Saturday, April 26, 2008
Phones
Glossy Black iPhone 3G is Just a Third-Party Case
9:45PM Haroon Malik | The first allegedly-leaked shots of the 3G iPhone arrived earlier this month. Yesterday, Engadget claimed that the iPhone was going to look all black and shiny, like in the photo. (Although they didn’t say that was a photo of the said unit.) Today, what we know for sure is that the thing in the photo is just a protection case available for the current iPhone out of Hong Kong. While it’s logical to assume that 3G will be in the next iPhone, we still have to wait to see if its all-black colour, the GPS, or any of the other predictions are true or not. [winandmac] More »
Robots
Robot Lawn Mower Can Lacerate, Probably Eat Humans
8:30PM Jesus Diaz | LawnBott, the US$2,750 robot which announced itself as your loyal automated lawn mower—capable of cutting 33,000 square feet of grass in a single charge—has revealed its true face: it wants to cut humans to pieces. Actually, just stupid humans, but the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Kyodo America have decided to “recall them immediately.” More »
Robots
Creepy 80-Year-Old Japanese Robot Brought Back to Life
10:00AM Matt Buchanan | Gakutensoku is Asia’s oldest modern robot, built in 1928 for the ascension of the Emperor Showa (aka Hirohito). Twice as tall as the emperor at 10 feet, 6 inches, it could tilt its head, blink, smile and puff up its chest and cheeks with a system of inflatable rubber tubes. Long lost in Germany before returning to Osaka, it’s been restored and brought back to life with a US$200,000 computer-controlled pneumatic servo system. But it definitely still moves like an 80 year old—very slowly. Check out the video of it in motion below, it’s like a robot from “It’s a Small World,” but even more uncanny and creepier. More »
Phones
Sprint Phones Now Come With Nude Photos of Employees (Free!)
9:30AM Matt Buchanan | Daryl J. Roy isn’t your average Sprint sales drone. Service doesn’t stop just because you’ve got the receipt and walked out the door. Have you ever checked out Sprint’s picture mail? He wanted to make sure Nicole McElveen did after she purchased some new phones from him. So he sent her a few picture messages, even though she didn’t pay for the service, before really showing off the resolution and clarity of their cameras with full-frontal nude pics of himself. Just to make sure she saw how good the pictures were, he re-sent them three different times. More »
Design
Improbable Blu Jacket Custom Made For Attention Seekers
9:00AM Sean Fallon | The Blu Jacket concept from Lunar Design aims to turn our children’s children into walking billboards using an electronic fabric based on e-paper technology and space-age organic fabrics. It could display your mood throughout the day, pull up maps using a built-in GPS module, display photos, video and (gasp) even advertisements. More »
Computers
Psystar Won’t Let You Reinstall Leopard By Yourself
8:53AM Jason Chen | A MacFixIt reader had a very interesting email exchange from Psystar’s support, who told him that they don’t want customers installing Leopard themselves. Here’s the quote from the support team: More »
Games
Audio Ping Pong is a Pain in the Neck…Literally
8:30AM Sean Fallon | The arduino platform has been the basis for a lot of bizarre gadgetry over the years, and the audio ping pong project by Mike McCracken certainly stands up to the best of them. The game is essentially the classic Pong with one major alteration—instead of using your hands and eyes, the game is controlled with audio cues and head movements. More »
Software
First iPhone Video Recorder Software With Audio
8:26AM Brian Lam | Here’s some iPhone software that is supposedly the first to record audio on top of video, at 128kbps sound and 320 x 416 video res. That makes it good fix for the iPhone’s official lack. In 2 months, when official third party software goes live, will anyone be able to replicate such a feat and access the hardware at such a low level using Apple’s SDK? Will it matter if an iPhone part deux already has the feature? Either way, better now than never. You can install it via installer.app. [mytriniphone] More »
Music
Video Demo: Archos Sling-Like TVportation Video Streamer
8:22AM Matt Buchanan | We had a little peek of Archos’ new Sling-like TVportation service for their TV+ box and 605/705 media players when we messed around with their 605 GPS add-on, but didn’t get to really dive in cause they were having some network issues before we had to split. Anyways, here’s a video walk-through, completely with heavy French accents. More »
Phones
