nice features, like remote pan and tilt, motion detection, and a slot for…
PhoneScoop, has, um, the scoop on all the new Motorola cellphones that are coming out this fall. Five GSM phones including the V600, a quad-band GSM cameraphone with built-in Bluetooth; four CDMA and TDMA phones, like the imaginatively-designed MS150, a 1xEV-DO phone with a wide-format LCD screen that is only for the South Korean market;…