GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

For a four-week period, I’m awarding one Leatherman Freestyle CX to the Gadget Lab reader whose comment best contributes to this site.

This week’s winner is “heroisum,” whose comment on the potential of an Apple tablet adds the hope that tablets will help save magazines and newspapers from extinction. “We need something that can replicate an actual page of content design cues included,” heroisum writes.

That’s a debatable point, to be sure. And heroisum wins for “comment of the week” not because we agree, but because this is a thoughtful, personal comment that advances the argument.

The prize is a Freestyle CX (above), one of the smallest tools Leatherman makes. It’s got a pair of pliers and a hard, 154CM stainless steel blade, and that’s about it. It fits nicely in your pocket, feels good in your hand and looks cool. Thanks very much to the Leatherman company for donating these as prizes.

There are two more weeks, so keep those comments coming. And as a reminder, here’s Gadget Lab’s comment policy.

Runners-up for comment of the week:

• Gadget Lab is patronizing to “ignant people in ‘third world countries’”
• Greenpeace activists are not terrorists
• An Apple tablet would kill the Sony eReader, not the Kindle
• Some more ways Nokia doesn’t get it
• A folksy bluegrass country tale about peeing over a fence

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Apple has released a minor software update for iPhone, patching a security flaw revealed just yesterday.

Security researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner on Thursday revealed a memory corruption bug that could be easily exploited by crashing an iPhone with a series of invisible text messages, which would then enable a hacker to hijack the device. From thereon, a hacker could control all the functions on the iPhone most alarmingly, he could send more text messages to hijack even more iPhones.

The researchers demonstrated the SMS security hole at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. They also demonstrated the flaw by sending an attack to crash a CNET reporter’s iPhone.

On Friday morning, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1. Available through iTunes, the update “Fixes SMS vulnerability,” according to its description.

Apple moved even faster than necessary to fix the problem: Miller told Wired.com it took him two and a half weeks to discover the exploit. A hacker “really smart and lucky” could take a few days to replicate the attack, but that’s unlikely because “not many people in the whole world” have these skills, he said.

“Still, it just takes one bad guy a couple of weeks, and every iPhone could be attacked,” he told Wired.com in a phone interview.

Nonetheless, Jonathan Zdziarski, another iPhone security researcher, said he felt Miller sensationalized the problem with this stunt. He noted that many devices have vulnerabilities “in the wild” that nobody has exploited, and it’s unlikely a hacker would’ve devoted much energy to replicating Miller’s SMS attack, because there isn’t much to gain beyond annoying iPhone users.

“Every time we find a bug it’s been there for a year or more,” Zdziarski said. “At the very least it’s been six months, maybe longer.”

Miller acknowledged that the iPhone’s SMS weakness has probably existed for years; he first discovered the flaw in iPhone OS 2.0, which launched in 2008.

“The problem has been in the phone for year, but no one’s known about it,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “Now that it’s out in the open, [Apple] can fix it.”

Apple did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Like an aspiring indie band, the Cybraphon has many instruments, plays them on an irregular schedule, likes to have an audience around it — and obsesses over comments on its blog, the number of friends it has on Facebook and how many fans follow it on MySpace.

The difference is that it is a handcrafted musical robot and one whose emotion meter swings from delirium to desolation based on its online popularity at any given moment.

“The Cybraphon has an almost egotistical desire for fame,” says Simon Kirby, one of the creators of the robot.

When the needle hits rapture, the Cybraphon’s built-in orchestra of mechanized acoustic instruments clang in harmony to belt out an upbeat tune. But without online attention it slips into dejection and spews out a sad melody.

Three U.K. based artists — Kirby, Ziggy Campbell and Tommy Pheron — built the robot over eight months using a 5,000 grant. It’s a mechanical marvel that stuns with its attention to detail and construction. An antique wardrobe houses more than 60 robotic components including musical instruments such as cymbals and an organ as well as electronic parts including a PC and a controller. Kirby and his colleagues first created a sketch of what they wanted and then sourced the parts from antique stores, junk shops and donations.

The Cybraphon’s emotions are accessible via a Twitter feed but also appear on a on a 100 year-old galvanometer housed in the wardrobe (pictured above).

Kirby says the Cybraphon is devised as a “tongue-in-cheek comment on people’s obsession with online celebrity.” And it is almost Julia Allison-esque in its quest for atttention. The device scours the web all day looking for mentions of itself and tracking how many friends it has on Facebook and MySpace.

“It is happy when it feels its popularity increases but is miserable if it is being ignored,” says Kirby.

The musical instruments inside the wardrobe include an Indian classical instrument called a Shruti box, an organ and cymbals. But they had to be tweaked to play on their own. The team attached a motor-driven crank to the drives of the Shruti box and modified it with 13 robotic servos. The organ was retro-fitted with robotic keys while a fan pumps air through it. Cybraphon includes 12 chimes that are struck by suspended solenoids and percussion instruments that are hit by beaters attached to motors. A custom made vinyl record is cued to play through antique brass gramophone horns.

The Cybraphon also has infra-red based motion detectors to sense when there are people around it. It then comes alive, playing the music that is driven by its current mood.

“The Cybraphon is switched on all the time but it really wakes up when someone walks up to it,” says Kirby.

The brain of the system is a Macbook Pro notebook hidden inside one of the drawers of the wardrobe. “That, a few Arduino boards and lots of wire,” says Kirby.

The computer runs software written in Python and MAX/MSP to monitor the web and update Cybraphons emotions according to its rate at which its popularity is changing. “The software takes email alerts from Facebook, Google and so on, processes them and compares the current activity to that in the last 24 or 48 hours to calculate the rate of change,” explains Kirby.

But no matter how much attention the Cybraphon gets, it always eventually slips into depression, says Kirby. That means online attention could cheer up the Cybraphon in the short term but once the initial excitement dies down, the robot is disillusioned. “We modeled it on an insecure, egotistical band,” he says.

Though the Cybraphon’s current mood is accessible via Twitter, and you can follow it on Facebook or MySpace, its music is not available online. However, you can watch a demo video of it below.

“A streaming feed, although perhaps a nice idea, is possibly too literal,” says Ziggy Campbell, one of the creators of the Cybraphon. Regular bands don’t stream live performances all day long and neither does Cybraphon. It keeps things more exclusive.”

The Cybraphon will be shown at the Inspace gallery in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Art Festival in August.

Campbell says the Cybraphon’s continued existence amuses him. “Bands by their very nature tend to be volatile and prone to implosion,” he says. “I’m surprised that the Cybraphon, a highly neurotic beast with some questionable electrical wiring, hasn’t hit self destruct yet. ”

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

See more photos of the Cybraphon

A closer look at the Cybrphon galvanometer

Artist’s sketch of the Cybraphon

The Cybraphon on display at the Inspace Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland where it will have its first showing from Aug. 5 to Sept. 5

Additional photos of the Cybraphon on Flickr. (Remember just visiting the page affects Cybraphon’s mood!)

Photos: Cybraphon

Posted under Gadget Reviews

This is the Axixa, and here in Barcelona, we need it. The ceramic, water-stain shaped device is a public urinal. It even comes in pee-yellow.

Public urination is a big problem in my hometown: hordes of drunken tourists, all filled up with nowhere to go. Bars wont let you use the restrooms unless you are a customer, there are almost no public toilets (a few porta-potties at the beach is about the size of it), and because the locals have some taste, there arent even many branches of McDonalds, the default public bathroom for much of the world.

The Axixa is a design by Mexican Miguel Melgarejo, and could be deployed cheaply and easily on any city wall. Inside there is a traditional U-bend water trap leading to a drainage pipe. The outside could actually be any shape, but a yellow streak of piss seems appropriate enough. But would people use them? If you are desperate enough to pee in the street anyway, we doubt youd be too embarrassed to use the Axixa instead. I just hope that the local government sees this and turns the design from concept into reality.

Axixa, a hygienic way of peeing on the walls [The Design Blog]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

We think weve just seen the perfect hackintosh machine. This little iiView A2 netbook, from the Singapore manufacturer of the same name, will ship with a copy of Vista and be eligible for an upgrade to Windows 7. But the tiny machine looks so much like a mini-MacBook Air that its begging to have OS X forced onto it.

Inside, its just another netbook: Atom 1.6GHz processor, 320GB HDD, and Intels 945 chipset. Outside, things start to get a little more interesting. A 12.1-inch screen is larger than you normally find on a netbook, running a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. The usual VGA-out is replaced by mini-HDMI, and the mic and headphone jacks are combined, just like a MacBook. Stranger still, these ports are hidden inside a flap, also like the Air. The price for this white MacBook clone is a reasonable $470, and it even has a removable (six-cell) battery.

The only thing that needs to be known is will it hack? Some netbooks are better than others as FrankenMac projects. Were looking forward to seeing just how compatible the A2 might be. And one more thing: The otherwise annoying Flash-based site plays the five digit tune from Close Encounters. Dork-tastic!

Product page [iiView via CNET]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Ill huff, and Ill puff, and Ill blow your house in! So said the rather nasty wolf to the Three Little Pigs, right before eating two of the poor little porkers. These foolish creatures chose to build their houses from sticks and from straw. The idiots. But could a puff of air really topple a house, even one made of old hay? Jem Stansfield, last seen using a vacuum cleaner to scale a building, decided to find out.

The video shows a Vortex Cannon, which fires out a pulse of spinning air at 200mph. When slowed down with a high-speed camera, you can see a ring hurtling towards the hastily constructed houses. This ring is in fact a 200mph cloud, formed from moisture condensed from the air itself.

So, how did the piggies homes fare? Poorly, Im afraid. The cannon even manages to blow the brick house in, wiping the smug look off that last little pigs pink face and resulting in an unexpected third course for the wolf.

Vortex Cannon! – Bang Goes the Theory Preview [YouTube/BBC via Geekologie]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Watch out, Flip, Kodaks in town, and hes agunnin for ya. Kodaks new Zi8 pocket video camera comes in at $20 less than Flips Ultra HD and manages to beat it in almost every way. The Kodak shoots 1080p, the Flip just 720p. The Kodak has built-in image stabilization (electronic, not physical), a microphone socket and an SD card slot for adding up to 32GB of memory (although it ships without a card in the box and just 128MB internal memory). The Flip doesnt. The Kodak even has ther Flips trademark flip-out USB plug and snaps five megapixel stills.

In short, if you were thinking of buying a Flip Ultra HD, you should be taking a long look at the Kodak instead. Heck, Kodak even hired a designer this time and made the camera look nice, something the company hasnt done for a while. $180, available September.

Product page [Kodak]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Sadly, DIYer Iwan Roberts has posted very few details on the making of these wonderful coconut headphones (or coco-cans, as we like to call them), but we can infer plenty from the picture.

Iwan made these custom headphones for a friend (Do not want to see them go, he says) from a couple of coconut halves, a pair of what looks like Panasonics already excellent RP-HTX7 retro-monitors, and a whole lot of twine. Were sure they sound great, but better, theyre probably the best smelling pair of headphones ever.

Product page [Dau Gi Bach via Make]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Czech hacker Josef Pra took a look at his useless three-cell MSI Wind battery and wondered why it didnt have a USB socket in the side. Surely it could power smaller, less thirsty devices than a netbook? After popping the case with a knife, he discovered that there was actually plenty of room left inside. Enough room, in fact, for a USB port and a voltage regulator.

It turns out that there is enough power in the 12 volt battery charge an iPhone twice, although of course you can use it with any USB-powered device. It also turns out that the power conversion, stepping down from 12 volts to 5 volts, generates a lot of heat, so Josef upgraded his passive-cooling device (a heatsink) to a bigger one, bringing the temperature down from a toasty 120C to a more manageable 70C, and punched through the stickers covering some existing holes in battery case for better air flow.

It looks like a simple hack, and damn useful too. As my wonderful and generous editor Dylan Tweney mentioned, it would be better if it worked with the battery still in the laptop, but still, Im going to give it a try with my own spare Wind battery.

USB iPhone battery pack from MSI Wind battery [Prusadjs. Thanks, Josef!]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

In this case, the definition of portable has been stretched slightly. The iConic 100 LED screen has more in common with a billboard than a television, with a surface area of 100m. The screen is actually high-def and can play back 720p video.

From there, the numbers get even bigger. The display is 12.8 meters long and 7.2 meters tall. Thats a 578-inch screen, if my math is correct, and the TV takes a half hour to set up once it has arrived. And how, you are no doubt asking, could this be called portable? Thats the trick. The Iconic comes on wheels. Giant, flatbed trailer wheels which hook up to a truck, making it technically portable, despite weighing 33,000Kg. It even comes with a generator so you dont have to find a socket to plug it in.

So, is this the worlds largest portable TV? Actually, no. Theres no built-in tuner, so really its just a big ol screen.

Product page [Adi. Thanks, ]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Nikon has announced three hot new products today, and if you have been paying any attention to the rumors, youll already know what they are. The biggest news is the new D300s, a video-capable update to Nikons top-of-the-range crop-frame DSLR, the D300. We also get a new entry level DSLR, the D3000, and a replacement for Nikons pro 70-200 zoom, called the AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm F/2.8G ED VR II.

D300s

So, whats new? A glance at the camera doesnt give much away. On the outside you see a camera much the same as the two-year-old D300, and from the front it is pretty much indistinguishable apert from the s. Round back, though, things have changed. The rear now looks just like the D700, with the memory-card hatch button gone, replaced by an info button. There is also a grille which covers the speaker for video playback and the welcome addition of a separate center button in the main control d-pad, plus a dedicated live view button.

The screen has also been improved, and is now the same 920,000 pixel model as found in the D700. Finally, there is a microphone socket hidden under the flap.

On the inside, the biggest change is video, coming in from the same 12.3 megapixel sensor as the old model. Itll shoot in motion jpeg format, like the other Nikon video-capable DSLRs, but also now in AVI, and itll do it at 24 fps and up to 720p. Also new is the ability to auto-focus while shooting video, using the slow but accurate contrast-detection method.

This video means youll burn through storage, and the D300s has an extra memory crd slot for you, adding an SD card to the existing CF. You can choose to mirror your images across the cards, use them consecutively or write, say, jpegs to one and RAW to the other, or still shots to one and video the other. Speaking of still shots, the D300s will now hit 7fps without an external grip (up from 6fps), and there is a new quiet shutter mode, which lets you rattle of shots without flipping the mirror back down between each of them.

In short D300s takes an already great camera, adds video and tweaks a few features. $1800, body only.

Product page [Nikon]

D3000

The second new camera is way down at the other end of the performance scale, although it manages to pack a lot in for such a cheap DSLR, and surprisingly doesnt have video. Priced at $600 with the 18-55mm VR kit lens, it costs the same as the D60, and you have to wonder why anyone would still buy the D60, especially as they share the same 10.2 megapixel sensor.

The differences: 11 point autofocus instead of just three, which also brings 3D tracking, Nikons name for spookily following a moving subject and staying locked on, a 3-inch screen (the D60 has 2.5 inches) and a new guide mode, which walks the user through the settings step-by-step.

This last looks great, especially in a camera clearly aimed at the first-time DSLR owner. You or I might spend hours, and a few battery charge cycles, digging through menus to discover what goodies lie inside. The normal user, though, is unlikely to stray from the green rectangle mode, so anything that stretches them and encourages experimentation is a good thing.

Product page [Nikon]

AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm 2.8G ED VR II

Quite a mouthful, huh? The new pro-zoom replaces the well respected but flawed 70-200 2.8 lens. And before you ask: yes, the vignetting has been fixed. The lens also gets a nano crystal coat to reduce reflections, and has seven (count em) ED elements to do the same thing. It also has upgraded vibration reduction (the VR II part) which gives up to four stops extra room before you start to get the wobbles. This combined with the fast 2.8 maximum aperture throughout the range means super low-light shooting. $2400

Product page [Nikon]

AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm 3.5/5.6G ED VR II

Finally, we have a new DX sized lens, the AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm 3.5/5.6G ED VR II, a superzoom with the new VR II anti-shake inside. $850.

Product page [Nikon]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Leicas long-time-coming S2 DSLR is about to hit the stores in the UK for a bank account-emptying 16,000, or around $26,000. And thats not even the top-end version. To get a sapphire-glass LCD screen and some gussied-up Platinum Service, youll have to drop another 3,100, or almost $5,100. To put that in some perspective, you could buy a Leica M8 and a lens for around the same price as the upgrade alone.

The camera looks sweet, though: 37.5 million pixels sit atop a huge 30×45mm sensor, a whopping 56% bigger than a full-frame sensor or rectangle of 35mm film. This is unashamedly a big, fat medium format camera, and it looks like a battleship, although it is actually smaller than a lot of pro 35mm DSLRs. The entire S range will launch in October, and you can see the full line-up of lenses and prices over at DP review. To give you a taster, the cheapest thing on the list is the battery charger, which will cost a ridiculous $420.

Leica reveal S-system pricing and launch date [DP Review]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

File this under “Dorktastic.” iRes Technology on Wednesday released its wearable mini camcorder, capable of recording up to seven hours of video and audio.

Called the uCorder, the gadget measures 3.5 inches long, one inch wide and half an inch thick small enough to fit in a shirt pocket or down Charlie Sorrel’s left nostril, which should help him keep his finger out for a few minutes. The cam shoots 640-by-480 video in AVI format; there’s also an option to record audio only as WAV.

Two models are available: $80 for the 1GB and $100 for the 2GB.

Product Page [iRes]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Security researchers plan to reveal a security hole that would enable hackers to take complete control of an iPhone with a text-messaging attack.

Security researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner will publicize the exploit Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, according to Forbes. The researchers said the hack involves sending a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that effectively hijack an iPhone. From thereon, a hacker could control all the functions on the iPhone, such as e-mailing, dialing contacts and, most alarmingly, sending more text messages to hijack even more iPhones.

How can you know if you’re being SMS attacked? According to Miller, one giveaway is if you receive a text message containing a single square character. If that happens, he suggests you immediately turn off your iPhone.

“This is serious,” Miller told Forbes. “The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone. Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”

Though many customers hail the iPhone as one of the most well designed and versatile smartphones, security researchers have criticized the phone for its weak security. For example, Wired.com recently reported on forensics researcher Jonathan Zdziarski’s discovery that the new iPhone 3GS’ data encryption can be cracked in a few minutes with free software. Because of this flaw, Zdziarski recommended against the iPhone being used by businesses.

Miller and Mulliner said they contacted Apple about the SMS exploit a month ago, but the company has not released a software update to fix the issue. Apple did not immediately respond to Wired.com’s request for comment.

Though the researchers informed Forbes of the SMS exploit, it’s worth noting they did not demonstrate it to Forbes. We’ll be convinced this is true once we see it.

For ongoing coverage of the Black Hat conference, read Wired.com’s Threat Level.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Apple is exclusively selling the new Eye-Fi Geo, a flash memory card with networking and geo-tagging capabilities.

Like previous Eye-Fi cards, the Eye-Fi Geo enables shooters to upload their photos over Wi-Fi to a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, or to a Mac or Windows PC on the same wireless network. What’s new about Eye-Fi Geo is it automatically geotags photos with meta data to identify where the photo was taken.

The Eye-Fi Geo card works with SD and SDHC cameras and can carry up to 2GB of data. The card should come especially useful for owners of iPhoto ‘09, which sports a new geotagging feature.

The Eye-Fi Geo costs $60 at Apple stores and Apple’s online store. Eye-Fi Geo can also be upgraded for $10 to share images through MobileMe and several other photo-sharing and social-networking sites, according to Macworld.

Product Page [Apple]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Spiderman, Spiderman, does everything a spider can! Including, it seems, using home-made vacumm gloves to stickily scale the walls of the BBCs White City building, a vertical drop of 120 vertigo-inducing feet.

In this case, Spiderman isnt the meek Peter Parker but engineer and TV presenter Jem Stansfield. Looking more like a low-rent steampunk Doc Oc than Spidey himself, Jem clanks his way to the top, in front of a cheering crowd. Theres even a dramatic slip a few yards from the summit.

How did Stansfield manage this trick, a stunt to promote his TV show Bang Goes The Theory? No, he wasnt bitten by a radioactive vacuum cleaner. Not quite. The suction is being supplied by an old hacked cleaning machine, though, and the pump is evacuating air from his plywood flippers. Its all delightfully King of the Rocketmen in looks, and if the series continues to be this good it might be worth a quick Mininova search for us foreigners. And as the Beeb warns, This stunt was carried out by trained professionals following strict safety procedures and should not be attempted or replicated. Thanks, Aunty!

Man climbs building with vacuum gloves [BBC via Geekologie]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

On the left, you see the E-Z Go Spine Extractor, its purpose: Removal of undesirable fish spine and other living things has never been easier! For immediate taste-pleasure and easy disposal.

The spine extractor, although authentic in both cheap design and Engrish product pitch, is a spoof. As is the rather handy looking box next to it, the Yu Wan Mei Device, which has been completed and is now available for sale. These parodies are what happens when the Onion gets into gadget marketing, and like anything the Onion does, theyre so close to the truth of our day-to-day gizmo-hunting life that a few tears of knowing pain slip between the mirthful drops from our laughing, watering eyes.

Click over to experience the dangerous joys of Metal Fun, fast-food snack bags filled with filings, shavings and other sharp shards. Or the Yu Wan Mei Loyalty Bracelet, the blurb for which is worth quoting in full:

Show your loyalty to Yu Wan Mei and its line of products in a high-fashion way! The bracelet looks so nice for men or womeneven the GPS chip inside is designed with an eye for style. Do not remove the Loyalty Bracelet.

Hot New Consumer Products [The Onion]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

This commercial product, the Cassette is Not Dead lamp, is an invitation to start a great DIY project. The 25 ($35) lamp is made up of old audio cassettes which are joined together by nothing more than string. In fact, so easy is it to construct that you can even remove and replace cassettes so they can be listened to (assuming you actually have something to play them on):

[Y]ou can play with it changing the tapes even with yours and listening all of them too.

See? Also available is a floor-standing version, which is essentially the same thing, forming a shade on a standard standard lamp. This costs a record-collection replacing 220 ($312), and could also easily be re-made with a bit of help form Ikea. Still, as inspiration, the beautiful lamps are priceless.

Product page [OOOMy Design]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Streaming media provider Vudu has partnered with LG to include its software into upcoming LG high-definition TVs. The move will get rid of the intermediary set-top box and allows consumers to directly watch on-demand content from the internet on their TVs.

“Smart TV’s are part of an exciting new industry trend,” says Alain Rossmann, CEO of Vudu. “Vudu is partnering with leading consumer electronics vendors to embed the new Vudu service directly into the TV, eliminating the expense and hassle of purchasing, installing or connecting another device to the TV.”

The new Vudu service delivered through LG TVs allows consumers to discover and watch high definition movies on-demand. The service will be available on upcoming models of LG’s broadband TVs later this fall.

Licensing Vudu’s software to consumer electronics makers such as LG though is a strategy that allows Vudu to go out of the box and focus on delivering the service. It’s a strategy similar to what GPS-navigation devices maker Dash had adopted. Dash started out by producing standalone GPS boxes with its software that offered services such as local search. But the company soon abandoned the hardware-based GPS systems and instead focused on licensing its applications and services to run on other products. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion acquired Dash earlier this year.

In the last two years, streaming media boxes that bring online movies, TV shows and content to the TV have become popular with consumers, though they are still a small fraction of audience that rents movies. Apple launched its Apple TV in 2007. Meanwhile, Roku, a company that started by offering $100 boxes in partnership with Netflix included access to content from Amazon.com earlier this year. Netflix rival BlockBuster also has a streaming video box available.

Vudu says its service differs from rivals in that it can offer movies in 1080p definition and high resolution Dolby Digital surround sound. Vudu also offers features such as instant fast forwards, rewind and instant start for all its movies. Customers can instantly buy or rent from the company’s library of movies with no monthly fees.

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Over at BoingBoing Gadgets, Rob The Boss Beschizza takes a Wiz on modern games. To be precise, he has reviewed the tiny, retro game-playing handheld console, the GP2X Wiz, and decrees it The best portable yet for retrogamers.

Im a retro-gamer. I used to beat all comers at Street Fighter 2 (SNES) playing with my feet. I once lent that same SNES and a copy of Super Mario Kart to an apartment full of weed-smoking stoner friends so they could practice and offer me more of a challenge (result, a thrashing for me). So Im well into the idea of putting these classics in my pocket, but for one thing…

The price. The GPX2, from Korean company GamePark, costs $180. This is steep, even on a million dollar per year bloggers salary. On the other hand, the machine has a 320×240 2.8 AMOLED touch screen display, a gig of memory and an SD card slot. It also runs a flavor of Linux, meaning that once I have laid out my $180, I can keep my cash and use emulators and hypothetical collection of legal ROMS. In short, $180 puts every old game, ever, on a handheld. Is this starting to excite you yet?

Gp2X Wiz Runs Retrogaming Rings Around Mainstream Rivals [BBG]
Product page [ThinkGeek]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

One well crafted pitch from Photojojo and were hooked. Heres the opening of the blurb which describes the Monsterpod: If there were a tripod equivalent to the hoverboard, the Monsterpod would be it.

Unbeatable. So what is it? The Monsterpod is a fat disc of viscoelastic polymer with a tripod mount up top. Screw on your camera, scooch the pod onto almost anything (bricks, glass, stone) and there it sticks for up to ten minutes, holding your camera steady for a quick low-light shot or self-portrait.

Viscoelastic Polymer is a material that acts like rubber honey once deformed it creeps slowly back into shape. Think Stretch-Armstrong, only more useful. The Monsterpod costs $30, and youll need to spend another $10 on the zip-up carrying case. This makes it a little more expensive the the other favorite mini-camera holder, Jobys Gorillapod, although the uses of each are different enough that you might want both. Maximum camera weight, 20oz.

Product page [Photojojo]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Apparently one of the most common, and therefore obvious, places to hide your valuables is under the bed. This means its the first place a thief will look. But if you have the BedBunker, it will make no difference he wont be able to open it anyway.

The BedBunker is a gun cache which sits under your mattress and infuses your dreams with manly, death-spraying action. Inside the 10-gauge steel box you can cram the bare essentials for survival: 35 rifles and 70 handguns. You can even take the optional castors to turn this into a rolling weapon-wagon.

Worried that things might get hot and the caps will start popping underneath you? The safe is fireproofed for 120 minutes, giving you time to get out before things blow. For the truly paranoid, we suggest just throwing a mattress inside and sleeping in the BedBunker itself (warning, air supplies may be tight). How much for this macho princess-and-the-pea accessory? $2,200-$4,000 depending on size. Infomercial below.

Product page [Bed Gun Safe via Uncrate]

Posted under Gadget Reviews

<< previous image | next image >>

It’s one of the few great archaeological mysteries of the world, and now a bunch of gadget-wielding geeks are going to try and solve it.

The tomb of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol empire and one of the world’s greatest and most ruthless emperors, has remained hidden for nearly eight centuries. According to legend, Khan died in 1227 near the Liupan mountains of China and is thought to be buried in the northeastern region of what is currently Mongolia.

Now a group of researchers led by University of California San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology, with funding from National Geographic, have embarked on a quest to find this ancient grave. Their secret weapon: an array of technological gizmos ranging from unmanned aerial vehicles to sophisticated satellites and 3-D displays.

“This is the first of its kind, says Mike Henning, a researcher at UCSD, a large scale expeditionary-type project that promises to open up new doors for technology.”

Hennig and the entire expeditionary team left for Mongolia earlier in July and will be there until the end of the month. They will do most of their work in an 11-square mile region in Mongolia flying two UAVs, directing satellite imagery and collecting data that will be processed at home later.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The drumbeat around Palm Pre’savailability on the Verizon Wireless network had been steadily getting louder in the last few weeks. And now Verizon has confirmed that Sprint’s exclusive stranglehold on the Pre is unlikely to last beyond the end of the year.

“We plan to offer the Palm Pre early next year,” Dennis Strigl, president and chief operating officer of Verizon told analysts on a conference call late Monday.

Palm made the Pre available starting June 6 exclusively on Sprint’s wireless network. The handset costs $300, excluding a $100 rebate on a two-year contract and has gathered fairly positive reviews for its design, ability to multi-task and offer an integrated contacts and browsing experience. Sprint and Palm haven’t disclosed how long the exclusive deal between the two carriers. Now it is certain that Verizon will get its hands on the device soon.

Verizon is also promising to offer other new handsets in the next few months. The company plans to refresh the Storm later this year, said Strigl.

There’s also an Android handset on the way. “Android is on our roadmap,” said Strigl. “We have a great device lineup.”

But will the combined power of the Pre, Storm and an Android phone at Verizon be enough to fight Apple and AT&T’s iPhone?

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

When a zipper shows up in mid-life crisis, there’s usually a private investigator outside a motel window with a telephoto lens.

But the only thing I was cheating on was my athletic destiny. Or I thought I was.

The zipper in this case was of the floor-to-ceiling variety, enclosing me in the oxygen-starved weirdness of an altitude simulation tent from Colorado Altitude Training. There, in the basement, wedged between the book case and my 7-year-old’s wooden railroad empire, I spent four weeks of not-so-restful nights trying to sherpa-charge my cardiovascular system for a road bike race up Colorado’s 14,420 foot Mount Evans.

Altitude-simulation tents are basically enclosures hooked to the back end of an oxygen generator, so they suck O2 out of your air instead of pumping it in. They don’t duplicate the air pressure difference — you would need a steel tank for that — but an athlete’s cardiovascular systems is still forced to work as if it were at altitude, causing the proportion of oxygen-carrying red blood cells to rise. The tents, which start at $4,000, are thus sold as a quick ticket to the “live high, train low” regimen.

“This is certainly the way to prepare for it!” Colorado Altitude Training CEO Larry Kutt told me. Kutt has no medical training, but he quickly sketched me out a program. Already acclimated to Boulder, I could ramp up the elevation quickly. He told me to start at 6 or 7 thousand feet and work my way up to 11 or 12 thousand. I would practically fly up Mount Evans. “The entire podium at the Tour de France [in 2008] was people using CAT equipment,” he exclaimed.

The tent CAT loaned me was one of the company’s higher-end models. Setup was simple but controlling the “low oxygen environment” was trickier. The unit delivers the oxygen-thin air in liters per minute. A hand-held meter gives the percentage of oxygen while a graph keyed to the starting elevation matches that percentage to an approximate altitude. But there is no oxygen level thermostat. Keeping it right meant waking up several times a night to check the meter and adjust the flow.

I took some “before” numbers into the tent with me. After a trip the Boulder performance Lab, I found my wattage at lactate threshold, the point where your body can’t clear lactic acid from the bloodstream, was 248, high enough to qualify me as “elite,” at least among 45-year-olds.

My VO2 Max (the amount of oxygen the body can process) was a respectable 51 liters per minute. If the tent increased the proportion of red blood cells, those numbers, and my performance, should go up.

After ten nights in tent, I upped my average speed on one 8-mile uphill ride by 1 mph, to 15.4 mph, shaving 1:32 off my best time, but that was perhaps due more to favorable tailwinds than anything else. On another climb, my best pre-tent speed had been 11.9 mph. A week before the race, after two weeks in the tent, I spun a disappointing 11.4 mph.

I went into the last week with growing doubts. I wasn’t sleeping well. With the iffy oxygen level controls, I would wake in the middle of some nights at the elevation equivalent of 13,000 feet. The next morning I’d wade through pedal strokes in a hangover-like stupor.

Two nights before the race, I decided to sleep tent-free. I wanted as much quality sleep and oxygen-aided recovery as possible. Turns out I needed it.

The Bob Cook Memorial Mount Evans Hillclimb starts at 7,555 feet and follows the highest paved road in North America, past the timberline and into the gasp zone above 14,000 feet. Pilots are required to carry supplemental oxygen a 12,500. And I’d been sleeping at 12,000.

But the morning of the race, disaster struck from the onset: a starting line snafu delayed my start by almost three minutes. I was crushed: All those sleepless, oxygen deprived nights in the tent were seemingly all for naught.

I still rode hard. For the first, comparatively flat, six miles, I tucked down on the drops and hammered, still thinking I might catch a lead group. By the time I got to the cruel hairpin where the real climbing starts, it was clear that would not happen. I kept pumping, leap-frogging from one group to the next, steadily suffering the grade. My time targets clicked by unmet. By the time I got to Summit Lake at 13,000 feet I had practically given up. The switchbacks through the otherworldly alpine expanse were numbing. At the finish line, I was despondent. Finishing at 2:46, I had missed my target time by 16 minutes. I attributed ten of those minutes to the chaos of the first 100 yards of the race, but I had only myself to blame for the other six.

I didn’t start feeling better until a week later when I went back to the Boulder Performance Lab. We were looking for the “after” results and we found them. They just weren’t what we expected. The difference was one watt out of 248. My VO2 max was up, climbing from 51 to 58, but my legs weren’t using that oxygen to any effect. I wasn’t faster. I wasn’t stronger.

But I was surprised.

Rick Crawford wasn’t. A Durango-based coach at Colorado Premium Training, Crawford has worked with ultra-elite athletes like Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer and Mount Evans record holder Tom Danielson. Crawford has “a lot of experience with tents” but says he doesn’t recommend them. “I have never asked a athlete to buy a tent,” Crawford says. “They just end up having them.”

Crawford discounts anything beyond a placebo effect, claiming that the low oxygen environment hampers recovery and robs the athlete of sleep, a primary component of any training program. “Why am I starving my athlete of oxygen that he needs to recover?” Crawford asks.

And even believers can be cautious.

Karen Rishel, a 44-year-old family practice physician, who races road and mountain bikes on weekends, had a custom tent made. She sleeps in it with her husband in their El Paso home. “All the advertisements say four weeks and it should make a real difference,” she notes. “I think it is cumulative and takes longer.”

Her experience in the first month matched my own. “For the first month that I was in the tent I would wake up in the morning and feel like crap, every day,” Rishel says, though in the end, she says, she got stronger and faster.

“A lot of people end up having an expectation that you are going to get tremendous results right away,” Rishel says. “It’s a long term journey with cumulative effects.”

That may be true, but I’m not sticking around long enough to find out. I bid farewell to the tent and returned to restful sleep. Turns out neither science nor body hacking nor a generous dose of tech were going to help me achieve a single minded two-wheeled fantasy.

I just couldn’t cheat on my athletic reality.

(Images by Beth’s Gallery/ Picassa, Colorado Altitude Training, and bicyclerace.com)

Posted under Gadget Reviews