Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
If Sprint’s website is any indication, and it probably is, the Palm Treo Pro will be arriving to the service sometime in the near to far future. There’s no formal page for the Europe-only handset at this time, but it’s been spotted in a product drop-down menu (pictured here). If you’ve been waiting to upgrade…
Happy Halloween! Bad news! Your costume sucks compared to this kid’s, which is amazing. It’s a homemade chicken walker mech costume, and it is so badass I can’t quite put how badass it is into words. I think between this and the Lil’ Mega Man costume we can conclude that Halloween is the best time…
While we’ve officially confirmed that the Nvidia chipset in the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros can theoretically support up to 8GB of RAM, Apple says the capacities for each top out at 4GB. Turns out, the actual number is right there in the middle-chip supplier Ramjet has tested and officially confirmed that the new MacBooks…
Click to viewWe’ve shown you Jules the robotic head before, but now a team of scientists have added real-time human expression mimicking—and taken him marching right across uncanny valley. A team at the University of Bristol, UK, have combined Jules with some analytical software that looks at a person’s face and tweaks Jules’ 34 servos…
The dual-camera DSi hits in Japan tomorrow, but thankfully, it seems that we occidents won’t have to wait until “well into 2009” as originally thought. Nintendo pres. Satoru Iwata told Reuters that a fall or Christmas ’09 release would likely be too late. Which leaves Summer or even before as the new launch window. Get…
On one hand. robots have come a long, long way in the last 25 years. On the other, 3/4 of the Gizmodo staff is still wiping their own butt. Regardless, Carnegie Mellon is hosting an excellent gallery documenting 25 years of their Field Robotics Center robots. This guy, called the “Terragator,” was built in 1984…
Japanese company Tsujiden has presented a new protective film that diminishes fingerprints in a matter of seconds, breaking down the oily residue using a simple property of chemistry previously utilized in soaps and detergents. The company claims that the lipophilic and hydrophilic properties of the film cause the grease to be “obscured” by allowing it…
How embarrassing. A loyal and loving wife baked this beautiful MacBook cake for her husband’s friend’s birthday. Note her meticulous attention to detail, including the little indentation in the front to open the computer and the perfect slightly-different-white Apple logo. Well maybe she should pay attention to new Apple announcements a little better. This lady…
This could be a tongue-in cheek bit of high-tech flirtery: Brazilian designer Lucia Lorio’s “Find Me If You Can” lingerie line has embedded GPS-uplinking units that a partner can remotely track. So you could play a titillating game on your man by flitting around near his location, and then zipping far away. Or you could…
On a recent earnings call, Asus explained some of their plans going into 2009. The big one? The company expects to have a $200 entry level Eee PC—which we assume has no Windows. But that $200 announcement is even more interesting when coupled with another announcement—Asus intends to phase out all 7″ and 8.9″ models…
Earlier we learned that it was Verizon’s requests that’ve partly crippled the Blackberry Storm, but we at least hope Verizon follows the lead of Vodafone UK and prices the thing reasonably. The Vodafone pricing scheme’s just out, and it’s seemingly good news: under a 12-month contract the phone costs the equivalent of $485 at its…
After weeks of wrangling, Wired had finally gotten commitments from high-level surrogates from both the Obama and McCain campaigns to participate in a debate about technology yesterday afternoon. So how did it go? It didn’t. The McCain campaign canceled a few hours before the event, with no plans to reschedule. While McCain’s personal indifference to…
The worst bit of snowball-fighting has always been, to me, the massive pain caused as you over-chill your hands by frantically sculpting your 100’th snowball: something that’d not be a problem with this snowball gun. It sculpts the ‘balls for you, three at a time, and then you can use its internal slingshot to fire…
Though the omission of two all-but-standard smartphone features from BlackBerry’s Storm is disappointing, it isn’t totally inexplicable. BGR has confirmed through a “really top-level” Verizon source that the crippling was — surprise! — carried out at the behest of the wireless company. Few wireless providers are innocent of phone neutering, but this blatant promotion of…
Hey Jason, Can’t sleep, so I’ll tell you a story. Returning back to Japan from HK, my father crashed his fine aluminum Italian automobile into the rear end of a Mini Cooper while rushing me to the airport.Kind of surreal to know you’re going to slide into another car and there’s nothing you can do…
Check out JVC’s Sound Garden concept: it’s come leaping forth like a delighted lamb from the creative spring that is Tokyo’s Design Week, and just like a newborn lamb finding its legs, it sure looks funny. An attempt at blending eco-friendliness with interesting design, it’s a full hi-fi speaker system with bass-reflex ports and the…
Click to view California’s Prop 8, which would strip gay couples of the right to marry in the state, is polling about even right now. Apple has decided to throw their weight behind shooting the measure down, but facetious iPhone enthusiast Stephen Colbert is having none of it. An impassioned speech and patented “Wag of…
Traditional sound machines tend to use white noise or repetitive nature sounds to compete with the cacophony of the outside, but that only works to a certain extent. Ecotones, by Silicon Valley start up ASTI, is hoping to one-up them by actually being able to adapt to the user’s environment. You can choose from 12…
Those of you who use Gchat through Gmail can now send text messages to mobile phones. The function is experimental, so you have to go to the Labs tab inside of Gmail’s settings (or click on that little green flask icon) to turn it on. Your messages will appear as a 406 number-once you’ve sent…
As expected, Microsoft’s controversial anti-piracy programs have raised a big fuss in China, where a good amount of companies are probably using not-so-legal versions of Windows on all their work computers. One Beijing lawyer made a submission to the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, suggesting a $1 billion fine for what he called “illegal…
