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Phillips is having trouble with 12,000 of its plasma TVs, and the company has agreed to repair them because of an overheating problem. Its 42-inch and 50-inch Ambilight models, TVs that have special lighting in the back that changes with whatever’s on the screen, are having trouble with arcing capacitors inside. The units in question…
The newly-annnounced Sony ICF-M1000, also known as “the radio”, is a super sleek high-gloss textured black cabinet with a white back-lit prismatic LCD display. It does AM/FM radio, has a headphone jack and a cable included so you can plug your favorite MP3 player in. Their press release actually says “an external music device” so…
What the heck is this neat-looking thing, anyway? Well, it’s not exactly a Bluetooth earpiece but works like one. It’s not exactly a cellphone, but it works as one. The 4.3-inch-tall LG Style-i still needs to your cellphone to work, but communicates with it and even two other phones via Bluetooth. You hold it like…
At the same time Sony offered its Blu-ray player for pre-order, the company also announced its first desktop and notebook PCs shipping with Blu-ray burners. The handsomely-designed VAIO RC Series is aimed at aspiring moviemakers and videographers, where Sony envisions them archiving their high-definition footage on BD-R (write once) or BD-RE (rewritable) discs. The company…
Call it shameless marketing, call it insipid design, call it what you will, but MiniSpeakers is jumping onto the World Cup bandwagon by releasing portable speakers aimed at people who support the Three Lions, England. The K1000 speakers boast two watts of sonic power and provide 22 hours of playback on three AAA batteries. When…
Airbus has teamed up with BMW to create a tricked-out interior for its A350 jet that it will be showing at the Aircraft Interiors Expo 2006 in Hamburg next month. Suckers for way-cool lighting, what really caught our eye was the ceiling treatment. Take a look at how it simulates the clouds in the sky…
Some tests have been conducted to find out actually how much DRM sucks—battery life, that is. The general results is a loss up to 25 percent of battery life when playing back songs laced with WMA 10 DRM. The Creative Zen Vision went from a 16-hour playback time down to 12-hours when playing only WMA…
Researchers in Boston have developed a system that has taken drug delivery to a whole new level: wireless. The system works with a small, stamp-sized chip implanted into the body. This chip contains 100 reservoirs of medicine that are released at different intervals depending on need. The chip can be monitored and controlled wirelessly. Forgetting…
In the U.S. we automatically assume that bigger is better. Well, over in Japan this isn t the case. Case in point, we see this miniature USB-powered shredder. It is small, it can shred an A4-sized document folded in half. Besides a USB port, this shredder can suck its juices from batteries or AC power.…
If you absolutely have to be the first one on your block to have a Blu-ray player, Sony says it’s now offering its $1000 BDP-S1 unit for pre-order starting today. One thing’s for certain, we won’t be seeing any of these until at least July even though Sony told us at CES the unit would…
We know what you’re thinking: “Those two gizmos look an awful lot like the Game Boy Micro.” And they do, there’s no denying it, but they’re not actually full-fledged handheld game consoles— Lavod’s PocketPlay 320 & 350 may come pre-loaded with classic SEGA titles like Sonic Chaos, Sonic Spinball and Ecco the Dolphin, but are…
Enjoy Apple’s new iPod nano commercial, illustrating how quickly your glittering towers of DRM-locked music can be leveled after Apple deauthorizes your PC, leaving your purchased music trapped in your iPod, never to be offloaded. We’re not sure if we like this commercial better than the old ones, which featured the animated silhouettes of those…
Kingston is unveiling their latest USB flash drive, the DataTraveler Elite-Privacy Edition. What makes this flash drive more private than the next? It is the first USB flash drive that secures 100-percent of the data with 128-bit hardware-based AES encryption. This ultra-secure flash drive also features advanced password protocols and lock-out mechanisms. It is available…
Apple’s magnetic Mag”Safe” connector on its Intel-based MacBook must be inappropriately named. How safe is a connector that bursts into flames with no provocation? This happened to a MacBook belonging to Rogier Mulder, who took pictures of the connectors and posted them on Flickr. Adding insult to injury, soon thereafter Apple contacted Mulder and asked…
Here’s the first keyboard to integrate a universal iPod dock, and the Razer Pro|Solutions Pro|Type Multimedia Keyboard also has a dedicated button to launch iTunes. It’s loaded with ten macro command hot keys which give you dedicated transport controls for your iPod and let you do things such as undo, zoom in and out, and…
Green beer is gross. If god wanted beer to be green, he would have made us use the hop plant’s cousin marijuana instead of barley to brew. (Hey…) So another feather in the cap of Brooklyn Brewery—they’ve already got our support for making pretty tasty beers—who produces regular, brown- to amber-colored beer with green energy,…
If you are 1) a gadget freak who 2) loves Disney characters and 3) lives in Japan, hooray for you! This post is guaranteed to make you a very happy nerd. Epson Direct recently added three more laptops in the NT2850 Endeavour series to their Disney line of laptops—your choice of Mickey Mouse, Winnie the…
If you’re living in close quarters, or if your kitchen drawers are so filled to the brim that you can hardly close them, you might be looking for something like these collapsible measuring cups from designer Boje Estermann and other in-house designers at Normann Copenhagen. These measuring cups, funnel and colander are made out of…
Take a look at this battery-powered modding tool—the Dremel Stylus is a hand-held device which is like a cross between a dentist’s drill and a power screwdriver, and appears to be well-suited for all of those intricate hands-on projects. If you have some precision sanding or polishing to do around the house, or especially fine…
More speculation is floating around about Apple’s answer to Origami, where CNet goes over the latest patent filings by Apple with the US Patent and Trademark Office for touch-sensitive screens, citing around seven patents filed by Apple so far. Perhaps the most provocative educated guess by the reporter is his Fox News-like reach about how…