Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
A week of unusual keyboards and mice over at ExtremeTech. Starting off the week: a vertical keyboard from SafeType, where the two halves of the keyboard are set perpendicular rather than parallel. According the manufacturer, the vertical placement of the keyboard allows the user to type while keeping the forearms in a neutral position (with…
Our invitation must have gotten lost in the mail, but MacCentral reports being invited by Apple to come to a special event in San Francisco next Monday for several “announcements that will be music to your ears.” Odds are that these are going to be the launch of Apple’s new music service and the debut…
Lengthy review over at BargainPDA of Sharp’s Zaurus SL-5600, one of the few PDAs out there running Linux. The SL-5600 looks a bit like those new Tungsten handhelds from Palm, since it expands to reveal a mini-keyboard, and has a 32MB of RAM, 64MB of ROM, slots for Compact Flash and SD memory cards, a…
Legend, one of the biggest PC manufacturers in China, has a new Pocket PC Phone coming out next month that has a real keypad that folds out rather than the virtual keypad that s found on models from T-Mobile, Siemens, and Samsung. Read
Sydney Morning Herald piece on how cellphones with built-in digital cameras will change the role photographs play in our lives: Until now, popular interest in photography has been in the long-term preservation of memories in treasured family albums. But with camera phones, the focus is more on sharing than storing. “The images will be used…
New computer called the KeyPaso that’s contained entirely within a keyboard, so all that’s needed is a monitor. Read [Translated from Japanese using Babelfish]
Now this is a real laser printer: the VersaLaser hooks up to a PC via USB and can cut, etch, and engrave designs into wood, glass, leather, and stone. Read [Via Slashdot]
From Torspoal, a new budget Tablet PC that turns out to really be just SlateVision’s FIC Tablet PC under another brand-name. Christopher Coulter, who tipped us off, writes in that the only real advantage these low-end Tablet PCs have is their price (since their specs aren’t that hot), and even that edge is being eliminated…
Article in the Fashion and Style section of the Sunday New York Times of all places on the cult of TiVo, one social grouping that most of you out there are probably already intimately familiar with. Read
First Sony, now Sharp has a line of wireless flat-screen televisions coming out. The AQUOS LC-15L1 connects wirelessly to a base station where you plug in your cable or antenna, and has a fifteen-inch LCD screen and a rechargeable lithium battery. Read [Via Slashdot. Translated from Japanese using Babelfish]
PC mag roundup of PDAs and PDA/phones. Their picks for the best of the bunch include HP’s iPAQ h5455 Pocket PC and Kyocera’s 7135 for professionals, and Palm’s Zire and T-Mobile’s Sidekick for consumers. Read
AiboHack, a website dedicated to, you guessed it, hacking Sony’s Aibo robotic dog, has a whole bunch of videos of Aibos dancing, among other footage of people training their robots to do ridiculous things. Read [Via MetaFilter]
From Other World Computing, some of the first external hard drives to work with the new FireWire 800 standard which promises transfer speeds of 800mbps, about twice as fast as regular old FireWire. Apart from those new Apple PowerBooks and the new G4 tower, there aren’t a whole lot of computers with FireWire 800, but…
CompactFlash cards have seemed downright bloated lately compared to some of the absolutely miniscule flash memory card formats coming out these days like mini SD and XD-Picture Card. Now there’s word that a smaller version of CompactFlash is due later this year called Compact USB Disk. While there’s already way, way too many different competing…
Nick’s always on us to post more salacious gadgets; fortunately BoingBoing’s saved us the trouble (at least for today) by finding the Audi-Oh, a pager-sized “digital music sex toy” that all but guarantees a good time when you go out to a club. From the Audi-Oh FAQ: Simply put, Audi-Oh listens to what you are…
The new must-have gadget for paranoid New Yorkers: the RadNet, a PDA/phone built by the Radiation Detection Center at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that comes complete with a built-in radiation detector. Radiation detection is something that’d be nice to have on a PDA, but it’s definitely one of those features that you…
Palm has finally figured out how to get the maximum amount of internal RAM in a Palm handheld up to 128MB, a long overdue improvement over the current 16MB. Read
Someone on eBay is selling what looks like to be the Tungsten C, a new handheld from Palm that hasn’t even been announced yet and that’s supposed to come with built-in WiFi. Looks like it’s the real deal (or an incredibly elaborate fake), and the bidding is already up to $800. Read [Thanks, Mike]
From Konami, a line of tiny, highly detailed remote-controlled tanks that can actually fight against each other laser tag-style. Dan’s Data has a very long and in-depth review. Read [Thanks, Tim]
New line of dual-band wireless routers and access points from Linksys that run on both 802.11a and 802.11g. And we assume, since 802.11g is backwards compatible, that these routers and access points will support 802.11b as well. Read