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Starting in July, Air France customers flying on the Airbus A318 will be able to send text messages and emails from their cellphones. Fantastic. Not so fantastic: Three months later, they’ll be able to make voice calls (shudder).
During the trial run, each customer will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about the service at the end of the flight—hopefully most people will be smart enough to write that the service drove them to contemplate gruesome suicide, otherwise Air France will be deploying the tech, which uses a “leaky cable” for signal conversion, on all of its flights.
We can only hope that if worse comes to worst, the probable $2.50-a-call fee will cause fliers with “leaky” mouths to do their best to keep them plugged. – Matt Buchanan
Air France to trial in-flight mobile use from July [Silicon via Crave]
This seems like a relationship pleaser to me. My girlfriend loves baths more than anything, but I like racing: cars, go karts, Hell even on foot. And we’re always looking for something new to do together.
Two words: Bathtub Racer. We’re talking fully motorized bathtub fun (No, not that kind of bathtub fun). For $17,000, you can get yourself 2 racers and an 65′x29′ inflatable track. And we’re not talking about a stupid little circuit track, this thing is a full on windy course.
Wait, did I just say $17,000? For a motorized Bathtubs and a track? Maybe I’ll just wait for one to show up on Craigslist. – Ben Longo
Product Page [Bathtub Racer via Random Good Stuff]
All those Palm buyout rumors may have come to an end, but new rumblings on the Web predict that Palm is about to shock the world with a UMPC of their own. The wireless handheld will follow in the footsteps of the OQOs, Sonys, and Flipstarts of the world. A UMPC-like device from Palm doesn’t sound too far-fetched, but considering how little UMPCs have impressed us, that’s not the kind of product debut we would have liked.
The Odds? 1 in 10. Which is just about the same as 0 in 10. But it would explain what they’ve been doing with their time over at Palm, considering the blank stares and empty booths over at both 3GSM and CTIA phone conferences this year.– Louis Ramirez
A group of British scientists are teaming up to create the first ever Star Trek-style force field. The shield would be used to protect astronauts from cancer-causing radiation coming from the sun in the form of solar wind. Astronauts will be able to turn the shield on or off, and they’ll even be able to use it on themselves when venturing outside their spaceship. All they need now is to get this guy to design their ship. – Louis Ramirez
This simple yet useful alarm clock from Japan can grab up to five songs from any Japanese cellphone wirelessly via IR. It doesn’t have a monster hard drive or a bevy of different card slots or a USB port, but just one simple feature that works as advertised. It’s pretty cool, if you ask me, and I’d love to see such simple, basic gadgets appear to compete with the overly complicated and expensive stuff that’s already out there. –Adam Frucci
Product Page [via Tokyo Mango]
It may look like a piece of jewelry your grandmother would wear, but this high-tech locket is anything but outdated. Designed by Lindsey Picket, the 1881 features a built-in camera lens that sits on the exterior of the locket. Open the locket up and the twin LCDs will display your favorite snapshots (that are stored on the locket’s built-in memory). It’s a nice way of giving an old-fashioned gadget a digital twist. – Louis Ramirez
Kodak 1881, PocketSized Digital Camera [Yanko Design via Gearfuse]
Remember the deal you made with the smart kid in school where he would let you cheat off his test and you would promise not to steal his lunch money? Samsung and Microsoft‘s just gone and done the same thing, except in their case they both fight for the nerd spot and the bully position goes empty. The two companies agreed to a deal that lets each other have access to patents for “computers, televisions, digital video recorders and digital media players.”
With Microsoft venturing into Zune and Zunephone territory, it’s interesting to see what this deal will do to help speed up development of the two products this year. Since Zune 1.0 was basically cribbed off Toshiba, and since Microsoft really wants to step things up with the 2nd generation, having Samsung’s experience in the phone and digital music player market will really help out their chances. – Jason Chen
Admit it, that whole cupping your hand over your mouth trick works about as well as an ice cream parlor in the middle of hell. The Breath Alert is here to help. This gadget is actually pretty scientific. It will detect the levels of volatile sulfide compounds and hydrocarbon gas that cause stank breath and will rate your breath on four levels. –Travis Hudson
Is your breath kicking? [Coolest-Gadgets]
Different from the Solid Alliance USB food platter are these miniature morsels that also serve as data storage. Everything from cheeseburgers to pizza are available and they come in capacities ranging from 256MB to 2GB. These gems are the work of a company named Vavolo. –Travis Hudson
Food Shaped Flash DRives that Don’t Make Me Ill [EverythingUSB]
Microsoft‘s just thrown down a brand new Xbox 360 backward compatibility update that adds or updates about 40 titles (give or take) to the list of Xbox games it can play. If you remember back to GDC, you’ll know that Microsft’s planning on ramping down the BC efforts after ’07. So unless they pull out a gigantic update near the end of this year, you’re probably going to have to keep that original Xbox around if you’ve got some titles you’re still keen on playing.
That said, it’s nice that they finally got some of the old Call of Duty games up in there. You can never get enough Nazi killing. – Jason Chen
April ’07 Back Compat Update [Major Nelson]
