Here’s a design that Dracula would love: a subcutaneously-implanted, wireless digital tattoo display whose fuel cell is powered by blood. An entrant into the same Greener Design Competition as the gravity clock, the concept uses Bluetooth to communicate with your portable gadgets—or even devices implanted elsewhere in your body.
Stuart Rowe, COO of play.com is claiming that sales of Blu-ray players have increased seven-fold since Toshiba announced it was cutting and running from its HD-DVD format. The UK-based web retailer sold more Blu-ray players on Tuesday than it has in the whole of last week, and was the first to react to the Toshiba news by slashing HD-DVD player prices.
Oh Brando, not only do you not heed my pleas for a USB trouser press, but you also continue putting products that are, quite frankly, strange and reprehensible. Who in their right mind would be interested in buying a webcam that looks like a ping-pong bat? Don’t you know that we computer-fixed weirdies have no interest whatsoever in exercise? Some of us, however, do appreciate the box of tissues in one of the press shots. Ping-Pong and webcam aficionados may want to jump for the full specs, anyone with a dirty mind just head straight to the gallery.
Its click ‘n’ snap-ness may not be quite as radical as the Nokia N93 featured in Transformers: The Movie, but Samsung’s patent for a gaming phone is pretty awesome. In phone mode, the phone looks like, well, a phone, but slide it into game mode and it becomes just a little bit special, with a folding housing that contains a third keypad. See how the US Patents and Trademark Office have had it described to them.
Clearly aiming for the same market as the EEE PC, Kojinsha’s new E8 UMPC has the added bonus of being a touchscreen tablet. It does, however, beat me how the Korean-made E8 is being labelled by some as a UMPC—it looks more like a sub-notebook to me.
After rediscovering the Lenovo X300, the Mighty Mossberg has analysed it, inevitably pitting it against the Apple MacBook Air in a classic fight of blood, dead and more blood and dead. And you know exactly what the outcome is.
Sony Japan has updated their low-end Bravias with two M-Series LCD TVs. The 20-inch KDL-20M1 and 16-inch KDL-16M1 share common technology, with 1366 x 768 pixel screens with a 178-degree viewing angle, and an updated Bravia 2 video engine. The fun starts with the coloured frames these TVs have: Sony seems to have picked colours that match as many bunnies as possible from their awesome commercial.
A quick update on the satellite story that we reported about earlier this evening: it looks like the weather cleared enough for them to fire, and they hit the satellite as intended. It only took one shot, and it hit a target moving at about 27,000 kilometres per hour. Impressive. They still need a day to confirm that the pesky fuel tank was destroyed. As soon as video and photos surface we’ll be sure to post them here, so keep checking back. [NY Times]
Ahh, Victoria. First you slap a court injunction on the airing of a TV show, even though it was downloaded thousands of times anyway. And now you go and legalise gambling via Pay TV.
Sure, every Aussie loves a bet. But now Victorians can love there bets from the comfort of their lounge. It’s linked with Foxtel’s Sky Racing channel, and provides detailed track and betting information on all thoroughbred, harness and greyhound meetings in Australia.
The service – due to launch in April – is only available to Tabcorp wagering account holders, who have to go through a screening process to get an account. Apparently this, plus the fact that you can pop a password on your Foxtel box, means that the channel is “secure” from underage gambling wannabes and adult gambling addicts.
Understandably, anti-gambling groups are pretty pissed off right now. I mean really, is there any need for this? Surely it’s easy enough to place a bet online without making it available through the TV as well. I mean, that extra Foxtel bandwidth could go (a small way) towards rebroadcasting Channel 7 to satellite customers. And nobody would get hurt by that. Unless they watched It Takes two, I guess.
[The Australian via TV Tonight]
