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This isn’t the first time the concept of color-changing electronic skins has been tossed around, but Philips is a big name, and they have big plans that extend beyond your portable gadgets. https://gizmodo.com/electronic-skin-changes-gadget-colors-on-the-fly-5285782 Electronic paper (e-paper) looks like conventional paper and the bright wash of color it generates uses the ambient light for rendition, just…
Wasilla, Alaska: Home to moose, human, and most notoriously, one Sarah Palin. Its most famous resident may be a divisive one, but I think we can all agree that Carlos Owen, backyard roboticist and aspiring mad scientist, is a hero. We’ve spotlighted Owen’s work before, back when he unveiled his 20-foot fire-breathing mech. As impressive…
Whining for the 431st time that there’s no MenuPages iPhone app—basically, an app with every menu for every restaurant in major cities—I got a reply from who appears to be Greg Barton, the founder of MenuPages. “Soon guys, soon.” https://gizmodo.com/wheres-my-menupages-iphone-app-5147536 Oh yes. [Twitter]
During our week celebrating precision audio, you guys asked about respectable but affordable home-theater audio. So we hit up CNet’s Audiophiliac, Steve Guttenberg, to clue us in to three exceptional 5.1 speaker/subwoofer combo packages selling for $800 or less. Energy RC-Micro 5.1 Energy is big on small speakers. Their RC-Micro 5.1 system ($600) includes four…
Simulate the experience of owning a DSi XL months before it goes on sale outside of Japan, with this Datel Japan DSi sound speaker. https://gizmodo.com/video-first-good-look-at-the-larger-nintendo-dsi-xl-5393387 Not only does it play your Mario soundtrack out loud, but it also charges your DSi when it’s plugged in. There’s even a little hole on the top half of…
Would you pay $1.99 a month for an app that gets you party jokes “to make you the center of attention”, excerpts from interviews, and no “fully nude content” whatsoever? That’s what Playboy expects you to do. That’s exactly what the official Playboy iPhone app does. It also includes “exclusive content”, like a non-nude Playmate…
Z Corporation’s Z-Scanner looks like a 23rd century View-Master, and in some ways it is. This scanner uses lasers to capture complex forms in 3D, with resolution up to 40 microns. Set shields to full for the hands-on video below! [Core77]
It started with Sony. Like most poorly thought-out format ideas from the Japanese titan, 2004’s Librie ereader promised a revolutionary new way to perform an act you never realized needed an overhaul. Reading. Books, in the paper and ink form, have been around for over a thousand years. You can bet your prized copy of…
We’ve been wondering what a Lalaized iTunes would look like, and we weren’t too far off: The WSJ says iTunes is evolving into a web-centric model, making the biggest music store in the world that much more powerful. https://gizmodo.com/what-lala-means-for-the-streaming-future-of-itunes-5421547 You won’t need software anymore to buy songs from iTunes. iTunes will just be on the…
It’s a small point of academic interested, but Sony’s upcoming PS3 motion controller appears to be called “Gem,” at least according to EA’s head honcho John Riccitiello (who would know). [Kotaku] UPDATE: Kotaku has learned that “Gem” was the prototype’s name…but it still may be the final product name, too. [Kotaku] https://kotaku.com/ps3-motion-controller-finally-named-update-5423123
Well, that took long enough. The Internet Movie Database—the sole reason that nobody can have factual arguments about movies anymore—has been turned into an iPhone app. A decent one, no less! Site-specific browser apps are prone to shittiness, because at heart, they’re really just websites. The key is to offer something more, or, if you’re…
Pac-Man Championship Edition isn’t just a fantastic game you should buy if you have an iPhone or 360. It’s a perfect example of how Microsoft is needlessly losing in the mobile space to Apple, at least in terms of gaming. You see, Pac-Man CE was originally launched a major exclusive for Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA).…
Oh, AOL, American Online, Aol. Whatever the fuck you call yourself now. Does your new bland logo—the one to which you switched today, with the annoying punctuation—come with a floppy disk? No? Whatever. I’m still not interested. And what’s with the clipart background, anyway. Consider yourself ironbarred. [AOL]
Panasonic just finished buying a controlling stake in Sanyo for $4.6 billion to form a Voltron of consumer electronics that’s the second biggest in Japan, behind Hitachi. Why? For Sanyo’s batteries. Sanyo’s the biggest global supplier of rechargeable batteries and solar panels, pulling in lots o’ moolah for ’em. [
WiGig, which its alliance members hope is the next major wireless spec, finally completed its unified specification. The tech gets speeds up to 7Gbps (10 times faster than Wi-Fi) and manages to stay backwards-compatible with existing 802.11 specs. WiGig, just as a refresher, uses the currently empty 60GHz spectrum, and is capable of multi-gigabit communication.…
This is awesome and just plain makes sense: With Amazon’s Disc+ on Demand, when you buy a DVD or Blu-ray movie, you’ll be able to stream it instantly via Amazon On Demand. So far, they’ve got this going for a few hundred titles it looks like, and it’s restricted to the US, but hopefully it…
Theoretically, if you were to strap a PS3 Slim, projector and substantial weight in batteries to your body, you could play games on a big screen anywhere. Well in practice, someone actually did that: Yes, it’s just an Epson viral-ish video, but that doesn’t make the clip any less wonderful, as a gamer walks the…
Today’s tenuous iPhone 4 rumor comes to us today from Russia, Twitter, and the letters F-O-X-C-O-N-N. https://gizmodo.com/new-iphone-4g-concept-is-son-of-macbook-air-and-ipod-to-5150375 The editor of Mobile Review, which has no track record on Apple rumors, is claiming Foxconn has just received an order for the next generation of iPhones. Foxconn, as you know, makes the iPhone for Apple, so that’s…
According to DigiTimes, Asus is building a “4- to 7-inch panel…which will offer a combination of tablet PC and MID functions.” And given Asus’ experience in cheap portables (inventing netbooks, remember?), the plan could be a perfect fit. [DigiTimes]
If you find your digital camera gets into that sort of situation often, that’s probably quite an attractive feature, right? In addition to withstanding 1.6-ton of weight, these three new memory cards are shock, water and magnet proof. You can pick up 4GB, 8GB or 16GB for both microSD and SD formats and 4GB and…
