Filed under: Cellphones
Just because you’re the elephant in the group, that doesn’t mean you’ll get away without suffering through the same humiliation that comes with being a hot new BlackBerry: dissection on camera. RIM’s first flip phone has recently been disassembled by the curious minds over at SycotecSolutions, giving us all an up close and personal look at what makes the Pearl Flip 8220 tick. Eager for more? Give the read link some of your undivided attention.
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Filed under: Transportation
The world of personal transportation, with few exceptions, has littered the earth with embarrassing paraphernalia. In-line skates, pogo sticks, the recumbent bike — all disasters to personal style. Mix in electricity and you get the Segway, or alternatively, Focus Design’s SBU electric self-balancing unicycle. The SBU can be steered by leaning left to right (like a regular unicycle) and uses Segway-style gyroscopes to power your lazy ass forwards and backwards. Not a new idea by any stretch, but Focus Design is actually crazy enough to be working on bringing this thing to market. Focus hopes to do a limited run of ten SBUs next month, at $1,500 a month. Peep the video after break to see if you can handle the shame.
[Via Hack a Day]
Continue reading Focus Design’s SBU self-balancing unicycle: because you didn’t look dumb enough on a Segway
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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Putting the world’s tiniest book to shame — not to mention the Torah-inscribed grain of rice — a research team at Osaka University has “written” the letters “Si” using an atomic pen that interchanges silicon and tin atoms, enabling those who have the time, resources, and patience to manipulate said atoms one by one. The results are a diminutive 2 x 2 nm (or 40,000 times smaller than a strand of hair) which took about an hour and a half to complete. The previous best was a laughably large 0.07 x 0.10 mm tome hailing from SFU’s Nano Imaging Lab. “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this,” said researcher Masayuki Abe, adding that, while the project sounded impressive on (really tiny) paper, it had failed to garner him any coveted cool points at the local bar. Next steps for the project will be determined once the team puts the finishing touches on the “g” and the “h.”
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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
We knew the SlingCatcher was sneaking out into the wild, and hey — we just snagged one at retail in Chicago. We’re busy tearing into all the projector, Sling streaming, and media streaming features, but we figured we’d throw up the unboxing photos right away so you can get a feel for Sling’s latest, long-awaited box.
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Filed under: Podcasts
Desirous of more of that enlightening Engadget banter? You’re in luck! We’ve got another installment of the newly-minted Engadget Podcast on tap, featuring an in-depth exploration of thoughts, feelings, and thoughts about feelings. This week Joshua Topolsky, Paul Miller, and Nilay Patel take you thorough a breathtaking range of topics, with a thorough dissection of the new MacBooks / MacBook Pros, a little Windows 7 talk, and an extra deep look at the T-Mobile G1 with the help of Engadget Mobile super-editor Chris Ziegler. Prepare for extreme geek-craft… now.
Note: We had some minor audio trouble with this one, so don’t be alarmed if you hear a little crosstalk — we’ll make sure things are as magically pristine as usual next week. Also, iTunes should be back properly soon, so stay tuned.
Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Paul Miller, and Nilay Patel
Guest: Chris Ziegler
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Dr. Teeth — The Interview Is Over
00:00:42 - Apple’s “spotlight turns to notebooks” event roundup
00:38:43 - T-Mobile G1 review
01:10:59 - Motorola Krave ZN4 officially launches on Verizon for $149.99
01:18:10 - Windows 7 to be officially named… Windows 7
01:21:18 - Engadget: now the Official Blog Partner of CES
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Filed under: Transportation
The much-anticipated, well-expected MINI E — the first all-electric MINI — is headed our way before you know it. BMW’s built itself a decent performer, offering 204 hp of electric motor in a setup quite similar to the Tesla. The car boasts a 150 mile range off its 35 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, can hit 62 mph in 8.5 seconds, and does a full charge off of an included high current charging station in a mere 2.5 hours. There’s naturally a regenerative braking system on board to help beef up the battery in city driving. BMW plans on leasing 500 of these to commercial and private customers in California, New York and New Jersey sometime early 2009, and Europe might get a crack at the car soon after that. No word yet on when we’ll see this car ready for the masses, but perhaps we’ll get more info when the MINI E makes its “debut” at the LA Auto Show next month.
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Filed under: Wireless
We knew they didn’t like it, and now they’re going out of their way to prove it. After FCC chairman Kevin Martin set forth a proposal to use the freed spectrum from the forthcoming 2009 digital TV transition for bringing mobile broadband to more locales, broadcasters who’d rather not deal with the trouble are stepping in with a collective “nuh uh!” Station owners and the four television networks filed an “emergency request” on Friday afternoon in hopes of convincing the FCC to hold off on its plan to vote on white space rules until “everyone had a chance to comment on the findings.” The report that’s mentioned found that no significant interference would come into play should the waves be opened up for unlicensed devices, but a spokeswoman for the National Association of Broadcasters stated that “the FCC is misinterpreting the actual data collected by their own engineers.” Whether or not NAB will get the 45-day grace period it’s asking for, however, remains to be seen.
[Via Mobile Tech Today, image courtesy of Orbitcast]
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Filed under: Home Entertainment
AT&T’s been cobbling together a voice recognition system for decades, affectionally known as Watson. The good news is that unlike most every other voice recognition system out there, AT&T’s might be useful for, you know, stuff. AT&T’s working on making your plain-language utterances into real-life gadget actions, and has built a voice-operated TV remote to make the idea a reality. Built to operate the U-verse service, AT&T’s new mythical remote lets you ask for whatever comedies might be on, or — in the inexplicable example cited by our source article — search for movies starring Bruce Willis, all using your voice in regular person sentences. AT&T’s also working with other developers to build applications like a yellow pages app for the iPhone. There’s no word on when (or if) AT&T will actually offer up the remote for consumer use, or when other applications are due to hit the mainstream, but we must say we’re ready for the tide to shift in human-computer interaction, where the computer does the heavy lifting. Because we have some Bruce Willis movies to watch.
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Filed under: Cellphones
According to the UK’s Telegraph, mobile phones are responsible for yet another one of the great terrors of the 21st century: dermatitis. Apparently, “skin specialists” have discovered that certain metals used in cellphones are causing some users to suffer inflamed, reddened, dry, blistered, and cracked skin. Sounds awesome, right? It seems that about a third of heavy talkers are sensitive to nickel — a substance commonly found in gadgets — which can become irritating after repeated exposure. Says Brown University’s Dr. Lionel Bercovitch, “Given the widespread use of cellphones, the presence of metal in the exterior casing of these phones and the high prevalence of nickel sensitization in the population, it is not surprising that cellphones can cause allergic contact dermatitis.” There’s probably little you can do to out-and-out escape the problem, so we suggest full face mask whenever a call needs to be made — also, for dinner parties.
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Filed under: Laptops
No telling if we North Americans will ever see this thing without the help of a dutiful importer, but if nothing else, it’s fun to gawk at. Shown off in Korea at KES 2008, LG’s 12.1-inch S-210 was said to be packing a 2.43GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, eSATA / USB ports, VGA out, Ethernet, an NVIDIA graphics set, audio in / out, HDMI and Windows Vista. Pricing and release information wasn’t even available for folks in Seoul, but we’ll try extra hard not to forget about this completely forgettable machine amidst all the other metoos in the crowd.
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