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Sony is hopping on the SSD laptop bandwagon, releasing a new Vaio without a platter HDD. The Vaio TZ18GN is an 11.1-inch ultraportable with a 32GB SSD, Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM, and, unfortunately, Vista preloaded. It weighs in at a svelte 2.5 pounds, which is a bit heftier than Toshiba's "world's lightest" SSD lappie at 1.73 pounds, but it's still pretty damned light. The price for ditching the HDD? $4,300, which is $700 more than the 100GB HDD equivalent. Eesh.
AU: We've heard these announcements before, and some of the Giz crew got hands on at that Experience More event. Australian pricing is $4,299 for the SSD TZ18. The same as the US price?? Pinch me! Actually I think Adam was looking at the wrong price lists...
[Aving]
Philips has been cranking out LCD Ambilights for a few years, upgrading the line in relative moderation. But their new Aurea televisions are a more aggressive take on ambient television lighting. Fully LED back-lit, the Aureas will actually glow through the case border, creating a dynamic frame effect. 
Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin took the inaugural mile-high ride on VA's first flight from LA to SF, and yes, it's as geeklustworthy as we 
After finding himself bored by his Wal-mart R/C Tumbler, one modder decided to do the only logical thing: make the toy into a badass case mod. While the specs are a bit on the lame—AMD Sempron 2800+, 40 gig HD, 736 MB of DDR 400 ram, and a CD/DVD drive—we're still fairly certain this computer could beat the crap out of a more Vista-capable machine without hesitation. And Christian Bale could use a Bat Computer...
Tarkan Akdam hated the iPod until his wife demanded one. However, instead of getting a new one he went the cheap way: got a broken one on eBay, a couple of small parts, a 4GB Compact Flash card and ended up with a custom 5.6mm x 51mm x 61mm module to replace its broken hard drive. The result: iPod as new, with less space but more battery life.
Strapya might just have come up with this year's most useless thingy, the Piano Can. Housed in what looks like a babyfood tin is a polythene keyboard that may or may not have been made out of an old plastic bag.
DARPATech 2007, the Pentagon CES, always brings all kinds of weird robots ready to help kill people and defend the troops.
Siggraph 2007 (which stands for Special Interest Group/Graphics) is underway, and one of our favorite parts of the annual design and innovation shindig is the Unravel fashion show, where this year's strange brew includes an updated version of the solar bikini and intimate controllers for a couple to play video games by touching each other.
Holidaymakers in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort were joined yesterday by an enormous Lego man. The eight-foot-tall yellow figure was spotted bobbing around in the sea just off the beach and subsequently rescued. Although he would not give his name, the man, who is thought to be British, has been made to feel at home. He's been left in front of the drinks stand. [
We're big fans of weird buildings - from 
Melding tradition and technology, shadow lamps are a new way of keeping up with your friends in Japan. Less intrusive than a web cam, the system pipes a live video feed from your friends houses via the internet, and projects their silhouettes onto a lampshade - rather like the iPod commercials. The inspiration, according to creator Shunpei Yasuda, comes from the paper walls found in traditional Japanese houses.
Amazon recently dumped an undisclosed amount of cash into AmieStreet.com, a start-up digital music store that throws in an element of social networking: track prices rise with their popularity. A song's price starts at nada, but as more people download it, the price tag balloons until it hits a 98 cent ceiling. The cool twist in the model is that the more popular a song gets after you recommend it, the more store credit you receive for being ahead of the crowd. 
A judge has ruled that a trial against Microsoft can proceed, to decide whether they misled people with their "Vista Capable" advertising campaign. Two PC buyers have started a class action, and are arguing that they bought machines that weren't capable of running Aero, even though they were marked as 'Vista Capable'. Microsoft are saying that Vista can run on slower machines, albeit with some of the eye candy turned off, and arguing that this was explained in their campaign. 
This is Die Bike, a biodiesel motorcycle that has been built from a car engine and a bike body by an Oakland collective called The Crucible. A recent test-drive got the eco-bike up to 130 mph, but its creators are hoping that, with a bit of modification, their baby will hit 160 mph on the Bonneville Flats next month and break some records in the process.
On Monday the world's biggest camera took the world's biggest picture - a not very wallet-friendly 31' by 111'. The camera body was an aircraft hangar, the film was cloth soaked in light sensitive chemicals and the exposure was a tedious ten days. Of course, there are limited options with a camera this big, and it can only snap whatever happens to be in front of it - a disused Marine Corps Air Station. 
From the land of seppuku and movies like Ichi the Killer comes the destruction of this not yet 2 day old iMac. The beautiful 20-incher gets gutted, face first, and by the end, we know something new: The LCD is made by LG Philips, specifically a LM201WE3. Was it worth it, fellas? I suppose, for science.
I'm a mile from the giant antenna in San Francisco, Sutro Towers. But my phones never really get good reception here. This repeater is good for creating a better signal in your most house or apartment's most vacant cellular airspaces. 
Forget the Wiimote, this humble German-engineered device houses a racing game controlled by your powerful stream of urine. Designed to promote taxis as an alternative to drunk driving, the Piss-Screen shocks drunkards with a brutal car crash when they inevitably ram their virtual roadster into oncoming traffic. Apparently if you're too drunk to play a video game with your junk, you're too drunk to drive home. Don't have to pee? Try the 
Oppo's following up their DV-981HD upscaling DivX-compatible DVD players with the DV-980H, a slightly cheaper model. The 980 doesn't have the Faroudja upscaling technology, but does have 1080p, HDMI 1.2, 7.1 channel audio, and DivX support. Looks like a cheaper alternative at $169 if you're looking to save a few bucks. [
The iPhone may have a dynamic UI that changes to suit whatever program's currently running, but it doesn't physically change. This All in One haptics phone designed by Lukas Koh does (on paper), and creates raised buttons depending on what mode you're currently in. Example: phone mode has the dial pad, and text entry mode presumably has a keyboard. Looks great, but impossible to make. [
If you thought Windows PCs were the only ones that get software updates really fast, our new aluminium iMac just got a notice to update an iMac-only software update that fixes "bugs" as soon as we hooked it up to the net. [
People like cheap things. Just like the PlayStation 3 price drop caused its sales to tent, the Xbox 360's slash made the Xbox 360 Premium rocket to #11 in sales in video games. The other two, Elite and Core, also went up as well. Forza 2, the 360's racing game, also benefitted from the price drop, launching all the way to #1 from #94. [
In a serious blow to the convenience model of parenting, a new study found that 8-to-16-month-old infants who are plopped in front of "Baby Einstein" videos understand on average six to eight fewer words per hour watched than kids who didn't watch Einstein. Chalk up another win for real parenting over virtual babysitting—at least until they're 
The Gadget: Newertech's MacBook and MacBook Pro Battery Charging Station, which let you charge and condition laptop batteries without having to swap out the one in your laptop.
This HTC Nike (P5500) Windows Mobile 6 smartphone found in HTC's roadmap looks almost exactly like the 
Look at what Apple sent us. We got the new iMac (complete with ultra thin keyboard), iLife 08, iWork 08, and a Panasonic HDC-SD1 Camcorder for testing out the revamped iMovie. If there are questions about these new products you want addressed, leave a comment below and well get to it in our walkthrough.
You know we've arrived in the future when we have a Tetris game that can be enjoyed just by plugging it into the TV. These TV Tetris controllers allow you to enjoy your second favorite Russian game from the '80s (their roulette game is still #1) with nothing but a Tetris shaped controller and a TV. You can even go mano-a-blocko with your friends by plugging in a second controller into the first. [
Instead of having a doctor put one cold ass stethoscope onto your back, Deep Breeze's Vibration Response Imaging system puts 42 cold ass stethoscopes onto your back. By using acoustic vibrations, the machine—hooked up to a computer—can produce an imagine of your lungs in mere seconds. And if you calibrate it juuuust right, it can even see directly into your soul (and tell you have asthma, emphysema or pneumonia). [