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By the time you finish reading this post about Sony’s latest media format—Blu-spec CD, which uses the same Blu Laser Diode as Blu-ray for audio CDs—they will likely have launched yet another one that we’ll report on shortly. In the meantime, Blu-spec CDs are apparently excellent because the new CD cutting machines “eliminate vibration,” which…
Nanoparticles that self-assemble into complex optical structures sounds like an early ingredient in a future Robot Uprising recipe, but the science team at University of California, Berkeley thinks they’ll be useful for nicely tame things. The self-assembly of the nanoparticle silver crystals can be controlled to produce different nano “devices” and it’s a a neat…
Click to view It’s amazing that you can fall asleep with the polls showing one thing and wake up to a world you don’t even recognize. Despite who I may have supported as of November 4th, as a fervent supporter of both democracy and touchscreen technology, I accept DRE 700:259 as the 44th President of…
Wireless-N speeds sound great and everything (74Mbps!), but who wants to buy a bulky new adapter? The GW-USMicronN from Planex makes the upgrade painless, assuming you have an N router. Possibly the smallest 802.11n USB adapter to date (1/6 the size of the D-Link beside it), early testing shows that its range and transfer speeds…
You may have thought the Embody chair was all very high-tech…but it’s got nothing on Oki’s protoype Leopard chair. It’s got a robot-leg in its design. Based on Oki’s well-named Robot Leg walking robot, the chair is motorized: when empty it perches up in the air, waiting for your butt to settle against it. When…
Believe it or not, up to November 1st many could and still were buying licenses for Windows 3.x (mainly for embedded systems like cash registers and airline entertainment systems from companies like Virgin). But on that day, Microsoft discontinued their licensing of the product. After 18 years, the iconic Windows platform is no more.Requirements for…
The ObamaBot has been a patient contributor to the Obama presidential campaign. After being assembled for $250, the 6-foot metal and wooden robot took to the streets of Florida waving signs to promote early voting and now President-elect Barack Obama. From a technical standpoint, the robot is apparently “powered by hope,” which seems like a…unique…approach…
Digitized Post-It-alike gizmos aren’t new, but none I can think of is quite as functional as Mintpass’ Mintpad. It’s a web-surfing, Wi-Fi, media player with 1.3-megapixel cam, microphone and built-in speaker, 4GB of memory with microSD expansion. Plus it’s a 320 x 240-pixel 2.9-inch touchscreen note-taker. It won’t handwriting-recognize your scrawls though, it simply replaces…
OK, I’ll admit that this self-stabilizing bike is clever: it’s kind of a Segway turned sideways, using gyros to detect if it’s off-balancing, and adjusting the steering automagically to compensate. It’s also a standard electric bike, so it propels you along without needing any annoying foot-power: very 21st Century indeed. Apparently it’s quite tricky to…
Before Tokyo’s Akihabara geek district was laced with neon, it looked like this photo taken circa 1950 which I saw on my recent trip. Despite the cow in the photo, even around this time, gadgets were a part of the trade. (Although as the ads below show, phonographs and vacuum tube radios made up some…
We mentioned it before, and were initially upset it wasn’t a revised Speak&Spell…but now Panasonic’s H1 Toughbook for clinical use is out, and its specs list is impressive. It’s water-, dust- and drop-proof from 3-feet, has a smooth-surface and with sealed buttons for hygiene, and is fanless. It’s got a six-hour battery life, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth…
From the haze of renders, name changes and unflatteringly exposed prototypes emerges the best evidence that a real-life Art Lebedev Optimus Aux keypad is nigh. The sexy, CNCed body doesn’t look to have deviated at all from the proposed design, and the guts shouldn’t pose any challenges that haven’t already been overcome in the larger…
The fundamental proposition of consumer technology is as follows: the closer we are to using the gadgets featured in the last 10 years of crappy spy thrillers and action movies, the more progress we’ve made. That’s how the Surface came to be, and how we’ve ended up with the fingerprint-grabbing, light-sensing LCD panel. AU Optronics…
We recently mentioned that Meizu’s M8 iPhone clonephone was really coming to the shops in China at the end of the year, but according to the head of the company, things’ll be happening a bit sooner than that. https://gizmodo.com/meizu-m8-iphone-clone-hitting-china-india-in-december-5056133 J.Wong himself has suggested that it’ll be on sale in China no later than the 30th…
Well, the election is over! Luckily, it was pretty clear from about two hours in who would be the winner this time around , so even if there were a couple of iffy voting hijinks, it wouldn’t be anything to take up to the Supreme Court. Still, some post-election voting humor never hurt anybody –…
Japanese company Soken showed off a wall made entirely out of 12×12 inch, 0.1mm thick e-ink paper displays at the FDPI conference in Yokohama this week. Called “Twist Ball,” after the rotating fine particles the paper is made of that change when voltage is applied, Soken’s e-ink vaguely represented something made out of tacky Christmas…
Sony has released a minor update to firmware 2.5 on the Playstation 3, which should be showing up sometime tonight. No. 2.52 fixes a test entry issue that some titles had and improves the “playback quality of some PS3 format software.” Users are already reporting that some things, like Trophies, are loading faster with the…
It’s been less than two weeks since T-Mobile’s G1 hit shelves, and Android’s already been jailbroken. Folks over at the xda-developers forum discovered an easy way to start telnet on the device, log in as root and get full system access and read and write. While the Googlephone is nowhere near as restricted as the…
Sure, election coverage is getting the most play tonight, but we’re equally (well, almost) invested in the destruction of everybody’s favorite mediocre consumer electronics chain – Circuit City. A tipster has sent us a sneak peek at Circuit City’s severance pay, and it’s not pretty. Part-time associates get an extra 75 cents an hour, full-time…
Those of you who watch CNN have probably noticed the neat multitouch screen the anchors have been playing with since the beginning of the election season. Now that all the votes are coming in and we’re literally counting down to the big reveal, the news network has given a shout out to the man behind…
