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Archaeologists are using a special remote-controlled undersea robot called Hercules to help them investigate an 1,500-year-old shipwreck buried in mud at the bottom of the Black Sea: The drone is the first craft ever designed specifically for deep-water archaeology, Ballard said. It’s controlled by a pilot in the Knorr, Ballard’s ship on the surface. But…
WhatIsNew.com list of the 101 excuses they’ve heard from people for not buying a Tablet PC. Right at the top of the list: It’s too expensive, which hopefully will not be legitimate excuse for much longer. My personal favorite excuses on the list: “It can’t get wet,” “It’s just an expensive Etch-a-Sketch,” “None of my…
One of the biggest gripes about the Pocket PC is that Microsoft never made a version of its ActiveSync software for the Mac. Not that you’d really expect them to. Anyway, there’ve been a few third-party software programs created to get the job done, the latest one is called The Missing Sync, and it offers…
A bunch of new gadgets aimed at students from RCA, including two new MP3 players with SD card expansion slots for adding more memory, a wireless digital audio system for connecting a PC to a stereo, a portable DVD player with a 7-inch screen (pictured at right), and a slot-loading progressive scan DVD player. Read
A new ultralight laptop from Panasonic with the optical drive in a very unusual place – it’s DVD/CD-RW drive is directly under the touchpad. The Let’s Note W2 (look, that’s what they called it) weighs just 2.8 pounds, and also has a 12.1-inch LCD screen, a 900MHz processor, a 40GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM,…
An Australian team won this year’s RoboCup, the international athletic tournament where teams of robots play soccer against each other. Read
MSMobiles has what look like the first pictures of HTC’s new XDA II, the successor to the Pocket PC Phone, the one rebranded and sold by T-Mobile, mm02, and AT&T Wireless. The updated version will have a faster processor (400MHz), a built-in digital camera, and optional Bluetooth and WiFi. Read
Ross Rubin wonders, “What’s missing from the iPod?” Well, it could have Bluetooth for starters. He thinks that while you wouldn’t want to use it for file transfers (it’s too slow), it would be nice to have Bluetooth headphones and remote controls for the iPod. He’d also like to see the ability to delete songs…
Another new 3G video cellphone from NEC. Like the e606, the e808Y has two built-in digital cameras, one for taking still pictures, the other for making video calls. The e808Y adds a mini-keyboard and 64MB of RAM to the mix and has a 65,000 color display that is 40% larger than that of the e606.…
A new digital camera from Minolta that they’re claiming is the smallest and lightest two megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom lens. The X20 also comes with a mirror attached to the front so you can better position yourself for self-portraits. Read
Gateway is adding a bunch of new flat-panel televisions to their ever-expanding line-up of consumer electronics, a 50-inch high-definition plasma display, a 46-inch enhanced-definition plasma display, an 18-inch LCD TV, and a 17-inch widescreen LCD TV. Gateway’s 42-inch plasma television is said to already be the best selling television of its kind in the US.…
This is a new one: a standalone digital camera for cellphones. The Fun Camera from Nokia has 8MB of internal RAM, the idea is that once you fill up its memory you attach the camera to a compatible Nokia phone, transfer the photos, and then send them to friends in emails or MMS messages. It…
More bad news for TiVo. Cable company Charter Communications is going to offer subscribers a new cable box that doubles as a digital video recorder and media center. The box runs on Digeo’s Moxi software, and has an 80GB hard drive, two television tuners for recording two different channels at the same time, a DVD…
A new software controlled AM-FM radio for Macs that can record the radio just like TiVo records television. The RadioSHARK from Griffin can pause and rewind live broadcasts, as well as automatically record regularly scheduled shows, and saves the shows as AIFF so you can listen to them later on an iPod. Read
For those with sweaty palms (for whatever reason), there’s a new mouse with a built-in fan from Japanese company ClickNJoy that should help keep your hands cool and dry. Read [Via BoingBoing]
Yet another wireless digital camera, this one a prototype from Fuji Film of a three-megapixel camera with built-in WiFi. No details on when the camera might hit the market. Read
Want to really piss off the RIAA? Just start up your own CD piracy business using Kanguru’s new CD mass duplicator, which can burn up to 100 CDs at the press of a button. The Autoloader 100 has a 52x burner and can pump out a hundred discs in about five hours. Read
CNET review of the Onebox Media Center from Niveus, a PC with a progressive scan DVD player, a digital video recorder, an MP3 jukebox, and a 6-in-1 memory card reader for viewing digital photos that is designed to sit in your living room rather than on your desk. Read
Even more robots today. While Tohoku University’s researchers are building dancing robots, MIT’s are hard at work on robotic snails that use fake slimes one made out of silicon oil, the other a mixture of glycerin and water, to move around: “People have looked at the properties of slime in the past, but more from…
Researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University have built a dancing robot that can follow a human dancer’s lead: The robot can predict the dancer’s next move through hand pressure applied to its arms and back, and also judging from dance steps it is making, and can then turn at the appropriate speed. Equipped with a computer,…