Mobile Devices

Art Lebedev said it was shipping the Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard, and it wasn’t kidding. Ryan Block over at Engadget has got one of the first models, and runs us through the easy-peasy configuration (using the still-beta Mac software). The lust-fest can begin. The keyboard looks incredible, and having the keys show the glyphs available when a modifier key is pressed is worth the entry price (well, perhaps half the entry price).

Watch out for Ryan’s rendering of the Engadget logo, scrawled across the numerical keypad. Let’s just say it’s a good thing he’s a writer.
Video: Optimus Maximus install, setup, Configurator, and use! [Engadget]

Fine, Sony. Don’t listen to us and others who care about digital camera image quality. Go ahead and cram yet more unneeded megapixels into a compact camera, in this case the newly announced DSC-W300 (available in May for $350), which boosts resolution to a rationality-shattering 13.6 megapixels. Just don’t crying to us when customers start asking why their images don’t look so good when viewed at full size.

We are amused, though, that you decided to add a scene mode called "Real," which supposedly minimizes post-capture processing. Makes us wonder if previous models shouldn’t have included more realistically labeled scene modes such as "Oz" and "Unbelievable Frickin’  Head Trip."

New Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W300 Features 13.6 Megapixel Resolution  [Cameratown]

Add one more nagging time-sink to your Twitter account: your houseplants. Botanicalls is a system which monitors the moisture level of your plants and lets them telephone you when they need water. Voice, though, is so 2005, which is why you can now add your plant to your Twitter list and have it message you when it’s thirsty.

The principle is simple, but you’ll need to be a confident circuit-maker to get the kit up and running. Two nails are pushed into the soil. When the humus is wet, a current flows between them. When that current drops, the Arduino-based circuit will connect to the Botanicalls network via a built-in, low-powered Zigbee radio and send you a Twitter update. It’s up to you to actually water the plant. If you have arranged for a neighbor to take care of your flora, however, you can still keep tabs them: the plant will Twitter a “Thank you” when watered.

Product page [Botanicalls via Crave]

A brilliant group of people have developed an online game designed to help the environment and fight poverty in the real world by turning game rewards into real-life help for social and environmental causes: Glupod - the first Video Game to deliver direct emotional fulfillment to the player.

The game, called Glupod, will debut worldwide on May 30. Glupod players will be able to provide food for a starving child in Africa, protection for a whale species going extinct or offset carbon emissions and help fight global warming. In a nutshell, Glupod gives gamers a variety of real-world causes to choose from and enables them to convert their in-game winnings into actual help for that cause.

For more detail please watch the below video and visit official Glupod website. Enjoy the game!

Meet Weemie, the first glupod angel, Katrina and Melina, and see how the three of them can make this world a better place.

Link

Can your fancy iphone squish up into a compact, portable ball or stretch out into a full-sized keyboard? That’s part of the promise/tease of a newly announced joint nanotechnology project between Nokia and the University of Cambridge. Called Morph, the technology is working on turning a fiber similar to spider silk into the basis for all manner of flexible, shape-shifting gear.

Morph-based handsets, besides assuming numerous forms, theoretically would clean themselves, recharge by solar energy, be transparent where that helps and much more. Nokia hopes to have handsets incorporating Morph on the market in seven years. Watch the video for more.

Nokia Uses Nano Tech For ‘Morph’ Concept cell phone [Information Week]

Posted Feb 25th 2008 12:02PM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
Intel’s had its new processor plans slipped out to the public thanks to Sun, according to DailyTech. Details on the 6-core (!) Xeon Dunnington, as well as the kinda-sorta hush-hush Nehalem were apparently leaked out onto Sun’s public web server over the weekend, including plans for the new Xeons to overtake the company’s Tigerton CPU line. The Dunnington processors will have a 16MB L3 cache shared by all six cores, and will be pin-compatible with the Tigertons, thus making integration with your Clarksboro chipset slightly less painful… by being possible. The Nehalem also got the spy treatment, with news that it will not only replace the Penryn line in Q4 ‘08, but will also be the first time in 18 years that Intel includes on-die memory controllers. If this sort of thing is important to you (and we think it may be) hit the read link and get all the juicy details.

Sony has recently upgraded their D3000 with the new Bravia D3500 series which includes a number of upgrades and enhancements over the previous models, brining the overall spec up to a higher end. The Sony KDL40D3500 is a middle range 40-inch LCD HDTV with a full HD 1080p screen for the highest HD format, offering some great features at a very reasonable price.

The Sony KDL40D3500 might still cost more than some other manufacturers, but they might not be so well equipped as the KDL-40D3500. The KDL40D3500 provides a great high to middle range 40-inch full HD HDTV at around £750 ($1500), much cheaper than their KDL40W3000.

The 40-inch Sony KDL40D3500 provides many great new features commonly only found on top of the range models, such as a full HD screen, 24p support for true film frame rates, a high dynamic contrast ratio of 16,000:1 for superior colours and black levels. Along with Sony’s Bravia Engine to enhance image quality, contrast and reduce noise, and Live colour creation provide very impressive image quality. TrustedReviews say, another benefit of the KDL40D3500: its exceptional sharpness. Fine details are rendered with total, noiseless precision, giving the image exactly the sort of ‘snap’ we love to see with our HD stuff. Plus the image tends to look more three-dimensional thanks to all the background detail that’s resolved.

Posted Feb 25th 2008 10:29AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Portable Audio, Wearables
Oakley’s Split Thump mp3 player sunglasses’ fashion offenses are too numerous to mention, and we’re not sure this is helping matters. According to the folks over at Tech Digest, the wrap-around music players will be getting a very special 500-piece, 1GB Jamiroquai edition, replete with purple and white camouflage design and two new remixes from the disco-aping singer’s 1993 album Emergency on Planet Earth. Grab your glasses, get out your floppy hat, slip on some Mickey Mouse gloves, and crack open a bottle of Vicks VapoRub — it’s time to party like you don’t know any better.

Remember the Meccano Spykee that was seen at CES last year? Well, it still hasn’t been perfected just yet, but a micro version is already ready to rock and roll.

The RC unit controls his forward and spin motion, as well as firing off his three sound effect features, and lighting up his head and base (which looks well cool at night of course). He’s basically your very own pet mini robot and driving him about is curiously addictive. The great thing about his tracks is that his movement is highly effective on any surface, whether it’s a slippery desktop, or a deep pile carpet, he’s really not fussed. His arms and head are articulated, so you can position them into a multitude of anthropomorphic gestures, and his beeping, sirens and various wooshing sound effects are, we imagine, the equivalent of futuristic cyber chatter. Maybe one day all pets will look like this.

Funny how big brother Spykee has not been launched yet while its Mini Me is already rolling about to stores for £19.99.

Sony has just announced the Cybershot DSC-H50, a 9.1-megapixel camera with 15x Carl Zeiss optical zoom, a UV hard-coated scratch resistant 3-inch LCD and comes with an IR remote.

The DSC-H50 also features Super SteadyShot, NightShot, D-Range Optimizer, smile recognition, face detection and has an advanced sports shooting mode that will offer shutter speeds up to 1/4000 of a second with continuous auto-focusing.

The DSC-H50 will be available beginning in May and is expected to retail for $400.

Via [I4U News]

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