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Remember when Swatch was cool? They share sort of the same weird out-of-time space that companies like Oakley do—possibly their explosive introductory success knocked them right out of the style/time continuum, where they persist in producing products that are ridiculously out of touch with consensus fashion reality. Like this MSNDirect SPOT ‘Paparazzi’ watch, which offers…
SorobanGeeks has pictures and videos up from the show floor of the Tokyo WPC Expo, with a lot the same stuff we’ve already covered (like the NEC fuel cell laptop) but definitely a lot of new things, too, like this Kyocera Contax point-and-shoot which I think is 6.5 megapixels with a 2.8x optical zoom and…
Has anybody else been pining for a Linux smartphone? How about a Linux smartphone with tri-band GPRS, still+video camera, Bluetooth, and MP3 playback? Motorola has your digits with the A768i, reviewed in-depth over at MobileBurn. The A768i is clearly a direct descendent of Moto’s first Linux phone (the strikingly similar A760, available in the Far…
Some of the designs for next year’s DARPA Grand Challenge are starting to pop up, as teams show off their entries into the contest to build completely autonomous vehicles. This go-kart sized unit is built by two kids called “The Prodigies,” and is computationally powered by a Via EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard (Via happens to be…
Despite XM’s removal of its USB tuner from the market, the time-shifting radio fans aren’t giving up easily, and neither are the companies that make the hardware and software that make it possible. We reported last week about a cable from Hybrid Mobile Solutions that let you connect an XM tuner to a PC, although…
Jens of Sweden has announced a new flash memory player, the MP-400, a pendant-style unit with a 20 hour battery life and a blue and orange OLED screen. Available in snow white and four other limited-edition colors, the tiny players won’t come cheap—about $500 for the 1GB model. The MP-400 has all the features that…
Nextel fan Chris Lohroff tells me that the much-awaited Motorola i860 cameraphone is now openly available on Nextel’s website. Go get ’em, tigers! If you’re already already using Nextel, you probably know why the i860 is hot, but for the uninitiated, it’s the first cameraphone Nextel has ever offered. Strange but true! i860 Product Page…
I’d really like to see one of these Claro ‘holographic’ televisions in person. The idea is great—suspending a rear-projection screen a sheet of glass, giving the illusion that it’s suspended in air—but it has some obvious downsides (besides the inevitable drunken crash into your $27,000 television). The default installation places the projector on the floor…
An Australian company is hawking a new “disposable video camera” called the ‘Roamio,’ capable of taking up to 64 1.3-megapixel still images and recording 10 minutes of VHS-quality video (I could never quite determine if that included sound—I suspect not). The idea is much like the idea behind disposable still cameras—drop $50 (AU) on a…
I was plenty impressed with the recently-announced Roland V-Accordion synthesizer as any right-thinking nerd should be, but I was perhaps most impressed by the originality of its design. How wrong I was! Russian bayan players (the Soviet Bloc-rockin’ accordion equivalent) were kicking out jaunty tunes on battery-powered squeeze boxes as far back as the 1950s.…
Taking the “G” out of “GPS” (Global Positioning System) is a new thinga-majig developed by KDDI and NEC, dubbed the “InfoSign.” Essentially acting as a temporary replacement for GPS satellites when they aren’t reachable (like when underground, indoors, or in Joel’s apartment), the InfoSigns are placed every 20 meters or so throughout a building. Since…
It may not quite beat the 13.7mm thickness of Motorola’s V3 RaZr, but Sanyo’s new A5507SA is probably thin enough for most people. Destined to only ever work on Japan’s au network, though, we’re doomed to laugh at its comical pre-teen oriented features such as the “allowance diary” and “junior dictionary.” Overly concerned parents can…
It’s cool that the Ceiva digital picture frames can now receive pictures directly from your camera phone—putting one of these on someone’s desk and then entertaining them all day with strange pictures sounds highly fun—but you still have to pay a monthly subscription fee to use the frames, since instead of hooking directly up to…
It certainly looks like someone forgot to remove their docking station, but that would instead be NEC’s latest demonstration of fuel cell technology used to power a laptop. While the estimated 10 hour battery life coming out of the 250cc cartridge doesn’t seem like a whole bucketload considering how much you’ve probably heard about how…
MobileTracker grabbed a larger picture of the new 5-megapixel SCH-250 from Samsung, along with a bit more information about it, including a price: $800. It also appears that the new cameraphone will have 90MB of built-in RAM and an MP3 player—nothing real notable, but details are so slim at the moment everything seems more important.…
GigaOm reports on MegaSim, the UltraAwesome SuperRad SIM card that has up to 256 MegaBytes of HyperRAM on board. The gist is, any phone in the future will be able to squeeze a little extra flash memory on board inside the SIM slot itself, plus allow the user to carry along a lot more data…
If you’re tired of accidentally searing your retinas trying to align the laser in that DIY CD or DVD player, you just might be interested in this gramophone kit from GadgetStuff. It looks like this kit is of the ‘paper cone’ variety, in which vibrations from the needle resonate through (guess what) a paper cone…
Dell is having a massive one day sale on many of their laptops—we’re talking like $750 off $1,500 laptops here. TechBargains has a good breakdown of how it works out, but there’s some serious savings to be had if you’re in the market for an x86 laptop. I’m not a huge fan for Dell’s laptops,…
This is how stupid I am: it actually took me a few minutes to figure out if UK company ‘Sky’ was a cable service or a satellite service. Sky—I know, I totally eat paint. Anyway, now that I’ve determined exactly what kind of service Sky offers, I can more better explain that they’ve launched a…
Ach! We almost missed these Chinese mobile phone concepts, entries all to a contest sponsored Sony ericsson. There’s a lot of silly, unrealistic shlock, but sometimes those are half the fun. A lot of them look like existing phones, like this concept that looks like a cross between a Sony Ericsson P910 and a Motorola…