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The name sounds like it was thought up during a spring break trip to Panama City Beach, but Volkswagen is planning to make Phatnoise’s Digital Car Audio System an option in its new automobiles. Phatnoise is basically a car stereo that plays MP3s. You just transfer MP3s from your PC onto these 20GB cartridges which…
Hard drives just keep getting bigger and bigger, Maxtor’s just come out with a massive new 300GB internal drive. Read
So apparently Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn’t tell a Japanese newspaper that the successor to the Xbox was due out in 2006. The paper that reported this, the Nihon Kezai Shimbun, has retracted the article, saying they misattributed statements to Ballmer. Analysts still think the Xbox 2 should be out sometime in 2005. Read
These have been an open secret for months now, and some of them have already even gone on sale in Europe already, but HP officially unveiled four new iPAQ Pocket PCs today. Pictured from left to right, they’re the 5150, the 2210, the 5550, and the 1940. The 2210 has a 400Mhz processor, 64MB of…
TiVo’s planning to have this feature by the end of the year, but it looks like Zenith has the first digital video recorder that’s compatible with high-definition television. The downside to recording HDTV with a DVR is that saving a show requires huge amounts of hard disk space – the HDR230’s 80GB drive can only…
Speaking of cars, there’s a new in-dash multimedia PC, or “carputer”, from Xenarc. The CP-1000 fits into the car stereo slot of a dashboard, has a 266MHz processor, a 15GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, a CD/DVD drive, two USB ports, built-in GPS navigation, and even a slot for adding WiFi. Read [Thanks, Wadsworth]
Designtechnica review of Samsung’s newish seventeen-inch LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 171N, which can display 16.7 million colors. Read
JVC is one name you don’t normally associate with PDAs, but they’ve got a new line of high-end Pocket PCs called iO that’s coming out. The first two, the MP-PV131 and the MP-PV331, both come with JVC’s special audio and video software player that plays MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, and MPEG4 files, and have 400MHz…
Doing something they should have done long ago, Microsoft is reorganizing and simplifying the brand identity for its Pocket PC and Smartphone operating systems. They’re really just variants of the same OS anyway, and so from now on they’ll both be known as “Windows Mobile”. For example, the new Pocket PC 2003 operating system which…
First review we’ve seen of a handheld running Pocket PC 2003, the latest version of the Pocket PC operating system. Hardware Analysis takes a look at the Asus MyPal a620, which besides having the new OS, has a 400MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, and a 65,000 color transflective screen. No built-in WiFi or Bluetooth, though.…
A new wireless gyroscopic mouse from Gyration designed specifically for use with Windows XP Media Center PCs. The Gyration Media Center Remote Control has a built-in motion detector (hence the gyroscope), so it can control the mouse pointer just by being waved around. Read [Thanks, Mike]
Nimble Microsystems’ new V5 mini-PC seems to be getting some pretty good buzz at the moment (write-ups in PC World, MSNBC, The Register, and even a Slashdotting) but apart from being small, it’s not clear why anyone would really want one. The V5 is billed as a “personal video conferencing player,” but doesn’t include a…
In case you missed any of these, the usual roundup of highlights from the past week of Gizmodo: The keiboard Cheapest widescreen laptop Robovac pets WiFi on an SD card Text message a SARS rumor, go to jail GPS bicycle GPS pet tracker Cordless-cellphones Mac on an iPAQ More details on the Treo 600 The…
San Jose Mercury News finally picks up on a trend we’ve been obsessed with for months now: widescreen laptops. Read
Hopefully settling matters, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Transport Association have commissioned a study to figure out whether or not it’s dangerous to use cellphones in-flight. Read [Via TechDirt]
You’d think that there’d be a certain minimum size that cellphones and PDAs could possibly shrink down to, such as too small to have buttons that can be pressed by normal-sized human fingers. But you’d be wrong. Sony’s Interaction Lab is working on a prototype for a credit card-sized gadget called the “Gummi” that ditches…
Nokia’s N-Gage gamephone is probably going to bomb, but that isn’t stopping ATELAB Research Group from developing their own gamephone. Or at least a concept design for a gamephone, as it’s not clear who will build these phones, or when they might actually come out. The Chameleon Mobile Gaming Machine switches to a horizontal orientation…
pdaPhoneHome with a remarkably thorough comparison of two different Pocket PC Phones, Samsung’s forthcoming i700 (pictured at right), and T-Mobile’s Pocket PC Phone Edition, which came out late last year. Read Amazon – T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone [Via PocketPCThoughts]
You knew this was coming sooner or later: they’re bringing the instant replay to real life. The Deja View is an eyeglass mounted mini video camera that’s connected to a portable, always on, storage device that keeps the last 30 seconds of footage its buffer so you when you hit the record button you can…
Some more details on Gateway’s first foray into the world of the Pocket PC. The Gateway 100X will run the new Pocket PC 2003 operating system, have a 400MHz processor, 32MB of RAM, 32MB of ROM, Compact Flash and SD expansion slots, and a 3.5-inch reflective (rather than transflective) color display. Should be out late…