The good news: those of us still looking forward to Sony's virtual world platform called PlayStation Home will be happy to know that it's arriving in 2008. The potentially bad news: it's arriving in "open, working beta" form. You know, like Google Everything. (To their defence, Sony actually fessed up to this obvious comparison, describing Home's rollout as "similar to Gmail.") My guess is that this beta angle is just a way to manage public expectations. And knowing that Sony is finally delivering Home should make us happy, even if a little sceptical. [Wired via Kotaku]

Read More »

I kind of like the BTM-118 from Brando, with its weird fusion of Bluetooth headset and FM radio in one gizmo. Maybe because I use a similar clip-on headset (partly to avoid fashion geekiness.) I guess this might be useful if you're into radio but your mobile phone doesn't do it: most ones with built-in radio use the earphone wires as part of the antenna circuit, don't they? Anyhow, the BTM-118 will give you 12 hours of FM, 10 hours of talk and 200 hours of standby. It's Bluetooth v2.0 and is available in black or white for US$53. [Brando]

Read More »

Acer has just announced their new 8.9" Aspire One ultraportable laptop. With a starting price of just US$379, configurations include an Intel Atom processor, up to 1GB of RAM and either 8GB of flash storage or an 80GB hard drive as well as a choice between Linpus Linux Lite and Windows XP. Nothing here is out of the ordinary for this new class of laptops except its competitive price and that future iterations are planned with 3G data support--yes, your computer may finally replace your smartphone. Read on for more details:

Read More »

Although it's not as scary as the spooky Big Dog—actually, it looks as friendly as the hilarious Fake Big Dog—I can imagine this prototype of a security robot dog developing into something capable running at 80kph behind you and tearing apart your thorax with pure steel fangs and claws. Fortunately, for now the rest of the videos show him to be friendlier than my own furry best friend.

Read More »

And now for the real Nvidia meat this week: The GeForce 9M series. Besides promising 40 percent faster performance than its last gen of notebook graphics cards (8M if you're keeping score), the 9M series brings Hybrid SLI to notebooks for the first time—the high performance GPU kicks in when needed, or it drops to the low-power one when things are chill. They go from the budget 9100M G to the top o' the line 9650M GT (which delivers 132 gigaflops), though they all support Blu-ray 2.0 spec (with 1080p output and PureVideo HD processing), PhysX, HDMI 1.3, DisplayPort 1.1 and mo'. You'll be seeing these puppies in "over a hundred notebook models beginning this summer."

Read More »

The 10" MSI Wind has just been priced at US$399 (Linux) and US$499 (XP). Asus just got some real competition. Here are the full details:

Read More »

Just a few weeks ago I showed you the Infection watch, which was very much in the vein of befuddling time display that importer Tokyo Flash has become famous for. But now there're the new Scramble and Progression watches from Nekura, and it looks like their LED-backlit LCD displays are slightly more straightforward, if still funky. You can even chose the illumination colour from a choice of six, or go for multicolor changing. Those straps are in engraved stainless steel too, and are "self-adjusting" somehow. Available now for about US$124. [Geek Alerts]

Read More »

We first brought you leaked mock-ups of Samsung's upcoming i900 mobile phone in January, along with a single pic and some specs. Until now, that's all we have to go on, but now Chinese site pconline.com.cn has got their hands on a real model and some more details on what the touchscreen phone will have inside.

Read More »

We have seen some amazing LEGO aircrafts in the past, but this F-14 Tomcat has to be the most awesome LEGO plane to date. In fact, it's so technically complex—most parts, including cannons, swing wings, landing gears, brakes, flaps, air intake doors, are electric and pneumatically controlled—that builder Jeroen Ottens got a dream job in Denmark as a Technic designer. Looking at the list of features, we are not surprised:

Read More »

People love to mod the Eee PC it seems, cramming everything you can imagine, including a touchscreen, into the diminutive cheapo notebook. But perhaps none have been so cheap and easy as this straightforward $70 touchscreen hack. It takes just 9 steps (including unscrewing the Eee 701 and putting it back together) to slot a USB touch controller board and touch-sensitive matrix inside the case. Even fumblefingers me could manage that, I think. [JKKmobile via Hackaday]

Read More »

Buzz Lightyear is now part of the International Space Station crew, after astronauts from mission STS-124 boarded the orbital outpost yesterday at 3:36PM EDT—bringing in the 12-inch to guard us against Emperor Zurg, who has been secretly building a weapon with the destructive capacity to annihilate an entire planet. Or maybe just teach kids about math and science. I can go either way, death rays or deathly equations.

Read More »

"Good computing punch and excessive endurance" is Laptop magazine's verdict of the MSI Wind. The 500-buck UMPC was put through its paces by the team, who put together a bunch of pros and cons.

Read More »

Wearing Bluetooth headsets is always a risky fashion statement, but it may be that the slenderness of Bluetrek's Metal headset reduces the fashion-geek effect. It looks even skinnier than Apple's offering, being a scant 4mm deep, and weighing a mere 4.5 grams. Nevertheless, the skinny earbud-like device will give you five hours talk and seven days of standby. It'll be available in Europe at first, from this month for around US$60 for black and silver, US$76 for silver steel colour. [Headset gazette via Mobile burn]

Read More »

SanDisk's new pSSD is a pATA drive aimed at the low-cost notebook PC sector— that range of ULPCs, MIDs and the like. Using Multi-Level Cell and Single-Level flash chip designs, the pSSD will have a read speed of about 39MB/sec and a streaming write speed of about 17MB/sec. Though there's no pricing info available, they'll be released at the beginning of August in 8, 16 and 32 GB capacities. Read on for the full press release.

Read More »

It's hard to believe that Asus's Eee PC 901 and 1000 didn't officially exist until this moment. But now they do! Officially. 'Course, there are few surprises left (except for battery life, they're claiming up to 7.8 hours), which takes the fun out of it: Atom processors, 12 or 20GB (up to 40GB SSD for 1000, or 80GB HDD for 1000H!) storage, depending on whether you roll XP or Linux. The 1000 is much like the 901, but with a 10-inch screen and a less cramped keyboard that's 92 percent of the standard notebook size. Annoyingly, still no official pricing info, but if they really wanna move these, it'd be wayyyy under that crazy $650 figure we heard.

Read More »

Yesterday, Wowwee's Flytech lineup buzzed into our lives in a mash of fairies, Dragons, and weird helicoptor-like flying things. Today we're going to take a look at their new Alive range of products.

The Alive branch of Wowwee is the family that brought you the Alive Chimp and the Alive Elvis. You remember, those dismembered torsos of life-like primates that were, for lack of a better term, wrong.

Well - fortunately - the 2008 lineup of Alive products is nowhere near as freaky. In fact, you could almost call them cute and cuddly. Rather than base them on the armless torsos of wild animals (you know the Elvis stories as well as I do), they've instead designed their new lineup on real-life animal cubs.

Read More »

Buckminster Fuller might best be known for the molecules named after him and dome designs that inspired structures such as the Epicot centre. But even more impressive is The New Yorker's rundown of Fuller's life and forgotten inventions, such as his three-wheeled, all-terrain car with a periscope, cities designed to float in the clouds or bathrooms designed like refrigerators. Here are a few of my favourite "Bucky" facts from the article:

Read More »

Despite the fact that the only BD Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player on the market today is the Playstation 3, Sony Pictures has announced that the first BD-Live enabled movie to hit Australian shores will be Men In Black.

It's due to hit shelves on June 25, and is set to include:

"a BD-Live multi-player Interactive Trivia Game, as well as exclusive downloadable theatrical and home entertainment previews and a FAQ about BD-Live functionality".

Sure, Nvidia's crashing into the mobile market Intel wants to dominate. And Intel is running into discrete graphics (not to mention ruling with integrated graphics). But you know, it's friendly right? Wrong. It's total war. Nvidia's continuing to hold out licensing SLI support for Intel's boards, notably its next-gen Tylersburg chipset for the Nehalem CPUs. And Intel hasn't yet licensed Nvidia to make an nForce chipset that'll support Nehalem, citing a "disagreement" over the terms. If they don't make nice, gamers will have to pick between having SLI or the latest and greatest Intel processors, meaning they get screwed either way. Man, where's AMD when you need them? [Maximum PC]

Read More »

Ozmo, a spanking new startup backed by Intel and partnered with Belkin, will demo its new Wi-Fi-based Bluetooth competitor at Computex on Tuesday. The system, which is the central part of Intel's Cliffside concept, uses current Wi-Fi hardware to create secondary networks that connect with peripherals built with its new transceiver. The transceiver will have a power draw comparable to Bluetooth, but its biggest perk is that it'll support enough bandwidth for the long, long overdue high-quality media streaming that the 'tooth could never deliver.

Read More »

We're not sure what this is, where it came from or what it's supposed to be, but Newest New News seems to be a parody "tech news" segment on comedy.com—a site that looks a whole lot like Will Ferrell's funnyordie.com. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that the clip is halfway funny in various places, letting you kill precious minutes as you're counting down the time left before you can take off without anyone getting up in your grill about it. [Comedy.com]

Read More »

Poor Toshiba's still not quite over the HD DVD defeat earlier this year, as evidenced by its president saying that they will "not market DVD players that are compatible with Blu-ray," instead opting for upconverting DVD players to bide their time before Blu-ray becomes so prevalent that the company has no choice.

Read More »

The Digitable coffee table was designed by Peter Lea as a functional piece of furniture that can play your CDs / DVDs while maintaining a cool contemporary look. It also features a sleek control panel integrated right into the frame and a disc storage carousel located in the base of the table. Let's face it, large disc collections can be hard to maintain, and they become an eyesore if stored out in the open. However, placing your discs within this coffee table would actually add to the decor—so your wife won't feel the need to defile your collection. Unfortunately, the design is only a concept at the moment. [Peter Lea via BornRich]

Read More »

It appears that no job is safe from the steady march of technology. Even beggars are being replaced by robots thanks to Alexander Gurko's "Bettelbot" (or "BeggingBot" in English). Basically, the BeggingBot is a robo-bum that plays music using sounds generated by floppy and hard drive mechanics and then begs for money once the song is concluded. If you place a few coins in the CD tray, the BeggingBot will continue to perform. That having been said, take a listen to the "music" after the break. I think Trent Reznor had better watch his back as well.

Read More »

ASUS is following in the steps of other Taiwanese companies HTC and Giga-Byte and making its own UI wrapper on top of Windows Mobile. In this case, ASUS's Glide might be—in this humble monkey's opinion—worse looking than Windows Mobile 6.1 itself, with clashing fonts, amateurish themes and backgrounds and a general discontinuity that isn't found in HTC's efforts. It does have a launcher, a photo app and a DJ program, which is probably useful for somebody somewhere. [Asus via Mobile Tech Review]

Read More »

We'd heard about Time Warner Cable's test run of consumption-based billing in Beaumont, Texas, back in January, though details were scant. Now they're plentiful. The plans (for new subscribers only) start up on Thursday, but thankfully they're not as... Read More »

If you need proof that anti-aging drugs are going to be serious business, you only have to look at today's purchase of Sirtris, a pharmaceutical company dedicated to researching the anti-aging benefits of restricted-calorie diets, by GlaxoSmithKline. The price of the purchase? US$720 million. And they plan to make all of that money back and a whole lot more by selling you pills to make you live to 120.

Read More »