We've seen solar-powered LED ski suits and interactive solar-powered roof tiles and now you can add that Christmassy touch to your garden with these solar-powered fairy lights.They feature 50 bright white LEDs, and charge automatically during the day to give you around 9 hours of light at night. They will set you back $US29.95, which is a little steep, but the bulbs will last 10,000 hours which is enough for several years' fairy-lit evenings. Praying for sun around Christmastime will have never felt so normal. – Kit Eaton
[Hammacher Schlemmer via Oh Gizmo]

Thanks to nanotechnology, an assistant professor at Stamford University has come up with a breakthrough in the the longevity of Lithium-Ion batteries. As well as being able to power your laptop for up to twenty hours—ten times more than current levels—Yi Cui thinks that his design could also work on iPods and other handheld devicies which rely on small batteries to work. The skinny after the jump.

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Despite the slow progress toward solid-state camcorders, there is still life in the MiniDV market yet, as JVC shows with this release of a budget camcorder that can shoot widescreen 16:9. The GR D850 is petite but packs a good 35x zoom, 680,000 pixel CCD and a decent 2.7 inch screen with auto-adjusting brightness. More details after the jump.

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BenQ is rolling out its G900W worldwide, a 19-inch monitor for PCs. You've got resolution of 1440 x 900 and 800:1 contrast, D-SUB and DVI ports. Response time is 5 ms. Price and another shot below.

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Although only waterproof to 15 feet, and therefore not exactly serious underwater snapper gear, this Liquid Image digital camera-mask is not a bad idea for kids or snorkelers as it lets you take hands-free images of the Big Blue. Full details will be released at CES next month, but we've got a bit more info after the jump.

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A statement documenting an amicable settlement with Apple over their law suit, and announcing the closure of the site. Founder Nick Ciarelli was hazy on the details but professed himself "very satisfied" with the settlement. – Kit Eaton

From Kotaku AU: According to a story up at Atomic, if you choose to buy one of Sony's 1080p Bravia LCD TVs, it'll throw a Playstation 3 into the deal - free.

At the moment, all the page says is "Coming soon - Bonus PLAYSTATION®3 promotion.", but tipster Dave is confident that the promo will start tomorrow and run until January 28. So there's plenty of time to take the company up on its offer.

We don't have any additional details, but we'll knock on Sony's door and see if it's willing to shed some light on the situation. However, I think it'll take more than walking into your nearest electronics store and requesting the offer.

And yes, this is an Australian deal by the looks of things. Nice to get one up over the States for once.

Update 1: Maybe you can just waltz into a store and snag the offer! A reader reports that their cousin bought a Bravia at JB Hi-Fi and was provided a special code that can be redeemed for a PS3.

Update 2: Alright, it's official. Sony just sent through a press release with all the info on the Bravia/PS3 deal.

According to the release, the offer is valid for anyone who purchases a full HD (that's the XBR, X and W series) Bravia LCD TV between Dec 21, 2007 and Jan 28, 2008. After your purchase, you'll be able to lodge your PS3 redemption via the www.sony.com.au/bonusPS3 URL.

It goes on to say that it doesn't matter where you buy your LCD TV, you'll still be eligible for a PS3.– Logan Booker

Full press release after the jump.

BRAVIA PS3 Promotion [Atomic via Kotaku AU, Kotaku AU]

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Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, has confirmed that major cities will only be broadcasting free-to-air in a digital signal by 2009. The nation-wide switch to digital television is to occur by 2013. According to Senator Conroy:

Setting a firm date of 2013 for the switchover from analogue to digital television transmission in Australia has given industry the certainty it needs to drive consumer uptake of digital television.

Until now, industry has had no declared end date and has been unable to plan effectively for digital television.

Interestingly enough, Hop-On, a company once known for making disposable cellphones, has introduced a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone dubbed the HOP2001 that is AT&T and Verizon ready. The phone features dual-mode GSM or CDMA, a 320×240 touchscreen, a 3-Megapixel camera with 10x zoom, Bluetooth 2.0, Wi-Fi, 256 MB Flash ROM and 128 MB SRAM, microSD expansion, and Telenav compatible GPS.

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Hidden pages on Vizio's site have revealed two new additions to the Vizio lineup. First up we have the VO47L FHDTV complete with a 47-inch viewable, 16:9 wide screen aspect ratio, 1920 X 1080 resolution, 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p, 480i compatibility, a 2000:1 contrast ratio (with DCR), a 178 degree viewing angle, included HDMI cable, and 4x HDMI inputs.

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A Sony spokesman has stated that Sony will soon be exiting the Rear Projection TV business as soon as their current inventory is gone. Even though Sony's rear projection TVs were still popular, they will be shifting their resources towards LCDs, which they believe is "what people really want". This news isn't too strange since Sony isn't the first to be dropping Rear Projection from their line up; Philips, Toshiba and Hitachi have already done the same. [Twice]

After Apple posted a job listing for a Reliability Engineer who would work in multi-touch development, blogs have been speculating left and right about Apple's plans. We went over to Apple's jobs page and found they're not just hiring a single reliability engineer, but a whole team of engineers specifically for multi-touch products.

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As long as your toothbrush is sitting around unused and unloved, you might as well put it to good use with this DIY Bristlebot courtesy of the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. All you need is a brush with angled bristles, a pager motor and a watch battery. Minutes of fun and tooth decay will be your reward. To see the Bristelbot in action, and learn how to build one yourself, hit the video after the jump.

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The Polar mobile phone is a concept piece from Yuta Watanabe that is intended for cold weather climates where thick gloves are obstacles to effective communication. The phone looks to be a bit bulkier than usual, with bigger buttons arranged in an easy-to-press vertical layout.

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Pimp
noun
Person Into Marketing Polls

Word.

Hit that Gizmodo AU Survey.

WORD.

This is just weird, even for the giddy parents-to-be types who like to run around showing off copies of their ultrasound at work. A hospital in England is one (two?)-upping old-school 2D ultrasounds with 4D scans of your in utero spawn. The new scanner produces a moving 3D image, which is why we guess they're calling it 4D—not 'cause it's like tesseract, which I would much rather look at. The article about the new tech's kind of trend-fishing with the iPod angle, since the hospital gives you the file on a CD or DVD, which you can load up on any portable media player. But sweet christ, I hope this doesn't become a real trend. [Evening Standard via Spluch]

Being homeless would suck, but being homeless in Canada during the winter would suck even harder. A Toronto ad firm called Taxi aims to help around 3,000 of these unfortunate souls (and drum up a little business while they are at it) using their new 15 Below jacket.The lightweight jacket was designed to be waterproof, windproof and capable of withstanding extreme cold temperatures with the help of pockets that can be insulated with crumpled newspaper.More info and an additional pic after the break.

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In an effort to get to know our readers better, we're kicking off a series of polls that will figure out just where you guys stand on certain technologies. We'll start it with a big one: which do you use, Macs or PCs? We'll round all these answers up into a big something-or-other that you guys will like. Maybe we'll even include bar graphs!

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Half the reason we like the Eee PC is that mods to it just keep getting further out there. The latest, and greatest, is a touchscreen. Jkkmobile's 4G is loaded up with Windows XP, but not the tablet version, so it's admittedly more of an interesting way to browse the web and play around with your fingers than a certifiable productivity booster, but we think it's pretty cool anyway. [jkkmobile via jkOnTheRun]

There have been many solutions to the problem of fat AC adapters clogging up your surge protectors (like this), but this ezSpace UFO flying saucer protector from ezGear looks like it can actually be filled with all AC adapters without colliding. The secret is that it's pretty huge and shaped like an flipped-over bowl, but it does the job in four and six-plug versions. There's even a wall-mounted version as well. The first products will ship in January. [EZGear]

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A detailed 10 step guide to dealing with broken light bulbs has been drawn up by the UK House of Commons Commission—an organisation responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Parliamentary estate. Naturally, this had many taxpayers in an uproar. In fact, a spokesman for the Taxpayers' Alliance referred to the list as "ridiculous." He went on to gripe about how public officials are being paid to write "guidelines on how to use a dustpan and brush."

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Sorting the 5,195 Pieces of the Millennium Falcon Gives Strange Pleasure, Back Pain

Boffins Say E.T. Too Bored By Our Messages To Phone Home

Half of Mac Users Pay to Download Music; 84 Per Cent of PC Users Thieving Assholes?

Turbo Toaster Prototype Jet Engines Your Toast

Duke Nukem Forever Teaser Leaves Us Unimpressed

Crazy Person to Attempt a Backflip in a Truck

It has been about a month since Google launched the Android SDK, and opinions are starting to trickle in—not all of them positive. According to Ars Technica's Ryan Paul, a hands-on with the SDK revealed "many bugs, some of which are impeding development"—a statement that was echoed by developer Adam McBeth, speaking with the WSJ. The problem is compounded by a lack of adequate documentation and a complete absence of a public issue tracking system.

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The i-Sobot may be the smallest humanoid robot that you can control, but actually controlling it requires you to enter in more difficult keypress combos than it takes to do a Babaility in Mortal Kombat. However, if you load up the i-Sobot with the Robodance 4 software, you can hook up a Wiimote and Nunchucks to control the robot. It's fairly easy to program—just pick an action from a giant list and then perform a gesture to map to it. You can even assign the Wiimote buttons to certain actions as well, which helps you do some more complex actions. The formal version won't be out until February, but if you want to help beta test you can get one in about a week. [Robots Rule]

Rather than continue hammering on AMD while they're down, Intel is apparently taking AMD's troubles as a little break of their own, delaying the launch of three 45nm quad-core Core 2 processors (Yorkfields) until Feb. or March, depending on AMD's release schedule for its upcoming tri-core and Phenom processors. This kind of reminds us of when Toyota wanted to raise its own prices to help out GM and Ford, which makes us sad. We prefer the far bloodier and more competitive processor wars of a couple years ago. [Digitimes via Inquirer]

The Samsung F700, or U940, has just been FCC-approved, meaning that it's going to make its way to Verizon really really soon. We don't have full specs yet, but it seems that the 5-megapixel camera has been cut down to 2-megapixels, but the 150MB of internal memory and microSD slot remains. It doesn't look like it's much of a smartphone, but that might be a good thing. [Phonemag]

Following an utterly abysmal 2006—exploding battery, anyone?—Dell's 2007 was more of a mixed bag. Its products were sharper than ever: gorgeous new notebooks, formidable gaming desktops and great values in large monitors (often found on sale). But at the same time, production issues and lingering organizational problems brought the company down from its comfortable perch as the world's number-one PC manufacturer. Let's take a close-up look at what kind of year Dell had, its triumphs and its losses. At the end we'll give the mighty Round Rock, Texas company a letter grade just like in the old-school days.

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• Joining the other boffins we've discussed today is this Indian boffin, who invented a flying carpet by attaching a powerful motor to a thin sheet of fabric. By the way, we have not used the word "boffin" on this site since 2004. Boffin! [Wired]
• Intel will delay their 45nm quad core chips because AMD is late to debut their new chips as well. I hope AMD is secretly planning a double secret back stab surprise and lying to beat Intel to market. Gotcha, sucker! [The Inquirer]
• HP paid Staples $US100 million to not stock competitor's ink, and made the money back by charging $8,000 for a gallon of their own ink, according to a lawsuit. The official charge: Dorkateering. [Ars]
• New Scientist claims it has the secret to winning Rock, Paper, Scissors. The battle of wits has begun! [Telegraph]

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Nokia is thinking about making its charging and headset ports magnetic, just like Apple's MagSafe ports on its laptops. Nokia users are well aware that the headset and charging ports on their phones are quite similar. The beauty of this idea is that there is a negative magnetic polarity on one of the ports and a positive polarity on the other, making it impossible to plug the wrong plug into the inappropriate jack. Great idea, and maybe a way to get to that "one plug fits all" idea I was ranting about yesterday. [Cellpassion, via MobileWhack]

This leaked spy-shot of an upcoming 5-megapixel Motorola/Kodak cameraphone seems to confirm the rumor that MotoZINE was the name for Motorola's upcoming multimedia phone series. According to IT168.com, the Z12 is going to be announced in Q1 2008 under the ZiNE brand, and will have either a candybar or a slider form factor and a Kodak-branded camera on the back. Other rumors have it that the phone may even have GPS or Wi-Fi in it as well. As long as Moto puts enough good parts inside (5-megapixel camera, GPS, etc.), we don't care if they stick to their tired four-letter naming scheme. [it168 via Unwired View]

A week after Vista SP1 RC hit, Windows XP SP3 Release Candidate is up on the download block. Release candidates are usually pretty close to the final version, though nervous Nellies might wanna hold back cause it's technically still trial software. Rewarding your balls of stainless steel is a 10 per cent performance boost, Network Access Protection cribbed from Vista, black hole router detection and more. Like a fresh supply of "Nyah-nyah-nyah, XP's still better than Vista." Happily, it looks to be a single 336MB download, not the Groundhog Day-like series of install and restarts that was the Vista SP1 install process. [Microsoft, Features Overview (pdf)]

According to market research by the NPD Group—who give out monthly console sales figures and other fun statistical fodder for flamewars—50 per cent of all Mac users paid to download music during the last quarter, while a seemingly laughable 16 percent of PC users did. Mac drones are also more likely to buy real live CDs (32 per cent) than PC people (28 per cent). But before we light the fires and let loose the dogs of war, let's give the numbers a once over.

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