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Who said you can’t reinvent the wheel? The omni directional wheels featured in the video below would make parallel parking a breeze.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXdvLGTW2nQ

If you have an office that’s as cluttered with gadgets as mine, you tend to appreciate convergence products. You have to be picky about which functions you want to have packed into a single device. For instance, a webcam built into your monitor might be cool, however, a mouse that’s also a label printer is not. (Yes, such a thing does exist). Here’s one that I’m pretty undecided on. It’s a Skype phone that’s built into your keyboard.

I’ve never actually seen the point in having a Skype phone, as I’ve found using the same headset for making calls and chatting with guildmates online to be easiest. Of course, not everyone has a headset lying around, and most people are used to talking on a normal phone, which is where this comes in. It really seems like a good idea, as you’re probably not going to be moving your phone or your keyboard far from your computer. However, to keep the keyboard a decent size, they had to make the phone receiver extremely tiny. This is where they’ll likely lose people. I know that I wouldn’t want to hold onto a phone that small for the duration of a lengthy call.

Look for Buffalo to launch this in Japan this October for around $65. There’s currently no word on a US release.

Source: CrunchGear

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Verizon Wireless is now the proud carrier of the new purple Samsung Gleam! This new phone is more than just a new color scheme. It has a living wallpaper capability, which allows Verizon Wireless users to view the phone’s status with either an urban or a country view that changes with the time of day. It also features popular multimedia and messaging features including, V Cast Music and Video, Instant Messaging using AIM, MSN and Yahoo and text, picture and video messaging. These are the same features offered on the popular, original bronze Samsung Gleam, which may have proved to be too neutral for the more colorful among us.

The Purple Gleam also has limited Bluetooth technology for certain profiles as well as headset, hands-free, serial port stereo support for music and certain dial-up networking profiles. Some of the Purple Gleam’s other specs include a bilingual interface (English and Spanish) and a personal organizer with calendar, calculator, alarm clock and stopwatch.

The purple Samsung Gleam just launched a few days ago and it sells for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service agreement.

Via [Mobile Mag] Via [SlashPhone]

I’m still hesitant to shell out $399 for an iPhone, but Case-Mate’s Diamond Case makes me appreciate my frugality even more. Because, how could I rationalize spending $399 on my iPhone and then not protect it with a $20,000 case?

It’s handcrafted with 42 diamonds (3.5 carats) set in 18K gold; the diamonds are VVS1 clarity and H color. To protect the diamonds and gold is the Diamond Case, crafted of Carbon Fiber leather “previously available only in high end after-market cars (Techart Porsche) and very high end cell phones (Vertu).” As the site explains, quantities are “extremely limited.”

My favorite part? - the link on the site for “Customer Testimonials.” Um, yeah, there are none to date. But, if you submit yours, you’ll be entered into a contest to win a $25 gift certificate, which basically means that you can buy yourself a small meal after you drop the initial $20k.

I wonder . . . shipping included?

Price: $20,000 at casemate.com.

Posted Jan 27th 2008 11:33AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Good news, everyone! According to reports, a US spy satellite which has lost power and propulsion is weeks or even months away from striking Earth. Officials say that the space junk — which can now no longer be controlled and could contain hazardous materials — is due to come smashing into some location on our planet’s surface, but they can’t really say where. “Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the Nation Security Council. Government agencies are still considering options such as shooting down the stray equipment, though they say they’d be just as happy to let the potentially radioactive / alien-filled hunk of metal crash into a small village in a developing country.

Posted Jan 27th 2008 9:48AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Laptops
You’d think there’d be a bit more excitement associated with the inclusion of Intel’s latest and greatest, but HP decided to take the quiet route with integrating Penryn into its Pavilion laptop lineup. The Pavilion dv2700t, dv6700t and dv9700t are all getting an Intel T9300 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo option, with a 6MB l2 cache and a purported 10% speed boost over last-gen Intel processors. Unfortunately, that mild speed boost comes at a $100 premium over the T7500, so you money might be better spent on RAM or a better graphics card — or you could just choose it all, the Engadget-approved method of speccing a laptop.

[Via NotebookReview]

It is soon to come to the Chinese New Year, which is the Year of Mouse. Hence, iRiver China introduces a limited edition of gold plated iRiver Mplayer, and only available at China. Each of these luxury mice comes with a lucky number, probably an alternative way to celebrate the Year of Mouse
[ via iRiverFans ]

iRiver, Mplayer, MP3 Players

Mozilla is working on a mobile version of Firefox. Unfortunately, it probably won’t see the light of day until end of this year. Well it’s about time. I was wondering why this was taking so long.

In case you don’t already run Firefox on your computer, get with it already. Just click the image link above and pull it down. You won’t regret it. The thing that really makes FF so much more than just a web browser and more like a platform are the slew of extensions available for it. I’ve got easily over a dozen extensions that improve my browsing experience, makes me more efficient and adds tools that I can’t live without now. After all, I blogged this entry directly in FF using an extension called ScribeFire, which rocks BTW.

The Samsung FlipShot was originally added to Verizon back in November, but was just available in a basic black. Now in that “what perfect timing for Valentines Day” thought, they have added the FlipShot in red.

The new red FlipShot will offer the same specs and include the ability to flip up and rotate the 240 x 320 pixel display, which will make it nicer to use the included 3-megapixel camera. Also featured is the support for V CAST Music and Video, VZ Navigator and Get It Now. The newly colored red FlipShot will be available for $149.99 after a $50 rebate and a 2-year agreement.

Read [Verizon]

Posted Jan 27th 2008 6:14AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Portable Audio
var In perhaps the biggest threat to Apple’s global dominance of digital music, Amazon just announced the international rollout of Amazon MP3. Right, the on-line storefront offering DRM-free music from all four major labels. That’s 3.3 million songs (priced at $0.99 or less) from over 270k artists encoded in 256kbps MP3 files for playback on any PC, any Mac, and pretty much any portable device you might own. Sure, it’s beta but so is that gMail account you’ve been using for the past 4 years. Unfortunately, the best that Amazon can commit to is “this year” which leaves plenty of time for the house of Apple to get their DRM shiznit together.