Saturday, November 3, 2007
Robots
Watch the DARPA Urban Challenge Final Live, Don’t Forget About Us
11:50PM Haroon Malik | If you are planning on showing Gizmodo no love this morning, we shall excuse you if you ditch us for the awesome DARPA Urban Challenge. The DARPA Urban Challenge hopes to pursue technologies that may replace humans on the battlefield. Teams enter an unmanned, robotic and autonomous vehicle, which is released in a mock city environment and must complete certain tasks to succeed. The main objective is for the robotic vehicle to carry out simulated military supply missions, whilst simultaneously negotiating their way through traffic and past obstacles. More »
Gadgets
Gadget Bottle Is Unintentionally Funny, But Still Terrible
11:40AM Adrian Covert | We’ve had our share of cool water bottles make their way through the site. Now we get BevyTech’s Gadget Bottle, which is just sad. Not only does this seem like a broken cellphone/MP3 player/pill bottle(!?) waiting to happen, but what practical reason is there for affixing a gadget to a water bottle? Granted the knife-bottle option does look extra grimy, but it’d be cooler if they built it into the bottle. I’ll spend my $8.25 elsewhere, thanks. [Gadget Bottle] More »
Design
Microsoft’s HD Photo Is Official JPEG Successor, Redubbed JPEG XR
11:20AM Matt Buchanan | Microsoft’s HD Photo standard is now officially tapped to become JPEG’s successor by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, but it’ll be known as JPEG XR. XR stands for extended range, given the wider colour palette and finer gradations it can show. Other benefits include in-camera imaging processing support and, supposedly, better compression. Besides losing its Windows-y name (in a former life, it was Windows Media Photo) it’s dropping proprietary control by Microsoft to become as neutral as JPEG is now. Though support’s already built-in to Windows Vista, it’ll take a year to get standardized, at which point large-scale adoption will probably start picking up steam. [Cnet via Electronista] More »
Gadgets
Touchstone Portable Gadget Charger, Hand Warmer…Eh?
11:00AM Sean Fallon | They say that the best way to develop a great product is to find a need and fill it. Perhaps the design team at DigitalTech didn’t look hard enough when they came up with their Touchstone portable gadget charger / hand warmer hybrid. It’s not that the two functions of the device aren’t useful —it can charge just about anything and my hands could stand to be a little toastier in the winter months —I’m just not sure that these functions make a lot of sense together. Still, if you would prefer a compact charger with some added yet unrelated functionality, you will be happy to know that the Touchstone can provide up to 9 hours of continuous cell phone charging and up to 6 hours of hand warming. Available for around $44. [Product Page via TFTS] More »
Vehicles
British Army Testing Invisible Tank, Not As Hokey As Invisible Car From That Crappy Bond Movie
10:40AM Matt Buchanan | Patton would’ve killed for a battalion of these babies. The British Army’s testing an “invisible” tank that works like the invisibility jacket Susumu Tachi put out a couple of years ago. Basically a camera/projector setup throws images of the surroundings onto the tank, letting you see through it, so it’s not quite the kind of future-y awesomeness DARPA’s working on. Yet, anyway, according to the project head: “The next stage is to make the tank invisible without them – which is intricate and complicated, but possible.” Add a couple of legs and a rail gun, and we’ll see Metal Gears walking around in no time. [Daily Mail via Geekologie] More »
Phones
Samsung SGH-i780 Gets Official
10:20AM Sean Fallon | Samsung has officially announced the SGH-i780 and its QWERTY keyboard, 2.55″ TFT touch screen with 320×320 resolution, optical joystick, Windows Mobile PPC, A-GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and support for triband GSM/GPRS/EDGE at 900/1800/1900 MHz and singleband UMTS/HSDPA. No word on pricing information, or where this phone might end up, but availability is expected to begin in January 2008. [Pocket PC Thougts via The Unwired] More »
Phones
WSJ: Google To Announce GPhone Plans on Monday…Finally
10:19AM Sean Fallon | According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will be announcing its phone plans on Monday, hopefully putting a stop to the endless rumours floating out there regarding the GPhone. The announcement is expected to reveal a series of alliances with multiple handset makers and cellphone operators that are open to the idea of pushing Google phone applications. WSJ notes that the timing of the announcement could always change, but at this point Monday is looking good. [WSJ] More »
Computers
Lenovo Making Crazy Money, Decides to Drop IBM Logo Early
10:00AM Sean Fallon | After tripling its earnings in the most recent quarter to $105.26 million, Lenovo has decided that it doesn’t need any stinking IBM logo on its products from here on out. As a result of their success, the decision has come 2 years earlier than planned. [CNET] More »
Press
An Overview of the New E-Voting Machine Guidelines
9:40AM Matt Buchanan | In case you didn’t want to rip through the pages upon pages of the EAC’s Voluntary Voting System Guidlines or the 600-page monster version before firing off your two cents on e-voting, Ars Technica nicely overviews them for us. For one, paper trails are now a de facto requirement, since “independent, voter-verifiable records” are required for certification, meaning we no longer have to pray that the machine’s software is up to snuff. More to the nitty-gritty, what emerges from the guidelines is something along the lines of an actual technical standard with “revised and clarified language.” And they actually have to be tested, not just rubber-stamped by third-parties hand-picked by vendors. Best of all, while technically the guidelines are voluntary, a bunch of state legislatures are voting to make them mandatory, giving them the force of law. Must be a glum day over at Diebold Premier Election Systems‘ HQ, lamenting the days of a total lack of oversight. [Ars, Flickr] More »
Gadgets
