Hasta La Gadget!

The Gizmodo Gallery, which starts this week in NYC, is going to have voodoo. See, Blendtec, the guys responsible for those catchy videos of gadgets being destroyed aren’t just giving us one to give away as a door prize, but they’re setting us up with a demo model we can use to pulp our own gadgets with.

We’ll have lab coats and goggles, but also whipped cream and berries. And I think we’ll sacrifice a gadget or two come this Saturday to the gods of user interface design or battery life because clearly, asking companies to improve such things have by and large gone unanswered. We may do even more than a few if you’ve got some particularly interesting and hated ones you want to puree, but no promises!

[Read more about our Gizmodo Gallery here and see what else we’ll be playing with at the event.]

[Thanks to REED ANNEX and thanks to our benefactor gizmine.com]

Gizmodo Gallery
Reed Annex
151 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Gizmodo Gallery Reader Meetup
The reader meetup takes place across the street from the Gallery, at a place called The Annex (not to be confused with REED ANNEX where the gallery is hosted.) The address is 152 Orchard Street and we’ll be there at 9 PM SHARP on Friday December 5th.

Gallery Dates:
December 4th-7th

Times:
12/4 Thursday
12-8

12/5 Friday
12-8

12/6 Saturday
11-8

12/7 Sunday
11-4

We don’t have super batteries yet, but soon we might see ultra-low power displays that could keep a notebook running 20 to 40 hours before needing a charge.

Mary Lou Jepsen, designer of nonprofit One Laptop Per Child’s famous green-and-white XO netbook, has plans to ship energy-efficient screens for laptops and e-books in the second half of 2009. Like the XO’s screen, the new low-powered displays will be readable under direct sunlight and consume a small fraction of the power of a traditional display.

Battery life has become a prominent issue as the tech industry demands smaller, more powerful gadgets. Manufacturers have been slow to make major strides in improving battery life; the technology has been stagnant in recent years. Therefore, it makes sense that Jepsen is thinking beyond batteries and looking at screens instead.

Jepsen Works to Raise Laptop Battery Life to 20-40 Hours [PC World]

For those of us who don’t remember life before the NES, Boing Boing uncovered a collection of vintage instruction manuals, ads, hang tags and more, which give us a glimpse of gadgets from the past.

Included in these clippings are lessons on how to build fallout shelters in case of emergencies, and my personal favorite, headphones, now available with a “new coiled cord!” Check out a gallery of our favorite retro gizmos below, or head over to the Product Manual Archive to check out the ongoing collection! [Product Manual Archive via BoingBoing]

Okonomiyaki’s a Japanese omlette/pancake dish that’s made of a mish-mash of anything you like. I love them. Kotaku’s Ashcraft loves them. This Japanese robot can make them. This makes it the best robot ever.

It’s called the Motoman SDA10, and it’s an industrial robot made for working alongside humans, not replacing them. They’re supposed to be super dextrous to the point of being able to put together a digital camera from tiny, tiny parts. Okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is delicious, and probably a better test of how awesome a robot is. In fact, I vote that they ditch Turing and use this instead. [Pink Tentacle via Born Rich via Dvice]

Believe it or not, this is far from the first we’ve heard of bringing high-def video to cellphones, and it’s not even the first application to dabble in mobile 1080p. Still, we’ll take all the innovation we can get in this space, and when the real Touch HD ever arrives, we’ll be ready and waiting with Full HD capabilities. Announced at ISSCC 2009 in San Francisco, Renesas Technology is showing off an application processor that enables handsets to process 1,920 x 1,080 resolution video at 30 frames-per-second; the processor’s core has a maximum operating frequency of 500MHz and supports MPEG-4 AVC / H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video formats. There’s no telling when the 6.4- x 6.5-millimeter chip will be available en masse, but we need the HTCs of the world to get us a 1080p phone and a retina implant or two to read 0.2-size fonts before it even matters.

Filed under: Cellphones, Displays, HDTV

Renesas aims to bring 1080p playback to your next cellphone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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