Mobile Devices

Posted Jan 17th 2008 4:11PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Media PCs
Last October, not much was known about Lumenlab’s elusive “Q,” but now it seems the firm’s all geared up to dish out the deets and accept obscenely large checks. The Qmax still maintains a 42-inch 1080p LCD display, but we now know that you’ll find an overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor (humming along at 3.3GHz), 768MB GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card by PNY (also overclocked), 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a trio of 1TB hard drives, the company’s own Hotwire powerline networking technology, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi and a fairly swank cooling system for good measure. Additionally, you’ll find HDMI, component and VGA inputs, 8.1-channel audio, optional HD DVD / Blu-ray drives and an optional $1,500 touch screen for those with plenty of cash to burn. Reportedly, this beast is handmade in Asheville, North Carolina and can be tweaked to your heart’s content, but the general configuration will set you back around $10,000. The only question left, it seems, is why?

Posted Jan 17th 2008 2:18PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
If the Disintegrator had you quivering in your combat boots, we’d recommend grabbing a bullet proof vest and having a seat for this one. Apparently, a fellow in California has dressed up a (legal) AR-15 assault rifle in Hello Kitty fashion for his better half, and while it’d be way too easy to pass this off as a fantastic Photoshop job, the pictures awaiting you in the read link definitely prove otherwise. Cute never looked so evil.

[Via CNET]

newVideoPlayer(”dysonball.flv”, 475, 376,”");The DC24 Dyson vac being introduced today is the first since the large DC15 to roll around the floor on a big orange ball instead of wheels, making it super maneuverable. It’s a little vac with a typically high price tag ($400 for DC24; $470 for its larger sibling, the DC25). In many ways it’s just another vacuum cleaner, but in its design, it does mark the return of James Dyson’s ball.

When you think of Dyson—if you think of the expensive British vacs at all—you probably think “suction.” After all, the slogan “doesn’t lose suction” is plastered on all of the Dyson vac marketing material. But James Dyson’s first innovations were not in vacuums, but in wheelbarrows of all things. Sir James built a wheelbarrow with a ball on it—the ballbarrow—adding stability to a traditionally wobbly device.As you can see in the video above, the DC24 pivots right and lift as you twist your wrist, allowing it to corner like it’s on rails. It has two tiny rear wheels, but they rarely touch the floor. It’s all ball.

Does that make it worth the money? It’s up to you—we’re not going to tell you it’s the best vac in the world. It’s just fun to see a product as part of an evolution, rather than some standalone brain fart. If you want to know more about Dyson’s early days (he designed boats, too, including something called the seatruck), have a look at this old Core77 interview. And if you want to know how his Airblade did against the Mitsubishi Jet Towel, well, just check out our Ultimate Hand-Dryer Battlemodo. [Dyson]

The popularity of the iPod naturally gave birth to the popularity of the iPod docking station. One of best that I saw at CES this year was the SoundWorks i765. The i765 is made by Cambridge, which is a company related to Creative, makers of the popular Zen PMP.

As an iPod dock and speaker, it definitely does its job with a built-in powered subwoofer that is “capable of filing any size room with rich, natural sound”. And even though I’m quoting from the press kit, I had an opportunity to verify this claim for myself. It’s true.

However, quality sound is only one of the i765’s amazing features. The user has the option to connect the i765 to a television using S-video. I was able to try it out, and it played a movie that I had on my iPod like it was a DVD.

By the way, the i765 can play DVDs, as well as CDs. It also has an AM/FM tuner with 16 FM and 8 AM presets. All of these audio and video functions can be controlled with the included wireless remote that can control the iPod as well.

You can purchase the SoundWorks Radio i765 for about $499.99 at the Cambridge SoundWorks site or at select Apple Retail Stores.

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Reason number 149 I won’t move to Texas: Time Warner confirmed it’ll be testing a new pricing plan in Beaumont that’s based on how much bandwidth you eat up. That’s right, hard caps. Totally made-up example, since they haven’t released details on the package tiers: Pay $50 a month for 500 gigs, and if you consume more, get slapped with probably obscene overage fees.

Supposedly, consumption-based billing is aimed at all you assholes downloading movies from BitTorrent—”heavy users of large downloads,” the purported 5 percent that swallows “up to 50 percent of network capacity” in order to improve network performance. But this is, at least partially, BS.

Everybody is using more bandwidth than ever, and that is going to continue ramping up with services like Netflix and iTunes that keep pushing these “large downloads” into the mainstream. So, it might only hit a small percentage of users really hard right now, but soon enough it’ll be hitting everybody, which is the real point.

At the same time, ISPs and telcos are lobbying hard against network neutrality, largely so they can slap the content providers themselves with higher costs for equal priority on the network with the ISP’s own services. In other words, they’re reaching into the cookie jar with both hands—from the top, and a hole they’re trying to cut into the bottom.

For now, Time Warner’s plan will only affect new users starting sometime in the next couple of months, and they actually give you tools to monitor your data diet, but if there isn’t a total revolt and pillaging of their home office, expect them to roll it out nationally and other providers to follow suit. [AP/Wired]

Posted Jan 17th 2008 9:49AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Video
When it comes to iPod docking alarm clocks, few can face-off with XtremeMac’s Luna. Now there’s the Luna X2. Normally we’d shred the puffery found in phrases like “world class iPod audio system,” “crystal clear display,” and a design meant to “complement any room’s decor.” However, their first-generation Luna was so well received that we tend to believe their boasting. For the moment, anyway. Your $120 (pre-order) gets you a pair of fully customizable, independent alarms, aux-in, AM/FM radio, and same audio performance found in the original Luna. Only now in a newly designed chassis which reflects the new iPod reality: the white iPod is dead.

Gallery: XtremeMac’s Luna X2 is ready to rule

Ladies and Gentlemen, the TwoDaLoo. Chat, exchange ideas, bond closer than you ever thought possible. And save water at the same time. Got your chequebook out yet? No? Why ever not, you sissies? The up-market version even comes with a TV and iPod docking station so you can spend more time catching up with…ahem…the mass media. $1400.00.

 The TwoDaLoo is billed as the world’s first toilet two people can use … at the exact same time. It brings couples closer together and conserves our water supply all with one flush. The TwoDaLoo features two side-by-side toilet seats with a modest privacy wall in between. An upgraded version includes a seven inch LCD television and iPod docking station.

Sharp’s looked, er, sharp at CES 2008 with its wireless PDA phone known as the PV250. You get a cool swiveling LCD display, a 1.8cm-thin QWERTY keyboard for thumb-typists, a 1.3 megapixel camera (meh) and a microSD memory card slot. What do you think of the design?

You can now access your business email on your iPod touch thanks to Intermedia who will be hosting Exchange customers, enabling them to access their business email via secure IMAP. Just make sure your iPod touch is up-to-date in the first place. Guess business executives now have another excuse to badger their bosses to purchase a bunch of iPod touch (or is it iPod touches?) for them to stay updated on the road at all times.

Apple boasts that the MacBook Air is the world’s thinnest notebook. The trouble with boasting is that people like to prove you wrong. We reported on the Mitsubishi Pedion, which, ten years ago, came in at 0.04 inches thinner than the Apple notebook.

CNET has since dug up an even thinner machine, the Sharp Actius MM10, which is an unbelievable 0.54 inches thick, soundly beating the MacBook Air’s roly-poly 0.76 inches, and managing to squeeze in an ethernet port, a PCMCIA slot and two (2!) USB ports.

Otherwise, though, it’s no match. The fugly black box, released in 2003, had a 10″ screen, a 15GB hard drive, a 1GHz Crusoe CPU and just 256MB RAM.

It did share a few features with the Air, though. In a contemporary review, Transmetazone said that “The touch pad is a nice change from those little dot’s in the middle of the keyboard”. It also shipped without an optical drive. The price? $1500.

Update: Thinnest notebook crown belongs to Sharp [CNET]

Sharp Actius MM10 1GHz Crusoe Notebook [Transmetazone]