Mobile Devices

Posted Feb 11th 2008 11:19AM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Digital Cameras, Displays
Oh yeah, we’ve seen multi-purpose digiframes before, but Mustek’s latest manages to handle five whole tasks only marginally well. You heard right — this minuscule device packs a 2.4-inch 320 x 240 panel for showing wallet-sized digital images along with an alarm clock, FM radio, built-in MP3 player and a thermometer. You’ll also find an MMC / SD expansion slot for loading up those precious memories, a USB 2.0 connector and a pair of skull-crushing one-watt speakers to boot. No price is listed, but judging by the design alone, we’d say that’s probably for the best.

[Via CNET]

Alcoshot Kit
Pay attention: this is the world’s smallest re-usable spirit kit. And contains all the necessary equipment and ingredients you need to make up to 120 (3 litres) of mixed fruit flavoured spirit shots (15% proof) in just five days. Just add sugar.

See price

Novatel just released its new Ovation MC930D USB modem that will hit theoretical download rates of 7.2Mbps as well as upload rates of 2.1Mbps, but don’t be surprised when you find that actual performance is way below the given figures. Setup is also a snap with the MC930D as it comes with automatic configuration, and you don’t even need to find any drivers since the flash memory already holds those. Each purchase of the Ovation comes wtih a splitter cable for that added power boost beyond a notebook’s USB port. Local carriers ought to be shipping the new Ovation sometime this month at a yet undisclosed price.

Yes, Google’s Android phones are now attacking in Barcelona.  The first out of the chute is this one from Texas Instruments for an unnamed vendor.  Word is this thing is blazing fast to respond, has nice integration with Gmail, Google Maps, Google searches.  To be sure, this is an early build lacking the update to the SDK that Google is adding, but it holds much hope for the future.

These basic phones were not online and the programs were less than full featured, but that is what you expect in an early prototype.  Word is we’ll see the first results in the 2nd half of the year.  Given high speed processors and a dedicated design team, Google may really have something here.  Stay tuned.

Read [Engadget Mobile]

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Posted Feb 11th 2008 10:43AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Cellphones
Sure, the folks in Redmond didn’t get their grubby mitts on Yahoo! (yet), but at least they picked up a little something for their mobile division, namely: Danger. According to news just crossing the wires, the monolithic company has picked up the Sidekick-creators for an undisclosed amount, and will subsequently fold the phone-maker into its mobile wing. Is there a Windows Mobile version of the Hiptop in our future? Survey says yes.

I am sure that this voice changing telephone will not give you a hard assed gravely smokers voice like my childhood friend Jeff had.  That guy had a full beard by the time he was fifteen and he sounded mean as sin on the telephone.  He would have made a good repo man.  The voice changing telephone, which is either for making prank phone calls or for nefarious purposes, will raise or lower your voice through an inbuilt voice modulation  unit.  All you need is a vacant land line jack and a spare $10.

Available where else but from Chinavasion.

Source: Gadget Spy

It’s been a while since I’ve used bar soap in the shower. No, I bathe on a regular basis and all, but I’ve found it much easier to just use a liquid soap, as you don’t really worry about dropping it, and it always seems to get a better lather. Sure, I could get a soap-on-a-rope, but I’d still have the lathering issue (and a lot of spare rope). Here’s a concept that would make it much easier to keep your soap off the ground, while making sure that you get lots of suds to clean with.

You have to give credit where it’s due, and soap should be noted as one of the few products that needs little packaging (usually recyclable paper) that just simply fades into nothing as it is used up. I’m aware that my method of using a liquid soap isn’t great for the environment, as it kills many fake plastic trees each year. This neat Soap Bank is a rather simple design which sticks to the inside of your shower and gives you a dish on which to place your soap. Once it has gotten down to a small chunk and is much harder to hold, just squeeze it through the slot into the hanging net. There you are free to lather it up without the worry of dropping it. We all know that the worst thing you can do in a shower is drop the soap.

For now this appears to be only a concept design. However, with the simplicity and usefulness of the product, I have little doubt that we’ll see something similar on the market in a short time.

Source: Yanko Design

Posted Feb 11th 2008 9:06AM by Sean Cooper
Filed under: Cellphones
Seeing as Mobile World Congress is all about the cellular experience, we weren’t too surprised to bump into some Android goodness while here. Texas Instruments had the handset you see above — from an unknown vendor — to demo the OS running on an OMAP 3430 at 500 MHz. The interface is dead quick and rather glorious, and while we had no internet connectivity on it, we still were able to have a peek at various applications — check the gallery for more photos. NEC / Wind River were also showing off an Android prototype platform running on a Medity2 testbed — also at 500 MHz — though it’s a pretty early implementation and was pretty wonky. Interestingly, neither of them had functional input in the browser, so while the NEC version was online, we couldn’t point it anywhere useful. Radio types in the devices were GSM but we expect they’ll likely have HSDPA once they finally land in our hands. In a few words, we like what we see.

Update: There seems to be a minor issue with how the gallery is displaying — if you want to see all 46 gorgeous pics, just click on one of the photos.

Gallery: Google attacks: Android at Mobile World Congress

The LG KF510 is a slim slider phone offering a 3 megapixel as well as the following features:

* 11mm (.43″) thick
* metal frame
* tempered glass display
* available in two color schemes, Stardust Dark Gray and Sunset Red
* MP3 player
* LG’s advanced tactile touch technology
* contextual buttons that change based on the current activity

Via MobileBurn.

I have been busy sorting out several nagging little problems recently. Firstly, I was battling with my own Blog hosting at Jason Slater Weblog after an unfortunate incident with the virtual server which caused the hosting platform to stop working. Fortunately, after a great deal of digging around in search engines (and an awful lot of Goggling, see Are you Goofling, Goggling or Gooping?) I managed to get it working again and it’s always surprising when the problem turns out to be something quite simple as I explain in How my Linux network unreachable problem got fixed. Secondly, our first proper VISTA machine went into operation recently, in our graphic design studio, and trying to get fonts transferred from the old XP platform posed a bigger challenge than it should. Have you ever had trouble installing fonts under Vista from a network share? There is a relatively straightforward work around to cure this problem but I’m sure there will be many more VISTA adventures in the months to come especially with SP1 on the horizon. Then of course there was Wireless woes - change the channel where our wireless access point has been misbehaving but a small configuration change kicked the problem into touch.

I am still considering the Dell Vostro after my previous post “the low cost Dell Vostro” but I haven’t encountered many people who have implemented them yet. If you are unfamiliar with the Vostro range they are a range of laptops and desktops from Dell which are designed with the small/medium enterprise in mind (with a low price point to match). My plan for the next few months however is to try and make real progress with our Sharepoint installation after considering whether Sharepoint is the way to go? There are a number of open source platforms for content management based systems, intranet systems and document management systems but Sharepoint really looks like it could make a huge impact in our business - I see it as an evolution of data management from simple user based shared folders to something that makes more sense of the information presented to it.

On a lighter note, the boys at the Abbey have been busy as Monk and his IT Junk not only reached his 100th cartoon panel but also moved to a new hosting platform at http://www.monkandhisitjunk.com./

Finishing on a tip, if you are curious about your broadband throughput then you can use an interesting online checking service that will let you Test your Broadband speed from and to various different servers around the globe. Have a great week.