Following the leak of Sidekick Gekko screenshots, the guys at Hiptop3 have snagged some pages of the manual. Besides confirming the 2MP camera with video recording, the blurb about being “highly customisable” is a bit more clear: Custom shells, so you can dandy up your phone any way you like (obviously for $$$). Check out the page about swapping out shells below, or head over to Hiptop3 to pore over the whole set.
Zara from Shiny Shiny got her hands on the Super Smoker, an electronic fake cigarette that allows you to smoke your filthy cancer sticks indoors due to the fact that it emits a harmless vapour. It uses replacable cartridges that come in a variety of nicotine levels, and while I’m sure it’ll keep you from getting the shakes if you’re a serious smoker, I doubt that it provides the smooth, satisfying flavour of a real cigarette. And for US$140 plus more for the cartridges, maybe it’d be cheaper to just go outside with a real cigarette. Or, you know, quit. If only smoking didn’t make you look so cool! Remember that, kids. Oh wait…[Product Page via ShinyShiny]
For those times when it feels like no one listens to you (because, incidentally, no one ever does listen to you), you need to enlist help. Pick up one of these large-sized movable LED displays by OMDM and transmit your message to the world via burning retinas and horrifying parallel parking. We humbly suggest something like “See Dad?? I always told you I’d buy that sign!” Yeah, that’ll show ‘em. [aving]
Anybody else out there a big Top Chef fan? Because The Smoking Gun is a product right out of Richard Blais’ arsenal. Packable with any wood chips you like, the gun lets out a steady stream of smoke that can “marinate” foods in flavour when the grill just won’t do. I’m not sure that I subscribe to the idea that Saran Wrapping some smoke around food for a few minutes while setting the table will rock one’s palate, but you can give it a try yourself for US$50. [Cuisine Technology via ShinyShiny]
Even though the XO Laptop’s Sugar-coated OS wasn’t exactly the most vaunted aspect of the attempted laptop-for-all, following Windows XP’s invasion of the project, former OLPC exec Walter Bender’s newly formed Sugar Labs is shopping Sugar around. They’re in talks with at least four “ultra low-cost” notebook makers who would use it for kid computers. This is the second OLPC splinter faction to licence tech from the OLPC project, the first being Mary Lou Jepsen’s Pixel Qi, which is licensing the XO’s innovative indoor/outdoor display and aiming for a US$75 laptop. I’m waiting for someone to sell me that sweet XO-2 unveiled the other day. [Betanews via Electronista]
Sometimes, I think that certain products are designed to remind the owner just how rich they are at all times rather than their supposed purpose. Take this ludicrous Red Diamond bathtub, for example. It’s got not one, but two waterproof HDTVs, can be controlled wirelessly via a built-in GSM module, and it’s built of solid fucking gold. Oh, and to top it off it has a Swarovski-crystal-lined champagne holder.
Roboticist Steve Yohanan thinks there’s something missing from the design of many robots: the human touch. By omitting the touch sensation from robotic design, Steve thinks that scientists and engineers are missing out on an important machine-human interaction, capable of communicating emotions. So he’s designed and built Haptic Creature, a furry robotic research bunny with touch feedback as its only way of communicating.
The Memorial Day weekend is finally here. For many of us, that means it is time to travel and or bust out the grill and cook up some meat. However, with gas prices being the way they are, you may be passing on the road trip this year. So, now that you are free to focus on throwing the ultimate BBQ this weekend, you are going to need some serious equiptment—like the examples found after the break. And, unlike many of the extreme grills out there, these are priced to own.
If you’d rather pack a rare conversation piece than a mobile powerhouse to impress the fellow Starbuckians, you’ll do no better than with this Xentex laptop prototype. While most laptops simply open and close, this Xentex can fold twice for portability.
Bad news for people who were looking forward to updated functionality in their Xbox Dashboard experience: Microsoft says there’s no Spring Update coming this year. The 360 usually gets two feature updates a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Instead of coding up some even fancier parental controls, the team’s working on “building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service,” meaning something or other, but there is a small update coming that will fix the problem where you can’t re-licence an XBLA game if your console went in for repairs and you got a new one. Dave Zatz says that a major UI overhall could be coming at the end of the year too. [Next-Gen]
