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A new iPhone app called Rowmote can control Front Row, Quicktime, DVD Player, iTunes and Keynote, just like Apple’s IR Remote, but over wi-fi. Apple’s IR Remote is fine, but it’s easy to lose and needs line-of-sight. Apple’s Remote app may still be the slickest iPhone application yet, but it only controls iTunes. Rowmote obviously…
The Playpump looks like a piece of playground equipment, but it’s really a disguised pump for getting water out of the ground. As kids play on it, water is pumped to a nearby tank. While it’s being used, the Playpump brings up 1,400 liters of water per hour, which isn’t too shabby. There’s a tank…
The SOLiCharger is solar-chargeable lithium ion pack for your iPhone that can fill to capacity in four hours of sunlight. Priced at $40 and available now, the SOLiCharger battery pack (left) is compatible with all of your standard iPhone charging options (AC, USB and car), but its big claim to fame is the ability to…
We’re hearing more and more about specific netbook-optimized operating systems, and Intel is joining in the game with an alpha release of Moblin, their netbook Linux OS optimized for Atom. Moblin is based largely on Fedora, and it’s still a work in progress, but its main goal is to optimize performance for Atom and Core…
Panasonic has just announced a new fluorescent light fixture that’s extra energy efficient. Responding to ambient light (from the sun, etc), the light will adjust its output accordingly to save electricity while maintaining brightness. The Auto-Eco Light-Control Twin Pa, its full glorious name, boasts an energy savings of up to 62% with its brightness automation.…
There are the snobby, deluded audiophiles who troll internet forums all day arguing about the merits of acoustic cryocoolers and adaptive spectral perceptual entropy coding, and then there’s Ken. Call his rig a ripoff if you want (his speakers, Bowers & Wilkins 802Ds, probably set him back over $15,000), but don’t impugn his enthusiasm. For…
Design studio Gridplane was hired by Microsoft to come up with a new user interface for the Xbox 360 (what eventually became dubbed The New Xbox Experience). Here is their work. Many screens look like little more than an enlarged, green-filtered version of the original 360 dashboard, but the company developed an “immersive 3D environment”…
The Register stumbled across a patent for the “Smart Interface System for Mobile Communication Devices”, a smartphone extension dock that lets you easily plop your phone onto your home network and connect peripherals. The dock contains a processor and storage of its own to run its OS, but its main function is to expand your…
In this video, the BBC takes us inside the top secret headquarters of IA Technology, where the former ejector seat company is working on the “world’s first fully accurate voice recognition phone,” the Zumba. Accompanied by a card-like carrying case/base station, the Zumba slips out into an earpiece shaped like one of those old fossilized…
There’s almost no way to describe this tech without boring you all to death, so before I do here’s the important part: basically, 32GB DDR3 consumer RAM sticks are now possible. The breakthrough behind the story is the development of a 50-nanometer, 4Gb (gigabit) (512MB) chips, which allow for a significant reduction in complexity, and…
In case you needed an extra reason to get that killer robot set, MAKE’s been kind enough to offer all us Gizmodo readers 10% off their wares at Maker Shed… but only for today! To get the discount, enter the code GIZDEAL on check out. [MAKE]
In case you’re curious about what else our friends across the Pacific are getting, here’s some more of KDDI au‘s Spring 2009 line. This season’s trends: 3-inch-plus screens, easy global calling and fitness. Like the Winter/Fall season’s phones, these ones are sleek clamshells chock full of features the public probably won’t use—like “Run & Walk,”…
Surprisingly absent until now, touchability has finally made it into the KDDI au line-up. Casio’s offering utilizes a 3.1-inch touchscreen for some funky music apps — making it a music studio in your pocket. The screen swivels around a central hinge to hide the phone’s regular numerical keyboard. Through a Yamaha piano app program, you…
Hitachi’s new Wooo, part of Japan’s KDDI au Spring line, comes with the unique ability to watch 3D videos. Sounds coool, even if the 3D-induced woooziness will have you switching back to 2D in minutes. The phone’s 3.1-inch display is the first of its kind to have 3D-capabilities and can be swiveled horizontally to be…
MobileCrunch has lots of photos of the Helio Ocean 2 for Virgin Mobile, which we last saw in a spy shot a few months back. It’s definitely real now. https://gizmodo.com/is-this-the-helio-ocean-2-393767 They don’t have many details, but you can head over to see lots and lots of photos of it in the open and splayed positions.…
The people in charge of Super Bowl CIVIII, or whatever they’re up to now, are going to be using Microsoft’s Surface to coordinate and view the goings on in Tampa this Sunday. Surface is used in the way you’d think it would be used—to zoom in and out and scale things to people can view…
The 16GB Leyio File Sharing Device comes equipped with a fingerprint scanner, and can also wirelessly transfer data to your computer and other nearby Leyios. Wait, there’s more. This flash drive also has a digital screen and a USB port built in so that you can plug in other flash drives to transfer more data.…
Hanging electronics from clothes always seem to scream, “please take my things,” but the Kyocera NS01 cellphone goes one step further because it’s attached to a belt. But that won’t save you from a gun. The phone has a 2.8-inch QVGA screen and comes with a 2-megapixel camera in addition to the integrated belt. It…
Here’s a novel idea: an ink pen that reads the color of any object you place in front of it, then mixes red, blue and green ink to match it. But I’m skeptical as to whether or not you can fit all the parts and electronics needed into a usable pen. You’d need room for…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Dell might go into the smartphone business. OOOLLLDDD? But today the WSJ reports Dell’s closer than ever, with prototypes built in two different styles and two competing platforms. The two styles may seem familiar to you, as demonstrated by my totally fake images above. One, we’ll call “iPhone,”…