Recent Apple patents hint at new features that could appear in future iPhones. Most interesting is a patent detailing haptic tactile feedback for iPhone that is, the ability for users to feel the virtual keys they’re pressing on the touchscreen.
The idea of haptic… Read More
BeautyMeter, the app which managed to sneak “child pornography” onto the iPhone, has been pulled from the iTunes App Store.
The application lets users upload pictures of themselves and then other people vote on their face, body and clothes (or lack thereof). The internet was set afire yesterday when it appeared that a 15-year-old girl had uploaded a snap of herself, clearly showing nipples and “partially nude at the bottom” as… Read More
Chinas Spring Airlines has a problem. It doesnt have enough planes to meet demand for its flights. And while it has ordered more planes, it has another solution: standing flights: for a lower price, passengers should be able to get on a plane like catching a bus, with no seat, no luggage consignment, no food, no water, said Springs president Wang Zhenghua. It will still be, he insists, very convenient.
By herding passengers… Read More
Matthias Ries has come up with an ingenious solution for carrying water bottles on bikes, especially for the accessory-phobic fixed-gear rider. The Bottleclip is a standard sized screw cap and a snap-on clip combined into one small plastic chunk. Screw in almost any normal PET water bottle and it hangs from the top-tube of the bike. It might not be quite as convenient as grabbing a bottle from a proper cage, but it is a lot easier to fit and wont spoil your fixies… Read More
Japanese company pedal ID caters to bike-lovers with small apartments, making tiny 1:9 scale bike kits, and what you see above is one of two special edition Transformers kits.
When assembled, the mini-cycle measures a mere seven and a half inches in length, but manages to have separate wheels, handlebars, chain and all the rest of the kit youd expect on a track bike (and no brakes, natch).
Id actually dig a full-sized Transformers bike, especially… Read More
A new application from AT&T brings voice activated, turn-by-turn navigation to the iPhone. Thats right, AT&T. Now you know that, take a guess as to how you might be paying for this application. A free thank you download to iPhone owners? No. An expensive but one-time payment of around $50? Nope.
AT&T, greedy-guts that it is, will charge you $10 per month for a rather pedestrian (ahem) GPS application, which makes it, along with… Read More
With Fourth of July celebrations this weekend, it’s time to stock up on beer, hot dogs and some tips on how to photograph fireworks better this year so your pictures don’t have to look like a child’s doodle.
Wired.com’s how-to wiki guide shows how you can get the best pictures of all pyrotechnics. It doesn’t matter if you are using a digital camera, a point-and-shoot or an iPhone. We’ve got it all covered.
Here are a… Read More
A photo ostensibly showing a 15-year-old nude girl has appeared in an iPhone app, highlighting Apple’s inability to safeguard its application store from prohibited content.
The image appears in the free app BeautyMeter, which enables people to upload photos that are then rated by others, who assign a star-rating to each other’s… Read More
Say hello to your latest personal navigation device: a netbook. Dell plans to introduce a GPS and Wi-Fi card that can be integrated into the company’s netbooks to turn them into gizmos that can offer turn-by-turn direction as well as any Garmin or TomTom.
“Smartphones already have GPS capabilities,” says Alan Sicher, senior wireless product manager at Dell. “We are now bringning it to netbooks so the devices know where… Read More
As quickly as gadgets evolve, their knock-offs do, too. Take a gander at some of the new counterfeit iPhones, which sport an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s proud creation.
iPhone knock-offs have come a long way in a short… Read More
There isn’t much to say about the blog “There I Fixed It”, other than that you should add it to your RSS reader immediately. It’s a gallery of user submitted hacks, the twist being that these hacks are disastrous, usually dangerously so, and many of them could quite possibly end in death.
The new car lock above is just hilarious, and the AT-AT caravan ladder… Read More
Energizer has launched an extremely useful range of products. XPal consists of various battery/charger packs which acknowledge that the batteries in your devices suck, and then do something about it.
The packs have lithium polymer batteries and come in various sizes and capacities. You plug in your cellphone, say, and while it charges from the mains, the battery pack in the XPal is also topped up. Later, when things run down, you can get another chage away from a wall-wart.
… Read More
Apple has taken the latest build of iPhone OS 3.1 in its gentle hands, climbed to the roof of the Cupertino campus and lofted the update to the winds, shouting “Fly, my little one! Fly!”
The beta version of the next update contains some new features, most of which will only be useful to 3GS owners. Developers at the Redmond Pie blog have played around with it and report the following tweaks:
This is the Solar Vest. If you didnt know that it was a solar vest, may we draw your attention to the giant, two-inch high letters on the back which spell out “SOLAR VEST”. This is, incredibly, touted on the product site:
In case your friends think this is only an ultra-fashionable vest, the words “SOLAR VEST” in big stitched lettering on the back let them know this is really a high-tech solar battery.
The vest, as… Read More
A Chinese publication has reported a rumor that a slimmer version of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console will be hitting stores July.
Anonymous sources told Economic Daily News that a lighter, smaller PS3 is due in stores July “to cope with extended summer vacation demands.”… Read More
After a mere nine months, I’m dumping my Hackintosh netbook (more precisely, selling it to my editor Dylan Tweney so his children can make better use of it). This is by far the shortest relationship I’ve ever had with any of my gadgets. Why the abrupt end? Oddly enough, the puny, low-powered… Read More
Palm is tightlipped about sales of the Palm Pre smartphone released earlier this month but one analyst claims the device is off to a great start.
About 300,00o Pres have been sold since the launch on June 6, says Edward Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. That’s the same number of phones sold in one month than Palm did in its entire previous quarter. Palm may have gathered about 70,000 Pre pre-orders in May, estimates Snyder.
An earlier estimate from analyst… Read More
The more cargo bikes I see, the more I want one. They’re immensely practical in any city, and can carry enough junk to make most car journeys pointless. But if you’re already used to a bike you likely think smaller — daily rather than weekly trips to the grocery store, for example. The cargo bike, then, may best be marketed at the guilt-ridden car user.
And this cargo bike might be just the one to pry you away from your gas-fuelled obsession. The Madsen… Read More
Doom, a game that has been ported to every device that contains a microchip, has finally come to the iPhone. And because the usual button-mashing, mouse-thrashing controls would translate terribly to the iPhones touch interface, the folks at Id software have redesigned the game.
Doom Resurrection is based on Doom 3, and departs from other Dooms in that it runs on rails. The game rolls you around through the levels, and youre left to aim the guns by tilting… Read More
Until a review unit arrives at Olympus Spanish PR Office (amazingly just around the corner from my apartment) Im slurping up anything and everything I can find on the web about the EP-1, or digital Pen camera. And its not just journalistic professionalism, either: As an amateur photographer, Im excited by a camera that could actually deliver on the promise of a compact digicam which works as well as an old film compact.
Non-DSLR cameras… Read More
Of these two Nikon rumors, one looks almost certain to be real, and one looks like a bad fake. First, the D300s, a camera which we actually expect to see announced pretty soon. The specs and a screenshot leaked already, pointing to a video-capable upgrade to the D300 with stereo sound and an SD card slot. This picture, though, looks like a poor piece of Photoshoppery, a simple grafting of the D5000’s microphone… Read More
What you see above is not a calculator. Or rather, its not the calculator you think it is. Rather, it is the latest software-only implementation of the classic Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, the 15C.
It gets better. This emulator runs on the iPhone, and is joined there by its little brother, the 12C (a financial calculator). Both calcs are photo-perfect representations of the originals and both run the same algorithms as the hardware versions to do the… Read More
This (fake) Nike ad is all kinds of awesome, but the thing that strikes me is that even parkour-busting robots wear hoodies,… Read More
iPhone 3GS owners (of whom there are already over one million, according to Apple) won’t be able to Jailbreak their smartphones to run unauthorized applications for a little while.
The Dev-Team, who regularly issues software to Jailbreak and unlock iPhones, is delaying the hack for iPhone 3GS. Why? Not enough people own the phone… Read More
Just a week after the release of Apple’s new iPhone, a few users have complained about the handset’s high temperatures, which in some cases are high enough to start browning the white plastic on the back of the phone.
Only a small… Read More
The movement toward adopting a universal cellphone charger that is, one type of charger that’s compatible with all cellphones is becoming a reality in Europe as soon as 2010.
Several major mobile manufacturers, including Nokia, Apple and Research in Motion, have signed up for the universal charger initiative led by the Group Special Mobile Association (GSMA), according to Reuters.
GSMA announced the initiative in February with a goal of pushing… Read More
The BBC convinced 13 year old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman and use it for a week. The first shock came just from seeing the thing:
[My Dad] had told me it was big, but I hadnt realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.
It gets worse from there. Wearing the 30 year old device on his belt (it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets) Scott felt embarrassed… Read More
This splendid video appears to be a viral ad for La Poste, the French post office. The problem is that it’s in French, a language which,… Read More
The iPhone 3G may, at least for some users, have an additional, undocumented feature: It can be used to toast bread.
Reports are coming in that the new, million-selling iPhone is suffering from overheating issues. The handsets are getting so warm, in fact, that the plastic cases of the white models are discoloring to pink. The picture above is from Ben on the French site Le Journal du Geek.
Its not just anonymous forum posters, either. Melissa J. Perenson… Read More
The iPhone 3.0 software update brought some great new features: search, cut and paste (at last) and background notifications. It also, for many users, brought a return to the bad old days of long, slow backups.
Everyone who upgrades their iPhone to a new OS will have a slow first backup, as the entire thing is redone from scratch. And having an automatic, mandatory backup is a good thing for a very lose-able portable device. But for me and many others, the bad old days… Read More
These CF/SD card adapters are either brilliant or bafflingly bad. The trouble is, we’re not sure which. The widgets let you take SD cards and use them in cameras which usually only accept the larger Compact Flash cards.
This could be useful, we guess, if you happen to have a lot of SD cards lying around. But we wonder if you’d want to. Neither of the two basic adapters (one for SD andone for microSD) lists read/write speeds, and in DSLRs,… Read More
The Touch Book, which first showed its pretty little face at the DEMO 09 conference back in March of this year, is just about to ship. But who cares, right? Its just another netbook, after all.
Well, no. The company behind the little computer, Always Innovating, actually lives up to its name. The standout feature is the detachable touch display, an 8.9-inch presure sensitive tablet which can live separately from the keyboard section. When joined… Read More
Not long ago the best smartphone you could buy was the iPhone. No contest. The uncanny combo of beautiful chassis, intelligent OS, super responsive touchscreen, and app store was unparalleled. There was no device on the market that came remotely close to touching the Jesus phone’s near mythical marriage of hardware and software.
Them days is over.
Now each major U.S. carrier has a device that can legitimately compete with the iPhone. To help you make sense of it, we took three major upstarts and stacked them up against the great white hype from Cupertino. Sprint with its Pre, T-Mobile with its G1, and Verizon with its Storm.… Read More
Talk about targeted marketing. A new ad published by Sprint (right) is forward enough to include the word “iPhone” in big, bold letters.
Similar to Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter ads, which bash Apple for its premium computer prices, the Sprint ad plays up the Palm Pre smartphone by stressing… Read More