Archive for the ‘Gadgets’ Category

Do not touch

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Do Not TouchYou may remember my confusion a few days ago over whether the TEAC MP-600 media player had touch screen functionality or not. French language site BestofMicro had mentioned it in their write-up of the MP-600, yet no mention of it was made on the TEAC website.

Anyway, I decided to get the word from the horses mouth, well at least TEAC’s. The long and short of it is that you may touch the screen but it’ll do bu**er all. So that sort of makes the MP-600 more of a run of the mill media player that’s a bit short on memory rather than a snazzy touchy feely one. How sad.

Picotux – The smallest Linux running machine

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

It seems that Picotux is the world’s smallest Linux running computer.
Its sizes are 35mm×19mm×19mm. Inside there’s an ARM7 CPU running at 55 MHz and an uClinux kernel 2.4.27 + Busybox 1.0.
Being this small, you might think the communication/connectivity part would have to suffer, but that’s not true.
It also has an 10/100 Mbps half/full duplex Ethernet and a serial port with up to 230.400 baud.
You may want to check the full list of technical specifications here.

The price may vary from ~100Euros (the cheapest) and it can go up to ~240Euros for advanced features. Aditional features can be bought as well.

Here’s a picture of it. What do you think?

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Digital Drawing Board

Monday, April 9th, 2007

This is what I call innovation. Back in my day we used a blackboard and chalk but it seems that future generations won’t have to get their hands dirty. This digital drawing board it’s not only clean and easy to use, as you can se it acts as a environment with predefined rules. Besides being cool this is a huge help when teaching physics classes or when you need simple animations to show your point.

Though it might take a while until we see this kind of hardware in the schools near you, it’s sure that technologies like this or derived from it are going to make our life better. What do you say about it?

The future of mobile phones

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

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Click to enlarge

I was writing earlier about the Nokia 888 concept phone, that got me thinking. It would be interesting to take a look at the direction mobile phones are heading so I searched around the Web and here’s what I’ve found.

What you see above is just a concept phone designed by Tao Ma, but it just might be the future also. As you can see the phone has no display so no text messages or internet access, but it does have a integrated MP3 player. The way I see it phones like this will be created in the future, as science evolves.

Electronic devices become more specialized and for ladies such phones that can double for a bracelet could be the perfect choice. Also businessmen would choose a device able to perform their daily tasks, as Internet connection, performing office tasks, etc. On the other hand young people would enjoy phones with functions similar to PSP or other portable gaming devices. The way I see it, the future has a phone for each of us.

Nokia 888 concept phone

Friday, March 9th, 2007

The new concept Nokia 888 is design by Tamer Nakisci, the Nokia Design Award, winner. And I say the award is well earned as you as you can see in the movie below. The phone is fully flexible and can take any shape, it’s even designed to ‘remember’ certain shapes ( some sort of presets), for example you can send a message to your boyfriend/girlfriend and make his/her phone take the shape of a heart.

Besides you can use the phone as a bracelet, make it turn into a clip-shape to carry it easily or make it ‘wave’ when somebody calls you. To do all this the battery is liquid-based an the display is flexible and servers as a touchscreen. With these features the phone will serve as a GPS device, PDS, alarm clock, electronic wallet and many more.

It all looks nice and high-tech but this is just a short preview of what technology has in store for us, phones like this won’t be on the market for at least a couple of years if not more.

Uber-geek’s dream PC

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

We all strive to own the coolest PC configuration. The coolest mouse, the coolest keyboard, a sound system to envy and so on. Well I was wondering what’s the dream machine for a computer addict and I’ve thought at something like this:

The main unit

We’ll start with the beginning, the case is supposed to be one of the main attractions of your system. There was a trend of highly sophisticated cases with neons and glowing fans, but that’s all over now. The new hype consists in components showing as much as possible, preferably mounted on a wall or floating in thin air as shown here.

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The Keyboard

Now that we’ve got over that we should cover the basic input, like a keyboard. But classic keyboards have many a problem, such as dirt getting between the keys, you have to bother your fingers with pushing buttons all day, not cool at all. What you really need is a small, compact, easy to use and to carry, Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard. It uses rechargeable batteries that last for 120 min, and it has a height of only 3.5 inches.

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The mouse

The mouse is not just a pointing tool, it’s the extension of your mind within the computer. Hence it must be perfectly adapted to your needs. Such mouse must be ergonomic, precise, and smart. The Logitech MX Revolution does all that and a lot more. It senses what application you are using and switches the scrolling mode concordantly, you can turn the wheel ‘click’ on and off and it has a neat Li-Ion battery.

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The monitor

A monitor must be large. This is the rule when talking about monitors now-days, large, slim and bright. Well the Athens Flat-Panel Monitor sure is large measuring 5 meters in width (that’s 5 ‘normal’ monitors) and it supports resolutions of 19200×2400 pixel. That’s HD and pure visual enjoyment. On the other hand it seems that it’s not the best commercial product as the company making them went out of business, nevertheless this is a must for your supersystem.

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The Sound System

Last but not least the sound system is crucial for the ultimate PC. The sound must not be a addon, it has to be am integrated part of your system. It has to be all around you and it has to provide the clearest sound for you to enjoy. Such immersion can be obtained only with a machine as the one showed below, that’s capable of putting you in the middle of the audio storm. Grace to Alpine.

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There you have it, the base for the ideal PC, I’m sure that you can find better examples for each category, but the main idea is the same. Watch out for the supercomputer!

Meet the phone that’s as good looking as the iPhone, but impossible to manufacture.

Sunday, February 4th, 2007
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My first impression was “Wow.”. Some time ago I’ve shown you some pics of Rune Larsen’s two concept phones, and I mentioned that the smaller one would be close to impossible to manufacture, with today’s technology. Well, Rune didn’t give up and he continued his designing, and now he released the “Crystal Phone”, which is amazing, but I don’t see any way it could be fabricated. On your right is a new picture of the Tiny Phone, all white and better designed than the first black pics. And below you can watch the Crystal Phone. As slim as a credit card, this is an awesome concept, but, unfortunately, it’s close to impossible to fabricate.

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I’m officially a fan of Rune’s work, and hopefully his designs will get more and more “doable” as time passes. Here are more pics of the Crystal Phone, this time in colour:

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