GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

If you think Intel chips are just for PCs, take a look at this touchscreen kiosk that the company has created for retailers.

The hulk of metal, plastic and glass looks like a Star Trek prop but it promises to replace the traditional CRT monitors with green-tinted screens that are still at the check out point in most stores.

The kiosk tries to bring the best features of online shopping, such as recommendations, history and easy check-out to retail stores, says Ryan Parker, director of marketing and architecture. We first wrote about this last year but Intel had a polished and slicker-than-ever demo ready Wednesday.

When a customer swipes a card or slides their purchase across the horizontal screen, the display will show the price and payment options –which include the option to pay by cellphone. As you scan the items, the kiosk also makes recommendations on what else you can buy and gives you a quick snapshot of it.

The entire kiosk is powered by Intel’s Core2Duo processors and it uses a solid state drive that helps the overall system work faster and consume less power than existing registers. The chips also include Intel’s vPro technology, a virtualization technology that Intel builds into the chip itself, to make it secure and easy to manage.

The whole set-up is pretty neat, especially when you compare it to the self-check out counters at a Safeway or Lowes. But I can also see something like this potentially slowing down the check out process and longer lines at exit are not something consumers want.

Intel says it retailers don’t have to buy this whole idea as it is. They can pick the pieces they want and integrate it into their existing stores.

Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

Source:wired.com

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Pay & Sit is yet another device to drive the poor from shared public spaces and let them instead be monopolized by apple-munching, mineral-water-sipping yuppies. Pay & Sit is a park bench dreamed up by designer Designer Fabian Brunsing. When at rest, it becomes the porcupine of the street-furniture world, deploying vicious metal spikes to keep soft rear-ends away. Only when a 50-cent coin is dropped in the slot do the spikes lower mechanically and offer up a smooth, comfortable surface.

Even the office-goers aren’t welcome to linger or dilly-dally in their relaxing: After a short interval, an alarm sounds, closely followed by the spikes popping back out. The message is clear: You sit, you pay.

If the Pay & Sit were ever to make it into the real world (unlikely, as this design is already a couple years old), then bums would have yet another sob-story designed to separate us from yet another few quarters: “Spare some change, guv’nor. I haven’t sat down for a week.” And then of course, there are bound to be people who find this new arrangement very comfortable indeed.

PAY & SIT: the private bench [Vimeo via Neatorama]

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Source:wired.com

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The iPad clearly needs a camera. Maybe not the fancy 5-megapixel, hi-def-shooting camera in the iPhone 4 – after all, who wants to hold a big slab up to snap photos? – but something for grabbing basic images would make Apple’s tablet way more useful.

Unless you want to wait for v2.0 next year, a case would be the only way to add a camera, and that’s just how Chet Rosales has managed it with his iPad Cam-Case. The concept case has an ugly fat strip up the side which has a camera at its top. This camera flips in its mount to fire forward or back, depending on whether you are videoconferencing or just snapping pictures.

Just think for a moment how useful this would be. Apart from Skype (sometime the only time I still wake my MacBook at weekends is to chat to my parents) and the usual quick snapshots, the big-screen iPad is perfect for augmented-reality applications, scanning and organizing business receipts (I still didn’t do my expenses from this year’s CES. Maybe with this I would have) and general photocopy duties: Being able to snap pictures of, say, your mom’s best brownie recipe and read it back full sized would be great (and fattening).

Chet’s cam-case is a concept, but we see no reason why such a thing couldn’t work: Apple lets add-on GPS units talk to apps as if they were built-in, so why not this? Clean up that design and I’d buy one right away.

iPad Cam-Case Product Design & 3-D Renders [Coroflot via Yanko and Laorosa]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

We knock Nokia’s premium line of Vertu cellphones not because, deep down, we really love them, but because they are cynical cash-ins, phones devoid of all but the most basic features priced to appeal to the moronic consumer who equates high price with high status.

So Norihiko Inoue’s concept design neatly sums up the whole Vertu scam. Described by Inoue as a “celebration of empty space”, the design is literally a shell with nothing inside. The conceit is that, sometime in the future, components will be so small that they can fit into the skin of a phone-sized handset. After all, unless you are Derek Zoolander, there is a lower practical limit to the size of a cellphone.

The buttons and screen rest on thin strips of shiny plastic which wrap around the air inside. Think of it as a real-world wireframe model. We have no idea if Inoue’s choice of Vertu was intentional, but if so, this is probably the most satirical concept design we’ve ever seen.

Design Launches ]

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In The Matrix, machines enslaved humans in womb-like pods and used their collective energy as a main source of power. A Japanese company is in the process of creating the next generation of batteries by using a similar principle of self-generating energy. But don’t be scared.

Murata Manufacturing has only created a thermoelectric device that turns heat into electricity, an innovation that could eventually lead to self-powered gadgets. So thankfully, this won’t involve any evil, sentient robots or even an overwrought performance by Keanu Reeves.

Murata placed two ceramic semiconductors at opposing temperatures (in a single device) to create electric currents. One is heated to 90 degrees °C and the second is cooled to 20 degrees °C — when a metal plate connects them, the temperature gradient creates a very small electric current (about 10 milliwatts.)

The expectation is that these types of devices will be able to push larger currents without heating up or bursting through surrounding electronics in very small packages.   

Currently, this device creates about 39 milliwatts of power per square centimeter at 360 degrees Celsius. That’s barely enough to run small time fan (much less a Big Ass Fan or a few hours of a mid-range laptop), but it’s a harbinger of battery power to come (we hope).

‘Recycling’ energy sources, like the heating of a gadget, for the benefit of the consumer is the type of resourceful idea that we expect many companies will working on for the next few years.

Lead photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

Posted under Gadget Reviews