Boy Genius just unveiled shots of what is very likely the Kindle 2. Notice the follow-up to the snowspeeder-like original Amazon e-book reader is more rounded, more early-iPod in its proportions, but still white with the same basic screen. The cool sparkly LCD status bar seems to be gone, a joystick has replaced the clickwheel, and the other buttons are smaller for fewer accidental page turns. No word on the availability of this baby, of course. As you might expect, Boy Genius has quite a few more pictures, and more details too, so feel free to drop on over there to have a look. We'll be here when you're ready to comment. [BGR]

The NTT DoCoMo prototype phone shown in the video above has an embedded DLP projector, presumably using an LED light source in order to project a respectable 20- to 25-in. video image on the wall a few feet away. The downside, as you can hear from the dude asking questions (AOL Switched's Tom Samiljan if I'm not mistaken) is that the phone is large, or at least small but strapped to a real brick of a projector. I guess we're supposed to admire the image, and wait for the actual mini-projector technology to catch up. [TechPertPanel - YouTube]

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According to a T-Mobile spokesperson, pre-sale demand on the Android G1 is so big that they have already sold all their units. She says that this is specially impressive because it happened after they tripled the amount of available G1 mobile phones. Of course, this could mean anything without knowing actual shipping numbers, but it seems there's plenty of interest despite its many shortcomings. If you want to pre-order yours, however, you can pre-order now through October 21 to get it at a later date:

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Netbooks were supposed to be this great inroad for Linux development, but it turns out that the XP side of the netbook business is doing a lot better in the area of customer satisfaction: MSI today told Laptop that, according to internal studies, "The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks."

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I'm starting to believe in those Apatow movies about nerds suddenly becoming popular without having to shed their nerdiness: A dude name Paul Slocum—who I'm picturing looks exactly like Michael Cera of SuperBad/Juno/Nick & Nora fame—hooked a crappy old amp to his little laptop, told the laptop to continuously calculate the digits of the magical constant pi, digits that run to infinity to the right of the decimal point, and turned those digits into synth commands for surprisingly danceable house music.

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OLEDs are pretty much awesome, but the coolest application, the bendy one, is still tricky, because flexible plastic is more porous than stiff glass, and OLEDs get really upset when they come in contact with oxygen. Apparently, though, Sony and Germany's Max Planck Institute have cooked up a flexible and transparent organic display that will do alright, when it is released in the undisclosed future.

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Believe it or not, there are no baseball bats in the Lego universe. Why? Probably because a minifig could use one to break another minifig's plastic cranium. And we all know that you can't use weapons in Lego's universe, much less break minifig craniums. This is why Brickarms, the dealer of All Things Violent for Lego minifigs, has released the baseball bat weapon, including a psychopath minifig posing with it for their publicity shots:

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Say it ain't so, Joe AT&T. According to RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis, the communications giant has delayed the release of the Bold on their network due to testing, possibly to safely avoid epic, bug-related fails. AT&T did go on record, only saying the phone is still scheduled to drop this year. But the longer you keep the BB faithful from the Bold, the more time they have to consider that other phone on AT&T. [AP via Phonescoop]

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Christian from Defence Tech is at the Modern Day Marine Expo, where instead of having girls in mini-bikinis caressing speedboats and yachts, they have girls in mini-bikinis caressing torpedoes and gatling guns. Like this one on board the Osprey, which uses a controller with the same shape and functionality of an Xbox 360 gamepad.

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Looks like Samsung keeps pushing for green computing. These computers are Korea-only for now, but the MV100 Tower and MZ100 Slim Tower, running on the Intel G43 chipset, consume only sixty watts in "power saving mode" and one watt in stand-by mode. I only have one question for you: Do you really care about how much energy your computer really consumes or you are now just thinking that the Samsung ninjas really need to eat a few pizzas? [Akihabara]

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I've been on a big Worms kick lately on my Xbox 360. It's the perfect game for four semi-sober dudes to play together, as its full of dicking each other over and explosions while being slow paced enough for even those with the most dulled reaction times to still participate. But when I've tried it with friends via Xbox Live, it just hasn't been as fun.

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Lots of news to catch up on this week from the App Store. So come have a look, iPhone folks, at what you may have missed on Giz this week, in addition to a few of our picks for new apps of the last seven days as always. We're excited first and foremost that Fring, a great multi-service IM and VoIP app, has just made it into the App Store (not even in the search index yet). Good thing, because the rest of this week's pics skew a bit toward the wacky side. But sometimes your weekend just needs a little wahh wahhhh...crickets...crickets....

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I just got off the phone with Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC, who confirmed that the rumours of Voodoo's demise were not just premature but "nonsense," but said "HP is asking us to integrate into the larger execution engine." Rahul is comfortable speaking both plainly and in business-ese—what we take this to mean is that Voodoo will merge manufacturing with HP's core in Asia, unify other non-design aspects of the business, and shut down a good chunk of the operation in Calgary, Alberta. "Typically we don't comment on layoffs specifically," says Rahul, who adds that he himself will not be leaving Canada.

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The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is "a proposed ground-based 6.7 meter effective diameter (8.4 meter primary mirror), 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night." What's that mean? Well, it means, if it's built, we'll have a telescope attempting to catalog the entire night sky into an absolutely massive 150 petabyte database. Awesome!

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It's been a while since an Asus product has rocked our world—we think the last time must have been the Eee—but the Atom-powered SSD-based Asus S101 looks amazing for its price—even better than we thought before. Just 1kg and a tapering 17.8mm thin (a bit thicker than the Air), its 10.2" LED screen runs at WSVGA (1024x600) resolution. And with 802.11n, ethernet port, Bluetooth, multitouch trackpad, 4-in-1 card reader, 20GB of free online storage and high quality speakers, the S101 packs plenty of useful features—though it only has 1GB of RAM and appears to have the same fatal flaw as the MacBook Air. Yes, the S101 uses a non-replaceable, 5-hour polymer battery.

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If you're looking for a coffee table with a bit more personality than yet another flatpacked piece of furniture from Ikea, take a look at Joel Hester's awesome handmade coffee tables.

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First we thought the Netflix-streaming, Blu-ray-playing LG BD300 would be "under $US500." Then we were happy to hear when that cryptic price was actually $US400. But now, LG has dropped the BD300 to a competitive $US350. Preorder it now at Circuit City or Amazon. Or don't. We're not losing sleep either way. (OK, that's a lie, we were really, really counting on you buying this player. Our lives will be ruined if you don't. And chances are, we will flip out, cover ourselves in green paint and tell everyone on the street that we're a chunk of moldy bread and not to touch us.) [Circuit City and Amazon via BGR]

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Attention, sports fans! Are you looking to show your extreme dedication to your favourite team without submitting your body to the discomfort of painting up and going shirtless to a December game in Green Bay? Are you looking for a sign of your fandom that will never, ever make it through airport security and may not make it through stadium security either? Well, say hello to the LED sports fan sign! Although I don't see why it wouldn't work in other, non-sporting events. I think I'll make an "O'Biden" sign for the next presidential debate. Thoughts? [Make]

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Everybody has a digital photo frame these days. Even at 32 inches, they impress no one. So keep your eyes out for the next trend, which we humbly suggest could be non-digital photo frames. Making a brief appearance around the turn of the century, these frames accepted one analogue picture but were able to run without a source of power (AC adaptor or solar) indefinitely. Now if only scientists could learn to harness this non-digital technology elsewhere, we just might have a fighting chance of breaking our dependence on foreign oil. Strong thesis, I know. But it's cool; the environment is sort of my thing. Wink. [I love blocks via DVICE]

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During an otherwise uneventful podcast on the S60, Nokia revealed this shot of an unnamed concept device. It features a big touchscreen interface like the HTC Touch or the iPhone, but a QWERTY keypad can fold out while the touchscreen swivels, transforming the candy bar device into a premium clamshell. We'll have to wait and see whether or not anything comes of the concept, but if Nokia knows what's good for them, we'll hopefully see the real product soon enough. [Cell Passion via BGR]

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Where the open internet goes, porn follows; however, this golden rule is being re-evaluated for the friendly skies by Delta, who plans to filter web sites used on their implementation of Aircell's Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi service. While most of the early adopters of in-flight Wi-Fi have said they will only filter certain types of traffic and not web content itself, relying on flight attendants to handle case-by-case complaints of passengers attempting to join the solo mile high club right from their seat. Which they obviously weren't too happy about.

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With the upcoming XCM Rapid Fire Gear Lite kit, Xbox 360 gamers will be able to add machine-gun style turbo buttons to their controllers. Working across multiple games and easily toggled with a top-mounted switch, the kit will also nearly double the controller's D-pad range of motion to 6 degrees in each direction. It will essentially take the stock 360 pad and juice it like [fill in your favourite baseball player here who you are absolutely SURE never used steroids].

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I've got some good news for those of you who hold the seriousness of space exploration dear, and bad news for those of you who like to watch videos of two people doin' it: someone wanted to make a porn in space, and Virgin Galactic said no.

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A new robot called ExoFly could be exploring the surface of Mars, guiding rovers through the surface of the Red Planet. Developed by scientists at the Technical University Delft, Wageningen University, and TNO in Netherlands, the ExoFly is designed to imitate the flight patterns of dragonflies. Dragonflies from 300 million years ago, because these things are huge.

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The Large Hadron Collider, which has been delayed due to some problems with a helium link, now has a date for when it'll go back online: early April. It's going to be so long not just because of the problem, but because there was already a scheduled maintenance from November 15th through April anyways, as there will be every year. This reduces the strain on the French power grid during the winter months and gives them a chance to make sure the collider is always running in top shape. [CNET]

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So here I'm in Neeeew Yooork. Teeeeerrific! (That's my Andy Warhol impersonation). One of the first things I did this week was to get a US mobile phone contract, and since I was there, what the heck, I replaced my broken-screen iPhone with a brand new iPhone 3G--which required a $US500 deposit because I have no credit history in this country. But I digress. The important thing is that I discovered that one of the best things about this phone--the one that truly made it a BlackBerry killer--didn't work after I tried it: Push notification services are not working yet.

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According to a casual announcement by John Favreau on the Howard Stern show, as of Thursday, Iron Man Blu-ray has outsold every other Blu-ray release to date. Without firm sales numbers, the accomplishment might not be saying much. Yet it's still a testament to how a major new release (which is verified awesome on 150 inches) can reinvigorate the Blu-ray platform. But Iron Man camp, you'd better watch your back. Because The Dark Knight is coming to whoop you up December 9th, bitches*!

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In the arms race to squeeze more pundits with more laptops into a single stage, CNN has always held the lead. They're for keeping an up-to-the-second finger on the blogosphere's pulse, receiving sordid tips from 21st-century Deep Throats, yes? Tell that to CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin--what you up to on that screen there, Jeff?

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The Gadget: Sling Pro HD is the top of the line Slingbox that streams your cable to any computer that can connect to the internet. The Sling Pro HD is a big step forward for Sling, now centered around the full HD experience, with component inputs, and OVA tuner, and 1080 HD streaming not just over local networks, but remote connections as well.