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This week at Uncrate: We expand our knowledge of suds with the Beer Wheel, hide in plain view with Fake Moustaches & Beards, and stop off at Raoul’s for a quiet, quality meal. We also keep our gear safe from wetness with the Seattle Sling Dry Bag, keep track of time, WWII-style with the Timex…
If you’re flying one of Europe’s many discount carriers and you’re not violently hungover, you’re probably doing something wrong—the cabins of those single-class A319s are bubbling tempests of unshowered, throbbing rage that always seem a fraction of a degree away from boiling over. Now on your sunrise flight from Krakow to Berlin, you can enjoy…
Say what you will about Windows Vista, but we think it’s a little outlandish to advertise the product on a toilet. In an unnamed Russian city, ads for Vista appear right on the porcelain reading, “Windows Vista – the digital future starts here.” We really hope it’s an advertising agency’s version of a prank. Otherwise,…
Nine of the top ten selling notebooks on Amazon right now are netbooks. (The other spot is taken by Apple.) Call them underpowered, complain about their screens, but there’s a reason why every PC manufacturer in the world has jumped on the netbook bandwagon.It should be noted, of course, that just because these systems rule…
In a stunning move, the folks at Asus appear to be adding a fairly significant feature to one of their netbooks—built-in 3.75G HSUPA connectivity to the Atom-powered 8.9″ Eee PC 901—without spinning off another 5 different model designations. The 3.75G chip will be in all 901s that ship from October onward.Claiming 7.2 Mbps down/2 Mbps…
According to the South China Morning Post, in China the iPhone 3G won’t have 3G or Wi-Fi. China Mobile wants Apple to disable these two features. The first because they don’t have a 3G network in place. The second nobody knows or can imagine why, but it simply makes the iPhone an almost-useless shiny brick.…
While SanDisk has made no official announcements, their 16GB MicroSD cards are popping up for sale at various internet retailers (at various prices, we might add). Ranging from $80 to $220 (we’d go with the $80), prices will settle with more availability. But we’re pretty excited to toss an iPhone’s worth of flash storage into…
Content producers of pretty much any ilk were excited to get news of the highly refined, newly hardware-accelerated CS4 product line, but probably missed this key feature buried deep in the release notes: multitouch trackpad support. MacBook Air and late model MacBook Pro users can now pinch, spread, and twist in Photoshop just like they…
Motorola doesn’t seem to have a great plan for the mobile space in the next few years, and these spy shots do little to assuage our fears of imminent crappiness. I mean, there’s nothing immediately wrong with what we’ve heard and now seen of the Q11—GPS, Wi-Fi, and 3G are standard fare for smartphones (and…
Rail-happy Japan, a country that probably takes great joy in watching America’s embarrassingly slow and fitful adoption of high-speed and maglev trains, will be graced with new breed of green, 200+ mph trains by 2010. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, the designer of these new trains, isn’t promoting speed as the main selling point—Japan railways have seen…
If the fantastic Large Hadron Collider rap was too esoteric for your tastes, Oort Kuiper’s Astrobiology rap, commissioned by a European astronomy magazine, probably won’t find its way onto your prestigious and exclusive “muzic 4 drivin’ ‘n’ shit” playlist. But, in the spirit of science, consider the facts: The song has a beat, therefore it…
Fresh from the arms-races-that-I-didn’t-even-know-were-happening department comes Casio’s latest venture in ultra-high density LCD panels, which has resulted in a 546ppi, 960×540, 2.0-inch TFT. To put that into real-world terms (or “iPhone terms” as they’re called around here), that means that this display is over three times as dense as the iPhone’s already lush 160ppi panel.…
HappyWakeUp is a new cellphone alarm app developed for S60 (the other open platform) that only wakes you when it knows you’re in a light sleep cycle. How does it know? Well, Computerworld says HappyWakeUp actually uses the microphone from your phone to statistically analyze your sleep habits based on noises you make, and when…
Seen at the Valley Fair Apple Store here in the Bay Area, some guy’s protesting Apple for something or other while wearing a homemade iPhone costume. Did your mom help you make that costume, sir? Because you should really ask her for help—she’d be able to pick out a nicer typeface and better looking icons.…
Even as Android lights up developers’ eyes with the sparkling promise of total openness, Apple’s grip continues to tighten around iPhone app development. After being blocked from App Store for “duplicating” iTunes functionality—a dubious argument, for many reasons—Podcaster’s developers turned to a loophole in Apple’s ad hoc app distribution program (mainly for education and testing)…
The large elderly population in Japan has manufacturers clamoring to develop devices to assist them. Not surprisingly, they are coming up with some pretty unique ideas. Take this human airbag, for instance. The airbag system is strapped onto the body and inflates in 0.1 seconds when it detects rapid movement toward the ground. Strangely, one…
Not satisfied with the amount of boob-touching going on in real life, a Japanese programmer after my own heart created paiTouch (oh wit! pai = slang for boobs)-an iPhone touchscreen version of his much more intensive Flash simulator complete with motion physics algorithms for “realistic” jiggling and plenty of customizable parameters.The iPhone webapp port runs…
T-Mobile’s just rolled back on their 1GB usage cap on their 3G plans for upcoming G1 Android customers, instead going to a hold-up-while-we-figure-this-out route. The statement they give now states that they can reduce throughput for “a small fraction” of users who are using too much data, but exact terms and limits are still being…
Google made the Android 1.0 SDK available today, following the announcement of the G1 phone yesterday. The 1.0 signification means it’s technically out of beta, and you can develop without fear of major changes to Android’s core programming. According to Mobile Whack, the only changes from the 0.9 release are some bug fixes and API…
Some very talented individuals at the Japanese company Hot Toys have developed 1:6 scale Iron Man Mark I, II and III figures that feature an absolutely extraordinary level of detail. Seriously though—just look at Stark’s face. Sure, he looks kind of Japanese, but I’ll be dammed if that is not the best Robert Downey Jr.…
