A tipster just sent us compelling evidence of giant 64GB and ridiculously huge 128GB Sony-branded USB drives circulating in China. When he first spotted them at a market in Zu Hai, near Macau, he thought it was a misprint, but then he discovered that his own father had a 64GB card. Lest you think he was still foolin' himself, you can see that when he stuck the drive into a PC and checked, the thing sure enough registered around 64GB of space:

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Sony's putting some great tech into its 1080p VPL-VW40 projector, but the big story here is the price: One penny under $US3000 takes it home. Sony just couldn't sit still while Epson and Panasonic break the $US3000 barrier for erstwhile crazy-expensive 1080p projectors, with both competitors already cranking out their second iterations packed with 1080p-ness. So here's Sony's reply, this Bravia SXRD projector with a 15,000:1 contrast ratio. There's three micro-display panels cranking out the high-rez in full 12-bit color, using liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) technology instead of those tiny mirrors in DLP projectors. And we especially like the 22dB spec of that ultraquiet fan on board. Sony says this mutha will be available on January 31st. [Sony]

Amazon just kicked a certain Cupertino-based company where it counts, scoring DRM-free MP3s from Warner Music Group that you can buy today. This leaves out only the big S, Sony, which is always the last to cave in when the topic is reduced content protection. By contrast, Apple, which helped usher in the DRM-free music initiative, is only selling iTunes Plus tracks from EMI. Stay tuned, though, as that could change at any minute. Jump for full press release.

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Panasonic has announced their development of the world's thinnest internal Blu-ray drive. At just 9.5 mm tall, it's thin enough for laptops but still packs a performance punch. We're talking 2X recording for both BD-R and BD-RE (rewritable) discs, along with BD-R DL support (but we're guessing that the dual layer writing is just 1X...have fun burning those 50GB discs). The drive also supports DVDs with 8x burning on all types of discs. It's priceless for now with Panasonic only shipping units to manufacturers at the moment, but we'll get more details soon when it's on display at CES. [fareastgizmos]

We're gonna cut the crap and avoid that whole condescending, elephant in the room post about DVD "backups" and how you need to easily copy home movies for grandma. EZ Dupe is a sexy, fairly tiny dual DVD drive that allows for simple (and probably illegal) 8x copy of your favourite discs. You can plug in the drive via USB to either a PC or Mac for Lightscribe (laser labeling) support, or unplug the drive from a computer entirely for the more portable, back-of-van piracy experience.

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You'll get a kick out of this guy's backwards singing, and he actually has a pretty good voice. Halfway through, the video is reversed, and you'll discover what song he's actually crooning. See if you can guess what the song is before the halfway point. We didn't get it until he was nearly finished with his backwards section. Great job of picking out things that look crazy when played in reverse, too. Jeez, how long did it take for this guy to learn to sing that reverse gibberish? Not to mix a maxim here, but jeez, it was worth it. After watching that, all we can say is, "Did I strap red nude, red rump, also slap murdered underparts? I did!" [YouTube, via Boing Boing]

Today, December 27 at 1:01AM EDT, The Supreme Pope of Tech Walter Mossberg has declared the Dell XPS One a better machine than the iMac. And yes, that sound you thought you dreamt was Steve Jobs screaming and Hell freezing. The Dell XPS One comes "sightly ahead" of the iMac because of its design and hardware features, like the audio video controls or the built-in memory card readers:

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high-end radar detectors goes back years and years. So it's no surprise that, come CES, it will be the first company to introduce a MapTrax GPS navigator with radar detection built in. We don't know much about them yet, like how the radar detection might be represented on a map, or if detection could help mark speed traps on the screen, but damn if it's not a start. People who note the placement of portable GPS navigators have asked me for years about this—"Why can't it have a 'fuzz buster' so I can see where all the cops are?" Well Dad, guess what? You're gonna get your wish. [Uniden]

The MPillow is a technogel-filled music player-cushion combo to aid relaxation, that connects via wireless to your computer. Designed by Per Arlander, Madiene Linstrom and Ozgur Tasar, you can either download your own music or listen to the ambient whale-fart sounds available on the MPillow itself. The lights change according to your musical tastes, apparently. A couple more pictures of the MPillow being fondled by a lay-dee and in light-up mode are below.

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It looks like Samsung is upping the ante in the OLED world. The Korean manufacturer has announced that it is developing a 31-inch OLED TV with a thickness of just 4.3mm, and will be showcasing in just two weeks' time, at CES. More details of the AM-OLED display are below.

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Ah, Mondo USB. A strange place, full of really useless gizmos that no one really needs. And the Moo Moo is exactly that: basically a plastic cow that you and your better half attach to your computers, you press the button when you're feeling lonely and an 18-stone transsexual appears from nowhere to do unspeakable things to you the corresponding beast attached to your sweetheart's machine will moo, too. When she presses hers, it's your cow that lows. Pointless yet poignant, the secret of all good USB toys. There's a video after the jump.

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If you have any DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, or even some old-timey CDs lying around that are in desperate need of a bizarre storage solution, look no further than the Art of Hand Stand Disc Holder. It doesn't do much beyond what you see here, but it will definitely add an interesting look to any desktop or home theatre. [Product Page]

Sure there are more useful mobile phone storage products out there, but few could match the style and sheer randomness of these "his and hers" bathtub holders. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice if they had some sort of functionality, but that would make them far less stupid —and who wants that? [Product Page]

After tooling around with getting internet sharing working on the Sprint Mogul for a bit, we discovered this small WMWifiRouter app by Jorrit Jongma. It's pretty much an install and run affair (save a bit of internet connection Wi-fi setup beforehand), but the only thing you have to watch out for is using a static IP address on the device you want to access it with (iPhone/laptop/whatever) because there's no DHCP server present. There's a good guide in the XDA Dev forum as well. The result? A 3G-ish iPhone. [WMWifiRouter]

Thought that the $US200 Everex gPC was too good (and cheap) to be true? Did an earlier, positive review from Wired only serve to pique your interest? Unfortunately, a recent review by PC Magazine may bring many Wal-Mart shoppers crashing to the earth. According to their review, the gPC is" one of those PCs you buy as a gift for the holidays and return to the store in January." So what went wrong?

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Most people are familiar with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage program—whenever you have to "validate" Windows, that's WGA in action. Since there is no copy protection on OS X, lifelong Mac users might be unfamiliar with this whole idea. Don't worry, it looks like you might get acquainted real soon! Apple has a new patent called "Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks" (sounds cold and medical, no?), that's pretty much exactly like WGA. And it's all because you've been breaking promises to Apple!

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• The NYPD will test electric scooters next month. NYPD Blue? More like NYPD Green! (Please, hold your applause.)[Newsday]
• Can't find a Wii near you? Try China, apparently they have them coming out the yin yang. They are pre-modded to play American games, too. [CrunchGear]
• Down Under Dealzmodo: Australians buying select models of Sony BRAVIA 1080 LCD TVs will receive a free PS3 until January 28. [Sony]

This Forbes article about Amazon's fat Christmas is mostly full of no-brainers (the Wii and MacBooks sold well) but it does have one worthwhile little statistic: When Amazon had Wiis in stock, they sold 17 of them a second. So don't feel bad if you ruined your chid's Christmas, only people with Flash fingers stood a chance. [Forbes]

Old ladies make quilts, nerds make life-sized replicas of the Macintosh 128k. And the best part is that Ben Fino-Radin's design even incorporates insertable images to mimic web-browsing. Ridiculous? You bet it is. Do I want one? No, not really —but I appreciate the effort. [Benjaminter via Boing Boing]

Want to work at Gizmodo? Have artistic ability? Like making visual puns as well as written ones? We've got the perfect gig for you. If you think you can make illustrations on demand, either from your own mind or bringing to life ideas of other Giz editors, send an email to tips@gizmodo.com with the subject "Art Intern". This isn't a full time position, but you will need to be available during the time where most of our posting is done. Attach a bit of your sample work in the email as well. The only other requirement is that you need to be able to photoshop/draw better than me.

This Sequiam Biometrics BioVault 2.0 is officially endorsed by the NRA as a biometric gun-safety device, meaning it's safe enough that an organization that specializes in guns believes it can prevent your kids from getting at your guns. And not only is it safe, it's convenient too. How many times have you heard an intruder outside, run over to your security vault and forgot your password? Too many times! We can't remember the last time we couldn't locate our finger (most of the time it's up our nose or in our ear). We'd totally spend the $US399 for this if only we had something to put in it besides our emergency stash of "Snatch, the Magazine" for power outages. [SharperImage via Random Good Stuff]

Christmas may be over, but if designer Sir Norman Foster has his way, everyone in Moscow will be staring at a 1500ft tall, 27 million square foot, $US4 billion dollar Christmas tree every day of the year. The structure, dubbed "Crystal Island" is being described as a "city within a building" and will feature 900 apartments, 3000 hotel rooms, an international school for 500 students, cinemas, a theater, a sports complex and more.

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Microsoft just rolled out the first publicly available release candidate for Service Pack 1 of Windows Vista, and we snapped it up, eager to see if it's faster than the currently shipping version of Vista. To test its speed, we ran a series of benchmarks on exactly the same machine, first with the original version of Vista, and then with Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of the upcoming Service Pack 1 (SP1). For comparison, on exactly the same machine and on an identical hard disk, we also tested those benchmarks using Windows XP. From the perspective of sheer speed, has Microsoft improved Vista with this first iteration of a service pack? Yes and no.

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When it looks like it might get ugly outside, you hold hands. At least in the business world. And the flat panel market, especially LCDs, is looking pretty throat-cutty. Hence we've got two big back-to-back hookups: First, Toshiba and Sharp. Now, Canon and Panasonic are each swallowing 24.9 per cent of Hitachi Displays, a subsidiary of Hitachi that fabs LCD panels to make a flat-panel triad, which hopefully means cheaper, better displays on our end as they share the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. [WaPo]

As if adorning an otherwise fine laptop in Swarovski crystals or Hello Kitty logos wasn't bad enough, NEC has made a laptop with both Swarovski and Hello Kitty, making this the worst laptop we've ever seen. Seriously, we're not even going to bother showing you the specs, because if anybody purchases this thing from Japan, we're going to have to revoke their Gizmodo license. We're sorry, but it has to be done. [Far East Gizmos]

NetGear has recently announced 5 new products to their arsenal of network-attached storage devices (NAS) with four of these coming to the ReadyNAS NV+ lineup and one to the 1100 series. The upgrades offer storage capacities ranging from 1.5TB to 4TB along with an enhanced UI, support for Gigabit Ethernet networking, UPnP AV multimedia access, HTTP/S remote access, FTP/S transfers, SSL and ACL security, hardware accelerated RAID 0, 1, 5, and their own proprietary X-RAID technology (enables users to add additional hard disks over without having to reconfigure the system or shuffle data). Prices start at $US1099. [Product Page via eHome Upgrade via Ubergizmo]

We're not sure where Impress.jp got their info that the Optimus Keyboard was delayed until late February '08, because from all the info we've got from Art Lebedev in the past few months (here and here) says that's the targeted ship date.

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Asus already has a full stable of Windows Mobile phones, but this flip-open QWERTY-enabled candybar seems like one we can get behind. Not only does it have a scree underneath for typing (in addition to the outside screen), it's powered by a 520MHz CPU, has Tri-band GSM, 3G, 256MB ROM and 128MB RAM, not to mention Wi-fi and Bluetooth. As long as that keyboard underneath feels as good as it looks, this could be a killer communicator.

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What consoles do you own? Some of you probably scored a Wii this Christmas, so feel free to tick that box really, really hard to show everyone how lucky you were (we didn't score one). Only the latest generation counts, so vote for the console or consoles you currently own.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

The Skinny: Opens your garage via fingerprint of up to 20 others. Survives in extreme temps from -30 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and wet weather. Costs $145 bucks.
The Catch: The preferred way to open a garage is still the good old janky wireless remote from inside your car. [Smarttouch via Gearlog]

We're pretty sure these two pieces of software were developed separately, but both MIT and Sony have come up with a way to take hand-drawn sketches and turn them into little worlds with embedded physics engines. Sony's uses their PS Eye to take either hand-drawn objects or just stuff they have laying on top of a paper and animating it into a little world. One awesome example is scanning in a hand-drawn tank and putting it into a tank battle game (which another Sony employee messes up by bringing in a real tank). Check out these three videos after the jump.

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This is real time "avatar" software from Japan that takes video of a person and automagically gives them a new hairstyle, makeup, or outfit. It's really incredible how well it works in real time, and you can imagine this tech being used everywhere from hair salons to clothing stores to online gaming. I want to know what I'd look like with a Mohawk and a Fu Manchu, so let's get this tech Stateside pronto, OK Japan? [TV in Japan]

The world's smallest Bluetooth headset just three weeks ago was Nextlink's Invisio G5. Today's it's a fatty, out-ano'd by the more dwarven AD-HSM10, which looks like a titanium hearing aid. It weighs about a gram less than the G5 and is more squat, but its measly 3 hours of talk time and 100 hours of standby fall short by an hour and 50 hours, respectively. "More to love" seems to weigh in the G5's favour, though the AD-HSM10 costs half as much ($85). [Adtec via Phone Arena]

Colorware, the company that spruces up iPods, iMacs, iPhones,