Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
4Smartphone is offering a pretty cool service with a pretty silly name: turn-key, hosted Microsoft Exchange 2003 service with enterprise mobile mail options. They’re targeting the service at small businesses that want something like BlackBerry email services but don’t have the IT infrastructure to keep the server-side things in swing. For $150 a year per…
Of all the PC sites on the internets to threaten to sue, HardOCP is probably the brass-balled choice of not-champions. That’s made no more apparent than the 180 that Futuremark—makers of the once-standard PC hardware benchmarking suite 3DMark—pulled after first confronting Kyle Bennet for saying their flagship product sucked, then quickly retracting any threats of…
Inkpens and screwdrivers. Even the most advanced mechanical varieties of each are still relatively low-tech, but when you combine them together, well, that’s when you have serious geniusosity. Write on virtually any surface known to man, at any angle, at up to 30° below zero, then turn around and secure that PCI card. Ok, so…
Product Highlights • Build Your Own 6 TV Tuner “Medusa PVR” [eHomeUpgrade] Business • Sony and Matsushita Reportedly to Release Blu-ray Camcorders in 2005 [CamcorderInfo] • People not lured by 17-inch notebooks [TheInquirer] • Where Some See Just a Shock Jock, Sirius Sees a Top Pitchman [NYTimes] • No Moto TVs? [GigaOm] Reviews • Network,…
From the National University of Singapore comes a new idea for wearable Bluetooth devices—this time in the form of a T-shirt. Presumably targeted largely at seniors, this tech will detect how fast you are moving and the angle of your body to determine whether you’re falling and, if you are, tell your PC or phone…
If you’ve ever wanted to experience the thrill of offroad inline skating—and I know I haven’t—then TrailSkate might be just what you’re looking for. It’s a skate! It’s a ski! It’s like miniature mountain bikes for your feet! Actually, it looks to me like a fine way to propel yourself Pro Bono into one of…
The Delkin BurnAway is an oddly-named but potentially useful slim-line CD burner with a built-in multi-format memory card reader that can burn CD directly from flash memory, no computer required. Not only that, you can plug it into a PC or laptop via USB 2.0 to use it as an out-board burner and memory card…
T-Mobile has released the Sony Ericsson GC79, a PCMCIA PC Card for laptops that lets customers connect to both Wi-Fi networks and T-Mobile’s GPRS cellular data network. If you already have a phone that connect to your PC via Bluetooth and built-in Wi-Fi, well… it probably won’t interest you that much. But if you’re missing…
Nothing crazy here, just another MP3 player, this one from South Korean company Muzio. The JM-600 is pretty much your standard media player (with a color screen, amazing) supporting the standard list of formats as well as OGG Vorbis. There’s nothing on their web site about it yet, so no ETA or MSRP, QED. Muzio…
ExtremeTech got a hold of Samsung’s LT-P468W, their largest LCD television at 46 inches. It’s a doozy—I got to play around one at the Home Theater Show a few months back and was absolutely blown away—but ExtremeTech, in their much more detailed testing that my five minutes of gawking have come back with the opinion…
Holy smokes! Unless God himself hands down the Science Tuba from heaven, this new Roland FR-7 Digital Accordion is going to win best product of the day, for sure. Apparently they are using something called “Physical Behavior Modeling” to simulate the bellows action of a real accordion. You can also get all the standard keyboard…
PhoneMag has been all over the new Motorola MPx220. When they heard that a Best Buy in San Marcos, California had the units on sale, they actually hopped a plane to go buy a couple—that’s dedication, for sure. It looks like Best Buy and Motorola (and Cingular) have soft-launched the MPx220 into some regions but…
It’s the World’s Smallest MP3 Player! With a built-in Li-On Battery, that is! Not much is known about this Hsuan Mao MP3-6610, but then again, how much do we really need to know about a pendant flash player? It’s light, it has a rechargeable battery, and will likely not have much memory built-in. More details…
The Times has a story talking about the phone companies’ new-found interest in selling service to the elderly—and the elderly’s new-found interest in getting the sort of service they want. The AARP has apparently taken notice of the ghastly service provided by current cell-phone companies and begun to lobby aggressively for simpler plans and less-confusing…
DesignTechnica reviews the Xbox-branded Pioneer SE-XB1 headphones, a set of wireless line-of-sight cans that use the newish Dolby Headphone surround-sound standard—and to great effect, according to their raves. Sound came not only appears to come from the front and back with the XB1s, but also from above and below, making playing games and watching movies…
The Baby-Comp and Lady-Comp are computers that help women determine when they are the most fertile—to assist in conceiving in the case of the Baby-Comp, and to avoid an accidental oven bun in the case of the Lady-Comp. By placing a sensor under the tongue and inputting personal information, the devices can tell you when…
There is a teaser image up on a Japanese gaming site showing a new Sharp Zaurus PDA that will be shown at the WPC 2004 conference. I think it’s safe to presume Wi-Fi will be built-in, although I don’t know about Bluetooth. Either way, it’s a new clamshell Zaurus, so we’ll be certain to let…
A couple people have written in to let us know that iSkin is now shipping two of their rubber prophylactics for iRiver H-100 series players. Two sizes are available in five colors, including “Ultra-Glo glow-in-the-dark,” for those awkward times you need a little help stretching one on in the back seat of a car. Good…
Digital Camera Info has a couple of nice round-ups of some of the new cameras revealed at this year’s Photokina expo. We’ve talked about most of them here already, but if you’d like to get into a little more detail on each one, it’s pretty interesting. There were a wealth of digital SLRs unveiled at…
Don’t know much about it, but someone has sent me information about two new portable players from Dell, the first a 5GB player, the other a new 20GB version that’s said to be thinner. It’s unknown if these will be branded as DJs, but I’d say its safe to say they will be. We’ll certainly…