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Okay, so I’m sort of confused. Last we had heard, Sony was canceling the Vaio U50/U70 palmtop PC in Japan due to lack of sales, but as of today they’ve announced their intention to sell it on the US market. How very strange. The American version will be called the VGN-U750P and share the same…
The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox web browser has officially hit 1.0. The main webserver is getting thrashed at the moment as everybody and their brother links to the front page, but it looks like these download mirrors are handling things fine. I was able to grab both the Win32 and the OSX version with no problems…
New information is popping up on a successor to the Samsung i600. Called the SCH-i645 / i640, the new clamshell is a Windows Mobile for Smartphones 2003SE phone with an SDIO card slot and built-in camera (of unknown resolution). The i640 will be a corporate version without camera or text messaging abilities. It will be…
The Register is reporting a new trojan for Windows that infects PCs only to send out SMS messages via free web-based text message services in Russia. Fortunately (for us), it’s confined to only Russia for now, but it’s notable—not because it’s a trojan, exactly, but because it means someone thinks there is money in SMS…
I don’t think it’ll be starting any new trends, but the A4Tech Battery-Free Wireless Optical Mouse has a good gimmick: instead of using Bluetooth or the like to communicate with a base station, the mouse uses RFID to transmit its position information. Unfortunately, the near-field nature of RFID requires it to be used on a…
Samsung has released another new hard disk-based audio player, the YH-920GS. Nothing much to report beyond its existence, although it does have the ability to display its interface in up to 10 different languages. The 20GB player will probably be Japan-only for the moment, although it’s hard to tell which player models Samsung will bring…
If you took one of those tiny Japanese notebook computers and crammed them into a single enclosure, you’d get something quite a bit like this e-Lets Be Silent Mt6600, a desktop PC just a hair over 8 inches square. Powered by a Transmeta Efficeon processor (at speeds up to 1.3GHz, I think) it has space…
Slappa has a new iPod case that uses the same hard pseudo-suede finish as their DVD cases, as well as a velvet inner lining. It actually seems maybe just a little bit over-engineered, but I guess things like a mesh grip on the inside would prevent your iPod from slinging out when opening the case—it…
It’s too bad the URL in this spam doesn’t seem to work. I’d actually buy something from these guys. First of all, let’s check our 3 top-selling items: 1. Russian surface-to-air missle SA-14 “Gremlin” (upgraded analog of SS-16 “Strela”) from our supplies in Kazakhstan. Due to high demand, it takes about 4 weeks to backorder…
I spied this over at Keitai Watch and thought you guys might get a kick out of it. It may still be in the “looking like a cheesy concept model that will never become an actual product” stages, but I felt as though it was sufficiently nifty to share. Obviously intended to be used as…
Combine some European law reform with Koito Manufacturing’s latest experiment, and you end up with LED headlights by 2007. They look rad, but there’s still a couple shortcomings—namely a lack of brightness and heat. According to a Koito spokesperson, the brightness could easily be increased by adding more lights, but doing so would increase the…
I was too lazy this past Friday to write about it, but Buffalo has introduced a new Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for you storage-obsessive folk. The “TeraStation,” features four 250GB hard drives giving a total 1TB (and yes I know 1TB = 1024GB but too bad) of storage. What I like most of all…
I figure nineteen inches is enough for any man, but I guess Sharp disagrees, as evidenced by their new 23-inch LCD HDTV monitor. For some reason they’re calling it an “IT-TV,” but I can’t quite figure out what that’s supposed to mean. Spec-wise it’s not bad, hitting two of the important elements: it’s bright with…
It may look retro-styled now, but the Anzani Lawnrider was seriously cutting edge (don’t hit me, I stole it) in the 1960s. Manufactured by the British Anzani Engineering Company, it is the descendent of an earlier and far less stylish model from the 1950s known as the Anzani Easimow (clever, guys). Anzani got out of…
M-Audio has announced the FireWire Solo, a simple bus-powered way for home recording folks to get tracks into their computers with a minimum of fuss (and EM noise). The Solo has two inputs, one with a 1/4-inch guitar input and the other a standard XLR microphone interface with phantom power. All in all, it looks…
The promotional material claims these carpet skates are like, “socks on a hardwood floor,” but having lived with hardwood floors for some years now, I can’t imagine Fun Slides are quite as splinterific. They do look kinda fun, though, and there’s a carpet puck accessory available for your indoor carpet hockey needs. Overturned laundry basket…
Most of the woven-into-clothing electronics concepts thus far have consisted of copper or other conductive wire threaded into more traditional textiles, such as cotton. Eleksen, a British company, takes a different approach, making the textiles themselves (in this case, nylon) conductive and pressure as well as humidity-sensitive. One of the more interesting uses mentioned is…
I like real-world user reviews, so even though I’m not really into Tablet PCs as a form factor (live by the keyboard; die by the keyboard, I say), it’s good to know that Marc Eisenstadt’s experiences with an HP TC1100 tablet laptop are favorable—it makes it easier to understand what it is tablet fans like…
Nvidia’s new mobile graphics chipset is about ready to make its splash and it looks like a doozy: 12 pixel pipelines and five vertex pipelines in the new GeForce GO 6800 put it on par with middle- to high-end desktop cards. Strangely, the first GO 6800 chips won’t use Nvidia’s modular MXM standard, but Trusted…
Creative is listing a “Limited Edition” version of its Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro—so limited, in fact, that nobody knows anything about it. It doesn’t look terribly different from the Audigy 2 (I don’t know where the Audigy 3 went), although it does now have native ASIO support and what looks to be a more…