LG’s upcoming KP500 smartphone is aimed at the entry-level end of the smartphone market, which kinda tallies with its cute-ish codename of Cookie. With quad-band GSM, GRPS/EDGE, a 3-inch touchscreen, accelerometer, Bluetooth, FM radio and 3MP camera, it doesn’t sound too low end—until you learn that it’ll only record video at QVGA resolution at 12 fps, and can only play back MPEG4 videos. But its price is attractive: around $US228, which Boy Genius Report reckons will end up below $US100 on contract. Due out later this month. [BGR]
Higher latency and much lower speed are keeping Wi-Fi out of a lot of business settings, even considering massive performance increases of new 802.11n over previous standards. Quantenna says it can remedy these problems with existing technology, and using techniques that are already part of the 802.11n standard. Though there is pretty much no way to tell if their throughput claims are at all reasonable, the basic idea behind the system is simple, and probably doable: lots and lots of parallel connections.
Zune Guy — arguably the greatest fanboy of our time — has decided to finally commit his acrimonious separation from his namesake to ink. So what does he do? He integrates the Zune logo into a tattoo of Dick Cheney as the Devil, where it serves as a makeshift inverted pentagram on the veep’s forehead. As far as tattoos go, this not-quite-complete piece of agitprop is a minor improvement and much easier to explain — after all, Cheney isn’t the most popular guy in the world, and people have at least heard of him.
Spy-technology aficionados will know about Minox’s miniature camera and it’s genuine espionage heritage, and now the camera’s gone all modern with a digital face lift. A 5-megapixel sensor’s been plopped into the Digital SpyCam, which remains tiny at just 8.5 x 3 x 2 cm and weighing in at 59 grams: small enough to disappear into a leather-clad fist when it needs to be concealed. With a lithium battery, and 42mm equivalent lens, plus capability of saving onto 16GB memory cards, it’s no slouch either. Budding spys, and perhaps genuine ones (Mi6 take note) will be able to grab one now for $US199. [Minox]
The UK Ministry of Defence has just declassified nineteen secret files detailing UFO encounters over the past decades, one of them involving a USAF Sabre fighter pilot who was ordered to fire at will against an unidentified flying object in British airspace. Unfortunately–or fortunately–lieutenant Milton Torres lost the contact after the UFO left the scene at a whooping 16,000 kilometres per hour. According to him, it had the proportions of an aircraft carrier:
Apparently the CLX-3170 is the world’s smallest and quietest multi-function printer. We say apparently here because the last time Samsung told us they had a “first”, it turned out they were twisting the facts to suit the headline of their press release.
In any case, the printer measures in at 415mm x 360mm x 311mm, which does make it quite small. Noise levels are also restricted to 46dB, which is also fairly quiet. There’s also a direct USB interface so you don’t need to connect this to a PC, and it comes in both black or two-tone grey colours.
Does that make it the world’s smallest and quietest? Who cares? It’s definitely small and quiet – and with the price of rent soaring and my generation starting to get annoyed at the volume of “kids today”, those two features are highly desireable in any PC peripheral, let alone a MFP which costs $599.
newVideoPlayer("/msl1_gizmodo.flv", 460, 280,""); When I read that the UFO-looking Mars Science Laboratory’s aeroshell would use a floating crane–called Sky Crane by NASA–to softly land the rover on Mars, I couldn’t believe it. Now, watching this hyperrealistic NASA simulation showing how the mechanism actually floats, lowers the rover, and then flies away, I still can’t believe it. This is the kind of stuff that makes the kid in me wake up and pay attention with my eyes and mouth wide open.
And another PC manufacturer begins their journey down the road more travelled. NEC has announced their own entry into the netbook market, the Versa N1100. It’s got the usual suspects in terms of components: Intel Atom processor, XP, 8.9-inch screen, 160GB HDD, Wi-Fi and webcam…
But it does try and differentiate itself (in the press release at least) with gesture-enabled NX pad and a keyboard with a 17mm pitch. Now while my years as an cadet at school (and my adolescent mind) tell me that a 17mm pitch isn’t much for a tent, it’s probably something special for a netbook keyboard. There’s also an Impact resistant design, which I take to mean it can handle being bumped against a pitched tent…
$749 is what the N1100 will set you back when it launches in the second half of November.
It’s a situation I’m sure we’ve all been in: You’re visiting your Nanna and Pop and you pull out your fancy new phone with all the bells and whistles to show them. But where you expect unbridled enthusiasm at your MP3-playing, 5-megapixel photo taking, internet browsing masterpiece of engineering, you instead got looks of confusion.
“Oh, that all sounds like too much for silly old me” they say to you. “All I need is a phone that can make calls and lets me listen to Ray Hadley on 2GB. He makes me feel all warm and tingly inside”. And after you recover from the shock that it was your Pop who expressed his affectations for the AM radio DJ, you realise that there aren’t a great number of AM-radio capable handsets in the world. You know, for the old people who still listen to AM. Thankfully, Sony Ericsson are addressing the problem with their R306 mobile phone.
On top of AM radio, you get… wait for it… FM radio, making this one of the greatest radio phones ever (although there isn’t any internet radio or DAB+ functionality). You also get a 1.3MP camera for photos of your Nanna’s cats, stereo loudspeakers so you can share your love for Ray Hadley with the world, plus standard phone features like MMS, MP3 ringtones and Bluetooth.
The R306 is available now. There’s no word on price in the press release, but given its obvious target demographic, I wouldn’t think it would be too expensive.
The wizards at Korea’s Yujin Robot have invented a coffee-serving robot. I wish I could tell you more about it, particularly why coffee; looks like it wouldn’t have any trouble just as easily serving beer, absinthe or cupcakes. Aving didn’t post any additional descriptions, just great photos, so I’m not even sure Cafero knows how to make the coffee it serves. Whatever, it’s a cool-looking semi-humanoid robot—with its with tray-friendly arms, a big wheely foot and a touchscreen face—so I decided to share it with you, in depth description or no. [Aving] galleryPost('cafero', 3, '');
