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A new adapter for adding a Bluetooth headset to cellphones. The HBA-001 from Hit Incorporated works on most handsets with a 2.5mm jack (except Samsung’s), and can clip right on to your belt, a feature that absolutely, positively won’t make you look geeky. Read
With Sony’s new wireless Clie PDAs getting more similar in terms of their specs and capabilities to Sony Ericsson’s smartphones, Ross Rubin wonders whether the two companies are headed for something of a collision. He speculates that Palm’s purchase of Handspring (and by extension, it’s new Treo 600) is going to put even more pressure…
There’s a new robotic vacuum cleaner coming from Hanool Robotics that the company claims will be smarter and better at cleaning rooms than the Roomba and the other robovacs that are out now. Instead of moving around a room randomly, or in ever-expanding concentric circles (like the Roomba), the OTTORO uses cameras and sensors to…
New line of external hard drives from LaCie designed by F.A. Porsche, the same firm behind Best Buy’s stylish line of vpr Matrix PCs. The drives will have capacities ranging from 40 to 250GB, and look a lot like the vpr Matrix computers too, i.e. very angular, with lots of black and silver. Read
Tom’s Hardware Guide asks a pretty good question about Philips’ new boom box, the AZ2555 Sound Machine: why in the heck is it “USB enabled?” You’d think WiFi would be a better means of accomplishing this, but the USB cable port on the Sound Machine is for streaming audio from a PC, basically turning it…
BargainPDA reports that Hewlett-Packard is working on a line of high-end Pocket PCs with built-in QWERTY keyboards, Bluetooth, WiFi, and optional GPRS, but there’s no word on when the first of these h4000 series handhelds might be released. Read
A new media-centric version of Toshiba’s massive seventeen-inch widescreen laptop, the Satellite P25. The Satellite P25-S607 adds Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center edition software (for recording and playing back TV shows like a TiVo), a remote control, and a DVD recorder to the mix. Rest of the specs are the same as the P25-S507: a…
A new wireless surveillance camera from Panasonic that can be viewed from anywhere over a web browser. The BB-NCW150 connects to a home network over 802.11b and also has remote-controllable pan and tilt to help you “keep tabs” on things. Read [Translated from Japanese using Babelfish. Via I4U.com]
DesignTechnica review of Sony’s sweet new ultralight laptop, the Vaio TR1A, which comes with built-in WiFi, a 10.6-inch widescreen display, a 900MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 30GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW drive, and a built-in digital camera: The VAIO TR1A’s beautiful display and excellent wireless connectivity will make the TR1A the perfect companion for…
We’ve certainly bitched about this long enough, but how come someone can’t build a hard-drive based MP3 player that’s smaller and lighter than the iPod (they already know how to make one that’s cheaper)? Is it somehow impossible for all the engineers in the world to figure this out? At least Creative’s new 30GB Nomad…
Gateway’s Pocket PC, 100X, which should have come out sometime around now, has been delayed until mid-August. The company says they want to do some more “testing” and also make sure that all the 100X’s accessories are ready at the time of its release. Read
Right now it’s just being tested, but scientists in Europe have figured out a way for someone to control the movement of a small robot just by thinking “turn left” or “turn right,” etc. The eventual goal is to use the technology to build a mind-controlled wheelchair for the severely disabled: The user dons the…
PDA Junkie pits two of the new high-end Pocket PCs in a head-to-head competition to see which one would come out on top. Toshiba’s e755 and HP’s iPAQ 5555 both have 400MHz processors, 3.8-inch LCD touchscreens, and built-in WiFi, while the 5555 also has Bluetooth and 128MB of RAM compared to the e755’s 64MB. The…
Smartphone Thoughts with an exclusive sneak preview of a new cellphone from Taiwanese manufacturer Chi Mei running Microsoft’s Smartphone OS. They’ve only got some mockup renderings of it, but it looks like it’ll be a GSM clamshell phone, like MiTAC’s Mio 8380, only without the 8380’s built-in digital camera. Read UPDATE: Looks like this is…
Talking on a cellphone while driving isn’t just the new drunk driving, a new study by researchers at the University of Utah suggests that it’s worse. They found that talking on a cellphone (both with and without a hands-free device) while behind the wheel is even more dangerous than driving while intoxicated. Anyone else feel…
Word of a new digital SLR from Fuji Film. The 3.1-megapixel FinePix S5000 will have a 10x optical zoom lens, and use Fuji Film’s special SuperCCD HR sensor which interpolates images to six megapixels. Should be officially announced on Tuesday, the 29th. Read
Better not get too attached to SMS sex, at least in China’s Liaoning province. The goverment there has made it illegal to send another person “insulting, sexual, or fabricated” text messages. Apparently the Liaoning Telecommunications Administration has been monitoring text message traffic and tracking down offenders. Read [Via SmartMobs]
A new MP3 player from South Korean companies Station Z and Eratech that’s the size of coin. Well, a really large coin. The EMP-Z will be just 10mm thick and 42mm in diameter, and to save space combines the USB port and the headphone jack into one, though it’s not clear exactly how they did…
NEC returns to the American cellphone market with their new 515 High Definition Mobile handset, which is the world’s first quad-band GSM phone. The 515 also has a large 64,000 color display and dual-processors for playing games on the phone. Curiously, at the bottom of the press release for the 515 there’s a note that…
A few years ago, Iomega, the maker of Zip drives and other high-capacity removable storage devices, came out with a line of 40MB Clik! disks that they touted as an alternative to Flash memory cards for portable devices (they were later renamed PocketZip, and we actually have an old HipZip MP3 player that uses the…