Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
After a looooooooong wait, the formerly Korea-only MobiBlu DAH-100-5 is finally on sale in the United States, albeit exclusively from CompUSA or MobiBlu’s online store. Like its fellow iPod Mini rival, the Rio Carbon, the DAH-100-5 is a lot more feature-laden than the comparable Apple. It’s got an extra gig’s worth of storage, as well…
Here’s a new spin on a familiar favorite: A mind-reading device that doesn’t just let the user control a cursor, but actually convert thoughts into complete sentences. Or at least that’s the eventual goal of the Brainy Communicator, in development at Singapore’s Institute of Infocomm Research. Right now, though, they’re stuck in the early stages—users…
MoDaCo is offering two cash prizes, worth a combined $1,500, to smartphone users (or prospective users) willing to fill out an 8-minute survey. Don’t worry, there’s nothing too personal in there, unless you consider your choice of mobile OS an intensely private matter. The one catch: Europeans and Americans only, please. Though MoDaCo promises a…
Stirling engines have been around since the early 19th Century, but they’ve never managed to find major commercial uses beyond toys like the Micro-Stirling-powered spinny thing pictured. The engines are a great concept, with the potential to be far more efficient than internal combusion, but the inherent disadvantages (most notably a long warm-up time and…
This one’s pretty hard to wrap my head around: An MIT researcher, Alan Epstein, has created a nickel-sized gas turbine, a pint-sized relative of those found on jetplanes. Despite the turbine’s tiny size, the blades whir along at 1 million RPMs. He’s pitching it as a replacement for batteries in handheld devices like GPS radios,…
A few years back, during a financial crunch, I briefly considered buying a Gateway laptop. An office techie talked me out of it, though, remarking that the company was in its death throes. That was right before Gateway tried to reinvent itself as a vendor of budget plasma TVs, and a few years before the…
The South Korean fuzz just busted a massive cheating ring, catching 141 college-bound kids cribbing answers from SMS. The government has responded by vowing to outfit every testing center with cellphone jammers, of the sort pictured to the right. Sure, it’ll cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $66 million. And the dollars-to-donuts bet is that…
Keitai Watch reports that as part of a renewal of their site, Amazon Japan has introduced a flattering new feature called “Amazon Scan Search.” After users download an application to their cell phone free of charge, they can scan barcodes of ordinary products, which in turn enables them to search the cell phone version of…
Gadget Madness interviews Mark Tilden, the man whose RoboSapien will probably fill many large stockings this Xmas. Apparently, a Robosapien 2 is in the works and will be unveiled at the New York Toy Fair ’05, which just happens to fall right on my birthday. A new cheap, hack-friendly robot would be a perfectly decent…
Reader Serge Claesen found this iPod Alarm Clock from JBL and it’s pretty nice looking—the sort of thing I’d expect to see on the Pan Am flight to the space station. As someone points out in the iPod Lounge thread, there’s really nothing intrinsically special about an ‘iPod Alarm Clock,’ since the iPod has an…
I get a few spammy emails from predominately Taiwanese vendors showing off their products—occasionally they’re even worth mentioning, like this ‘credit card’ USB flash drive with a solar-powered calculator on the front. Earth shaking? No, but a nice efficiency of space. No price, but if you want to try their email, it’s [email protected]. Usually these…
A few of you have written to ask where our Nintendo DS launch news was—I sort of thought you guys that were interested in picking up a DS already had one, since they’ve been sold out on pre-orders for the last couple of weeks at least, but hey! DS is launching, friends—I hope you get…
There’s an age-old media tradition called “holiday pegging,” which is nowhere as dirty as it sounds. All it means is that, come every Fourth of July, your local newspaper is bound to run some heartwarming tale about a war widow who knits American flags from dental floss. Or the week leading up to Christmas, there’s…
With no technical training (indeed, not much education at all), no external financial support, and no fancy computer-aided design, Wu Yulu manufactures his robots out of scrap metal, spare batteries, and duct tape on the outskirts of Beijing. His completed projects include everything from a small hopping frog to a human-esque robot which performs a…
Looks like our wishful thinking has born fruit, at least sort of. The SOLIO, from UK-based Disruptive Technology Channels, serves as a battery backup for your iPod, holding sufficient juice to keep you fully charged. You can load it up by plugging it in to a wall outlet for four hours (UK style, naturally—adapters for…
Sticking with the retro theme, this Tokima robot watch brings me straight back to 1984. I had the plastic version, though, unlike this new-old-stock model from 1998 that’s now going for 125 quid. This freckle-faced girl—Claire? Amy?—tackled me during recess, trying to plant one on my lips. In the process, she shattered my beloved robo-watch.…
I wouldn’t have thought you could found a successful business selling out-of-date phones, but I’d have been wrong. Retrofone does precisely that, selling phones to businesses and individuals who for whatever reason aren’t interested in all the whiz-bangery of Bluetooth, cameras, and color displays, like this Nokia 8110. Retrofone stocks phones from a variety of…
I’ve always preferred the American version of football—something about seeing dudes get pancaked by 300-pounders does my heart right. But I’ll give soccer some props here and confess they’ve way got better trading cards. The new DVD Cardz from Serious pop into any standard DVD player or DVD-ROM drive, and provide the owner with, uh,…
Some smart cookie down at Sharman Networks sees the handwriting on telephony’s wall. Or maybe he just wants the company’s flagship P2P software, KaZaA, to be known for something other than spyware. Whatever the reason, the new KaZaA 3.0 will include Skype, so you can dial up your file-swapping pals in the Ukraine for nothing.…
I’ll be the first to admit, it’s hard to get psyched for a $30 keyboard. But the latest from Adesso, the FOLD-2000, is hermetically sealed and able to withstand a dip in a disinfectant bath. Yeah, it’s designed for hospitals and clean rooms. I can foresee another target market, though: Heavy computer users who occasionally…