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What would make Apple announce a upgraded Xserve G5 just a week before MacWorld? Could it be that they’re so crammed full of new product announcements that they’re actually pushing stuff out early? Wishful thinking, perhaps, and idle besides—this 2.3GHz Dual G5 rackmounted machine is a beaut. Why can’t all my machines be rackmounted, huh?…
First, I should say: I’m sorry about shining those laser pointers at the jets. I just thought they’d crash or something—I didn’t realize people would get all freaked out. I promise never to do it again, but as my influence over military spending is patchy at best (my line iteming of R&D for a carbon-fiber…
No pictures yet, but apparently Motorola is set to announce a partnership with snowboard manufacturer Burton to produce a line of outerwear that not only has space for iPods and other portable music players, but will use Bluetooth to communicate with a bit on the sleeve that can control incoming and outbound calls, as well…
It’s technically illegal to bundle a bunch of Nintendo NES games with your portable DVD player, but god bless Taiwanese manufacturer Fontastic Telecom for doing it anyway, especially since their little entertainment unit can actually play them. And a double portion of blessing on them for including the seemingly superfluous telescoping antenna on top—it fully…
TimeTrax will be launching a raft of new products this week at CES, including this version of their XM satellite radio reciever and software that will directly copy songs recorded from the XM service onto a user’s iPod. While it’s somewhat impossible to, say, pull an entire album down from XM, it’s still somewhat surprising…
MobileTracker is reporting that Cingular will be getting their own version of the RIM BlackBerry 7100* series, branded as the 7100g. The keyboardless T-Mobile 7100t has been a relative success for the company, despite recent issues with the network access from the carrier. UK carrier Vodafone has their own version of the 7100 which is…
Looks like those Samsung concepts weren’t the only ones to leak out onto the web, as iDNES.cz displays what they presume to be the entire 2005 Samsung GSM phone road map. It’s an attractive looking bunch of phones, with traditional clamshells complimenting rotating screens and all sorts of other interesting (if perhaps pointless) features. And…
If you’re wondering how Sanyo can cram an 8-megapixel sensor into this new VPC-C4 camera, I can tell you: cheating. It’s really just a 4-megapixel unit which can use interpolation to upscale the resolution of the shots. That’s a not a bad thing, really, but it will provide results far different than those from a…
Having made many of the “must have” lists for Xmas 2004, WowWee is introducing follow ups to their breakout product, the Robosapien. A new 7-inch Mini Robosapien is the first to be shown, shipping in February for just $10. More robots will be shown at CES this week, including a new ‘Robosapien V2,’ a ‘Roboraptor,’…
Here’s a pic of that new AMD Alchemy-based portable video player from FIC, called the ‘Vassili.’ It’s cool and all that it uses the new AMD chip that does look mighty nice, the specs of the player itself aren’t all that impressive: 20GB hard drive, 3.6-inch screen, and USB 2.0. I think it’s pretty safe…
AMD has announced a new chip called the ‘Alchemy’ Au1200, designed to power portable video devices of all sizes. The hot heat about the Alchemy is two-fold: first, it can resize almost any major format video into different resolutions on the fly (upscale and downscale, it seems), meaning that devices that use the chipset won’t…
The Quark claims to the world’s “highest performance classic spinning top in the world.” That means it’ll spin for a long, long time—up to 15 minutes a twirl, they say. Manufacturer Quirkle will even include a laser pointer with each purchase to aid in “precision dynamic balancing,” as well as a glass spinning surface (aka…
There’s an opportunity for set-top manufacturing companies like Moxi and 2Wire to really outclass TiVo, simply because they designing devices around a very specific set of, well, specifications. The newly announced 2Wire MediaPortal, for instance, isn’t just a satellite receiver. It’s also an internet/Ethernet-enabled media streamer with a built-in 250GB hard drive, designed to provide…
Gawker Media (publisher of Gawker.com, Wonkette.com, Gizmodo.com, Defamer.com, Fleshbot.com, Screenhead.com, Kotaku.com, and Jalopnik.com) is looking for a corporate intern. You will have to share a Glock. Update: We’ve been flooded! Hold off sending in any more emails for now. The ideal candidate will be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as s/he bounces out of bed each day…
The StroboPick is a tiny strobe light guitar tuning pic, designed to let you tune your guitar visually by shining red and green LEDs on the string until they line up. While strobe tuners have been around for a while, the StroboPick is considerably cheaper than conventional $200 models, ringing up for just $35. And…
There is just a teensy bit of information floating up about the Samsung SGH-P777, an EDGE-capable phone that should show up on Cingular sometime in Q1 of ’05. MobileTracker has the basics, including this tiny picture we ripped off. I would expect to hear more from Samsung real soon, as references to the SGH-P777 are…
It doesn’t get much hotter than bot-on-bot action (it’s enough to make your circuits fuse), and the eRobotica 2005 PlayBot Calendar aims to please. Each month has a different robot Playmate, with shots ranging from the relatively tame (like this upskirt) to downright bestial, with two Sony AIBO slipping it doggy style. It’s safe for…
Just like the recently-developed HD DVD/DVD dual-disc format from Toshiba, JVC is showing a new prototype triple-layer Blu-Ray/DVD hybrid that puts a 25GB Blu-Ray layer on top of a coventional two-layer 8.5GB DVD disc. Dual format discs are hoped to ease the transition from DVD to whatever format will win the upcoming standards war (probably…
Development of the next round of high-speed wireless data services has officially started, with a new consortium of carriers signing a ‘Super 3G’ agreement. The new system, planned to be at least 10 times as fast as modern 3G services, should first been seen in testing environments in 2007, with commercial deployments to follow. Companies…
The Sumitronics SP-103 MP3 Docking Station is a $300 FM radio designed to capture ‘the latest Top-40 music hits’ and copy them automatically to your USB Host-capable MP3 player. I can only presume by ‘latest Top-40 music hits’ they mean ‘whatever happens to be playing on the radio at any given time,’ but until the…