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Well not exactly. The San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has voted to ban Segways from use on sidewalks. The idea is to keep sidewalks safe for pedestrians, so using them in the street is still fine. Read Amazon
A company called MangoFoto is introducing a service called Longstreet that lets people wirelessly transmit the pictures from their cameraphones – you know, those cellphones with built-in digital cameras we’re all supposed to be using in a few years – either to a kiosk to have prints made, or over the Internet to Totalmass to…
Viking 512MB CompactFlash memory cards are now just $131.44 after rebate at Amazon. Remember when these used to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars? Amazon
Bizarre looking “HalfKeyboard” from Matias Corp., that is really just the left half of a regular keyboard. To get the rest of the letters, you press down the space bar, which works something like a shift key. They claim people can type up to 64 words per minute with these. Aimed mainly at PDA users,…
Digital Photography Review on one of the hottest new digital cameras, Canon’s four-megapixel PowerShot G3. The G3 has 4x optical zoom, and a few new features like Intelligent Scene Analysis based on Photographic Space, or iSAPS, in which the camera “uses variables such as focus distance, exposure brightness and cross references these against a large…
Thinking about getting a 3G phone? Think again. All these new 3G wireless networks were supposed to make it possible to surf the web on a cellphone at near-DSL speeds, or at speeds at least faster then dial-up, and certainly faster than the pokey 14.4 kbps of 2G. But it’s becoming pretty clear that it’s…
InfoWorld on the struggle that Microsoft is going to face in getting its new Smartphone operating system adopted for cellphones. The battle pitting Microsoft against the quintet of Motorola , Nokia , Siemens and a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson will likely be long and hard-fought, as the two sides tussle for control of…
CNET has a couple of product roundups that should be useful for anyone building a home theater, one comparing 50-inch or larger high-definition televisions, and the other comparing high-end home theater speaker systems. Their top picks for each: Hitachi’s 51-inch 51SWX20B HDTV, and Onkyo’s SKS-HT500 5.1 channel speaker system. Read – HDTVs Amazon – Hitachi…
Sony Ericsson’s T68i cellphone, which has a color screen, Bluetooth, and uses GPRS for surfing the Web and sending emails, text messages, and multimedia messages, is just $24.99 with new service activation over at Amazon. Amazon [Thanks, Wes]
Several readers have written in with earbud headphone recommendations of their own: Etymotic’s “in-ear canal” headphones, and Shure’s E Series earphones. Read – Etymotic Read – Shure E Series [Thanks, Samantha and Paul]
Wired News has an excellent new guide out today on how to buy a digital camera. Read
The New York Times on one consumer electronics hybrid that works: combination DVD and VCR players. Unlike a lot of other combo devices, you don’t really sacrifice quality in either component, and you have one less remote control to deal with. None of them let you copy a commercial DVD onto a VHS tape though.…
For the fashionista geek on your holiday shopping list: a Christian Dior leather iPod case designed by Hedi Slimane. What’s outside your iPod may turn out to be more important than what’s inside in your iPod. Read [Via BoingBoing]
Linux Professional Solutions has a guide to building your own Linux-based (of course) digital video recorder. Seems like a lot of trouble to avoid paying TiVo’s monthly fee, but on the other hand it does have a CD burner for archiving shows. Read [Via Slashdot]
Forget that crap I wrote last week about Creative’s CardCam being the world’s thinnest digital camera. A new 2mm camera created by Minolta in conjunction with researchers at Osaka University makes the 6mm CardCam look downright bloated. Besides being thin, the camera also captures images in a very unusual way, taking 100 small pictures each…
A new 500GB external FireWire hard drive from LaCie. That’s half a terabyte, which is enough space for about 125,000 MP3s. Oh, and they neglect to make it clear that there are actually two hard drives in there, not one. Read
There’s a controversy brewing about Viewsonic’s new V35 Pocket PC which has started shipping. Advertised as having 64MB of RAM, some users have discovered that their handhelds only have 36.45MB of RAM available, which is significantly less. Could be that the OS requires the remaining memory, and the device’s memory manager only lists memory that…
Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever are sponsoring research at Penn State to develop a new refrigerator that cools food using extremely loud sounds. Read [Via Slashdot]
Wired News on a portable DVD player that doesn’t have an LCD screen. Instead you watch a tiny image projected just in front of your eyes by a device embedded in your eyeglasses. The article is a little bit of a tease, as the device isn’t actually on the market yet, and probably won’t be…
Had dinner last night with Andrew Womack, of The Morning News, and his lovely wife Melissa, and was asked, as is inevitable when one writes a gadgets weblog, for a recommendation. Andrew was looking for some earbud headphones to replace the ones that came with his new iPod. I didn’t have a good answer for…