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What has eight-wheels, goes 230mph, and takes ten hours to recharge? Okay, yes, DildonoTron 9000—besides that. The Eliica electric car designed by Hiroshi Shimizu, is what, and Auto Express got to take one out for a ride. It’s as ugly as sin, but it’ll do 0 to 60 in just four seconds, powered by separate…
Product Highlights • Apple Cinema Displays have faulty LCD panels [TheInquirer] • Creative Zen Micro Launch (Singapore) [HardwareZone] • CTL Launches Nexus 2200 22? LCD HDTV/Monitor [ChaitGear] • Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes Podcast [MalcolmAdams] • Someone Gets a Treo 650 from Sprint [Treonauts] Reviews • palmOne Tungsten T5 – Palm OS PDA [TrustedReviews] • Bluetake…
Everybody is a lot more excited about these ringback tones than I expected. I’m sort of dreading them, myself, as I’ll now be forced to endure everyone’s humorous or nostalgic choices of music as I try to call them. On the bright side, it gives me an excuse to hang up on them faster, preventing…
Hitachi has developed a new display that is embedded in a table-top. The touch-sensitive unit can be drawn on and can even respond to gestures, so that drawing a circle around something, for instance, could trigger a zoom in on an image, or inscribing the sacred pentagram could automatically call your principal and tell him…
This new robot was shown off in Japan yesterday by Danish researcher Hautop Lund. The ATRON is designed to be completely modular, able to reconfigure itself into one of 100 different shapes with corresponding motions, from snake-like slithering to walking to rolling. Each link communicates with the others via an infrared link and is self-powered—they…
It’s not going to tell Treo fans anything they didn’t already know, but this review on USA Today is the first review of the Treo 650 I’ve seen. Ed Baig gives it good marks, bagging on the obvious shortcomings, like the lack of on-board memory and the so-so camera. If this review is any indication,…
There’s no reason smartphones have to run PalmOS, Windows Mobile, or even Linux or Symbian. There’s nothing stopping a manufacturer from crafting their own stylus-oriented touchscreen OS—it might even be a good idea if they can bring something new to the table. The reason most companies, don’t, though, might be the same reason that Motorola’s…
Hotmail used to let you access it using Outlook or Outlook Express—that was one of the reasons I used to use them exclusively about four years ago. Now a couple of readers have told me that their free access to Hotmail from Outlook has been suspended, with a message encouraging them to upgrade to MSN…
I’ve been bugging my friend Ricardo Infernauta to take a couple pictures of the grey market electronics district called Santa Ifigênia in his native São Paulo, Brazil for about forever. When he came through, he wasn’t joking about it being a madhouse—it’s like a South American inversion of the cramped but orderly grey market shops…
All About Symbian gets the first proper Nokia 9500 Communicator review out the way and it’s a pretty interesting read if you’re a clamshell fan. Nokia isn’t doing anything terribly fancy in this $1,000 phone, but the addition of Wi-Fi and more memory make it looks like a worthwhile upgrade for Nokia 9000 loyalists. On…
I don’t know if VTEC Europe is the same company as our VTEC—and finding out would edge me perilously close to real journalistic effort—but if they are swinging on the same side they’re a company I really like (it’s their incredibly fun-featured kids toys that does it for me, really). That being said, this V-MMV…
So I just wanted to thank everybody who sent in tips about gadgets and software for small business owners. There were some really great ideas in there and I hope to compile a few of the best into an article at some point in the near future. I should let you know, though, that I…
Digital Cube’s i-Station PMP-1000, talked about last month, seems to have been launched “worldwide,” although I couldn’t find any retailers selling it online yet, and I haven’t heard of any major US distributors. Looks like it does pretty much everything you could ask for, though, with 20GB+ of storage. Rumor has it these’ll be around…
Remember the Rolleiflex MiniDigi we talked about a while ago? We were told it’d debut in the US in July, but that didn’t happen. Months passed with no word, and now we’re hearing it’ll be shipping before the end of November, just in time for the holidays. Price is still expected to be around $350,…
Just noticed a little while ago that Verizon is now offering custom musical ringbacks in test markets in California. In case you haven’t heard, ringbacks are what callers hear when they call you. Like a ringtone, but for the caller. I’ve been waiting for this for a while, thinking it’d be cool to have callers…
You know, I really hated WeatherBug for a long time. I thought, “ooh, weather in my systray, neat!” for all of ten minutes, then I realized that it was making popups. And showing me banner ads I didn’t want to see. And it had changed my browser config without asking. And there was no way…
Gordon Meyer’s new book Smart Home Hacks was recently released and we’ve worked out a great deal with O’Reilly to run a chapter excerpt to let you see what you think. (O’Reilly has a few sample hacks from the book online, as well). I chatted Gordon on IM to talk about the book, home automation,…
I meant to mention this earlier this week and forgot, but a post on Music Thing just reminded me of it. If you get off on Japanese product design as much as I do, you owe yourself a spin through the “Product Design Database,” a showcase of different consumer products from the ’70s, ’80s and…
Yo, want a Treo 650 tomorrow morning? Users on Treocentral’s forums are reporting they’ve been able to order PalmOne’s new smartphone from Sprint today with overnight delivery. It’s taking almost everything I have not to put in an order myself, but since I’ll only get a day of use out of it before I skip…
Novatel Wireless is releasing a new set of products called “Ovation” that act as Voice-over-IP systems for home and small offices—but don’t use broadband connections. Instead, they route traffic onto European 3G networks, which may not be fast compared to cable, DSL, or fiber, but offers enough throughput to run voice traffic over the network,…