Mixing suction-cups with the chance of a high-speed death: sounds like fun, and exactly what designer Robert Nightingale has come up with in his “Hitch” concept. It’s a smidge like the free-ride skateboard Kouriers in Snow Crash and a smidge like bad building-climbing gear from B-movies. The idea of Hitch is simply to sucker onto a vehicle that’s about to move off, using the belt and hand suction cups, thereby gaining yourself a free journey. But Robert also suggests aircraft hangers as a good hitchhiking location, which I’m pretty certain is a one-way ticket to a Darwin Award. [Yanko Design]
Here is what the clunky Amazon Kindle should have been since the beginning: a simple, ultra-sleek full-page 8.5-inch by 11-inch electronic book and newspaper reader with a flexible plastic touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity, and the ability to read regular Office documents without conversion of any kind. As we said yesterday, Plastic Logic showed it at the Demo Fall 08 conference in San Diego. Seeing it up close and on its side makes me want to have one. Badly.
We brought you a three new Vaios last week, but Sony Japan seems to be in the mood to tweak much of the rest of its Vaio line of laptops and desktops. There are new machines in the A-series, C-series, L-series and R-series. The RT50 is aimed at professional users, labelled “photo edition,” with an anti-glare screen and a screen shield. CS60B is a 14.1-inch laptop in numerous colours and 802.11n Wi-Fi, and the LJ53B is one of Sony’s stylish desktop all-in-one media-players. But the AW70 and AW50 are the most interesting: monster, 18.4-inch powerful laptops with Blu-ray burners and HDMI-out, designed as desktop replacements.
LG’s VX9600 has finally gotten the go-ahead from the FCC and may appear on Verizon shelves everywhere soon. Though information is scarce, the phone will have Bluetooth, an MP3 player, a 2 megapixel camera and a 3-inch 480×240 pixel TFT touchscreen. Verizon is allegedly planning to market it as a lower-end, and thus cheaper, version of its iPhone contender, the Dare. Neither company has officially announced the phone yet so no word on pricing or availability. [Phone Arena]
I have an allergy to all gimmicky USB things, but these USB Halloween Pumpkin LED lights are actually cubicle-worthy, especially seeing how they all look with the lights off. Unfortunately, the US$13 8-pumpkin lights package has some problems.
Following on the heels of its main rival Nokia, Sony Ericsson’s allegedly also planning an unlimited music downloading service for its Walkman-branded mobile phones. According to the Financial Times, Sony Ericsson is in discussions with all major labels about a rival tunes subscription service.
News junkies rejoice! Google has begun scanning microfilm from various newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, further pushing libraries towards obsolescence (just kidding, I think). The searches can be had first through Google News, and will eventually be available on every papers’ own web site. Much like its book project, Google will shoulder the cost of digitising archives, though it’ll avoid the embarrassing legal snafu’s of yesteryear by actually asking permission to scan this time around. [NYTimes]
In an attempt to one-up Verizon’s FiOS, AT&T has finally rolled out a new software update for its U-verse service that’ll let subscribers watch recorded shows on up to eight different TV sets. FiOS only offers multiroom DVR for seven different televisions currently. The feature is already available in San Francisco an nearby subscriber cities, but ought to be rolled out to the rest of the Bay Area this week. While I’m sure this is a welcome change for anyone who’s been using U-Verse, I doubt being able to DVR on one extra set will help AT&T gain the ground it so desperately craves. [Wall Street Journal]
Here’s a challenge to hackers everywhere if I’ve ever heard one–a company named Verayo claims to have created an RFID chip that’s completely unclonable thanks to a type of electronic DNA technology called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). Unlike basic passive RFID chips, where data can be easily copied from one chip to another, Verayo’s PUF-fy RFID chips use a series of challenge-and-response pairs to make counterfeiting nigh impossible (or so they say.)
The official Zune 3.0 details we saw earlier today are now visible in video form, showing off purchasing from FM, Wi-Fi music store and channels, which recommends music to you based on what you already listen to. Three more clips where this one came from. [MSN Video]
