From the haze of renders, name changes and unflatteringly exposed prototypes emerges the best evidence that a real-life Art Lebedev Optimus Aux keypad is nigh. The sexy, CNCed body doesn’t look to have deviated at all from the proposed design, and the guts shouldn’t pose any challenges that haven’t already been overcome in the larger Optimus products. In other words, the Aux might be showing up on rich peoples’ desks sooner rather than later. [Optimus Project]
Only yesterday we learned of Olympus’s entry to the mid-range DSLR game with the E-30 and now the camera’s had its first hands-on over at DPReview. And it seems ok: the team liked the fact that it had many of the features of the pro E-3—like the 2.7-inch 230,000-pixel viewscreen and 1/8000th seconds shutter speed—while being a little smaller and having those “art filters” for real-time image manipulation. The pitch/roll correction system got a thumbs up too, as did its nine aspect ratio options. We’ll have to wait for a bigger hands-on to get the full skinny, but it looks promising for now. [DPReview]
The fundamental proposition of consumer technology is as follows: the closer we are to using the gadgets featured in the last 10 years of crappy spy thrillers and action movies, the more progress we’ve made. That’s how the Surface came to be, and how we’ve ended up with the fingerprint-grabbing, light-sensing LCD panel. AU Optronics has developed systems that can handle both without interfering with a panel’s display capabilities. While this tech is not likely to quickly replace the dirt-cheap light sensors that manage screen brightness now, LCD fingerprinting could add an interesting security layer for increasingly common touchscreen devices, among other things. [Tech-On via Gearlog]
We recently mentioned that Meizu’s M8 iPhone clonephone was really coming to the shops in China at the end of the year, but according to the head of the company, things’ll be happening a bit sooner than that.
Well, the election is over! Luckily, it was pretty clear from about two hours in who would be the winner this time around , so even if there were a couple of iffy voting hijinks, it wouldn’t be anything to take up to the Supreme Court. Still, some post-election voting humour never hurt anybody – check out this Rube Goldberg machine by some kids over at the University of California Berkeley and feel relieved that, unlike in 2000, it’s easy this year to laugh about this kind of stuff. [Thanks Roland!]
Japanese company Soken showed off a wall made entirely out of 12×12 inch, 0.1mm thick e-ink paper displays at the FDPI conference in Yokohama this week. Called “Twist Ball,” after the rotating fine particles the paper is made of that change when voltage is applied, Soken’s e-ink vaguely represented something made out of tacky Christmas wrapping paper.
Our Gizmo-Grow competition is well under way, but if you’re struggling to come up with some ideas to get the Giz name out there, here are a few that we came up with:
Sony has released a minor update to firmware 2.5 on the Playstation 3, which should be showing up sometime tonight. No. 2.52 fixes a test entry issue that some titles had and improves the “playback quality of some PS3 format software.” Users are already reporting that some things, like Trophies, are loading faster with the new version. [Kotaku]
It’s been less than two weeks since T-Mobile’s G1 hit shelves, and Android’s already been jailbroken. Folks over at the xda-developers forum discovered an easy way to start telnet on the device, log in as root and get full system access and read and write. While the Googlephone is nowhere near as restricted as the iPhone, there were apparently still a few walls that needed to be broken down and now, anything goes. Check out modmygphone for the full list of jailbreak instructions. [modmygphone - Thanks Kyle!]
Remember that WD TV device we showed you the other day? It’s now available in Australia. I know – it’s like a world record or something for us to get a product like this within days of the US. Somebody call Guinness.
Anyway, the thing will set you back $199, connect to your TV via HDMI and playback all that illegally downloaded content from bittorrent you’ve got stored on an external hard drive. It’ll also do photos and music, and comes with a cheap-looking remote control. Still for $199, you can’t expect a frickin’ Harmony remote, can you?
