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This has got to be the most devious use of cameraphones yet. The Italian mafia is approaching voters and offering them 50 euros if they’ll cast their ballot for a specific candidate. But before you can get the cash they want to see some proof: a picture taken with a cameraphone from within the voting…
Steven Berlin Johnson wants to know how some Duran Duran and Depeche Mode songs mysteriously ended up on his iPod: I’m pretty sure that I’m not buying crazy songs in my sleep — and there’s no record of anything by Duran Duran or Depeche Mode in my entire music collection. (I even searched my hard…
Remember that post we had up a week ago of a photo Anil Dash snapped of a sign he saw hanging in a camera shop that read “Digital Cameras Can Cause Blindness”? Well he walked by the same shop a few days ago and discovered that they’ve now gone out of business entirely. Perhaps the…
If you think using a secure, encrypted telephone is going to prevent the government (or anyone else) from eavesdropping on your conversations, you might want to think again. The Feds just revealed in a recent report about wiretapping that encrypted phones posed no barrier to them listening in. Read
Kanguru has managed to squeeze 2GB of memory onto one of those USB keychain drives. It ain’t cheap though. The new USB 2.0 KanguruMicroDrive might weigh just 21 grams, but it’ll set you back about $1300, giving you another good reason not to lose your keys. Read
Brighthand review of the new SCH-i700 Pocket PC Phone from Samsung, scoring high marks for its bright screen and its 64MB of RAM. Also the first Pocket PC to come with a built-in digital camera, though its 0.3 megapixel resolution is no great shakes. Read
Tablet PCs are getting cheaper and cheaper. CP Technology is planning a new line of $999 Tablet PCs under the name “Nvision.” Can’t wait until these hit $600. Read
They might not be able to get decent reception where they’re going, but in Vietnam people have started making offerings of cellphones to their dead relatives. Read [Via TechDirt]
A new digital guitar from Yamaha that can purportedly teach would-be Yngwie Malmsteens how to play: The EZ-EG, a digital guitar, has no strings. Instead, thick steel wires can be strummed on the body. Narrow horizontal buttons on the neck correspond to frets. The guitar can play a song through its speaker while buttons on…
A decent primer in the San Jose Mercury News on the ins and outs of WiFi, looks useful for anyone trying to make sense of 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g. Read
Adding yet another option to confusing melange that is home networking, a new company called Coaxsys is selling hubs and adapters that create a network over a home’s coaxial television cable connections. Apparently 97% of American homes are wired with coaxial cable. Read
Another big setback for Microsoft: T-Mobile is dropping plans to introduce a cellphone running Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system, saying it has “fundamental problems” and a high failure rate. So far Microsoft’s attempts to break into the cellphone market haven’t been too stellar. The first Smartphone, the SPV from Orange, isn’t selling as well as initially…
This is probably going to become one of my regular reads. All about gadgets. Woo!
It’s pretty shameless, but some guy in Canada is trying to raise money to for his anti-spam software company by riding a Segway HT from Ottawa to Toronto. Besides finding investors, Paul Edmond hopes to also break the record for the longest recorded trip ever made by a Segway, a record that we would guess…
While those Motorola WiFi cellphones are still a few months away, Calypso Wireless is claiming to already have the first cellphone with WiFi out. Their C1250i handset has built-in 802.11b and can seamlessly switch back forth between cellular networks and WiFi hot spots. Is this phone for real? We would love for this to be…
Apparently Nokia’s N-Gage gamephone didn’t go over very well at a big press conference they had for the phone just prior to the big E3 video game tradeshow. Actually, that might be an understatement: Reaction to the company’s announcements from those present at the conference was overwhelmingly negative, with most of those we spoke to…
We trashed the whole idea of Siemens trying to launch of a line of fashion cellphones when we first learned of it, as we were incredulous that Siemens could actually be with it enough to create phones that could be considered fashionable. And when we saw the first few XELIBRI phones, our suspicions were confirmed.…
One-stop log for late-breaking techno-doohickies.
Wired News on how kids toys keep getting more and more technologically sophisticated, with sixty percent toys for pre-schoolers having some sort of microchip in them. The latest is a line of stuffed animals from a company called Wabi that have built-in cordless phones that parents can call and leave voicemails for their children on:…
There’s been talk of this for a few months now, but the Inquirer confirms that Motorola is “not far” from releasing several cellphones with built-in WiFi that will be able to seamlessly roam from one wireless hot spot to the next. Whether they’ll be able to make Voice over WiFi calls is unclear. Read