Hasta La Gadget!

Those of you who watched the Discovery Channel’s Time Warp on October 15th can switch off now: You have already seen this spectacular and dangerous variant of Will it Blend?

Everybody else should put on a pair of safety goggles, hide behind the sofa and hit "play".

Next up on Gadget Lab: Danger Edition — How to make a dog go "Woof" with just a can of gas and a match.

Time Warp – Lighter in Blender [YouTube via Kotaro 269 via Giz]

See Also:

• Ultimate Gadget Challenge: Blendtec vs Chuck Norris
• Will it blend? By God, Does The Total Blender Blend.
• Blender With Built in Tachometer

Apparently the Motorola leak-fest begun yesterday hasn’t come to a halt. After witnessing some compelling renders of smartphones the company has headed to Verizon, we’re now privy to a set of featurephone / dumbphone mockups — all courtesy of the Boy Genius Report. The new images show off a device supposedly called the “Niagra” (pictured), a slider in the vein of yesterday’s “Calgary” QWERTY phone, a dowdy looking number called the “Fairbanks” (a PTT device), and a clamshell called the “Harmony.” The latter two phones could hardly stoke much excitement, but the Niagra definitely gives us some hope for Moto’s big comeback. Now — these will all be powered by Android, right?

More of Motorola’s 2009 Verizon lineup leaked originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS’s touchscreen Eee Top ET1602 all-in-one was certainly adored in a pre-staged way by small children when it launched last month, but Slashgear’s taken it for a spin and found that it actually deserves the love. The 15.6-inch resistive touchscreen wasn’t on par with the capacitive screen in HP’s TouchSmart or the active digitizer in newer tablet PCs, but it did the job, and ASUS’s Windows XP “Easy Mode” launcher and bundled touch apps were intuitive and friendly, although certain apps would drop back into XP’s mouse-oriented interface at times. Under the hood, the netbook-class 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB of RAM, and GMA950 graphics didn’t rock anyone’s world, but they managed general browsing and 720p video playback without issue. All in all, it seems like ASUS has built an interesting little AIO for the expected US price of $450 — now if they’d just start shipping them here, we’d find out for ourselves. Hit the read link for the full review.

Filed under: Desktops

ASUS Eee Top ET1602 touchscreen all-in-one gets reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I was tempted just to post the picture above, naked, alone and – more importantly – defenseless against your cruel and merciless ridicule. But of course, I couldn’t. The Soaripod is just too ripe — a sweet, soft target in these slow pre-Christmas weeks. Here we go:

First, the name. While Soaripod is clearly meant to conjure a feeling of jet-set luxury, the pronunciation is Sore iPod, a hilarious marketing screw-up. The crass copy doesn’t stop there, though, and we can clearly see the inclusion of a Grocers’ Apostrophe in the phrase "Clips to 100’s of Surfaces". As they say in the newspaper game, "sic".

The device itself looks curiously familiar, rather like a one legged Gorillapod. The difference is that, although the Gorillapod costs $5 more, it has two extra legs and can connect to pretty much any device you own, including iPhones and cameras. The Sore iPod is iPhone and iPod Touch-only, and even then you need to put the unit in a special case. And don’t forget, Joby actually makes a one legged Gorillapod.

At the other end is a plastic clip which looks like it might take more time to secure than a mortgage loan in These Trouble Times™.

Finally, let us consider the product site, a clear extension of the product itself in that it is complete overkill for a single purpose. The site is, as you will have guessed, created in Flash. The page itself offers no interactivity whatsoever, other than a line of regular html links along the bottom and a big ol’ Buy Now button which, of course, dumps you off at PayPal.

The irony here is provided by Wired.com and Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney (named, incidentally, after his curious and unique belly button which is neither an "inny" nor an "outy"). Well aware of my easily flattered ego, he sent this message:

They missed a big opportunity to kiss up by not calling it the Sorripod.

True, but unnecessary. Like a magpie attracted to a shiny geegaw, I am hopelessly drawn to plastic tat of all kinds. If I were a cat-stroking Bond villain, this would be my weakness, and the means of my ultimate, grisly demise. $30.

Product page [Soaripod. Thanks, Dylan!

See Also:

• Gorillapod Go-Go: Miniature, Flexible Tripod
• Gorillapod Goes Solo
• CES: Joby Gorillapod Attaches Cameras to Anything
• Joby Puts a One Pound Gorilla in the Room

Yesterday’s purported renders of Motorola’s 2009 smartphone line seemed plausible, but these less adventurous feature phone renders are almost too safe to be fake. Behold, the Son of Razr!

Obviously this slider, codenamed Niagra, is a pretty large departure from the Razr tradition—it’s a slider, after all. But its lineage would appear to be undeniable, considering the distinctive keypad, thin profile and metallic finish. That said, all of the vowels in the name appear to be vital to pronunciation, so the bloodline can’t be totally pure.

As for the Fairbanks and Harmony clamshell phones (below), there is little reason to believe that these are anything but a minor update to Moto’s existing entry-level free-on-contract handsets. As with the smartphone leak, these renders came naked. In other words specs, prices and release dates are still a mystery, albeit one that will certainly be solved, unspectacularly, with some form of press release. [BGR via Slashphone]