The Skinny: Alpine’s entire 2008 catalog was just leaked, and this is their MSN navigator with the same slow-ass movies, gas, and traffic data that Garmin and others have been rocking for over a year. No word on size of the wide touchscreen display. There’s a PND-K3 model without MSN direct. The Good stuff: Actually, this is one of the first models I’ve seen to allow sorting of gas by location or price, and I like the zoom into intersection functions that make complicated turn scenarios simple. [via AudioJunkies]
According to the product page, the R/C Spy Snooper robot vehicle is “capable of entering a room undetected.” Call me crazy, but you would have to be blind, deaf or both to miss a robot that measures 9-inches long and about 10-inches high when it enters a room. On the plus side, the device looks pretty cool and it can transmit audio to a receiver up to 150 feet away. Just don’t expect to pick anything up except laughter and not-so top secret information on how much of a tool you are. Available for around $US80. [Product Page via Gadgets News via Geek Alerts]
Want to prevent your own condo tower from bending back and forth like a stick of rubber? Easy, hide a 50,000 gallon water tank at the top and cover it up. That’s exactly what developers did for San Francisco’s One Rincon Hill, the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi River. The building uses the 416,000-pound tank to create tuned liquid damper (a first for the Western U.S.), thus preventing the building from moving around if a strong enough wind comes in from the San Francisco Bay.
Though experts say it’s unlikely such a situation would arise, a lack of protection against such a wind could cause feelings of motion sickness and discomfort in residents. The nearly-completed building is the largest structure built in SF in over 30 years. [SF Chronicle via Curbed SF]
Someone sent CrunchGear a shot of their brand new Amazon Kindle and some pretty serious problems they’re having with its screen. This could be an isolated issue, or not. Is anyone else having similar issues with their Kindle? Let us know in the comments. [Crunchgear]
There’s something not quite right about this girls’ eyes. No, it’s not the emo makeup or stupid hair colouring, although those are pretty bad. It’s… oh my god, it is. She has Hello Kitty contact lenses. We’re through the looking glass here. Take a closer look, if you dare.
By 2012, two-thirds of all high-def disc drives for PCs will support both Blu-ray and HD DVD, says an analyst at ABI Research. He also added that by 2009, universal drives will cost the same as Blu-ray drives, fuelling the interest in choosing them over a single-format drive. ABI also says that the rumblings about a market for standalone HD processors inside PCs is bunk, and that Intel and AMD will soon smoothly handle HD using standard chipsets. The analyst addressed HD disc burning, too, saying only that for now, consumers will probably stick to burning DVDs for data storage, and that burning HD discs will only really matter when prices on blank media come down. It’s funny how technology always comes in to solve problems created by technology. [ABI Research]
Someone on the BlackBerry forums with the handle “Cooper” has posted what appears to be a photo of the upcoming Blackberry 9000 series. If this photo is the real deal, you can plainly see that the much-rumored touchscreen functionality would not be part of the equation. Before you get all disappointed, keep in mind that this could be anything from a mock-up to a really awesome fake. [BlackBerry Forums and Boy Genius via Pocket-Lint]
Jeffrey Stephenson, the man who first looked at a cigar humidor and said, “I can turn that into a PC,” has made another Art Deco PC out of wood. The G-metric Nano, which will be unveiled publicly at CES this year, is the smallest enclosure Stephenson could design that contained a VIA NX15000 Nano-ITX mainboard, 1GB of RAM, and a slot-loading DVD player. The case itself is hard Pennsylvania cherry, but Stephenson’s signature inlay is done with walnut, mahogany, basswood and cherry veneers. The feet serve a dual purpose of adding style and hiding the fact that the large heatsink extends out of the box a tad. [Jeffrey Stephenson]
Note to automakers: cars of the future are meant to be fierce. Sure, they can get 100mpg, but they’d better look like they can decapitate onlookers during the morning commute. This new solar vehicle (that’s still missing a sexy name) may be by the makers of champion solar race cars, but it looks like a jerky golf cart. Then again, any car capable of 44mph speeds for three hours at a time—that runs on nothing but the sun—has our ears perked.
To get around IP lawsuits, Canon plans on developing their own SED technology that works better than the type they’re being sued over. [Bloomberg]
