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Ever been to one of those restaurants where they take your order on a PDA? Well sometimes what seems like a good idea backfires, and the author uses the incident as an opportunity to rail against all sorts of new technologies like ice cube dispensers, electric stoves, e-books, and robotic pets that seek to replace…
Online museum dedicated to documenting the surprisingly large number of synthesizers and rhythm machines produced during the Soviet era. Who knew that at one point the Soviet Union had a synthesizer industry so robust and prodigious? Read
Oh wow, yet another newspaper article introducing TiVo to the public and pointing out that digital video recorders are replacing VCRs for taping TV shows. The fact that it’s 2003 and there are still articles like these being written points to a colossal failure in marketing on the part of TiVo and Sonicblue, the company…
New mini MP3 player from Archos that comes with a built-in FM radio that you can directly record from, and even has a 30 second buffer so you can still catch the beginning of a song even if you press record after it’s started. The Ondio also has a microphone so it can double as…
CNET list of the digital cameras that aren’t out yet, but they’re most looking forward to, like the 3.34 megapixel Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z3 and the Fujifilm FinePix F410. Read
Jim Hughes writes in that he doesn’t want a Swiss Army knife of a gadget, just something like the Personal Mobile Gateway from IXI Mobile, which offloads all the cellular connectivity to a little box that connects to all of your different Bluetooth-enabled phones and PDAs. Read And Morgan over at Knitwitology.com talks about what…
The first Danger HipTop with a color screen has turned up, but the catch is that it’s only going to be sold in Europe at first. Danger wants to sell more of its monochrome HipTops before they introduce a color one here. Word is that the color HipTop should go on sale in Europe within…
The first laptop to run Lindows, that version of the Linux operating system that is supposed to be able to run lots of Windows applications, comes out next month. The Lindows Mobile PC weighs just 2.9 pounds, and comes with a 12.1-inch screen, 933Mhz processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 20GB hard drive. At $799…
With all the new software coming out that let’s you blog from your cellphone or PDA, a practice with that has been given the rather ungraceful name of “moblogging,” pretty soon the cellular signal-challenged subway will be the only way to escape from this relentless urge to update Gizmodo. Read
New boombox-like stereo from TerraDigital that wirelessly streams MP3s off your PC not using 802.11b, but with its own wireless system that supposedly has much greater range and can pass through walls more easily than WiFi. The TerraPlayer TR-100 also has a large 6.2-inch LCD screen for navigating and playing your MP3 collection. Read
PPCW.net has the scoop on the first cellphone in the US to run Microsoft’s Smartphone OS, the SC1100, which will be manufactured by Compal, but sold by EverLink Wireless under the brand name “red e”. The phone itself looks about like the other Smartphones out there, with a 220×176 pixel color screen, tri-band GSM for…
Chris Gunton writes in that he’d like to see a wristwatch with Bluetooth that could display information from a cellphone, PDA, or MP3 player. Doesn’t sound like it’d be too difficult, anyone know of any Bluetooth-enabled watches? Would it really have been too hard for Fossil to have put a Bluetooth chip into their new…
One of the handy things about a USB port is that it can be used to power peripherals, at least ones that don’t need that much power. Belkin has a new USB laptop light that attaches to a laptop whenever it’s necessary to type in the dark. The TraveLite USB Lamp comes out next week.…
Keychain USB flash drives have been getting plenty of attention lately, what with Dell announcing that they were dropping floppy drives in favor of giving customers keychain drives instead. There are dozens and dozens of them on the market, in all sorts of shapes (and mainly one size: small), but Iomega, that storage company that’s…
Jon Wiley mentions below that he wants a Bluetooth headset that can be used for listening to music, which sounds like a simple enough request, but it turns out that at 90 KBps Bluetooth’s bandwidth is too limited to actually listen to uncompressed 16-bit stereo audio. A company called Impulsesoft has figured out a way…
New adapter from Griffin Mobile called the Total Remote that plugs into the headphone socket of any compatible Pocket PC, turning it into a universal remote control. Read
Looks like IBM is shunning both Palm and Microsoft and is going with Linux-based Qtopia as the operating system for its new line of PDAs. Qtopia is the same OS used by Sharp in its Zaurus handhelds. Read
Grammy performers and presenters are getting gift bags filled with a ton of free gadgets, including a 20GB iPod, an Invicta Lupah chronograph watch, a Logitech digital camera, a Sunbeam Healthometer wrist blood pressure monitor, a Siemens SX56 cellphone, and a Crest Spin Brush. Read
New portable USB drive from SmartDisk that doubles as an MP3 player. The Rover as it’s called weighs less than an ounce, and comes in two capacities, 64MB and 128MB. Read
Brighthand review of the PEG-SJ33, that new Sony PDA, with some interesting details, like that the SJ33 was designed to be reminiscent of a Walkman, and that the screen can be shut down to save power when it’s being used as an MP3 player. Read Amazon