Wednesday, April 18, 2007
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First Shots of the Sony Ericsson P700i Smartphone
11:44PM Seamus Byrne | Thanks to a mysterious user by the name of deuxani, we now have a better look at Sony Ericsson’s forthcoming P700i smartphone. The phone will come with a 2.6-inch QVGA screen and 3.2-megapixel camera with duplex LED light. It’ll have three flavors of wireless including 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. As you can tell by the image, it’ll also have a two-letter-per-key keyboard, which kinda ruins it for me ( I could never get used to that style of texting). Otherwise, it looks pretty solid. No word on availability yet. – Louis Ramirez Sony Ericsson P700i Smartphone News [Unwired View] Image via Esato More »
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Subtitle-Reading Glasses Make Cinema-Going for the Hard of Hearing Less, um, Hard
11:41PM Seamus Byrne | Here’s something that could be a godsend for the hard of hearing who feel they are not getting their money’s worth in the movie theater. A nifty little idea thought up by some clever people at Madrid’s Carlos III University for the Spanish Center for Subtitles and Closed Captions, this gadget fixes onto a person’s glasses to give them access to subtitles—even in a subtitle-free showing. The technology is simple: There is a computer in the cinema that emits the subtitles to within 50 meters, and also deals with their synchronization. A receptor in the glasses captures the signal and projects it onto the microscreen, which fits over the right-hand lens. It’s easy as pie to use—one button turns the gadget on and off and another one restarts it. – Ad Dugdale Gafas con subtitulos a la carta [El Mundo] More »
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Cat Cocoon: Another Crazy-Expensive Toy for Your Cat to Ignore
11:40PM Seamus Byrne | Either your cat will go nuts for this Cat Cocoon or will completely ignore it altogether. But its cardboard box-like corrugated material looks just right for sinking a claw or two into, and if I were a cat, I would certainly dig this thing with its variously sized peepholes. But I’m a dawg, and don’t feel like paying $249.99 for a glorified cardboard box. But that’s just me. Check out larger versions of these shots of the kitty playing in this beehive-shaped oddity, after the jump. More »
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Xilt Mod Gives Xbox 360 Wii-Like Tilt Controls
11:10PM Seamus Byrne | Xilt, a mod for an Xbox 360 controller, will be available in about a week, letting you tilt forward and back or left and right with your wired or wireless Xbox 360 controller using an accelerometer similar to the one in the Nintendo Wii. It’s a do-it-yourself kind of thing, and its creator says it takes just 10 to 15 minutes to install its seven wires. Its hardware and software are created by an Xbox 360 modder who calls himself GreenGiant, who hasn’t determined exactly what the price of this modification will be yet, but he says it might range somewhere between $35 and $45. Check out one more graphic, the Advanced View screen of the the Xilt Mod configuration manager, after the jump. More »
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Rumor: HTC Will Ship G-Phone by Year’s End
11:05PM Seamus Byrne | G-Phone rumors are making headlines this morning as DigiTimes reports that HTC has begun manufacturing the mysterious Google phone with shipments to begin late 2007. The phone will support 3G Edge, but not HSDPA nor will it have GPS. It will, however, have built-in GMail and Google search. DigiTimes isn’t the most reliable source (as we’ve seen in the past) so I wouldn’t buy this just yet. – Louis Ramirez HTC to Ship Google Handsets by Year-End [DigiTimes via Mad4Mobiles] More »
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Scientist Declares Beer as the Source of Civilization and Technology, Nobody Is Surprised
10:51PM Seamus Byrne | This is a post that Gizmodo’s resident hops philosopher Travis should have written, but as he’s sleeping one off it’s been left up to me. Charlie Bamforth, a British academic who holds the most fabulous of titles—the University of California’s Anheuser Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science—claims that without beer, we would be without computers, the iPod, Silicon Valley and the space program. It’s not exactly the newest of sentiments—British artist Hogarth depicted the good and bad side of 18th-Century London life with his cartoons Beer Street, all ruddy-cheeked prosperity, and Gin Lane, where booze-addled sots let their babies slip to their death, and all for another G&T— but it’s a belief that’s always good to hear. Find out Charlie’s theory after the jump. More »
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Intel Ultra Mobile Platform 2007 Officially Announced, MIDs and Menlow to Follow
8:17PM Seamus Byrne | Intel has officially presented the Intel Ultra Mobile Platform 2007 (formerly known as McCaslin) and announced the new Menlow architecture with Silverthorn processors for 2008. They have also given us a peek and poke over Redflag’s MIDinux Linux distribution, which apparently has been designed for those mobile devices that can’t decide if they want to be an iPhone or a PSP when they grow up. But despite the obvious ripoff interface inspiration, MIDinux is quite interesting because it marks a departure from the Microsoft-based UMPCs, of which the 7-inch HTC Shift is going to be one of the 2007 platform flagships. In fact, it opens a new category of consumer entertainment-oriented, more compact UMPC called MID (yet another acronym that means either “Mobile Internet Device” or “Those Cupertino Rascals May Be Onto Something Again—Let’s Try to do the Same Before It’s Too Late.” Not sure which, but one of the two). More details after the jump. (And kudos to APC for grabbing that first tasty pic up top. -ed.au) galleryPost('umpc-mid07', 8, 'umpc-mid07'); More »
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The Porsche Phone: Look Ma, No Taste
8:10PM Seamus Byrne | Before you get all over-excited and think that the German carmaker is about to team up with Vertu, Ã la Ferrari, think again, because the Porsche people are far too cool to do that, preferring to redeploy their technology to the kitchen toward sleek toasters and kettles. This, my friends, is a cellphone embedded in the model of a Porsche 911 (although, perhaps in an attempt to confuse the Porsche people on the copyright front they have called it the Cayenne (oh dear, Ad… the Cayenne is a type of Porsche – ed.au)). And admit it, that’s some wheeltrim on the phone. There’s a 2-megapixel camera buried in the windshield, the 262K color screen has an MP3 and MP4 player, it supports micro SD up to 1GB and runs on Dualband GSM. Apart from the kitsch value, there’s a great reason for having this if you have kids. You’ll never need to buy them a mobile, as they’ll always be happy to emulate you by sticking a Matchbox car next to their ear. There’s a picture of it business-side up after the jump. More »
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iPod to be Mandatory Tablewear for Oyster-Slurping Diners – and What if You’re Eating Bull’s Testicles?
8:00PM Seamus Byrne | The Fat Duck, one of the restaurants in the celebrated UK gastronomic town of Bray, Berkshire, is to take its customers’ enjoyment of food up a notch. Diners who choose a dish called Sound of the Sea, a mixture of seafood and edible seaweed served on a sand-like tapioca mixture, will listen to the sounds of crashing waves on an iPod in order to enhance the taste. The man behind all of this is Heston Blumenthal, the Doctor Bunsen of the British cooking world, and the man who gave us Snail Porridge, Nitro-Scrambled Egg and Bacon Ice Cream and Mango and Douglas Fir Purée. “I did a series of tests at Oxford University three years ago which revealed that sound can really enhance the sense of taste,” he told a magazine. “We ate an oyster while listening to the sea and it tasted stronger and saltier than when we ate it while listening to barnyard noises, for example.” – Ad Dugdale Fat Duck dons an iPod [Manchester Evening News] More »
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