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The Aalborg zoo in Denmark is offering parents the ability to keep tabs on their kids via small Bluetooth pods that attach to their clothing: Base stations scattered around a site detect nearby tags and relay their location to a central database via wireless LAN (local area network). Parents register their cell phones with the…
With the new Terminator movie on the way, it’s fitting that Newsweek has an article about the military’s quest to build robotic soldiers. They’re a long way from robot marines storming the shores of Tripoli, but iRobot, the same company responsible for the Roomba Intelligent Floor Vac, is working on a “PackBot” that could be…
Research firm InfoTrends predicts that digital cameras will almost completely have replaced reloadable film cameras by 2008, at least at the consumer level. Read [Via PhotographyBlog]
Despite evidence to suggest that driving while talking on a handheld cellphone is just as dangerous as using one with a hands-free device, the British government has banned talking on a handheld cellphone while driving. The initial fine isn’t much, about $40. Read [Via MobileTracker]
A new application from Hewlett-Packard that’ll let you print directly from a Bluetooth-enabled cellphone to a Bluetooth-enabled printer. Though at the moment it only works with one phone (Nokia’s 3650) and one printer (HP’s Deskjet 450). Read
Fujitsu and Gateway are both coming out with laptops with built-in 802.11g. Read
Speaking of perfect PCs, it doesn’t look like Gateway’s new Media Center PC would quite qualify for that title, at least according to DesignTechnica: While performance is above average, more fit and polish would have made this system more intuitive to consumers new to the Media Center idea. The fact that there are two separate…
From Pioneer, the first combination TiVo/DVD recorder. We noticed a few weeks ago that they’d licensed TiVo’s software, but we figured that Pioneer would just come out with a combination DVR/DVD player like the one Toshiba just released. That a TiVo would come with a DVD burner so you could actually archive shows on the…
PC Magazine envisions the “Perfect PC”. Or actually the “Perfect PCs”; they go through different categories, looking at what would go into making the perfect gaming system, the perfect ultraportable notebook, the perfect budget PC, etc. Read
This hasn’t been confirmed, but the Register reports that Motorola is getting ready to launch a cellphone that will run on Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system. If this is true, it’d be a huge score for Microsoft, which so far has had trouble signing up any of the major cellphone manufacturers to make handsets that use…
Wow, CNET really bungled this story about NEC’s new line of “foldable” LCD monitors. Who ever wrote the story misunderstood what was meant by NEC’s press release, and assumed that NEC had invented an LCD screen that could be folded up like a piece of paper, when in fact they just meant a monitor with…
Slate tackles why 50 Cent, besides topping the Billboard charts, also happens to be the most downloaded artist when it comes to cellphone ringtones. Looking beyond the most obvious cause for this – that white suburban kids think it’s street to have “In Da Club” as their ringtone – Rob Walker identifies another reason: that…
This almost too meta for us: sneaked photos of the P810, Sony Ericsson’s successor to the P800, taken, appropriately enough, with the digital camera of a P800. No details available, except that the P810 should have a 1.3 megapixel digital camera built-in and a thin metal body like the T610. Read [Thanks, Mike]
The head of Apple’s industrial design team, Jonathan Ive, gives Wired News a first-hand look at the new Power Mac G5: Ive was asked to compare the G5 to high-design computers from the world of Windows PCs, such as those from Alienware or Falcon Northwest. “It’s really much more potent when you don’t put on…
An external Firewire DVD-R/RW drive that doubles as a standalone DVD player. And for all the bootleggers in the house, the Que!007 Portable Digital Theater from QPS can also make DVD-Rs or Video CDs directly off of television. Read
It’s almost too easy, but we can’t resist taking a shot at the news that Stuff magazine (that magazine for frat boys and frat boy wannabes) is producing a new show on gadgets for The National Network. Side note to anyone at TNN: if you’d be interested in a show about gadgets that’d actually be…
Tired of not being able to listen to music while he swam, a student at Brunel University in Britain made a pair of goggles with a built-in MP3 player that uses (somewhat freakily, we might add) bone conduction to vibrate the sound directly into your skull. Read [Via I4U]
The big digital camera news of the day is the release of the five megapixel E-1 from Olympus. Steve’s Digicams has a first look: The Olympus E-1 is the world’s first 100% all-digital interchangeable lens SLR system. This camera has been designed entirely from digital technology and for digital photography. Olympus and Kodak have partnered…
Besides announcing his refusal to use the new name for Pocket PC 2003 – which was awkwardly renamed Windows Mobile 2003 Software for Pocket PC – ZDNet’s David Coursey gives some tips on who needs to upgrade and who doesn’t. Read
Lindows isn’t the only game in town anymore when it comes to low-cost Linux PCs, Linare is coming out with a $199 PC with a 1GHz VIA processor, 128MB of RAM, a 20GB hard drive, but no monitor. Read [Via Slashdot]