Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
A few years back Intel used to sell a standalone digital microscope aimed at kids, but the new Coolscope from Nikon is actually full-fledged PC that comes with a digital microscope built-in. The microscope has a maximum magnification of 40x, and is attached to a five megapixel digital camera so you can take pictures of…
EdgeReview on XM’s satellite radio receiver for PCs, the XM PCR, which connects to a PC over USB. Read
From TDK, a new piece of stereo equipment that combines a CD player with a 20GB hard drive. The DA-9000 CDRW Jukebox can rip MP3s from CDs, copy MP3s from a PC and also has a CD burner for making mix CDs of music stored on the hard drive. In these days of 30GB iPods…
Panasonic’s new high-end 42-inch plasma TV, the TH-42PA20, has a contrast ratio of 4000:1 (which is pretty good) and can supposedly produce over a billion colors, something which would be a record for the industry. Read
The new color Sidekick officially comes out tomorrow from T-Mobile. Apart from the color screen and the addition of twice as much RAM, it looks about the same as last year’s monochrome Sidekick. Read
A couple of new wireless mini computers with built-in keyboards and integrated GPRS from Zupera that look similar on the outside, but are radically different on the inside. The Smartbook-7c (pictured at right) is more like a large PDA, and has a 7-inch touchscreen, a slot for CompactFlash memory cards, runs Windows CE.NET, and comes…
David Pogue of the New York Times challenged each cellphone company to send him their easiest to use phone, and found, surprise, surprise, that all of the phones have really glaring design flaws. Among them, Nokia phones require four button presses to turn off its ringer, counterintuitive “on” buttons from Samsung and Kyocera, and difficult…
Looks like Handspring inadvertantly leaked a picture of its new Treo 600 PDA phone yesterday. Someone with sharp eyes spotted one in the hands of Handspring chairman Jeff Hawkins in a photo that was released to the press of the Handspring management team for the big announcement of Palm’s acquisition of the company. Read
Leica’s D-Lux 3MP Digital Camera is now available for preorder from Amazon. Besides being better designed than most digital cameras, the D-Lux also has a 3x optical zoom lens and includes a 64MB SD memory card. Official release date is June 30th. Amazon
A weed-killing robot from Denmark that can distinguish between crops and weeds. The four-wheeled robot actually goes out into the field and identifies which plants are weeds by scanning the ground using a camera and modified face-recognition software. Right now it’s just being used to note the location of unwanted plants so that farmers can…
Desperate for ways to boost revenues, a bunch of minor-league baseball teams, and even a couple of major-league teams, are experimenting with letting fans order food and buy memorabilia with their cellphones from the stands at games: As he watched the triple-A Buffalo Bisons mount a first-inning rally on a recent Saturday night, Fred Cilono…
Looks like HP’s iPAQ h5600 wireless Pocket PC, which last we’d heard had been cancelled, is back on again. Or at least something resembling the h5600 is in the works. Brighthand reports that HP and Sprint are developing a new iPAQ that will connect to Sprint’s CDMA wireless network and likely be powered by the…
Every few months somebody writes one of those “build-your-own-TiVo” stories. This latest one is in Wired News, and it focuses mainly on MythTV, which is Linux-based software program for turning a PC into a digital video recorder: Thanks to the combined expertise of about half a dozen hackers from all over the world, the project…
Big, big news of the day: Palm is buying Handspring for $168.9 million. This isn’t exactly a huge shock. Handspring has been in trouble for a while, and people have been predicting this for months. Read
Pimps aren’t exactly known for being early adopters, but in Hong Kong they’ve taken a shine to cameraphones, and are using them to email pictures of their girls to prospective “clients.” Read
Buried in this Reuters article on Philips’ new strategy to go after the youth market with digital cameras and wearable MP3 players, is the news that its new 20GB hard drive MP3 player, the HDD 100 (pictured at right), apparently is already on sale in Asia, and will hit Europe in July. No word on…
New Bluetooth hands-free speaker phone system for cars. The DriveBlue has both a speaker and a microphone and pops into the cigarette lighter socket of your car. Compatible with Bluetooth-enabled phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Philips, and Siemens. Read
Though there are more than a few PCs on the market now running Windows XP Media Center (that variant of the Windows OS designed for recording television like a TiVo, organizing and playing your MP3 collection, looking at your digital photo album, etc.), it hasn’t really taken off yet, mainly because of complaints about its…
Talk about a teaser campaign turning out to be a letdown. After a big teaser campaign last week, Digital Photography Review notes that Konica’s new five megapixel KD-510Z digital camera is just its KD-500Z camera with a silver, rather than black, casing. Look, save the teaser campaigns for when you really have something great to…
Grab 50 Memorex 48x CDRs for $9.44 on Amazon, no rebate required. Amazon