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Liam the Intern writes: According to the results of a study released by Nomura Research Institute in Japan on the 24th, there are 2,850,000 people considered “otaku” in Japan, with a combined market power of around $2.6 billion. “Hey, bitchin,” will probably be the response of many anime fans here in the USA who call…
Japan’s Matsushita Corporation announced today that they will be releasing the “SJ-MJ59” MiniDisc player under the Panasonic brand come October 1st. Since you can’t just go and release a normal product these days (and expect to make a profit), this time’s cheesy “MD players are going out of style in our own country, we need…
TIME reviews CVS’s new “disposable” digital cameras, the $20 system where you basically rent a camera, take up to 25 pictures (deleting out the bad ones), and return it to CVS, who provides you with prints plus a CD for permanent storage. They were pretty pleased with the overall quality, and I can’t find any…
Alcoa has teamed up with Pittsburgh Brewing Company to produce and package Iron City beer in a new aluminum bottle. They’re pushing it as “unbreakable,” which is certainly true compared to glass, and harping on its ability to keep a beer cooled for up to an hour longer than traditional bottles – all for only…
If the d_skin Protective Disc Skins work as advertised, they look like an indispensable product. The idea is simple: the d_skins are clear, thin discs that clip onto the outside of CDs and DVDs with a “Liplock Seal,” guarding them against oil smudges, stains, and scratches. The cool part, though, is that you don’t have…
HP Korea has officially announced the rw6100, a no-holds-barred – wait, that’s stupid – a really nice slider phone with almost every cutting edge feature you could possibly want, including a 1.1-megapixel camera, high-speed EV-DO cellular networking, Wi-Fi, and a 520MHz processor. But if as you are reading the specs, seeing almost everything you could…
So Sony revealed a bunch of nerdy details about its upcoming handheld PSP gaming system yesterday, and while there’s plenty of stuff to chew on in there if you want to try to figure out exactly how powerful the PSP will be (rough estimate: in the Playstation 2 neighborhood), the most important bit for most…
We’re getting ripped off, people. You can get Om Malik all over the place, magazines and the like, but when you head over to GigaOm it’s only reasonable to expect maximum Om. I mean, it’s in the goddamn name. So who’s this Matt Maier and why is he writing perfectly capable reviews on GigaOm, like…
I keep a close eye on personal cooling technologies, because I have become over the last few years, sort of as a hobby, a real fatass. And while New York has had a mild summer all around, I still seem to be the only one who is standing in the humid subway stations, soaking in…
There’s an old saying in the journalism business: “Poop stories come in twos.” So when I saw on BoingBoing that someone had compiled a story on the wide range of toilet paper roll holders, I immediately checked my email, where I was pleased to find this little nugget from Jeff Palylyk. Radio Shack Canada is…
Casio has announced five new cameras today, ranging from the slim Casio Exilim Card EX-S100 with a 3.2-megapixel sensor, up to the Casio Exilim Pro EX-P700 [pictured], a 7.2-megapixel camera with 4x optical zoom and something called “Business Shot,” which is sort of post-processing “image straightener.” Digital Photography Blog has a good round up of…
Ah, sweet slumber. This morning I was your naughty plaything. I dedicate this post to you, sugar. So you know that Nintendo DS “mystery port?” The one where I went out on a limb and seat it was for an Eyetoy-like camera? I was almost completely correct; it’s for a microphone headset. See, except for…
Howard Forums’ infamous Mark Morrow is at it again, this time dumping an insiders look at the Motorola MPx 220, the quad-band clamshell packing a dual-core processor running Windows Smartphone 2003 SE Operating System. And in typical form, it’s phone pr0n at its finest, with lots of phone-on-phone action, set pieces, and even a little…
So am I the only one who thinks Motorola’s new Pininfarina-designed i833 is really freaking ugly? I mean, you can put carbon fiber and wood and whatever you want on the inside, but it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s all lumpy and weird. Sure, they say it “evokes the stylings of the ’50s…
When Nintendo unveiled the final design of its upcoming handheld, the DS, some people noticed there was a mystery port beside the headphone out jack (which Nintendo was nice enough to actually include this go-round). Now IGN passes on an interview with a Nintendo rep that doesn’t really reveal much, but does acknowledge that the…
So the American Cancer Society is developing a new PDA-based application that is targeted at primary care physicians and other health care industry workers called “C-Tools 2.0.” I don’t know what it does, exactly – fights cancer, I guess – but since I am destined to die a horrible, choking, sputtering death thanks to my…
Pocket-Lint reviews the Oregon Scientific MP100 MP3 player, which is “smaller than the average box of matches.” It’s capacity is small, too, at just 128MB, but you knew there wasn’t going to be a hard drive in there, so don’t get all huffy. The MP100 does have upgradeable firmware, which is always nice if a…
Altec Lansing has a new set of speakers for the iPod, the inMotion iM3 portable audio system. Not much to say, really – stereo speakers, with a built-in dock, extra input jack, and the ability to be powered by four AA batteries when you’re away from your AC power. The best part, though, is that…
Blowed up bridge kills camera, SanDisk CompactFlash card survives. Film at… well, never, I guess is their point. Read – SanDisk CF Card Survives Blast That Destroys Camera [MobileMag]
I always appreciate it when an artist is asked about his work and admits that, basically, it’s a total failure. Fortunately, Douglas Irving wasn’t trying to replace traditional clocks when he designed the Sine Clock, a system that pulses three different sine waves to indicate minutes, hours, and a full day, with the shortest-length wave…