Gadget Access

by Darren Murph, posted May 10th 2008 at 5:23AM
It’s a tough call — are you willing to get your eyeballs within the driver’s seat of your remote-controlled vehicle, even if it means looking freakishly like Geordi La Forge? If you’ve thrown aside your pride and confidently answered “yes,” you should certainly have a gander at the Pilot View FPV 2400. Designed for use in radio-controlled aircraft and cars, the system places a wireless camera in the cockpit and then beams back live first-person footage to those horrifically unsightly goggles you see consuming the face of that poor gal above. In all seriousness, we’d bet the experience is fairly novel, if not a touch fantastic, but we could probably think of more enthralling ways to spend $549 if we were really pressed.

[Thanks, Claudio]

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Filed under: Wearables

So what does an auto loan lender do when borrowers forget to pay? Give them a really annoying box that beeps when payment is already due and prevents the car from starting. Sub-prime borrowers can no longer give an excuse that they forgot to pay because this box won’t fail to remind. 

Called the “On Time” this gadget is installed in the car and blinks when payment is near the due date and beeps on the date itself. When payment still isn’t made, the car won’t start, leaving you without a car to use until you have settled your bills. If payment has been made, the auto-loan lender will give the borrower a code to reset the box and stop being annoyed by all the beeping and the blinking. 

Lenders say that they missed payments have been down by 30%. I wonder if mortgage lenders should do the same for houses. Install a similar device, only no beeping and blinking…just a recorded voice that nags every morning and night. Now that would be really cool and yeah, so annoying. But at least, people will be motivated to pay.

Read [The Consumerist]

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by Joshua Topolsky, posted May 9th 2008 at 8:54PM
If you were starting to get worried that the new Gizmondo device would never see the light of day, fear not! According to an interview with Carl Freer, the company is hard at work on its next handheld, which he claims will feature a number of improvements on the previous, practically perfect iteration. First up, the new system will be built atop Windows CE 6 (which Freer claims has lots of “new goodies”), utilizes a separate graphics chip, will be an open platform with a readily available SDK, and can grab content form a web portal (Gizmondo.com, likely). Most interesting of all, however, is that Freer says the old Gizmondo units will be returning to store shelves. All of this magic is said to be happening by the end of the year — though since we’re nearly half-way through it, Carl and co. have a pretty small window. This is where the “exciting psychic worlds” come into play, right?

[Thanks, Trevor]

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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds