Gadget Access

Posted Mar 21st 2008 3:02PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Transportation
While we spent our high school days trying not to cut our thumbs off in shop class, these West Philly High School kids have been making a run on the $10 million Automotive X Prize. They’re building a plug-in diesel hybrid in an attempt to reach that magical 100 mpg mark “without sacrificing style, safety or affordability.” Pictured above is a previous project, a K1 Attack modded up hybrid and biofuel-style. Seems like they’ve got the chops, but they’re certainly up against a lot of competition.

Posted Mar 21st 2008 5:15PM by Ariel Waldman
Filed under: Features, Misc. GadgetsAriel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.

In honor of the loss of one of our greatest sci-fi heroes, Movie Gadget Friday is paying homage to the inimitable Arthur C. Clarke with a two-part series that explores the future of 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact. This week we’ll be diving into the luxurious exploration of deep space. Everyone knows HAL, but 2001 also takes an extraordinary amount of time to study the intricate details of each spacecraft — as such, this week we’ll focus on the Orion III and Space Station V.

Space Station V
Serving as a meeting point between Earth and the Moon, Space Station V is a space structure of massive proportions. From the inside looking out, the view might be slightly disorienting, as the station constantly rotates, its rings providing a grounding effect, allowing travelers to enjoy the extravagance of Earth’s gravity in space. Upon arriving at Space Station V, visitors are greeted with a standard reception area where they are asked to move through to documentation, which involves a wall-embedded voice print identification system for each visitor. The interior design of each room stays true to its circular exoskeleton, while the furnishings appear to hold closer ties to the 1960s than the early oughts — just the way we like it. More after the break.

PicturePhone
Located in Space Station 5 are multiple PicturePhone stations via Southwestern Bell, for those wanting to video chat with the family back home. (Hey, give ‘em a break, Skype doesn’t get invented until 2003.) All PicturePhone stations are private with chairs and tactile numeric dialing keys for convenience. The video quality definitely leaves something to be desired, but seems to maintain an transmission stream uninterrupted even by the antsy-button pressing of a little girl. By inserting your credit card vertically into the dock, a brief video call will cost you approximately $1.70 (pretty good considering calling from space is cheaper than most mobile roaming fees). Be warned, though, as the PicturePhone contains paragraphs full of illuminated fine print similar to pretty much every device on deck — including the Zero Gravity Toilet.

Orion III
A spacecraft with a strong plane-design influence, the Orion III takes the comforts of the friendly skies into space. Pilots are able to make the jump between jet-jockey to space cowboy thanks to the familiar, easy to use plane-like cockpit and controls. Passengers relax in style, traveling in rich leather seats which feature an embedded widescreen display for both entertainment and business needs. The controls appear to be directly beneath each display, so travelers need not worry about fighting for elbow room to reach those primitive armrest-embedded controls. Lined with futuristic velcro technology, the aisle floors are strong enough to hold down the weight of a person when the shuttle reaches zero gravity (also useful for unexpected turbulence). The suspiciously all-women space-flight attendants are also outfitted with white leather apparel and gripped shoes so as to easily serve passengers; we can’t help but wonder if anti-discrimination laws still hold up in space.

Next week in our two-part series, we’ll jump ahead to two years from now to check out the the gadgets found in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. For more on the spacecraft of 2001, check out 2001: A Scale Odyssey.

Ariel Waldman is a social media insights consultant based in San Francisco. Her blog can be found at http://arielwaldman.com.

If you think the ubiquitious spider head massager looks ridiculous, then you haven’t yet seen this face massager from Japanese company Akaishi. The device has four little arms, with a roller on the end of each arm. You move the rollers over your cheeks and chin to relax your tense facial muscles. The model pictured above seems to be using this and the other version made by the same company, which is used for the ridge of the nose and scalp.

Seems rather primitive compared to the electronic device marketed by Suzanne Somers, the FaceMaster, which stimulates your facial muscles with electricity to whip them into shape, though I suppose the rollers have a different purpose (relaxation as opposed to beauty enhancement).

The roller arms sell for 1,575 Yen (about $16).

Via The Nikkei Weekly (subscription).

Posted Mar 21st 2008 1:37PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Media PCs
OK, perhaps not so sneaky, there’s a nice big BitTorrent logo right up front, but Myka seems to be quite the end-to-end solution for getting those torrents up on the big screen. The box hooks up to the internet via LAN or WiFi, includes a 80GB, 160GB or a 500GB drive for storage and runs a torrent client on Linux. Outputs include HDMI, composite, S-Video and SPDIF, and codec support is substantial. You can add storage via USB, and pull video off your computer if you’re not in a downloading mood. Prices range from $299 to $459. Let’s keep it legal out there, kids!

[Thanks, ARZ]

In what seems to be the hot handset of the moment, the XPERIA 1 from Sony Ericsson has had some more details revealed courtesy of a recently released white paper, which came courtesy of the Sony Ericsson website.

The XPERIA X1 has not had any shortage of available information leaked up till now, but these are the official details. Its hard to even begin, the official white paper is a 40-page PDF document that is just full of goodies. Some of the highlights include:

• Information on the pre-loaded panels for the XPERIA interface, which will include a Sony Ericsson Panel, Media Experience Panel, Slideshow Panel, Microsoft Today Panel, 3D Fish Panel and some user customizable panels.
• Media Sharing using ActiveSync or Wi-Fi.
• Video recording options include MPEG-4: 30fps @ VGA, H.263: 30fps @ VGA except the U.S. model is only at 24fps and H.264: 15fps @ VGA but it is not supported on U.S model.
• Sadly Opera will not be pre-installed, opting for IE instead.
• Location services will include a pre-installed Google Maps.
• Email to include automatically configured POP3, Exchange Direct Push and wizards to set up Gmail, Yahoo, Live Hotmail.
• Pre-insalled Java ME.
• Sadly, as pointed out by inxperia, support for 1700MHz is missing.

While this is just a very brief summary of the details, if you are at all interested in this phone then check out the read link below for a link to the White Paper. It seems we have just about all the details that we can handle on the XPERIA X1, now we just need to get some in the wild and see some actual user reviews.

Read [Sony Ericsson Official White Paper] Via [inxperia]

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I have to wait for Firefox 3, as much as I want to upgrade now, what with the promise of better memory management and performance increases, because I depend too much on the over 2 dozen extensions that I have. But Mozilla got smart with the upcoming next release of Firefox - they’ve launched a competition (Extend Firefox 3) to recruit developers to create brand new extensions that take advantage of new features in FF 3, as well as to simply upgrade existing extensions so that they continue to work.

Prizes include travel to a Mozilla Developer Day, development gear (including a macbook air), and Firefox swag. Come on Firefox community - keep me loving my browser!

Posted Mar 21st 2008 9:10AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: LaptopsPushing pixels is great and all, but sometimes we’ve just got a hankering to see how far those dollars can stretch, and Averatec’s 2575 laptop mostly satisfies those urges. For $1100 you get Vista Home Premium running on an AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core chip, with 2GB of RAM, ATI RS690 integrated graphics, 250GB of HDD and a Super Multi DVD drive. The 12.1-inch screen runs at 1280 x 800, and sports a 1.3 megapixel webcam. There’s even ExpressCard 34 / 54 and a 4-in-1 memory card reader, and the whole shebang weighs in at 3.9 pounds and 1.5-inch thick. It’s available now.

Posted Mar 21st 2008 6:20AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Gaming, HDTV
On June 12th, 2008 there’ll be no place to hide from the release of the gunmetal MGS4 PS3. Well no place except every single country other than japan where the ¥51,800 (about $520) limited edition console will exclusively launch. That wad of Yen nabs the limited edition 40GB console with a Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots software bundle and like-colored DualShock 3 controller. How you like that, Ol’ Snake?

[Via Impress]

Posted Mar 21st 2008 3:08AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: cellphones, Transportation
Like it or not, a new era has dawned. More than a year later than anticipated, Emirates says that the world’s first authorized cellphone call was made by a passenger during an Airbus A340 flight between Dubai and Casablanca. Once the aircraft reached cruising altitude, passengers were permitted to make and receive both calls and text messages. Emirates plans to fit additional aircraft with the interference-blocking AeroMobile system later this year while adding blackberry and “other data services.” To keep the annoyance factor to a minimum, the flight crew requests passengers to silence their ringers and will shut off the in-flight service when appropriate. For example, during long-haul, red-eye flights or breaking celebrity scandals on TMZ… we hope.

[Thanks, Jonathan F and Andrew B.]

It may not be nice to look at or fun to use, but at least the horridly named EM-SOL1GIG portable media player by eMotion is great pals with the environment.

Not only do the built-in solar panels provide enough renewable juice for the 5.5″ x 3.0″ x 1.0″ device to play AVI videos at 25 frames per second and video game emulators on its 320 x 240 display, but they also power up the unit for playback and viewing of music (MP3, WAV, WMA, ADPCM), photos (JPG, BMP, GIF), and text files stored on the device’s 1GB of internal memory or on SD cards up to 2GB in size. The EM-SOL1GIG can even be used to charge the lithium batteries tucked inside external devices such as digital cameras and cell phones.

It makes more sense to me for the panels to be on the back of the player (rather than “inside” it) so that you can actually use it while it was charging, but for only $169, I guess I shouldn’t complain. I do, however, find it mighty suspicious that 1) the amount of time it takes for the EM-SOL1GIG to receive a full charge and 2) how long said charge actually lasts are both absent from the product page.

Via Crave.